Hullabaloo

Saturday, May 21, 2005

 
Stem Sell

"I made it very clear to the Congress that the use of federal money, taxpayers' money to promote science which destroys life in order to save life is - I'm against that. And therefore, if the bill does that, I will veto it.''

Just in case you are confused, using taxpayers money to destroy this life in order to save lives is evil:



But using taxpayers money to destroy this life in order to save lives is good:





It looks to me as if the best way to convince Bush and his followers to support stem cell research is to propose that we only use arab embryos.


Via Suburban Guerrilla

Update: Apropos of this subject, Kevin at Catch points to this article By Sidney Schanberg from last week.

Warning: more sad (or in the words on one commenter, "tasteless") pictures. Violent death, I agree, is quite tasteless. The death of a bundle of human cells, not so much. It's unfortunate that one has to illustrate the difference so starkly but in America today it's clearly necessary.



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digby 5/21/2005 08:20:00 AM |

Friday, May 20, 2005

 
Pulpified

If you are having trouble staying awake this morning, read this account in the New York Times about how the US forces beat prisoners to death in Afghanistan; you will possibly never sleep again. Apparently, they commonly used what is known as a "common peroneal strike" - a potentially disabling blow to the side of the leg, just above the knee. They did this so often to certain prisoners within a short period of time (mostly just to hear them scream --- it was funny) that they developed blood clots from the injuries and died. The tissue on their legs, as the coroner described it, "had basically been pulpified."

As we already know from the stories in Guantanamo, many of the prisoners were sold or turned over to the Americans by Afghan warlords with an agenda. They were not guilty of anything:

Even as the young Afghan man was dying before them, his American jailers continued to torment him.

The prisoner, a slight, 22-year-old taxi driver known only as Dilawar, was hauled from his cell at the detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan, at around 2 a.m. to answer questions about a rocket attack on an American base. When he arrived in the interrogation room, an interpreter who was present said, his legs were bouncing uncontrollably in the plastic chair and his hands were numb. He had been chained by the wrists to the top of his cell for much of the previous four days.

Mr. Dilawar asked for a drink of water, and one of the two interrogators, Specialist Joshua R. Claus, 21, picked up a large plastic bottle. But first he punched a hole in the bottom, the interpreter said, so as the prisoner fumbled weakly with the cap, the water poured out over his orange prison scrubs. The soldier then grabbed the bottle back and began squirting the water forcefully into Mr. Dilawar's face.

"Come on, drink!" the interpreter said Specialist Claus had shouted, as the prisoner gagged on the spray. "Drink!"

At the interrogators' behest, a guard tried to force the young man to his knees. But his legs, which had been pummeled by guards for several days, could no longer bend. An interrogator told Mr. Dilawar that he could see a doctor after they finished with him. When he was finally sent back to his cell, though, the guards were instructed only to chain the prisoner back to the ceiling.

"Leave him up," one of the guards quoted Specialist Claus as saying.

Several hours passed before an emergency room doctor finally saw Mr. Dilawar. By then he was dead, his body beginning to stiffen. It would be many months before Army investigators learned a final horrific detail: Most of the interrogators had believed Mr. Dilawar was an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time.

Read the whole article. This man's story is relayed in full detail as well as others who were kicked in the genitals, arms chained to the roofs of their cells for days on end, threatened with rape and other "interrogation techniques."

The main unit consisted of body builders who were called "the testosterone gang." They decorated their tents with the confederate flags. There seems to have been almost no supervision of the 21 year olds who were "leading" interrogations. These guys were not a bunch of scared kids on the front lines fighting for their lives. They were a bunch of guys just "blowing off steam." I'm sure Rush would just love to have been there. They were having quite the party.

Some of the same M.P.'s took a particular interest in an emotionally disturbed Afghan detainee who was known to eat his feces and mutilate himself with concertina wire. The soldiers kneed the man repeatedly in the legs and, at one point, chained him with his arms straight up in the air, Specialist Callaway told investigators. They also nicknamed him "Timmy," after a disabled child in the animated television series "South Park." One of the guards who beat the prisoner also taught him to screech like the cartoon character, Specialist Callaway said.

Eventually, the man was sent home.

There's some South Park Republicans for you.

Perhaps most tellingly, the soldiers felt they were justified in beating and torturing prisoners because the secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, had declared that the detainees, as "terrorists," were not covered under the Geneva Conventions. They took the gloves off. Just as their superiors told them to.


Perhaps when Newsweak "takes action" to remedy the damage they caused to US credibility, they can explain this:

With most of the legal action pending, the story of abuses at Bagram remains incomplete. But documents and interviews reveal a striking disparity between the findings of Army investigators and what military officials said in the aftermath of the deaths.

Military spokesmen maintained that both men had died of natural causes, even after military coroners had ruled the deaths homicides. Two months after those autopsies, the American commander in Afghanistan, then-Lt. Gen. Daniel K. McNeill, said he had no indication that abuse by soldiers had contributed to the two deaths. The methods used at Bagram, he said, were "in accordance with what is generally accepted as interrogation techniques."

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digby 5/20/2005 07:55:00 AM |

Thursday, May 19, 2005

 
Ricky In Paris

I think it's fairly predictable that we are going to see the 101st keyboarders go into high gear tomorrow in response to the blogstorm developing over Little Ricky Santorum's Hitler remarks. They are going to bring up Robert Byrd's previous statements and say that it's even steven. And the press will probably see it that way as well. Overheated rhetoric, he-said-she-said and all that.

While I agree that it's probably not a good idea to evoke Hitler on the floor of the senate, I do think it's fair to take a look at the substance of the two statements by Byrd and Santorum and see if there is any actual merit in either of them.

Santorum said today:

The audacity of some members to stand up and say, "how dare you break this rule." It's the equivalent of Adolph Hitler in 1942 "I'm in Paris. How dare you invade me. How dare you bomb my city? It's mine." This is no more the rule of the senate that it was the rule of the senate not to filibuster. It was an understanding and agreement. And it has been abused.

So, Santorum is clumsily blabbering that the Democrats are trying to stop the change of a rule that they're abusing. Or something. His point is that there was no rule to begin with --- it's an agreement, an understanding --- and even if there had been, the Democrats violated it by abusing it.

Santorum, of course, is speaking out of his ass. Norm Ornstein has definitively written about this. The Republicans are breaking the rules.

To make this happen, the Senate will have to get around the clear rules and precedents, set and regularly reaffirmed over 200 years, that allow debate on questions of constitutional interpretation–debate which itself can be filibustered. It will have to do this in a peremptory fashion, ignoring or overruling the Parliamentarian. And it will establish, beyond question, a new precedent. Namely, that whatever the Senate rules say–regardless of the view held since the Senate’s beginnings that it is a continuing body with continuing rules and precedents–they can be ignored or reversed at any given moment on the whim of the current majority.

Santorum is full of shit and everybody but the theocrats and the press knows it. Even Ricky. His analogy is wrong. The correct analogy to this situation would be if the French said to Hitler, "We have a treaty, you can't bomb our cities. You can't invade Paris!" Which they did. And he invaded anyway. I think you can figure out who represents the French and who represents Hitler in our little senate passion play.

Which brings us to Byrd:

But witness how men with motives and a majority can manipulate law to cruel and unjust ends. Historian Alan Bullock writes that Hitler’s dictatorship rested on the constitutional foundation of a single law, the Enabling Law. Hitler needed a two-thirds vote to pass that law, and he cajoled his opposition in the Reichstag to support it. Bullock writes that “Hitler was prepared to promise anything to get his bill through, with the appearances of legality preserved intact.” And he succeeded.

"Hitler’s originality lay in his realization that effective revolutions, in modern conditions, are carried out with, and not against, the power of the State: the correct order of events was first to secure access to that power and then begin his revolution. Hitler never abandoned the cloak of legality; he recognized the enormous psychological value of having the law on his side. Instead, he turned the law inside out and made illegality legal."

And that is what the nuclear option seeks to do to Rule XXII of the Standing Rules of the Senate.

That is correct. Hitler didn't defy the rules or the law. That's one of the hallmarks of the totalitarian state. They always operate within the law. They just make sure the law confers upon them absolute power, that's all.

So, we have both Byrd and Santorum making references to Hitler as regards this rules change. One is barely comprehensible and posits an absurd analogy to Democrats being Hitler in Paris. The other quite astutely points out that these arbitrary rules changes to advance the power of one party are not without precedent. Indeed, Hitler was a master at it.

I suppose that Hitler references are always going to cause a stir. But, aside from the sheer glory of Byrd's rhetoric compared to Santorum's incomprehensible blubbering, there is a serious point to be made. When one party is acting in ways that seriously draw the comparison, maybe it's fair to look at the substance of the charge. The fact is that while this rule change may not be the end of the world, it is another in a long line of pure power plays on the part of the Republicans who show no signs of having any limits. I know it's not nice to bring up the H-word, but if the shoe fits...


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digby 5/19/2005 09:55:00 PM |

 
Downing St Revelations

I suppose that I understand to a certain extent why the press is so disinterested in the Downing Street memo. It's because they think that the memo merely says the US was inevitably going to war as early as 2002 --- and everybody already knows that. In fact, we knew it at the time. As Juan Cole documents in detail in this Salon article, Bush and his national security team made it quite clear that they wanted to invade Iraq long before 9/11 and launched into high gear to make it happen immediately after. This memo is an official rendering of something that I think the press believes people have absorbed --- and assume that the election settled. They're wrong, but then what else is new?

There are a number of other important revelations in the memo, the most startling being the rather casual acceptance of the need to create the illusion of legality. We knew that going to the UN and dealing with the inspectors were a form of Kabuki on the part of the Bushies, but it's never been clear before now that they planned it that way. Some of us actually believed that there may have existed a genuine desire on Blair and Powell's parts to slow down the process and try to persuade the Bush administration to back off under international pressure. Apparently not. Everybody signed on to this egregious scam from the very beginning ---- it was always a matter of finding the proper cover. I wonder if the Scowcroft (and Poppy) messages were part of it too?

The Downing St. Memo contains another smoking gun that I haven't heard anyone mention. It says:

The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss [the timing of the war] with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbors, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.

I must say that this answers definitively one of the biggest questions I had in the run-up to the war. I had always wondered how, if anyone believed even for a second that Saddam had serious biological or chemical weapons, that we would ever have placed 100,000 American soldiers like sitting ducks in Kuwait over the course of several months before the war. It was an incomprehensible risk, I thought, considering that everyone knew that the war was unnecessary in terms of the terrorist threat. Even Bush couldn't be that craven and stupid. And he wasn't. He expected a razzle dazzle military "cakewalk," not a catastrophic loss of life, and that's what he got. It seemed clear to me then that we knew with certainty from the start that there wasn't a serious WMD threat in Iraq.

Most of us have known for some time that the administration cooked the intelligence, although no commission or congressional investigation has been undertaken to determine if that's the case. (The Silbermann-Robb commission goes to great lengths to explain that this conveniently wasn't their mandate.) All this nonsense about how the intelligence services "misled" the president is rightly seen a crapola. I do think people assumed, however, that the Bush administration felt they needed to cook the intelligence because they actually believed that Saddam probably had WMD even though they didn't have the intelligence to support that claim. People thought they had overlearned the lessons of the first Gulf War when the CIA had underestimated Saddam's capability and they just weren't taking any chances.

And from a public relations standpoint, I'm sure most people felt it was nonsensical that they would have taken the risk of being shown as complete assholes in front of the entire world with all of their absolute pronouncements of Saddam's arsenal if they hadn't legitimately believed that he had one. More importantly, it would have been shockingly irresponsible after 9/11 to expose our intelligence services to the whole world as being completely unreliable if they knew for a fact that there was no real threat. But that's what they did.

This memo shows that they knew he didn't have that threatening arsenal and it appears they just didn't care about the fallout. Clearly they believed they could say anything and get away with it. And they are right. Both Bush and Blair were re-elected despite the fact that they invaded a country to "disarm" it and found out that the country didn't have any arms in the first place. That should have been a firing offense, but it wasn't. Now we know they knew it all along.

Who knows if people would have voted differently if they knew that their leaders knew ahead of time that there was no serious threat of WMD? My suspicion has long been that a fair number of voters believed that in spite of all the hoopla about not finding WMD that their leaders must have known something for sure that they couldn't tell us about. This memo proves that they were right. What they knew for sure was that the country they wanted to attack presented no threat.


One interesting thing in the Cole article that I hadn't heard before was a reason why Tony Blair went along with all this. It's just unbelievable:

When British Prime Minister Tony Blair arrived in Washington on Sept. 20, 2001, he was alarmed. If Blair had consulted MI6 about the relative merits of the Afghanistan and Iraq options, we can only imagine what well-informed British intelligence officers in Pakistan were cabling London about the dangers of leaving bin Laden and al-Qaida in place while plunging into a potential quagmire in Iraq. Fears that London was a major al-Qaida target would have underlined the risks to the United Kingdom of an "Iraq first" policy in Washington.

Meyer told Vanity Fair, "Blair came with a very strong message -- don't get distracted; the priorities were al-Qaida, Afghanistan, the Taliban." He must have been terrified that the Bush administration would abandon London to al-Qaida while pursuing the great white whale of Iraq. But he managed to help persuade Bush. Meyer reports, "Bush said, 'I agree with you, Tony. We must deal with this first. But when we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq.'" Meyer also said, in spring 2004, that it was clear "that when we did come back to Iraq it wouldn't be to discuss smarter sanctions." In short, Meyer strongly implies that Blair persuaded Bush to make war on al-Qaida in Afghanistan first by promising him British support for a later Iraq campaign.

Tony Blair had to make a deal with Bush that he'd support him on Iraq to get him to go after Al-Qaeda. Is there anything more pathetic --- and frightening --- than that?



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digby 5/19/2005 10:48:00 AM |

 
Try Again

I appreciate George Will's ongoing attempt to distance himself from the Theocratic freak show, I really do. But using postmodern theory to advance rightwing epistomology (while attacking postmodernism), may be a truthful description of right wing propaganda techniques; however it is hardly noble or meritorious. (Not that Will has any conception of what he's actually saying, because he he clearly doesn't.)

This argument is particularly galling coming from someone who supports a president who recently made a speech in Eastern Eurpose essentially accusing Roosevelt and Churchill of being equivalent to Stalin.

Nice history you've got there boys. It'd be a shame if anything happened to it.



Update: Yglesias has more.



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digby 5/19/2005 09:15:00 AM |

Wednesday, May 18, 2005

 
Who Shot Sam

“You must be careful what you say, as well as what you do”
Don Rumsfeld

I've been a little bit busy this week so I guess I missed the outcry of the warbloggers and white house against the Washington Times for this:

(Via Altercation)

Washington Times cartoon sets Pakistan on fire

[ MONDAY, MAY 09, 2005]

ISLAMABAD: A cartoon in The Washington Times lampooning Pakistan's role in the US war on terror has turned into a rallying point for nationalist passions and hidden anti-American sentiments here.

The "offensive" cartoon (published May 6) shows a US soldier patting a dog (Pakistan) that holds Abu Faraj Al Libbi (a terrorist linked with Al Qaeda) and saying, "Good boy ... now let's go find bin Laden."

President George W Bush had described the arrest of Al Libbi - the third-ranking leader in Al Qaeda who was arrested in Pakistan this month - as "a critical victory in the war on terror".

A survey carried out by Online news agency revealed hurt national pride, with people cutting across the class divide vocally demanding that the government quit supporting the US in its war against terrorism.

"I think the Pakistan-US relations on the war against terrorism would not continue any more. The US is wary of admitting that Pakistan helped the US to find out its enemies," said Nazeer Ahmed, a lawyer.

For Muhammad Ali, a student of Quaid-e-Azam University, the cartoon belittles Pakistan' anti-terror efforts and exposes how much the US values Pakistan's role in the war in terror.

Many students of this university are so sore with the US "assault on national pride" that they will settle for nothing less than an apology from US President George Bush.

It's not just the capital's chattering classes that are affronted; ordinary shopkeepers too have not shied away from registering their outrage against what they see the US duplicity in its relations with Pakistan.

On the diplomatic front, the Pakistan Embassy in Washington wasted no time in registering its protest against this insensitive cartoon.

"We are disgusted with the insensitivity of the editors of the Washington Times. They have insulted the 150 million people of Pakistan," said Mohammed Sadiq, Pakistan's charge d'affaires in Washington.

In another instance, the government expressed its dismay over a news report carried by Newsweek magazine in its latest edition about the reported desecration of the holy Quran and inhuman treatment meted out to the detainees at the Guantanamo Bay detention centre.

Here's an earlier report from DAWN on May 7.


It appears that there is quote a bit more to this Newsweak story than meets the eye, doesn't it? It doesn't take a genius, or an expert in the history of the Taliban to know that they claim quite a bit of support in Pakistan.

This article indicates that the original protests in Pakistan were as much concerned about the cartoon as about the Koran story (which, by the way, every Muslim in the world undoubtedly already knew about.) Does the American press -- Newsweak itself! --- not realize that this was a huge deal over there? I know why the Bush administration and the 101st keyboarders would want to keep this quiet --- they will never speak ill of one of their own compadres like the reverend Moon --- but, what in the fuck is wrong with the rest of the media? Are they enjoying watching the US media being discredited by propaganda and dirty tricks one by one? Do they think they are immune or are they just looking forward to the big bucks that Rupert pays (which won't last long once he owns the media outright. Think WalMart, kidz.)

I can't say that I've heard anything about this, although the Washington Times apparently quietly apologized last Saturday for any offense they'd caused.

Cartoonist Bill Garner told Pakistan's Dawn newspaper that he never intended to offend the Pakistani nation.

"It is a cultural gap, a cultural misunderstanding that caused the uproar.

"The symbol to me was that of friendship," he was reported as saying. "There is a saying in English that a dog is a man's best friend."

"There has always been a great friendship with animals, especially dogs, in America".

Mr Garner said that the cartoon was meant to depict "the spirit of goodwill and friendship that exists between the two countries".

Sure Bill. The Washington Times, btw, has apparently removed the cartoon from their web-site. But thanks to the Washington Socialite the cartoon has been preserved.

It would be nice if the so-called liberal media would dig just a tiny bit further than Scott McClellan and Powerline for their analysis of world events. But then, why should they? According to the dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, the White House is just having a bit of fun. (And apparently covering Tony Blankley's ample hindquarters.)



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digby 5/18/2005 04:05:00 PM |

 
Historical Blindness

Stuart Rothenberg, usually a fairly dry and non-partisan observer, just said on CNN that one could rightly blame "the court" for the impending nuclear showdown in the senate. He claimed that until the late 60's the court never involved itself in the kind of controversial issues that upsets people. Even William Schneider looked surprised.

I guess Stu had a wild 60's because he apparently doesn't realize that there was a little kerfluffle about the actions of the supreme court quite awhile before the late 60's --- long before the rightwing adopted a "culture of life," they were screaming about this:


Thurgood Marshall, center, chief legal counsel of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, is surrounded by students and their escort from Little Rock, Arkansas, as he sits on the steps of the Supreme Court Building in Washington, D.C., Aug. 22, 1958.

The right wing responded with their usual alacrity:





Update: Transcript

ROTHENBERG: I simply wanted to add, Wolf, that if you want to know who to blame ultimately for this confrontation that we have now, I think you can almost make the argument that can you blame court, because the court got us into these kinds of issues in the late '60s and early '70s. Before that, when you and I didn't have so much gray hair, we didn't talk about these issues. But the court decide these issues were relevant and individual rights needed to be protected. And so now they've gotten into the whole other area.

BLITZER: Go ahead, Bill, and I'll add one point. But, go ahead, Bill.

SCHNEIDER: That's exactly what's got conservatives upset, because they say the court has overreached. It's overextended. It's become a judicial activist, the court. And they say we want to curb the court they have broken the separation of power by legislating in too many areas. But Democrats say, no, we want to protect the separation, that the Congress is reaching too far. They used the Terri Schiavo case as an instance where Congress, in their view and the view of many Americans, try to cross over the lines and direct the courts to do a certain thing. And the courts refuse to go along.

BLITZER: Hasn't the Supreme Court, Stuart, always, though, been involved in shaping actual policy? Brown v. Board of Education 1954, ending segregated schools. Did the court go too far in that particular decision?

ROTHENBERG: Well, I don't know about a particular decision, Wolf. Everybody has their own opinions about the decisions. But I think you're generally right, that the court has sought to expand its role in interpreting law and interpreting the Constitution. And Americans have conceded the right to the court do that. So I don't -- the American public is, too, somewhat at fault. They looked to the court to do these kinds of things. And we're in the situation now where Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, agree that the court has such an important role in deciding what our rights are that now everything's a political fight.

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digby 5/18/2005 09:42:00 AM |

 
Extreme Moral Clarity

Attaturk says Andrew Sullivan is taking criticism for saying:

Instapundit's coverage suggests that he believes that the erroneously-sourced Newsweek story is actually more offensive and important than what happened at Abu Ghraib.

I don't know about Instapundit; I've been awfully busy watching dust motes above my monitor and haven't had a minute to spare reading his world renowned blog. However,as I note below, The Blog Of The Year has expressed this exact view quite explicitly:

I really think that calling Newsweek's blunder "the press's Abu Ghraib" is unfair to the low-lifes who carried out the Abu Ghraib abuses. After all, they didn't even hurt anyone, let alone kill them. And the people they abused were almost certainly terrorists. One can't say the same for the people who were murdered in the riots that foreseeably followed Newsweek's story.

digby 5/18/2005 09:27:00 AM |

Tuesday, May 17, 2005

 
Lovely DiRita

So everybody is rightly quoting the liar Myers (he must be since his version of events is completely at odds with the new "Newsweak Lied" meme), based upon Kit Seelye's article in the NY Times. And there is some discussion of Lawrence DiRita's intemperate remark as quoted in Evan Thomas' article:

Told of what the NEWSWEEK source said, DiRita exploded, "People are dead because of what this son of a bitch said. How could he be credible now?"

But, what I haven't seen (and, granted, I may have missed it) is the acknowledgement of what DiRita himself was quoted as saying in this AP report on Saturday:

"The nature of where these things occurred, how quickly they occurred, the nature of individuals who were involved in it, suggest that they may be organized events that are using this alleged allegation as a pretext for activity that was already planned," said DiRita.

It wasn't only Myers who gave this explanation, it was the now conveniently irate Pentagon spokesman as well. Maybe a reporter needs to ask him about this.



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digby 5/17/2005 11:32:00 AM |

 
The New Christocracy

Kevin Catches this little gem

In Ohio, the Rev. Rod Parsley of the World Harvest Church said at a gathering of 1,000 Patriot Pastors last week that the issues underscoring the filibuster fight transcend partisan politics.

"We're not Democrats. We're not Republicans. We're Christocrats," he declared.

Christocrats tend to vote exclusively Republican, however, because Jesus was very much against the capital gains tax.




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digby 5/17/2005 10:50:00 AM |

Monday, May 16, 2005

 
From The Beginning

Talking about inequality and social mobility, Ezra says:

I've little hope that we'll address this, though. The overarching evils of vast inequality and the transcendent good of do-it-yourself mobility are such foundational philosophical tenets of America's two parties that I can't see either coming to recognize that the fix, such as one exists, might be the same for both. Indeed, while the Democratic party may be convincible simply because the solutions line up with our proposed programs, Republicans will, for good reason, never relinquish the strict dichotomy they've created between individual mobility and general equality. The belief that large social programs must be avoided because they tamp down on individual virtues stretches back to Hoover and Associationalism, it's not going to be given up now.

As I have argued before,at some tedious length, it goes back further than that. It goes all the way back to the beginning of the Republic and relates very closely to our little "problem" with slavery. It might even be said that the whole concept of American individualism rests on the back of racism.

It was long held that government guarantees of equality meant that the wrong people would get things they did not deserve or could not handle. There have been many of "those people" over the years, but the concept originated with slaves and free African Americans. And the reason is that they, unlike virtually every other poor sub-group, had no economic support systems like churches and ethnic organizations and instead had to depend upon government programs. The face of government largesse was, for many people, black. The "welfare queen" was only the most modern description of a phenomenon that riled up certain citizens for a long, long time.

Individualism became part of the American ethos as much as an expression of racial superiority as personal virtue.


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digby 5/16/2005 11:44:00 AM |

 
Old News

Asinine, uninformed comment of the day (and there are so many):

I really think that calling Newsweek's blunder "the press's Abu Ghraib" is unfair to the low-lifes who carried out the Abu Ghraib abuses. After all, they didn't even hurt anyone, let alone kill them. And the people they abused were almost certainly terrorists. One can't say the same for the people who were murdered in the riots that foreseeably followed Newsweek's story.

Hindquarter, Powerline

Except, except.... Highpockets, here's what your pal Lawrence DeRita had to say:

"The nature of where these things occurred, how quickly they occurred, the nature of individuals who were involved in it, suggest that they may be organized events that are using this alleged allegation as a pretext for activity that was already planned," said DiRita.

No kidding.

(I'm not even going to address the ridiculous assertion that the Abu Ghraib prisoners were terrorists. He needs to do some homework on that subject. Suffice to say that repeating anything that the addlepated James Inhofe says is always a mistake.)

To any of us who were closely following the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo story last summer, this Koran in the toilet thing is old news. Really old news. I wrote a lot about General Geoffrey Ripper and the interrogation techniques down there, and in the course of reading all the informatin that was coming out about Gitmo at the time, it was glaringly obvious that religious desecration was on the menu. (Juan Cole points out in his post this morning that this may actually be a standard US military training technique.)

When the first four British detainees were released, they made some claims that sounded ridiculous. The stuff about desecration of the Koran hardly raised an eyebrow by comparison to the wildly improbable assertion that American women were rubbing menstrual blood all over detainees to get them to talk. How could you believe anything they said when they made up crazy shit like that, right? Right.

What's so phony about the right wing explosion on this issue is that as Arthur Silber points out in this indispensible post, is that it's not as if the Muslim world wasn't already well aware of this practice. Detainees have been released and they have talked. As far back as December 2003, when Vanity Fair published David Rose's expose of Guantanamo (sorry, not online), it was known that throughout the Muslim world, Gitmo was seen as an abomination. And it was known that practices in Guanmtanamo were creating more terrorism and more violence than they stopped:

One senior defense intelligence source gives a grim assessment of the camp's backlash potential: "It's an international public-relations disaster. Maybe the guy who goes into Gitmo does so as a farmer who got swept along and did very little. He's going to come out a full-fledged jihadist. And for every detainee, I'd guess you create another 10 terrorists or supporters of terrorism."

The miracle is that the riots didn't come much sooner. Guantanamo is the greatest recruiting tool in the jihadist arsenal and our absurd insistence on keeping it going (even though it has long since been shown to be nothing more than a puerile expression of national rage) turns us from simple over-reactors into stubborn fascists and self-defeating idiots.

David Rose, in his recent book based upon the Vanity Fair reporting, called "Guantanamo: The War On Human Rights" says:

Across the middle east, those pictures of the newly-arrived detainees kneeling in the dirt in their shackles have become a trope for cartoonists and pamphleteers, a graphic rendition of oppression which speaks to millions of Muslims. The unjust suffering of families and individuals engendered by this aspect of "Operation Enduring Freedom" is sowing dragons’ teeth, turning moderates into fanatics determined to smite the west.

On Islamist websites and in the Arab press, Guantánamo is cited time and again as a rallying point for jihad, as a justification for creating more suicide "martyrs".

This little item in Newsweak is a pretext for action against interrogation techniques that are already well known. Which is why the quasi retraction over the week-end is such a chickenshit display of cowardice on the part of Newsweak. This is old news to anybody who's been paying attention. The jihadists know it, those of us following the story know it and the government certainly knows it. The riots last week in Afghanistan and now around the world are orchestrated to gin up support and their followers are already pissed off enough about this stuff to get with the program quite easily.

Of course, as Silber says, this is probably going to end up being just another scalping party. And until the mainstream media cares about being played and used, the shrill shrieking harpies of the right wing noise machine will continue to treat them like the lackeys they are ... and make examples of some of them every once in a while to keep everybody in line.

This will teach the media to report any more stories about fun loving hijinks and calling them torture. The Blog of the Year is on to you, MSM killers.



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digby 5/16/2005 10:42:00 AM |

Sunday, May 15, 2005

 
A Guy's Gotta Make A Living

This is the only source I find with this information, so maybe it's not true; if it is, it's amazing:

The Syrian government signed an agreement with New Bridge Strategies to improve its image in the American society, convince President Bush that it seeks good relations with his administration and is willing to be extremely flexible in its cooperation with the White House.

The company was selected specifically because its CEO (Joe Allbaugh) had close ties with Bush. Allbaugh was Bush's Chief of Staff and Campaign Manager when Bush was the Governor of Texas. He managed his 2000 campaign and later became Director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, in charge of coordinating the public services and provide assistance to the victims of natural disasters.

I'm sure the fighting 101st keyboarders will will ensure that Allbaugh keeps his eyes open for all the WMD's Saddam spirited into Syria before the war.

Allbaugh is extremely close to Junior. He was the third in the "Iron Triangle" with Rove and Hughes. Josh Marshall has reported how unseemly it is that he's out there raking in huge bucks so soon after being in the administration anyway, particularly from the Iraq debacle which was never part of his portfolio. (He's never been anything but a political hack.) But for him to be making big money lobbying for one of the officially proclaimed terrorist states while his good buddy is the president goes beyond the appearance of impropriety. For all the shrill caterwauling about liberals committing treason every other minute, this little deal really looks like it could be.

But IOKIYAR. It's not like the guy went to a buddhist temple or had a haircut or anything.



Via The Left Coaster
digby 5/15/2005 09:12:00 AM |

Saturday, May 14, 2005

 
Populist Tango

Via Daniel Munz, who's pinch hitting over at Ezra's place, I see that my old pal "Mudcat" Saunders is offering some more good advice to Democrats:

"Bubba doesn’t call them illegal immigrants. He calls them illegal aliens. If the Democrats put illegal aliens in their bait can, we’re going to come home with a bunch of white males in the boat."

The thing is, he's absolutely right. To put together this great new populist revival everybody's talking about, where we get the boys in the pick-up trucks to start voting their "self-interest," we're probably going to need to get up a new nativist movement to go along with it. That's pretty much how populism has always been played in the past, particularly in the south. Certainly, you can rail against the moneyed elites, but there is little evidence that it will work unless you provide somebody on the bottom that the good ole boys can really stomp. As Jack Balkin wrote in this fascinating piece on populism and progressivism:

History teaches us that populism has recurring pathologies; it is especially important to recognize and counteract them. These dangers are particularly obvious to academics and other intellectual elites: They include fascism, nativism, anti-intellectualism, persecution of unpopular minorities, exaltation of the mediocre, and romantic exaggeration of the wisdom and virtue of the masses.

Is it any wonder that the right has been more successful in recently in inflaming the populist impulse in America? They are not squeamish about using just those pathologies --- and only those pathologies -- to gain populist credibility in spite of a blatant lack of populist policy.

Populism can have a very close relationship to fascism and totalitarianism. Indeed, it may be essential. Despite Dennis Prager's confused blather, it wasn't the intellectual elites who fueled the Nazi movement; the intellectuals were purged, just as they were purged by Stalin, by Pol Pot and by Mao during the "cultural revolution" in China. These are the extreme results of a certain populist strain --- or at least the misuse of populist thinking among the people. That Mao and Stalin were commies has nothing to do with it. Populism, in its extreme form, is inherently hostile to intellectualism.

That is not to say that populism is evil. It is just another political philosophy that has its bad side, as every philosophy does. Balkin describes it in great depth, but here's a capsulized version:

The dual nature of populism means that political participation is not something to be forced on the citizenry, nor are popular attitudes some sort of impure ore that must be carefully filtered, purified, and managed by a wise and knowing state. From a populist standpoint, such attempts at managerial purification are paternalistic. They typify elite disparagement and disrespect for popular attitudes and popular culture. Government should provide opportunities for popular participation when people seek it, and when they seek it, government should not attempt to divert or debilitate popular will. An energized populace, aroused by injustice and pressing for change, is not something to be feared and constrained; it is the very lifeblood of democracy. Without avenues for popular participation and without means for popular control, governments become the enemy of the people; public and private power become entrenched, self-satisfied, and smug.

Progressivism, or modern liberalism, takes a distinctly different view:

Central to progressivism is a faith that educated and civilized individuals can, through the use of reason, determine what is best for society as a whole. Persuasion, discussion, and rational dialogue can lead individuals of different views to see what is in the public interest. Government and public participation must therefore be structured so as to produce rational deliberation and consensus about important public policy issues. Popular culture and popular will have a role to play in this process, but only after sufficient education and only after their more passionate elements have been diverted and diffused. Popular anger and uneducated public sentiments are more likely to lead to hasty and irrational judgments.

Like populists, progressives believe that governments must be freed of corrupting influences. But these corrupting influences are described quite differently: They include narrowness of vision, ignorance, and parochial self-interest. Government must be freed of corruption so that it can wisely debate what is truly in the public interest. Progressivism is less concerned than populism about centralization and concentration of power. It recognizes that some problems require centralized authority and that some enterprises benefit from economies of scale. Progressivism also has a significantly different attitude towards expertise: Far from being something to be distrusted, it is something to be particularly prized.

That sounds right to me. What a fine tribe it is, too. Balkin goes on, however:

What is more difficult for many academics to recognize is that progressivism has its own distinctive dangers and defects. Unfortunately, these tend to be less visible from within a progressivist sensibility. They include elitism, paternalism, authoritarianism, naivete, excessive and misplaced respect for the "best and brightest," isolation from the concerns of ordinary people, an inflated sense of superiority over ordinary people, disdain for popular values, fear of popular rule, confusion of factual and moral expertise, and meritocratic hubris.

And there you see the basis for right wing populist hatred of liberals. And it's not altogether untrue, is it? Certainly, those of us who argue from that perspective should be able to recognise and deal with the fact that this is how we are perceived by many people and try to find ways to allay those concerns. The problem is that it's quite difficult to do.

In the past, the way that's been dealt with has been very simple. Get on the bigotry bandwagon. In some ways, everybody wants to be an elitist, I suppose, so all you have to do is join with your brothers in a little "wrong" religion, immigrant or negro bashing. Everybody gets to feel superior that way.

There was a time when the Democratic party was populist/progressive --- William Jennings Bryan was our guy. (He was also, if you recall, the one who argued against evolution in the Scopes trial.) He ran his campaigns against the "money changers" in New York City; the conventional wisdom remains that his Cross of Gold speech with it's economic populist message was the key to his enormous popularity in the rural areas of the west, midwest and south. I would argue that it had as much to do with cultural populism and Lost Cause mythology.

Richard Hofstadter famously wrote that both populism and early progressivism were heavily fueled by nativism and there is a lot of merit in what he says. Take, for instance, prohibition (one of Bryan's major campaign issues.)Most people assume that when it was enacted in 1920, it was the result of do-gooderism, stemming from the tireless work by progressives who saw drink as a scourge for the family, and women in particular. But the truth is that Prohibition was mostly supported by rural southerners and midwesterners who were persuaded that alcohol was the province of immigrants in the big cities who were polluting the culture with their foreign ways. And progressives did nothing to dispell that myth --- indeed they perpetuated it. (The only people left to fight it were the "liberal elites," civil libertarians and the poor urban dwellers who were medicating themselves the only way they knew how.) This was an issue, in its day, that was as important as gay marriage is today. The country divided itself into "wets" and "drys" and many a political alliance was made or broken by taking one side of the issue or another. Bryan, the populist Democrat, deftly exploited this issue to gain his rural coalition --- and later became the poster boy for creationism, as well. (Not that he wasn't a true believer, he was; but his views on evolution were influenced by his horror at the eugenics movement. He was a complicated guy.) And prohibition turned out to be one of the most costly and silly diversions in American history.

It is not a surprise that prohibition was finally enacted in 1920, which is also the time that the Ku Klux Klan reasserted itself and became more than just a southern phenomenon. The Klan's reemergence was the result of the post war clamor against commies and immigrants. The rural areas, feeling beseiged by economic pressure (which manifested themselves much earlier there than the rest of the country)and rapid social change could not blame their own beloved America for its problems so they blamed the usual suspects, including their favorite whipping boy, uppity African Americans.

They weren't only nativist, though. In the southwest, and Texas in particular, they were upset by non-Protestant immorality. According to historian Charles C. Alexander:

"There was also in the Klan a definite strain of moral bigotry. Especially in the Southwest this zeal found expression in direct, often violent, attempts to force conformity. Hence the southwestern Klansman's conception of reform encompassed efforts to preserve premarital chastity, marital fidelity, and respect for parental authority; to compel obedience to state and national prohibition laws; to fight the postwar crime wave; and to rid state and local governments of dishonest politicians." Individuals in Texas thus were threatened, beaten, or tarred-and-feathered for practicing the "new morality," cheating on their spouses, beating their spouses or children, looking at women in a lewd manner, imbibing alcohol, etc.

Yeah, I know. The more things change, yadda, yadda, yadda. The interesting thing about all this is that throughout the 20's the south was Democratic as it had always been --- and populist, as it had long been. But when the Dems nominated Al Smith in 1928, many Democrats deserted the party and voted for Hoover. Why? Because Smith was an urban machine politican, a catholic and anti-prohibition. Texas went for Hoover --- he was from rural Iowa, favored prohibition and was a Protestant. Preachers combed the south decrying the catholic nominee --- saying the Pope would be running the country. Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia went Republican, too. Now, one can't deny that the boom of the 20's was instrumental in Hoover's victory, but rural America had been undergoing an economic crisis for some time. However, then, like now, rural American populists preferred to blame their problems on racial and ethnic influences than the moneyed elites who actually cause them. It's a psychological thing, I think.

(By 1932, of course, all hell had broken loose. Nobody cared anymore about booze or catholics or rich New Yorkers in the White House. They were desperate for somebody to do something. And Roosevelt promised to do something. Extreme crisis has a way of clarifying what's important.)

So, getting back to Mudcat, what he is suggesting is a tried and true method to get rural white males to sign on to a political party. Bashing immigrants and elites at the same time has a long pedigree and it is the most efficient way to bag some of those pick-up truck guys who are voting against their economic self-interest. There seems to be little evidence that bashing elites alone actually works. And that's because what you are really doing is playing to their prejudices and validating their tribal instinct that the reason for their economic problems is really the same reason for the cultural problems they already believe they have --- Aliens taking over Real America --- whether liberals, immigrants, blacks, commies, whoever. And it seems that rural folk have been feeling this way forever.

It's a surefire way to attract those guys with the confederate flags that Mudcat is advising us is required if we are ever to win again. On the other hand, short of another Great Depression, how we keep together a coalition of urbanites, liberals, ethnic minoritites and nativist rural white men, I don't quite get. Nobody's done it yet.



*I should be clear here and note that Jack Balkin does not necessarily endorse my views on nativism and populism in his paper. He notes that there has been some revision of Hofstadter's analysis and that some scholars have found substantial regional differences among rural populists. I agree to the extent that I think this is a much more salient aspect of populism in the south. But history leads me to agree with Hofstadter that nativism and racism are powerful populist impulses pretty much everywhere. It may change colors and creeds, but it's always there.

Balkin does point out some of the difficulties in creating a coalition of progressives and populists and suggests that academics in particular have a hard time because they really are, well, intellectual elites. It's interesting. One of the more intriguing things his thesis alludes to is that the crusade against popular culture may be the least populist thing we could undertake. The rural populists really don't like the liberal elites telling them what's good for them.



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digby 5/14/2005 09:43:00 AM |

Friday, May 13, 2005

 
Prescient Heckler

Back in the day, before talk radio became a stroke inducing wingnut nightmare (and before Air America) I used to listen to KABC in Los Angeles, which has always been an all talk station. In the mornings it had Michael Jackson (not that one) a very erudite, well informed personality who had the world's most impressive rolodex. He could get Nelson Mandela or Margaret Thatcher on the phone and callers, before everybody became a right wing asshole, were invariably polite and well informed. It was the kind of talk radio that people like me -- the snoozers who watch the History Channel and Lehrer --- love. No yelling, no controversy, just a bunch of smart people palavering endlessly. Needless to say, this is so far out of fashion it might as well be a Nehru jacket.

Jackson was on from 9 to 1 and then that sanctimonious prick, Dennis Prager, would come on and blow the whole mood. Guys like him are a dime a dozen today, but he was my first modern wingnut gasbag, so he holds a special place in my ... digestive system.

Today, on the Huffington Post, he says that the guy who heckled Ann Coulter is a Hitler youth. But the universities are also like Weimar Germany and Phd's led the way to the death camps and the gulags.

None of that is factual or makes any sense. Weimar "decadence" was the target of Nazism, not the cause --- unless you want to adopt the abuser excuse "she made me do it because she was bad." And Nazism may have ostensibly been "secular, but it sure as hell used Christian nationalism when it suited them:

In his first radio address to the German people, twenty-four hours after coming to power, Hitler declared, “The National Government will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built up. They regard Christianity as the foundation of our national morality and the family as the basis of national life.”

But whatever. That's just typical Dennis Prager dribbling confusedly about barbarians and brown shirts because somebody was rude to Ann Coulter. Rude to Ann Coulter --- something one would think he'd be embarrassed to bring up considering what a nasty piece of work she is.

Does everyone remember what the student's outrageous question in that Q&A was?

"You say that you believe in the sanctity of marriage," said Ajai Raj, an English sophomore. "How do you feel about marriages where the man does nothing but fuck his wife up the ass?"

Think about that for a minute. When I first heard about it I thought he was saying something for the pure purpose of being (as he admits) a jackass and trying to put Coulter off balance. But considering the revelations of this week, in which it was revealed that a prominent religious leader enjoyed forcing sodomy on his wife against her will, it's actually a serious question.

I agree with Prager that there are barbarians in our midst, but I think he needs to look a little bit closer to his own social circle.



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digby 5/13/2005 07:02:00 PM |

 
Who Loves Ya baby?

Roy Edroso says:

Sometimes I wonder if I'm not being too harsh, and sometimes maybe I am, but I can safely say that I will never regret saying that Michelle Malkin is utterly delusional

Word.

Although I agree that these are fine words to live by, and I do, in this case he is specifically referring to her latest illustration of right wing paranoid victimology:

When was the last time you thanked a cop? And wouldn't it be nice if, for just a brief moment, the mainstream media would hold a ceasefire in its incessant cop-bashing crusades?

There are good cops, and there are bad cops. But national press outlets, predisposed to harp on law enforcement as an inherently racist and reckless institution, hype the hellions at the expense of the heroes.

Yes, and the MSM hates puppies and kitties and baby rhesus monkeys too. Goddamn evil bastards.

Roy swats down her absurdities like the pesky little nits they are and goes on to discuss the veritable deification of cops in our popular culture noting the somewhat disturbing CSI trend in which:

...cops are not only immaculate honest and zealous in pursuit of the truth, they are also scientifically predestined to find it. (Someday Minority Report will be done as a cop series, and young people will be shocked to learn that it was originally a dystopian vision.)

This may be working against the police, actually, since now prosecutors such as those in the Robert Blake case find their TV addled juries unimpressed with any evidence that isn't scientifically incontrovertible. They even call it the CSI effect. (I would imagine that the new series CSI:Wichita will solve that little problem by having the crime scene investigators simply pray for the suspects to confess. Looking very hot, of course.)

Meanwhile, here in California, cops and firefighters are on TV every five minutes taking issue with the powdered and pampered Republican Governor saying of them, “These are the special interests. Special interests don’t like me in Sacramento because I kick their butt." Seems these unionized public employees didn't care too much for that. Go figure.

As Roy says and I concur:

I don't begrudge the police this heroic treatment -- though I would prefer, as I suspect they would, that they got the love in their pay-envelopes rather than from mass media. But to say that the MSM is out to make cops look bad is just nuts.

And that is why I join Roy in saying I will never regret saying that Michelle Malkin is delusional. And nuts.



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digby 5/13/2005 05:24:00 PM |

 
Doomsday Machine

Everybody go sign up for PFAW's "Nuclear Option" Mass Immediate Response:

By giving us your cell phone number, we will text message you as soon as Senate Republicans trigger the "nuclear option." Embedded in that text message will be a link to the Senate switchboard. With the push of a couple buttons, your call – along with thousands of others – goes right through to the corridors of power demanding preservation of the filibuster.

This the first time flash mob technology's been used for political purposes. Which means it's just cute enough to get some press.



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digby 5/13/2005 01:35:00 PM |

 
Revival Hype

Both Matt Yglesias and Kevin Drum believe, based upon findings in the recent Pew poll, that we would be better off if we liberals lightened up and accepted the 10 Commandments on public buildings and certain other somewhat trivial religious issues. I'm not sure how we do this, considering that this has been the interpretation of the courts rather than a legislative battle, but I'm sure that if we just give in on Pricilla Owen et al, we'll see some change on this and other issues of importance to the Religious Right. I'm also sure we can then cherry pick those issues that are really important to us, but I'm not certain at all if the principle on which we make our argument will still be operative once we've tossed it aside for these trivial reasons.

As it happens, I couldn't care less whether the 10 Commandments are displayed on public buildings as long as all religions are treated equally. I certainly hope that when a Hindu requests that his religion be equally represented that we liberals will also uphold his rights. Otherwise, we will have established a state religion, which I think is a really bad idea considering the millenium's worth of blood that was spilled by our forebears in Europe over these issues.

Unfortunately, it seems we are on course to do just that. Or at least establish a "Judeo-Christian umbrella" state religion.

A federal appeals court has ruled that a Virginia county can exclude a member of a minority religion from offering prayers at county board meetings -- even though adherents of "Judeo-Christian" religions are allowed to lead invocations.

In a unanimous ruling April 14, a three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against county resident Cynthia Simpson, whom officials denied the opportunity to offer prayers at meetings of the Chesterfield County Board of Supervisors.

Simpson is a practitioner of Wicca, a neo-pagan religion that she has described as interchangeable with witchcraft. She is a leader in a Wiccan congregation in the suburban county near Richmond. When she asked to be put on a list of those who could lead invocations at board meetings, the county attorney told her she would not be allowed, claiming that "Chesterfield's non-sectarian invocations are traditionally made to a divinity that is consistent with the Judeo-Christian tradition."

Simpson, working with attorneys from a pair of civil-liberties groups, sued the county. A federal district judge in Richmond sided with her, ruling in 2003 that the practice unconstitutionally discriminated against religions that do not stem from the dominant Western monotheistic traditions.

But the latest ruling reverses that decision, citing the Supreme Court's 1985 Marsh vs. Chambers decision allowing "non-sectarian" legislative prayers before the Nebraska legislature. Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, authoring the 4th Circuit's opinion, said the content of the prayers Chesterfield County officials allowed was broad enough, and the fact that Simpson was barred from offering one was immaterial to the case.

"The Judeo-Christian tradition is, after all, not a single faith but an umbrella covering many faiths," Wilkinson wrote. "We need not resolve the parties' dispute as to its precise extent, as Chesterfield County has spread it wide enough in this case to include Islam. For these efforts, the County should not be made the object of constitutional condemnation."

Wilkinson has been widely rumored to be among the candidates for a Supreme Court appointment, should any slots on that body come open before the end of President Bush's term.

Apparently, all religions that fall under the Judeo-Christian "umbrella" are non-sectarian, which I suppose is a form of progress. But you can't just let any old religion be officially recognized in public functions. Ones that aren't drawn from the old testament, anyway.

Clearly, just like guns and the death penalty and dozens of other things, the Democrats are going to cave on this issue. And in and of itself, it will not make much difference. Ever since the entire congress stood on the steps of the congress and sang "God Bless America" I knew that any pretense toward religious neutrality was over.

But, what makes anyone think that this will be enough to sway any votes or stop the rest of the theocratic agenda? Are people voting on the single issue of the 10 Commandments and if we give in on that we can start talking about the minimum wage? Just as people like Kevin and Matt and I don't care deeply about whether the 10 commandments are displayed or a creche is put in front of city hall at Christmas, I doubt whether the full 70%+ of Americans who thinks the 10 Commandments should be allowed on public buyildings actually vote on the issue. Most people agree, just like us, that it isn't a big deal --- all except those who are fighting for the principle of it. Those people aren't changing sides politically --- and the rest just don't give enough of a damn to change their voting behavior over it.

The danger is that the ones who are fighting on the principle that Christianity should be part of civic life are also the ones who are not giving any ground. And they won't. They are thinking long term -- patiently chipping away at the principle of separation of church and state, while the rest of us say "lighten up" to the ACLU, who is taking a principled stance on trivial issues so that we can make a consistent argument when it comes to fighting for the important ones. Like teaching creationism in the public schools.

As Matt points out, the other interesting finding in the PEW poll is that a majority believe that creationism should be taught along side evolution in the schools. (I suspect that most people do not realize that the goal of the Christian Right is to replace the teaching of evolution, and think instead that creationism is a worthy subject for a class on comparative religions, not science. But that's just a hunch.) Kevin says we shouldn't give in on that, but really, what's to stop it?

I realize that we liberals believe that this is a matter of teaching fact based science as opposed to faith based religious belief, but the truth is that schools that aren't funded by public money can teach creationism till the cows come home already. The state cannot compel anyone not to teach religion in place of science in the public schools unless we believe there is a constitutional prohibition against the schools promoting one religion over another.

So, on what will we hang our hat on once we've decided that religion --- or more specifically the "judeo-christian umbrella" --- is sanctioned by the state in regards to prayer in schools, the 10 commandments on public buildings and public displays of religion on community ground. These things are all trivial in themselves (although for some people, putting little kids in the position of having to pray or abstain is unconcionable.) But regardless of whether each little instance of religious tradition in the public square is in itself pernicious, taken together, if sanctified by the courts, it erodes one of the basic tenets of our system, which is the prohibition against the establishment of state religion. And that adds up to a greenlight to teach creationism or promote any other Christian dogma --- with my tax dollars.

On a pracical political level, I might point out that electorally, getting religion may not be the bonanza everyone thinks it will be long term. The largest growing religious cohort in the United States is "non-religious", doubling in the past decade and growing stronger. And it's particularly true in the western states where there is a growing preference for "spirituality" over formal religion.

Contrast this with the studies that show Protestants losing ground for decades, perhaps stabilizing now, but certainly not growing, while Catholics remain fairly stable, but divided politically. The Barna group, which does the most in-depth polling on religion in America recently wrote:

"There does not seem to be revival taking place in America. Whether that is measured by church attendance, born again status, or theological purity, the statistics simply do not reflect a surge of any noticeable proportions.

If we are to look at the electoral landscape, we will see that the hard core religious cohort is most influential in the south, which is no surprise. But if you take a look at this interesting map, created by USA today, you' will see that "non-religious" is a rather large minority in the west and midwest swing states; when you combine it with liberal mainline protestant churches and liberal catholics you will see that the Christian Right is not the electoral powerhouse it's cracked up to be. We should not fear them like this.

And needless to say, as our ethnic make-up continues to change, in which Buddhists, Hindus, Confucians and others continue to immigrate and pass their belief systems to their children, we are going to see a continuance of the explosive growth in those religions and philosophies as we've seen in the last thirty years. There is a huge potential for strife in our future if we continue down this road of establishing the "Judeo-Christian" umbrella as a quasi official religion.

There is good evidence that we are the victims of Republican hype on this religious issue, which perpetuates itself in the servile media, creating a faddish obsession with religiousity at a time when more people are actually leaving religion than coming into it. Like the phony campaign against Christmas, they are tying us up in knots with this theocratic correctness. For both practical and principled reasons, we shouldn't let them do it.


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digby 5/13/2005 09:11:00 AM |

Thursday, May 12, 2005

 
Gandhi And His Rabble

And the "revisionist historians" proceed apace. Via Ted at Crooked Timber I see that the Highpockets and the boys at Powerline have endorsed the idea that the British should have held out against "Ghandi and his rabble" --- to prevent violence, of course, which is why all good white men have to keep the wogs in line, don't you know. Didn't the Raj have any purple ink to pacify the little bastards? Dear me.

"It's great to see someone standing up for colonialism, especially British colonialism. I agree wholeheartedly with this observation, for example:

Had Britain had the courage to face down Gandhi and his rabble a few years longer, the tragedy that was the partititon of India might have been avoided." (quoting Roger Kimball.)

But really dear boy, while we're praising British colonialism, let's not stop there. One can't help but observe that if they had just held out against Washington and his rabble a few years longer the tragedy of the civil war might have been prevented. Failure of nerve, I'm afraid. Yes, yes, it would have been bloody, but what isn't, I say? Best to keep the swinish multitudes under one's thumbs. (Of course, except for the slaves, the Americans were white, weren't they? Makes a difference; indeed it does.)


Hilzoy at Obsidion Wings offers the substantive response for trolls who require one.



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digby 5/12/2005 07:56:00 PM |

 
Oil For Fools

I think the thing I love most about the right wingers is their commitment to principle and intellectual consistency. For instance, on the Un Foundation's blog UN Dispatch, Peter Daou took issue with Roger Simon's obsessing over the Oil For Food program, while never having a kind word to say about the good things the United Nations does around the world. The right blogosphere is incensed that he would dare to tell a blogger what he should blog about, and besides the oil for food scandal is, like, really really bad.

Now call me crazy, but I seem to remember some wingnuts bleating every five minutes or so about how the news media is obsessing about all the "bad news" in Iraq to exclusion of the "good." It's been their mantra for the last two years as a matter of fact. John Tierney of the NY Times even said just the other day that we shouldn't talk about the suicide bombers because it gives the wrong impression --- that suicide bombers are everywhere and people's lives are threatened. Even though the Iraqi people's lives actually are threatened and there actually are suicide bombers everywhere. Best not to harp on the bad news.

Here we have an institution, the UN, that is enmeshed in a corruption scandal --- and not one that appears to be unprecedented or shocking by corruption scandal standards. Certainly, it cannot be compared to the serious everyday violence that is taking place in Iraq. And yet we have right wingers obsessing about it to the exclusion of all its substantial and important good works around the world --- while they constantly complain that the news media focuses too much on wanton violence and social chaos in a country we occupy, to the exclusion of insubstantial and meaningless happy talk about schools being painted (for 2 million dollars a piece.)

The sad fact is that the UN Oil for Food scandal is becoming another one of these right wing masturbatory obsessions --- like Christmas in Cambodia and Vince Foster. There are always a few of these hobby horses out there, nobody knows why.

Meanwhile the UN actually does a lot of really important work, unlike the Pottery Barn debacle in Iraq, where we are supposed to get credit for fixing what we broke. Here are just a handful of the issues the UN has been working on while the wingnuts blather on:

Tackling the threat of transnational organized crime

Shipping supplies to millions of Iraqi schoolchildren

Controlling the Marburg virus

Building thousands of homes for tsunami victims

Partnering with the private sector to meet humanitarian needs

Reducing child mortality rates

Rehabilitating Iraq's marshlands

Eradicating polio

Rebuilding lives in Afghanistan

Fighting the global malaria epidemic

Curbing the world's most hazardous pollutants

Improving global disaster and emergency response

Building a sustainable future

This right wing UN fixation is another one of those issues that goes all the way back to the Truman era. I'll say it again; anybody who thinks the Republicans are the party of new ideas are sadly mistaken. They haven't even joined the last half of the 20th century yet.



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digby 5/12/2005 05:22:00 PM |

 
Blasphemous Perverts


Everybody's talking about the article in The Nation about Dr. David Hager, the Bush appointee to the Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs in the Food and Drug Administration. His wife Linda says he forcibly sodomized her. Often while she was unconcious due to her narcolepsy.

Now, this would noramlly be just a run of the mill GOP hypocrite story that doesn't deserve any more than a little laugh over beers. But it should be emphasized that many of of us knew Dr Hager was a scumbag when he was appointed back in 2002. And he has subsequently proven to be the extremist we knew he was by personally blocking, in unprecedented fashion, the FDA's decision to make Plan B, the morning after pill, a quasi OTC drug.

But, he was a very religious man so everyone had to shut up and let him have a job he was abjectly unqualified for because to do otherwise would be theocratically incorrect.

Dr Hager was primarily known at the time as the writer of scriptural cures for women's reproductive problems. But his cure for infidelity was just plain creepy:

Picture Jesus coming into the room. He walks over to you and folds you gently into his arms. He tousles your hair and kisses you gently on the cheek. . . . Let this love begin to heal you from the inside out."

I'm no Christian, but that sounds damned close to blasphemy to me.

Between the mule fucking, the narcophelia and the sexual fantasies about Jesus, I'm beginning to feel like a provincial schoolkid. To think that we impeached a president over a couple of half baked blowjobs in a hallway --- and listened to years and years of non-stop moralizing from these Republican perverts. I'm a pretty sophisticated person and I don't usually pass judgements on people's fantasy lives or their sexuality. But the Christian Right with their wild shedding of the most shocking of sexual taboos are starting to freak me out. And I'm from California.



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digby 5/12/2005 09:54:00 AM |

Wednesday, May 11, 2005

 
It's Still On?

I knew it was over when Bush's fawning sycophant, Dennis Miller, tried to pass himself off as a libertarian on Jon Stewart's show a couple of weeks ago. In fact, I found that little moment quite uplifting. There is nobody more trendy, more "finger in the wind," more faddish than the Rant man himself. If he's climbing off the conservative bun-boy train, then the zeitgeist has definitely shifted.

And his show's finally been put out of its misery, too.



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digby 5/11/2005 06:46:00 PM |

 
Glory, Glory, Jalapeno

In honor of this great post by James Wolcott called "Godless Heathens Get No Respect", I am hereby no longer going to be polite or even mildly respectful to the morons of the Christian Right.

As Christian fundamentalism becomes more intrusive and oppressive, Pat Robertson's odious discharge being just the latest example, it is up to us adherents to reason, law, and unchained thought to revive and sustain the reputations of America's great individualists and nonconformists. It's understandable that Democratic candidates, sincere and insincere, feel they have no choice but to drag faith around with them like a little red wagon, but the we non-office-seeking nonbelievers are under no such obligation, and have been accomodating for too long.

He is right. There is a long tradition of religious irreverance in this country and I'm tired of holding back out of some misplaced sense that I'll offend some religious person somewhere. I'll cast my lot with this guy:

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

Mark Twain

Back in the late 70's the fundamentalist bozos were wandering around church parking lots like a bunch of blind salmon, sending money to perverts like Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggert and handling snakes around children. Paul Weyrich and Morton Blackwell knew just what to do. Make them into Republicans. And now they are the very backbone of the Party.

Morons.





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digby 5/11/2005 05:53:00 PM |

 
Getting Antsy

Kevin Drum wonders what Bush's bizarre Yalta blathering was code for. We all know that when Junior dredges up some obscure historical reference (like his strange interjection of "Dred Scott" into the debates) you can be sure he's speaking in tongues to somebody. The question is who and why.

I think it's just possible that the neos are getting ready to turn up the heat on their old nemesis, Russia. They will not rest until some commie blood is spilled by the forces of good. And terrorism just isn't a grand enough enemy for these guys. It's messy, it's hard to define, we can't defeat it with bombs and military invasion. I think it's been much too hard for these guys to get their nut with this sneaky, asymetrical 21st century enemy, and the Iraqis just aren't cooperating enough with their "liberation" to be truly satisfying. Time to get back to basics.

If we're lucky, maybe before he checked in at his new job, Wolfowitz dusted off his 1992 plan to invade Russia. (Oh, excuse me, "defend our vital interests in Lithuania.") Now that was a war plan, goddamit.

PENTAGON WAR SCENARIO SPOTLIGHTS RUSSIA

STUDY OF POTENTIAL THREATS PRESUMES U.S. WOULD DEFEND LITHUANIA

Barton Gellman Washington Post Staff Writer
February 20, 1992; Page a1

A classified study prepared as the basis for the Pentagon's budgetary planning through the end of the century casts Russia as the gravest potential threat to U.S. vital interests and presumes the United States would spearhead a NATO counterattack if Russia launched an invasion of Lithuania U.S. intervention in Lithuania, which would reverse decades of American restraint in the former Soviet Union's Baltic sphere of influence, is one of seven hypothetical roads to war that the Pentagon studied to help the military services size and justify their forces through 1999. In the study, the Pentagon neither advocates nor predicts any specific conflict.

The Lithuanian scenario contemplates a major war by land, sea and air in which 24 NATO divisions, 70 fighter squadrons and six aircraft carrier battle groups would keep the Russian navy "bottled up in the eastern Baltic," bomb supply lines in Russia and use armored formations to expel Russian forces from Lithuania. The authors state that Russia is unlikely to respond with nuclear weapons, but they provide no basis for that assessment.

[...]

National security officials outside the Pentagon sharply disputed the scenario's premise, noting that the United States never recognized the Soviet Union's World War II conquest of the Baltic states but steered clear of interference there for fear of nuclear war. One State Department official said the Pentagon scenario "strikes me like being more of a Tom Clancy novel." Another official with responsibility for European security policy said flatly, "We have no vital interest in Lithuania."

[...]

Wolfowitz, who requested the scenarios in an Aug. 10 memorandum, wrote that they would "guide program formulation and evaluation." Wolfowitz asked for two scenarios centering on Russia: a smaller, more rapidly developing threat based on the consolidation of existing Russian forces, and a much larger, more slowly developing threat premised on "reconstitution" of a Russian-based hostile superpower.

The reconstitution scenario names no adversary, citing only a "resurgent/emergent global threat," or REGT. It describes a five-year U.S. buildup that would come in response to a Russian buildup, could exceed peak Cold War levels and could lead to a major global war.

The Lithuania Scenario

The Lithuania scenario is a potential diplomatic embarrassment, emerging as it has in the aftermath of a joint declaration Feb. 1 by President Bush and Russian President Boris Yeltsin that "Russia and the United States do not regard each other as potential adversaries."

It is also the only European contingency in the Pentagon document. Congressional advocates of drawing U.S. forces in Europe below the 150,000 troop level set by the Pentagon for the mid-1990s can be expected to challenge the realism of the scenario and assert that no plausible mission remains for large-scale NATO forces.

Finally, the Lithuania scenario is the most demanding single military contingency in the Pentagon document and, therefore, a potentially controversial yardstick for the military force required in the late 1990s. A working group from the Joint Staff's planning directorate, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the office of program analysis and evaluation estimated it would take 7 1/3 divisions, 45 fighter squadrons and six aircraft carriers to fight the Russians.

[...]

REGT Scenario

A "resurgent/emergent global threat," or REGT, becomes capable of threatening U.S. interests worldwide. According to national security sources, the scenario refers to Russia, with or without other former Soviet republics.

The REGT develops into an "authoritarian and strongly anti-democratic" government over about three years, beginning in 1994. After four or five years of military expansion, the REGT is ready to begin "a second Cold War" by the year 2001, or launch a major global war that could last for years. Pentagon planners assume that the United States would spend years of political debate before beginning a buildup in response to the REGT. "Reconstitution" of U.S. forces, as the Pentagon calls the buildup, would include expanded recruitment, weapons modernization and greatly increased production, and, if necessary, the draft.

No outcome is projected for a global war.

As you may have begun to notice, the right wing doesn't adapt well to change. They are still talking about McCarthyism and hippies and any number of other anachronistic topics. They are obsessed with being right, not only today, but fifty years ago. They still call liberals commies. It would not surprise me in the least if they are going to turn their attention back to their mortal enemy. Once a commie, always a commie. Hasn't that always been their motto?

And if Bush's pal Vladimir doesn't co-operate, we can always start asking "who lost China?" That one never gets old.



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digby 5/11/2005 05:01:00 PM |

 
Kangaroo Justice

The Talking Dog has posted another one of his interesting interviews with attorneys for alleged unlawful combatants, this one with Joshua Dratel, the lawyer for the Australian David Hicks, who is being held at Guantanamo. Read the whole thing, but this passage is particularly stunning:

Talking Dog: Can you briefly summarize what you in particular find unfair about the military commission process at Guantanimo?

Joshua Dratel: Basically, there are no rules. The Uniform Code of Military Justice, which governs court-martials -- that's been thrown out. No standards at all. Total arbitrariness. No efforts at anything resembling fairness. Let's start with evidence and proof. People don't know this, of course.The government's "proof" consists entirely of interrogators reading from reports of their interrogations-- without any basis to challenge the underlying accounts of witnesses, such as the witnesses themselves (who have frequently been shipped out of Guantanamo) or their interpreters, or the conditions under which the statements were taken, which were frequently, to put it politely, "coercive." Just statements from the detainees themselves-- regardless of whether obtained from abuse, or coercion, even rising to torture. In the commissions, you simply can't challenge them-- you don't have access to the witnesses.

Talking Dog: I understand you spent a fair amount of time challenging the panels and their members themselves.

Joshua Dratel: I'm glad you brought that up. That's another area of unfairness. In a military felony case-- that's any case where the penalty might be more than one year in prison-- and remember that these detainees might get life in prison or even death sentences-- you need at least 5 panel members under the UCMJ. Under the commissions arbitrary set-ups, they envisioned between 3 and 7 panel members. In David's case, they planned 5 panelists and one alternate. But we challenged the panelists, for a variety of reasons, and 3 challenges were granted. We thought they would appoint 2 more officers to bring the panel back to 5, but they didn't. Now this makes a huge difference. And that's because under military rules, you need a 2/3 vote for conviction. On a 5 member panel, that means you need only coNvince 2 out of 5 for an acquittal; on a 3 member panel, of course, its 2 out of 3... a much higher burden, and not one required by the UCMJ. Conversely, the government's burden is halved: while it needs four of five votes to convict in a five-member commission, it needs only two in a three-member commission.

And then we get into the issue of the fact that in a court-martial,there is one judge, and the panel acts as kind of a jury. Under this set-up, the whole commission was supposed to make rulings. Of course, they had no legal training (except for one officer, Colonel Brownback). But the panelists couldn't absorb certain basic legal concepts-- such as 'ex post facto" and "jurisdiction". For example, if a citizien of Country A (we'll call it "Australia") is fighting in Company B (we'll call it Taliban Afghanistan) against Country C (we'll call it the Northern Alliance of Afghanistan), in Hicks' case, supposedly he was in a fox-hole guarding a Taliban tank position or something, before he was picked up by the Northern Alliance, then how does Country D, the United States, get jurisdiction over him? I mean, the United States has no jurisdiction over Hicks and his alleged actions-- completely lost on this panel. Of course, the panelists' response was "you mean he just gets away with it?" But the crimes he is accused of were not war crimes-- he was not even accused of shooting at soldiers-- as if that were a war crime, which it is not. At worst, it was either a domestic offense (like treason) in Afghanistan, or acting as a soldier of a military, in which case, he wouldn't be guilty of a crime at all, but a combatant subject to the Geneva Conventions. Also, of course, the evidence also is illegitimate because of the manner in which it was obtained-- all consisting of statements of detainees made under coercive interrogation or even torture. At the motions argument, we wanted to call witnesses who were experts on international and military law. But the panel didn't want to hear any of them.

Finally, of course, Rumsfeld has controlled the appeals process by stacking it with his own hand-picked cronies. The objections to the process are not just procedural. The government's entire case against everyone is based on interrogations of other detainees. Nothing else.

Even the Star Chamber was mostly made up of actual lawyers and judges. As we get farther and farther away from 9/11 doesn't this stuff seem crazier and crazier? I always thought that we behaved like a dumb wounded giant lashing out indiscriminately, but as time went on I assumed that we would pull ourselves together and begin to behave rationally. But we are not. Guantanamo is a gulag.

One other little bit of the interview I'd like to highlight is this:

Talking Dog: Do you think that by and large the American people
really care about this issue at all, and why do you think that is?


Joshua Dratel: They care about some of these issues in the
abstract, but they have no idea how things are being done at Guanatanamo. These are not proven terrorists. There has been no determination of any value at all. You would hope that Americans would care about torturing the innocent. Certainly, there would be concern for OUR personnel in the hands of another nation. I'll tell you that the military people are very concerned. They are concerned about the reciprocal effects of our runnning a process that isn't fair, or capable of making objective determinations, even if no Americans are subject to them. But think about when it's our personnel-- such as when Private Lynch was captured-- how we demanded that she and others be treated per the Geneva Conventions. In the future, how can we make demands like that with a straight face-- or will others pay any heed when we ignore the conventions and flout the rules ourselves?

I don't think people give a damn, or at least most people. The Pew Poll released this week found:

Republicans have succeeded in attracting two types of swing voters who could not be more different," the study reports. "The common threads are a highly favorable opinion of President Bush personally and support for an aggressive military stance against potential enemies of the U.S."

Bush voters are just fine with torture, probably even of other Americans, but particularly of "the enemy." And I doubt that they have any problem with the double standard of saying that you may not torture ours, but we can torture yours. God is on our side, after all, not theirs.

As you know, I'm gifted with from time to time by e-mails from a right winger. Here's what he had to say about torture recently:

On Sunday night "60 Minutes" did its 10th liberal anti-American segment in a row about the war in Iraq. This time it was about how we torture people at Guantanimo (GITMO.) The explosive incident in question, to which there was a direct and credible witness, involved using an American woman to sexually humiliate, in theory, sexually repressed Muslim prisoner.

The fist logical response to this has to be: if it were me or my son I'd thank God loudly and eternally to have such complete wimps as torturers. Second, the American version of torture might even be fun. Indeed, American torture is often, although I'm sure not always, a joke. We saw it in Abu Ghraib. In the same prison where Saddam Hussein would make movies (now for sale world wide) of his guards slowly cutting off the tongues and limbs of fully conscious human beings, or breaking as many bones as possible with a club, again on a fully conscious human being, the Americans would make their prisoners get into a gym class style human pyramid (no mat to cushion their tender knees), and, they would be naked too, as if to really insure that the torture was really really severe. Again, all a rational person can say is: if it were me or my son I'd pray to God to be imprisoned by the very gentle and civilized Americans.

The above, of course seems obvious to a monkey, although it is apparently not so obvious to a liberal. But it does give rise to another important question: why do the liberals devote more time to their delirious idea that is worse to torture someone, American style, than to kill him on the battlefield? After all, we are killing a lot more people in this war than were ever made to wear female underwear at Abu Ghraib? On the battlefield you die, and often very slowly and painfully. If the bullet hits you in the heart you are very lucky. More likely an Iraqi insurgent will be severely wounded by a bullet or explosion that leaves a significant part of his body on the battlefield, and only then will he slowly bleed to death or slowly be infected to death. This is far worse than a gymnastics class, in women's underwear no less, at Abu Ghraib, and yet it gets less attention from the liberal press?

I suppose the liberals prefer to focus on torture because it plays upon a universal subconscious fear of genuine torture that we all share. It is highly manipulative, and fraudulent though, to influence foreign policy in this emotionally deceptive way. Real thinking should prevail, not liberal blather. What remains inexplicable is that liberals largely ignore our real torture. When we pick up a high level al-Qaida official such as al-Libby who almost certainly has information on upcoming attacks on Americans, we obviously torture him, for real, to save lives, but this remains mostly off the liberal radar screen; perhaps because it is obviously necessary and obviously too nasty to talk about? Liberal outrage at the sex play at Abu Ghraib makes the point almost as well while being far more palatable to a broad audience.

He goes on to say that torture becomes problematic because the interrogators can't keep their mouths shut so it lets the enemy know what they will need to withstand (and gives liberal traitors ammunition) thus ruining the whole torture scheme. I don't know how many people there are like this in the country, but you can be pretty sure that all of them who voted, voted for George W. Bush. One expects this kind of talk from wingnuts.

But I also have to suspect that some version of this "tortured" logic was used by those swing voters who were so impressed by Commander Codpiece and his "aggressive military stance." And he knows it:

Q Mr. President, under the law, how would you justify the practice of renditioning, where U.S. agents who brought terror suspects abroad, taking them to a third country for interrogation? And would you stand for it if foreign agents did that to an American here?

THE PRESIDENT: That's a hypothetical, Mark. We operate within the law and we send people to countries where they say they're not going to torture the people.

But let me say something: the United States government has an obligation to protect the American people. It's in our country's interests to find those who would do harm to us and get them out of harm's way. And we will do so within the law, and we will do so in honoring our commitment not to torture people. And we expect the countries where we send somebody to, not to torture, as well. But you bet, when we find somebody who might do harm to the American people, we will detain them and ask others from their country of origin to detain them. It makes sense. The American people expect us to do that. We -- we still at war.

One of my -- I've said this before to you, I'm going to say it again, one of my concerns after September the 11th is the farther away we got from September the 11th, the more relaxed we would all become and assume that there wasn't an enemy out there ready to hit us. And I just can't let the American people -- I'm not going to let them down by assuming that the enemy is not going to hit us again. We're going to do everything we can to protect us. And we've got guidelines. We've got law. But you bet, Mark, we're going to find people before they harm us.

In other words, "don't worry your pretty little heads about torture; we do what we need to do." And the security moms swoon.

I'm hoping that when we begin our great Democratic moral crusade against dirty talk on TV (to show empathy to all these parents who vote Republican because we haven't done enough about Britney and Janet's nipples) that we can find a few minutes to also talk about why torture is wrong. I know it isn't as appealing to the religious among us who are so worried about their children being exposed to sex, but it might just save this country's soul, nonetheless.




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digby 5/11/2005 11:39:00 AM |

 
Rick Santorum Knows What He's Talking About

Via NewsHounds, who watch Fox so we don't have to:

Last night, anti-abortion extremist Neal Horsley was a guest on The Alan Colmes Show, a FOX News radio program. The topic was an interesting one - whether or not an internet service provider should allow Horsley to post the names of abortion doctors on his website. Horsley does that as a way of targeting them and one doctor has been killed. In the course of the interview, however, Colmes asked Horsley about his background, including a statement that he had admitted to engaging in homosexual and bestiality sex.

At first, Horsley laughed and said, "Just because it's printed in the media, people jump to believe it."

"Is it true?" Colmes asked.

"Hey, Alan, if you want to accuse me of having sex when I was a fool, I did everything that crossed my mind that looked like I..."

AC: "You had sex with animals?"

NH: "Absolutely. I was a fool. When you grow up on a farm in Georgia, your first girlfriend is a mule."

AC: "I'm not so sure that that is so."

NH: "You didn't grow up on a farm in Georgia, did you?"

AC: "Are you suggesting that everybody who grows up on a farm in Georgia has a mule as a girlfriend?"

NH: It has historically been the case. You people are so far removed from the reality... Welcome to domestic life on the farm..."

Colmes said he thought there were a lot of people in the audience who grew up on farms, are living on farms now, raising kids on farms and "and I don't think they are dating Elsie right now. You know what I'm saying?"

Horsley said, "You experiment with anything that moves when you are growing up sexually. You're naive. You know better than that... If it's warm and it's damp and it vibrates you might in fact have sex with it."

Unless it was male, which would be so gay.

Hey, the First Lady was joking about this stuff a week ago and all the wingnuts said that it was just an old farm joke and it's another sign of how out of touch we coastal elites are that we thought that the right wing Christians would find anything unwholesome about it. Now I understand what they mean. Bestiality is an integral part of the "heartland lifestyle."

It turns that in this instance at least, they are right about liberals not understanding the red state culture. I am way out of touch with the mulefucking traditions in Real America.


Note to the DLC: Have next presidential candidate hump small pony on Meat The Press.



Hat tip to A. Signalstation
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digby 5/11/2005 11:01:00 AM |

 
President Prick

Has any country ever had a more arrogant, insolent, contemptuous leader than we have? Really, I can't think of any monarchs or popes who behave this presumptuously, but then they only think they are God's representatives on earth, not God himself:

RIGA, Latvia -
President Bush is used to taking center stage, even when sharing the dais with other presidents in their own countries.

That made for some awkward moments at a news conference Saturday with Bush and the leaders of three Baltic republics. Host President Vaira Vike-Freiberga of Latvia invited her counterparts from Lithuania and Estonia to make opening statements, but forgot Bush before opening it up to reporters' questions.

Bush interjected, and she demurred to her high-profile visitor.

"I think maybe somebody from across the ocean should be given a chance to make a statement, as well," she said, drawing laughs from Bush and the reporters.

After Bush finished, Vike-Freiberga then explained that they would take four questions — one for each president. Again, Bush tried to interrupt, saying, "Or you can have all four questions to me," knowing that foreign reporters usually want to use the opportunity to probe the U.S. president.

Vike-Freiberga ignored the remark as she called on a Latvian journalist, and Bush threw his arms up and looked to help from aides offstage. The Latvian journalist said he would prefer to question the U.S. leader, and Bush responded, "Yeah, I thought that might be the case."

And as he predicted, all four questions were for him.

I guess we know why John Bolton is such a favorite around this White House.



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digby 5/11/2005 10:25:00 AM |

 
Boffo Republican

I think I'm going to have to adopt Mrs David Frum as my personal favorite Huffington blogger if she keeps this up. Today, she follows up with more advice on how to bring Hollywood and Washington together. This time she suggests how Hollywood might entice Washington to be sympathetic by proposing the following:

Briefly, the plot is this: A Mid-Western high school girl (think Lindsay Lohan) discovers that she is pregnant. She is scared and embarrassed—but also, she strongly wants to keep the baby. Now I know what you’re thinking. In every other Hollywood movie of the past three decades in which a girl gets pregnant, she is wisely counseled to seek an abortion by her school guidance counselor, while her father—a lay Evangelical minister, former Klan-member, and crooked car dealer—insists she must carry the baby because that’s what God would want. Eventually the whole story gets caught up in politics, with angry pro-life protestors waving pictures of dead fetuses at the weeping girl, whose cause has been taken up by a brave and kind Democratic congresswoman. This politician is determined to stand up for freedom of choice, because that’s what this country was founded upon. Well, all I can say is that’s not going to be this movie. Our twist: While the girl’s boyfriend supports her decision to keep the baby—he even offers to take a job, finish his diploma by night, and marry her—her environmentalist, anti-war activist father insists she get an abortion. The political fight that ensues takes place between pro-choice groups (think Kirstie Alley in a mumu, screaming through a megaphone) and a brave and kind Republican congresswoman. This politician is determined to stand up for the preservation of life and family values, because that’s what our country was founded upon.

Bravissimo. This woman has her finger on the pulse of Real America. The reason this film is going to be such a big hit is because it's something that young girls and parents everywhere can relate to. This is the story of everygirl --- a story being played out every day in trailer parks and tract homes and apartment houses of real America. Real Americans know that teenage motherhood is always good and should be encouraged. And there is many a 16 or 17 year old young man who would relish the idea of working all day, going to school at night and taking care of an uneducated wife and small infant these days. That's one of those old fashioned family values that never goes out of style. (If only the plot could feature the girl dying in childbirth, we could really re-enact the good old days --- and heighten the pathos and bathos too!)

I do quibble with the anti-war activist father who wants to force his daughter to have an abortion. Isn't that a little bit overdone? Who among us isn't fed up to the gills dealing with this type -- your familiar hippie, tree-hugging, authoritarian, misogynists. Can't we be just a little bit more original here? Send that back for a re-write. Let's make him gay.

Other than that, this movie is perfect. It will encourage girls everywhere to get pregnant so their boyfriends will marry them and they'll live happily ever after and never have to eat tofu or do yoga again. An adolescent dream come true!

Oh, and Kirstie Alley's fat --- so she's perfect for the Democrat because, as we all know, only Democrats are fat. (Well, except for Rush and Tony Blankley, but they have chemical imbalances.) I suggest James Gandolfini as the sociopathic gay dad, and Queen Latifah as the head of the pro-choice street gang. And 18 year old Lindsey Lohan is, as Mrs Frum suggests, perfect for the girl. She is, after all, dating that hot 50 year old Republican, Bruce Willis.

Come to think of it, maybe he could play the dad and the kid could turn out to be his, which would explain why he is so insistent on the abortion, and...and...Kirstie Alley could be a lesbian scientolgist and Queen Latifah could be a man and .... they could all go on Jerry Springer! Now we're talking Real America, baby! Let's Greenlight this thing!



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digby 5/11/2005 09:12:00 AM |

Tuesday, May 10, 2005

 
Freakishly Confident

Avedon Carol, pinch hitting over at Eschaton writes:

One reason I don't think it's at all paranoid to suspect that the Republicans have deliberately taken over the voting system in order to cheat is that they keep doing things that don't otherwise make sense. There's a rather long list of things you just wouldn't expect them to think they could get away with unless they really thought they could control the ballot box, because otherwise they would have to expect that the public would kick enough of them out to not only end some political careers but also make impeachment - and prison - a distinct possibility.

As pointed out to me this morning by my favorite correspondent, the item at the top of the list (that may just be the "real" nuclear option) is this provision in the "Real ID" bill that removes judicial review. This article calls the hoohaw over the filibuster a trojan horse ---- it's the elimination of judicial review that's the constitution buster.

The right has held for decades that judicial review has no constitutional foundation. Because of various rulings over the past 50 years on civil and individual rights with which they disagree, they have developed the dogma that the courts do not have the right to determine if a law is unconstitutional, despite more than 200 years of acceptance of Marbury vs Madison and the debate that came before. This is what Pat Robertson is talking about when he says, "if you look over the course of a hundred years, I think the gradual erosion of the consensus that's held our country together is probably more serious than a few bearded terrorists who fly into buildings." (It's actually the last 200 years he's trying to overturn, but what's a century or two?)

This isn't a new thing, but like so much else lately in wingnut governance, it was until quite recently a fringe position that nobody took seriously. Indeed, even conservative legal scholors like John Yoo, who is not one would ever call a moderate, disagrees with this interpretation. But, it has clearly gained currency recently. The Senate, for instance, has put forth several more or less symbolic bills that are explicitly exempted from judicial review. There's S. 1558, the "I can put the 10 commandments anywhere I damn well please and judge is going to tell me I can't" Act. And there's S. 2082, the "I can say God told me to do this and no judge can say it's unconstitutional" Act (also known as the "foreign govmint's got nothin' to do with our laws" Act.) And then there's S 3920 the "two thirds majority can overturn the Supreme Court" Act.

But these have no chance at passage. The "Real ID" bill, however, does. As far as I've been able to ascertain, nobody has ever actually passed and signed a bill that would explicitly exempt legislation from judicial review. This is unprecedented and if it happens it should trigger a constitutional crisis. If congress can pass any laws it wants and declare them exempt from judicial review --- as with the Real ID bill -- and also peremptorily "bar judicially ordered compensation or injunction or other remedy for damages" then our system of checks and balances has been gutted. There will be nothing to stop a majority, particularly if it ends the filibuster, from passing any laws it chooses with a simple majority and exempting all of them from judicial review for constitutionality. In other words, the constitution says what the majority says it says.

As Avedon Carol points out in the post I linked to above, you have to wonder why they would do this when the shoe could easily be on the other foot at any given time. You have to believe that it has always been that threat that kept previous majorities from enacting such a fundamental change to our system that could only help a party intent upon enacting its agenda unimpeded --- but which could be used by either party to do it. These last few elections have been close. The GOP majority is not solid. And while I have argued that the double standard is entrenched because of the republicans' willingness to make nonsensical arguments that confuse the press and render any accountability useless, it will not do them much good if the rules have been changed and a new Democratic majority operates as ruthlessly unconcerned with public opinion as they do.

No, you really do have to wonder how they think they can get away with such radical changes that have no constitutional or even popular support. It really does make you have to at least consider the possibility that they know they will not lose elections.



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digby 5/10/2005 01:30:00 PM |

 
Not Ready For The Close-up

In the post below, I wondered why Jack Abramoff was so unsuccessful in Hollywood and surmised that it might be because Hollywood types aren't as gullible and easily led as those in the conservative movement (which is really saying something.) And what do I find immediately after I posted it, but proof, right on the new internet nexus of Hollywood and politics The Huffington Post, from none other than Danielle Crittendon of "What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us" (and marriage to David Frum) fame:

Maybe it is futile to hope that we can ever bridge the gap between Powertown and Tinseltown so long as the Republicans are in power. But if that day ever comes, perhaps it will go -- or should go something like this:

INT. CORPORATE BOARDROOM OVERLOOKING CENTURY CITY TOWERS, DAY.

A young man in horn-rimmed eyeglasses and a Hollywood mogul are deep in conversation over a long table. In front of the mogul are a vinyl binder embossed with the Great Seal of the United States, a White House pen and pencil set, and a White House coffee mug. The mogul is fiddling with and admiring his new presidential cufflinks. The young man is taking notes.

YOUNG MAN

Gosh, I wish the President could
hear what you just said! It’s so reasonable.
It’s so smart. You must be the only
one out here who thinks like you do.

MOGUL
(attempting modesty but failing)
Well, Mr. Vice President. There are a few of
us. We just wish we could
get our voices heard.

YOUNG MAN
Oh the President will hear them all right.
He’ll certainly hear yours.
I was just talking yesterday to the Vice
President for Concepts and Planning and
the Vice President for Public Liaison.
And we agreed – you’ve surprised us.

MOGUL
Why surprise?

YOUNG MAN
It’s, well—I probably
shouldn’t say this but we Republicans
too often take a stereotypical
view of Hollywood liberals.

MOGUL
How so?

YOUNG MAN
I guess we see them as unpatriotic,
Jesus-hating environmental hypocrites who are
subverting the culture and are completely
out of touch with mainstream America.

The mogul snorts.

YOUNG MAN
(continuing)
But if more Republicans could meet
liberals like you, I think we
could change that stereotype.
(Confidentially) You know,the president
was really impressed by your op-ed on
global warming in the L.A. Times. The
President disagrees with your conclusions
of course, but - .

MOGUL
(stupefied)
The President read my op-ed?
He reads? I mean, he reads the
L.A. Times? Well … you don’t say.

YOUNG MAN
Were you serious when you said
earlier you’d be willing to host
a casual discussion group with a
few of your Hollywood friends?

MOGUL
Sure.

YOUNG MAN
I think we could get you some
top people. Maybe Vice President Cheney.
Or Vice President Liz Cheney.
(confidentially)
You know, you might be the
man to actually broker
a détente between Hollywood
and Washington.
And who knows where that could
lead? For you. For us.

MOGUL
(thoughtfully)
I may even be able to get
Barbra out for this.


YOUNG MAN
Thank you for everything you
do. It’s important to
America.

And then the young man pitches his idea for a fascinating reality TV Series called "When Monkeys Fly Out of Your Ass!" and the mogul claps his hands and says "oooh you are so brilliant, little Republican, I love the way you think." And everyone lives happily ever after.

Hollywood moguls are used to being flattered, it's true. But they hire professionals to do this job. This kind of pitch would get you fired for the sheer insult of its puerile transparency.

No wonder the King of Republican lobbyists could only get two shitty Dolph Lundgren movies off the ground in 8 years. These guys are amateurs. Best they stick to trying to snow Rapture enthusiasts and confederate sympathisers. Hollywood is clearly above their paygrade.



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digby 5/10/2005 12:53:00 PM |

 
Nixon's Babies

It's pretty clear to me that Beltway insiders are aware of the explosive "Watergate" style possibilities of the Tom DeLay scandal, but I don't get the impression that anyone knows quite what to make of it or how to exploit it. And perhaps it's one of those things that's best left to unfold naturally. If it does unravel completely it could be the end of the ascendency of the conservative movement and we could, perhaps, get down to the important business of spending the next generation undoing all the damage they've done. It is, after all, out specialty.

Franklin Foer writes a very interesting article in this week's TNR that gets to much of what's important about Jack Abramoff and how he fits into the bigger scheme of things. It's not just that he was a pal of Delay's or that he was a crook himself. It's much bigger than that; it touches upon important elements of the entire modern Republican Party and exposes the web of connections between the conservative movement, the right wing press, the Christian right and the Republican congress as entirely corrupt.

DeLay, though, was not the only prominent conservative to see Russia the Abramoff way. Two months before DeLay touched down there, Abramoff's firm shepherded a contingent of Washington journalists and thinkers around Moscow--an itinerary of meetings and meals designed to please the trip's funder, a Russian energy concern called NaftaSib. This journey included Tod Lindberg, then-editor of The Washington Times editorial page; Insight magazine's James Lucier; and Erica Tuttle, The National Interest's assistant managing editor at the time.

Such trips were essential prongs of Abramoff's lobbying campaigns. The conservative movement's think tanks, newspapers, and little magazines are filled with junketeers who have traveled the world on his dime. "It was like, you weren't cool if you didn't go," remembers Marshall Wittmann, former legislative director of the Christian Coalition. And that's precisely as Abramoff planned it. In a draft of a 2000 proposal to represent the Malaysian government, he and his colleagues boasted, "Our firm is one of the most expert in organizing effective trips to distant destinations, having already brought literally hundreds of such notables [as think-tank scholars and journalists] to destinations ranging from Pakistan to Russia to Saipan and within the U.S. mainland." They told the Malaysians that these trips produce a "certain outcome": "timely and powerful editorials and articles" conveying his clients' messages. "Our firm has facilitated hundreds of such articles and editorials."

It's one thing to imagine that politicians, with their need for campaign cash, could be swayed by a lobbyist. Journalists and intellectuals, on the other hand, even those who admit their ideological predispositions, aren't supposed to be so susceptible to influence-peddlers. Abramoff, however, proved otherwise. He understood how the universe of thinkers and activists associated with the Republican Party operated, how to manipulate them with ideological buzzwords, and how to influence them with access and money. Jack Abramoff didn't just corrupt Tom DeLay. He helped corrupt the whole conservative movement.

Foer makes much of this idea that Abramoff corrupted the conservative movement, but I think the evidence show that the conservative movement was bound for corruption from the get-go. The modern Republicans, from their earliest incarnation in the 60's, starting with still active operatives like Morton Blackwell and Karl Rove to the next generation of Abramoff, Norquist and Reed, have always operated as dirty tricksters, and corrupt power brokers. The modern Republican Party is not, and never has been, the party of Ronald Reagan, not really. It's the party of Richard Nixon.

Jack Abramoff, Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist came together as a power in the College Republicans during the Reagan years. Blackwell, Rove, Atwater, and many others powerful operatives and strategists had cut their teeth there, as well, but these guys came in at the beginning of the heady Reagan years and they were fueled by the belief that they were on the permanent winning side of history. The triumverate of Norquist, Abramoff and Reed is legendary --- and they are all implicated in the burgeoning Jack Abramoff/Tom DeLay scandal.

They have come to represent the three most important wings of the modern conservative movement --- the Christian Right (Reed), the movement ideologues (Norquist) and the big money boys (Abramoff.) They are the Republican party. And they are all corrupt.

Reed is a total phony. I had long assumed, as most people probably did, that he came up through the Christian Right, a conservative Christian who got into politics through religion. He sure does look the part, doesn't he? This, of course, is not true. He wasn't "born again" until 1983, long after he had committed himself to Republican politics and proved himself to be a ruthless, unprincipled operative. He helped to create the Christian Coalition, it didn't create him. In fact, the Christian Right doesn't really exist independently of the Party, it is a wholly owned subsidiary, consciously created and nurtured as a Republican voting block.
(Morton Blackwell famously gave the Moral Majority its name.) Ralph Reed is now entering electoral politics himself, making the big move. He's probably the most dangerous Republican in America.

Norquist, as most people know is a great admirer of Stalin's tactics. He's quoted as saying to Reed back in the College Republican days:

[Stalin] was running the personnel department while Trotsky was fighting the White Army. When push came to shove for control of the Soviet Union, Stalin won. Trotsky got an ice ax through his skull, while Stalin became head of the Soviet Union. He understood that personnel is policy.

To that end, Norquist more than anyone else has ensured through carefully constructed alliances that movement ideologues like himself peppered the Republican power structure to the extent that over time, they have come to define it. This is why people like John Bolton, who has no more business being a diplomat than the Rude Pundit does, have become mainstream Republicans, even though they are clearly radical. He has made sure that Republicans are interdependent on each other through money and influence and that the money and influence flow through him and his allies.

Norquist is the truest of true believers, but he understands the importance of certain other inducements to keep people in line. Tom DeLay and Norquist created the K Street project and it's been a rousing success. Abramoff and DeLay were the guys who offered those needed inducements when true belief and solidarity weren't enough. Delay wielded the hammer and Abramoff (among others) offered the goodies. This is how they hold the GOP majority together. Ask Nick Smith how that works.

It's not surprising that Abramoff is the weak link in this. He was the front man back in the college republican days, but he doesn't seem to have been a real strategist in the way that Reed, with his ruthless single mindedness was or Norquist with his long term Soviet style political vision. In fact, the strangest thing about Abramoff is his almost decade long movie producing career that resulted in only two movies being made --- Dolph Lundgren's "Red Scorpion" and "Red Scorpion II" --- both of which were co-produced by his brother, a successful show business attorney. This is an odd chapter in Abramoff's life. It's hard to know why he was unable to parlay himself a real career in Hollywood, except to wonder if maybe Hollywood, for all its faults, just isn't as easily bought off as his pals in the conservative movement. After all, these kind of perks are just standard in the Entertainment industry and can't buy you much of anything at all (from Foer's article in TNR):

Over time, Abramoff's media management grew more sophisticated, and he dispensed largesse across conservative journalism. His junkets didn't just comprise meetings and site visits, they also included plenty of recreation time. Trips to the Choctaw Reservation, for instance, featured gambling at the Silver Star resort and rounds on a lush new golf course. Clint Bolick recalls, "I left the trip early, because it seemed to be so much about golf and gambling, activities I'm not much into." As an artful Washington schmoozer, Abramoff would go even further that. One former Washington Times staffer told me that Abramoff's practice invited his family to watch the circus and a Bruce Springsteen concert from its box at the MCI Center. (By my count, six Washington Times editors and writers attended Abramoff trips.)

Abramoff came back to Washington when his pals came to power in 1994. They suddenly had it all; their triumphant public leader, Newt Gingrich, was even considering a run for the presidency in 1996. (The ever humble Newt was quoted as saying, "Am I going to have to get into this thing?") This was the time to put into place their plans for a permanent Republican establishment ("personnel is policy"), with the power of big money behind them. The problem is that Abramoff got greedy, and so did his little college republican friends. Both Norquist and Reed have been named in the various scandals, right along with Delay. Everybody seems to be hold their breath waiting to see if this thing takes down The Hammer, but the undercurrent of excitement is really whether it will render Norquist, Reed and others impotent over time as the scandal unfolds. It's possible. These guys have always had the problem of hubris and premature triumpalism. They operate on a very emotional level that is a weakness. And they are, of course, incredibly greedy.

Much of this information can be found in Nina Easton's fine book "The Gang of Five" which you should read if you are interested in learning about the relationship between the players in this DeLay/Abramoff scandal. She thought in 2000 that these guys had already overreached, but clearly she was ahead of herself. And it should be noted that even if all three go down, the momentum of the conservative movement will only slow, not reverse itself. Barring a very serious crisis, it's going to take a long time and a gargantuan effort to turn that ship around, if we can do it at all.

But if these guys are irreparably discredited as a result of their own arrogance and avarice, it will be the final nail, I believe, in the Nixon legacy. These are his political heirs, raised and nurtured on the mother's milk of corruption and dishonesty, scarred while very young by the ignominious downfall of their political father; driven to wreak revenge and recapture what they perceived as their rightful ownership of American politics. They are the spawn of Watergate resentment and this country will never be healthy until this group of radicals are removed from positions of power.

Watch this Abramoff scandal. It may go nowhere, but the potential for a lethal, if not mortal, wound to the conservative movement resides inside it.



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digby 5/10/2005 09:09:00 AM |

Monday, May 09, 2005

 
Ethical Misdirection

Adam Cohen wrote an interesting op-ed this week-end about ethics and it's one I think that the people involved should take a long hard look at. He makes the following good points:

But more talk show hosts, and talk show audiences, are starting to ask whether at least the most prominent talk shows with the highest ratings shouldn't hold themselves to the same high standards to which they hold other media...Many talk show hosts make little effort to check their information...They rarely have procedures for running a correction...The wall between their editorial content and advertising is often nonexistent...And talk show hosts and their guests rarely disclose whether they are receiving money from the people or causes they talk about.

Rush Limbaugh and the rest of the radio pundit pack deliver far more people "news" than the NY Times does every day. There's a whole"fair and balanced" Network devoted to right wing opinion that often fails to correct itself. And the cable shoutfests that spend hours discussing delusional swift boat obsessions and Clinton's manly member set the agenda for what will be covered and discussed for days to come. Perhaps it's a good thing that the mainstream press has decided to demand that these quasi-journalistic venues are held to some ethical standard. After all, they've been getting away with murder for decades now.


Oh, and maybe once we get that all cleared up we can start talking about bloggers.



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digby 5/09/2005 06:08:00 PM |

 
Retro Wingnuttia

So The Huffington Post is up and right now it's featuring Larry David at the top of the page supporting John Bolton. I guess he really is a conservative just like my favorite mainstream writers Ann Coulter and Tony Blankley said. First David Horowitz, now this. Where will it end, I ask you, where?

It is good to see that David Frum is seriously performing this week's designated function of rewriting history in ways that would make Stalin proud. He claims that the cold war started on May 9th 1945 when the Russians inexplicably required that they be allowed to celebrate the end of the war on a different day than their allies. This is a new one on me. I had always heard from the wingers that the cold war started at the "sell-out at Yalta." Frum sees this intransigence as another sign of foreboding which we presumably should have heeded and invaded Russia forthwith. (In any case, he thinks that it's wrong that we haven't established memorials to the Gulags in the same way that we established memorials to the Holocaust and I'm sure that liberals are to blame for this because you know how we love Gulags.)

Of course, this mainstreaming of standard John Bircher talk circa 1958 was actually validated by George W. Bush this week when he "apologized" for the so-called sell-out at Yalta in a speech that would have made Joe McCarthy proud as punch. Repeating that old canard was once considered the sign of an bloodthirsty moron who literally believed that it was better to be dead than Red and believed it would have been preferable to start dropping nukes on the Soviet Union at the earliest possible moment. (Think Jack D Ripper.) Hey the Soviets had already lost 20 million, what difference would a few more million make, right? Besides, they were commies, not humans. Lucky for the planet, seasoned battle hardened men instead of chickenhawk baby boomers were in charge at the time and cooler heads prevailed.

The most amazing response to this I've read is this one from The Belmont Club in which Bush's apology was compared favorably to the apologies for slavery and Native genocide. Considering that slavery and native American genocide were perpetrated by Americans and sanctioned and financed by the American governments of the time it's hard to make the connection between that and failing to invade Russia but I guess if you squint your eyes really hard you might be able to see some correlation. And, of course, one wonders whether we would have been able to actually occupy Russia as well as Europe and Japan, even after the inevitable nuking, but no bother. Russia had already been pretty much destroyed so we should have put the frosting on the cake of WWII and completely annihilated it in order to save it --- our favorite rationalization for American bloodlust for the past fifty years. "We're killing them for their own good."

But my Gawd, the brass balls of Bush to make this fatuous boast:

We will not repeat the mistakes of other generations, appeasing or excusing tyranny, and sacrificing freedom in the vain pursuit of stability," the president said. "We have learned our lesson; no one's liberty is expendable. In the long run, our security and true stability depend on the freedom of others."

Meanwhile:

Seven months before Sept. 11, 2001, the State Department issued a human rights report on Uzbekistan. It was a litany of horrors.

The police repeatedly tortured prisoners, State Department officials wrote, noting that the most common techniques were "beating, often with blunt weapons, and asphyxiation with a gas mask." Separately, international human rights groups had reported that torture in Uzbek jails included boiling of body parts, using electroshock on genitals and plucking off fingernails and toenails with pliers. Two prisoners were boiled to death, the groups reported. The February 2001 State Department report stated bluntly: "Uzbekistan is an authoritarian state with limited civil rights."

Immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, however, the Bush administration turned to Uzbekistan as a partner in the global fight against terrorism. The nation, a former Soviet republic in Central Asia, granted the United States the use of a military base for fighting the Taliban across the border in Afghanistan. President Bush welcomed President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan to the White House, and the United States has given Uzbekistan more than $500 million for border control and other security measures.

Now there is growing evidence that the United States has sent terror suspects to Uzbekistan for detention and interrogation, even as Uzbekistan's treatment of its own prisoners continues to earn it admonishments from around the world, including from the State Department.

The so-called rendition program, under which the Central Intelligence Agency transfers terror suspects to foreign countries to be held and interrogated, has linked the United States to other countries with poor human rights records. But the turnabout in relations with Uzbekistan is particularly sharp. Before Sept. 11, 2001, there was little high-level contact between Washington and Tashkent, the Uzbek capital, beyond the United States' criticism of Uzbekistan.

And, as we all know, that is only the tip of the iceberg. There is the AQ Khan debacle wherein we have let the man who sold nuclear technology to every Tom Dick and Harry who wanted one, skate. Why? Because our ally, the military dictatorship of Pakistan demanded it and in the interest of the GWOT, we have let it happen. We have the recent presidential "man-date" which just shows how far Bush will go to debase himself tip-toeing through the bluebells with Prince Abdullah for the trivial purposes of showing the people that he's serious about gas prices. Clearly, the principle of freedom doesn't weigh heavily in his decision making. And everybody on the planet except the 101st Fighting Keyborders and the rest of the right wing press know it.

This insufferable self-serving sanctimony about freedom and liberty is more than just annoying, however. It's dangerous. We're now goading Vladimir Putin in ways that don't make make sense and he is clearly not impressed. Pretending now that the waging of the Cold War was a mistake, when it was clearly one of the wisest and most intellectually evolved thing a great nation has ever done, is unwise. After a little more than four years in office, the administration has managed to almost completely destroy this country's hard won credibility and it appears that Junior and his neocon cronies will not rest until it is completely gone. And pathetically, they are now reduced to using old chestnuts from the National Review of half a century ago to do it. Even though we actually won the cold war, apparently it's more important that William F Buckley be perceived as having been right.

The most astonishing thing about this is that it appears this actually is the product of 40 years of heavily subsidized college Republican bull sessions and right wing think tank white papers. Tired, warmed-over fifty year old McCarthyite crapola. I thought liberals were the ones who didn't have any new ideas.



Update: I know the Larry David piece is satire. I was being ironic and clearly, it failed.

Update II: Fixed ridiculous error on date of Yalta conference. Never post while doing somethiung else.
digby 5/09/2005 03:48:00 PM |

Saturday, May 07, 2005

 
Biddy Values

When exactly did Cokie "she who shall sit in judgement of all who are not perfect" Roberts retire and name Michelle Cottle as her replacement?

Let's be clear: This isn't a question of vengeance or even of teaching the batty bride a life lesson. It's about actions having consequences and the misuse of public resources (something you can bet Sean Hannity would be ranting about if the bride in question had been some homely piece of trailer trash). Hell, if my centrally monitored fire alarm accidentally goes off more than a couple of times, the D.C. Fire Department will start charging me for the cost of needlessly dispatching its trucks to my house, regardless of whether I've made every effort to control my temperamental system. Will I be miffed if this happens? Sure. But the city has a right to expect me to take responsibility for tying up its trucks and personnel. I don't see why the people of Duluth should expect any less from Wilbanks--especially given that her false alarm was deliberate and at least partially premeditated.

So let's stop all the bloviating about prosecuting Wilbanks, and let the now-humiliated bride start working out how to repay her very real debt to the people of Duluth. Maybe then her neighbors will be able to begin forgiving and forgetting. After all, while Wilbanks unquestionably made a stupid mistake, it's not as though she slept with an "American Idol" contestant.

Michelle and Cokie heard all about it when they were getting a wash and curl down at the beauty parlor. The neighbors aren't going to be doing any forgivin' and forgettin' until that little tramp gets every single one of them tickets to Oprah and a spot on Katie Couric.


The nosy old biddies really are back in charge, aren't they? And they aren't all named James Dobson, either.



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digby 5/07/2005 01:23:00 PM |

 
The Age Of Stupidity

DC Media Girl says this interview proves that the inehritance tax needs to be raised to 95%. I'm sorry to say that I think I've been unfair to all the religious types who believe the Rapture is imminent. Clearly, this is the end of the world as we know it.

Q: Where do you see yourself in 10 years?

HILTON: I don’t know. Married to my boyfriend with two kids and a house. Still acting and doing stuff.

Q: What kind of wife would you be?

HILTON: A good one. I’d cook and clean.

Q: What would your children’s names be?

HILTON: Paris and London.

Q: Paris for a girl? London for a boy?

HILTON: Yeah.

Q: Why are you so popular?

HILTON: I don’t know, because of who I am. I’m not like anybody else. I’m like an American princess.

Q: What would you be like if you were -- I don’t know -- Paris Smith?



HILTON: I’d be the same. Maybe I’d be a veterinarian.

Q: In your career, what are you most afraid of happening?

HILTON: I don’t know. Nothing.

Q: Nothing? What about in your personal life?

HILTON: I don’t know. Death.

Q: Why? What’s so scary about death?

HILTON: Because I don’t know what happens.

Remember. She's a productive member of society who will have no choice but to stop investing if she has to pay taxes. The middle class should be proud to subsidize the government entirely in order that leaders like her be given the freedom to create more wealth. She is the engine that runs this economy of ours and we need many more of her. That's what makes this country great.

She's a lot like this guy:

Bob Woodward: How is history likely to judge your Iraq war?

President Bush: History, we don't know. We'll all be dead.

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digby 5/07/2005 08:27:00 AM |

 
Homos Everywhere!

Check out the video on Rev-Mykeru showing what Robertson says when he doesn't realize he's being taped.

Pat Robertson thinks he can tell if someone is gay by the sound of his voice on the phone. He must get awfully nervous when Gary Bauer and James Dobson call.


Via Big Brass Blog
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digby 5/07/2005 07:59:00 AM |

Thursday, May 05, 2005

 
Reefer Madness

Well, this makes good sense.

The focus of the drug war in the United States has shifted significantly over the past decade from hard drugs to marijuana, which now accounts for nearly half of all drug arrests nationwide, according to an analysis of federal crime statistics released yesterday.

The study of FBI data by a Washington-based think tank, the Sentencing Project, found that the proportion of heroin and cocaine cases plummeted from 55 percent of all drug arrests in 1992 to less than 30 percent 10 years later. During the same period, marijuana arrests rose from 28 percent of the total to 45 percent.

Coming in the wake of the focus on crack cocaine in the late 1980s, the increasing emphasis on marijuana enforcement was accompanied by a dramatic rise in overall drug arrests, from fewer than 1.1 million in 1990 to more than 1.5 million a decade later. Eighty percent of that increase came from marijuana arrests, the study found.

The rapid increase has not had a significant impact on prisons, however, because just 6 percent of the arrests resulted in felony convictions, the study found. The most widely quoted household survey on the topic has shown relatively little change in the overall rate of marijuana use over the same time period, experts said.

"In reality, the war on drugs as pursued in the 1990s was to a large degree a war on marijuana," said Ryan S. King, the study's co-author and a research associate at the Sentencing Project. "Marijuana is the most widely used illegal substance, but that doesn't explain this level of growth over time. . . . The question is, is this really where we want to be spending all our money?"

Sure. Let's spend billions on arresting pot smokers for absolutely no good reason. They should taking the purple pill instead like Real Americans anyway.

There is a rather large minority of Americans (or so I've heard...) who smoke marijuana or who have smoked marijuana and the numbers have stayed pretty much the same from decade to decade since the 60's. Every once in a while the government and the moralists get hysterical like today's "this is your brain on pot, oh my God, it's not Cheech and Chong's marijuana --- it will drive you mad, I say, mad!!!" --- and then it all quiets down for awhile.

That is not to say that we don't have a problem with the drug culture. However, the drug culture I'm talking about is the one that's advertised incessantly on television that tells people they should eat pills from dawn to dusk. Hey, it's a free country, but if you're going to pass moral judgments, how about taking a little look at the chemically induced burgeoning erection business?

(Meanwhile, in Bobo's world, half of the heartland is blowing themselves up in meth labs and screwing themselves to death. But I think they tend to vote Republican.)

Seriously, this is one reason why kids do dangerous drugs. They find out quickly that this stuff about pot is nonsense and people who say it is as dangerous (or more dangerous by implication) than cocaine or methamphetamine, then lose all credibility. If they're lying about this, they're probably lying about everything.

I don't know what it is about pot that upsets some people so much but it always has. Associations with race used to be the thing; now I think it's lazy pleasure. These people apparently believe that pleasure has to be mixed with violence or punishment. Certainly, the right's foremost expert on drug abuse, Rush Limbaugh, seems to think so.



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digby 5/05/2005 02:12:00 PM |

 
A Moronic Proposal

From "the sage," Larry Elder:

Weyco Inc. and Investors Property Management may be onto something. If employers seek to control costs, improve morale, boost the company image and reduce workplace drama [by not employing smokers], why not refuse to hire ... Democrats?

Democrats -- compared to Republicans -- on average are less affluent, more unhappy, more prone to anti-social behavior, more prone to self-destructive behavior, and more likely to have been shot at, robbed or burglarized. More of them see X-rated movies, more of them smoke, and they're less likely to be married and more likely to have separated or divorced.

George Washington University professor Lee Sigelman looked at 22 years of survey data collected by University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center. Overall, he found Democrats less affluent, more distrustful, more sickly and more suicidal, and thus doomed to an earlier death. In short, Democrats as a class -- like smokers -- have, uh, issues. So let's just extend this hiring ban to cover unhappy, anti-social, self-destructive, unhealthy Democrats.

And what about last year's "Primetime Live" sex survey? It found Republicans, more than Democrats, to be satisfied with their sex lives, more likely to wear something sexy to entice their partner and more likely to be in a committed relationship, in which they claim to be very satisfied. The survey also found that Republicans are less likely to cheat on their partner or to fake orgasms. No wonder Democrats are unhappy, unhealthy and anti-social.

And then there was the follow-up study that showed Republicans have on average 20 fewer IQ points than Democrats and are pathological liars, which explained the results of the first one. (And anyone should be able to understand why Democrats would be depressed, if not suicidal, when people who exhibit these traits are running their country. It's a miracle we can get out of bed in the morning.)

As for the sex satisfaction comparisons, let's just say life is always simpler if you keep your expectations low. Rush Limbaugh, Daryn Kagan. Nuff said.

I should make it clear for the Ann Coulter fans, that I understand that Elder was attempting to make a swiftian argument against he idea of banning smokers from the workplace, a sentiment with which I happen to agree. But as with all conservative would-be satirists, he completely misses the point. In this case, it isn't Democrats using Big Gubbermint to outlaw smoking in the workplace, its the free market that's doing it. If we had national health care, which would be less expensive for these companies than the system we have now, this "incentive" to keep people with unhealthy habits out of your workforce will greatly dissipate. And anyway, Elder's supposed to be a libertarian, so what's he bitching about? John Galt can fire anyone he damn well wants to.



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digby 5/05/2005 12:46:00 PM |

 
While The DLC Slept


Matt Yglesias and Atrios both take issue with Marshall Wittman's comparison of Move-on to Tony Benn, british lefty leader of the 70's and 80's. Yglesias ably proves that there is very little actual policy difference between Move-on and the DLC but he gives short shrift to what I think are the underlying reasons for the comparison --- style and temperament. Benn wouldn't sit down and shut up and it drove the other Labour leaders insane as they were trying to modernize their image and transition from mild market socialism to savvy free marketers. They didn't like the resistence and felt it undermined their goals. In those days it seemed important that the left shed its radical image.

When the Labourites were trying to change the party image 20 or 30 years ago, the Tories were, by contrast, a group of prudent yet forward thinking conservatives who had long believed that free enterprise was being stifled by outdated socialist schemes. And the economy was sick and seemed to prove their point. After the worldwide youth movement of the 1960's reached its apotheosis, it sounded quite good to have some "grown-ups in charge." That was the environment in which Michael Foot asked Benn to stop with the rabble rousing. We underwent much the same thing here, a little bit later, which resulted in Bill Clinton being nominated and running as a centrist in 1992. Liberals everywhere were redefining themselves in the face of a conservative backlash of one degree or another.

But, that was then and this is now. We are no longer in a period in which liberalism must tone down its radicals and burnish its management credentials. If anything, we must prove that we even exist and beyond that, that we stand for something. Even the liberal eliminationist mantra on the right has begun to sound stale and decrepit --- the evil strawman they've created is as lackluster and dull as we are. We are in danger of simply fading away if we do not pour some some blood and nerve into our politics.

Furthermore, the consensus style of politics that the DLC depends upon to deliver its centrist vision simply is not possible in this political environment. The right has become radical and uncompromising, each of its factions growing more and more demanding. There is no middle in American politics today, as much as we might wish it to be so --- and it's not because of positions on the issues, it's because of the zero sum politics the Republicans are playing. In order to provide some ballast, we simply must have some weight on the liberal side of our arguments or they will carry us all further to the right than even the DLC can live with. That's where Move-on and Michael Moore and the left blogosphere come in.

This is not the kind of politics I would prefer. It would be nice if we could have some civility and comity for awhile; this is exhausting and mostly unproductive. And people in hell want ice-water. It is what it is and if there's one thing we should have learned over the past 15 years it's that being conciliatory with the radical Republicans and allowing them to take us further and further right is a recipe for losing. We've lost it all for the moment and we are barely hanging on to the possibility of getting a piece of it back.

Ralph Reed, Christian choirboy and corrupt lobbyist used to exhort new College Republican recruits back in the early 80's repeat the famous "Patton" speech only substituting the words Democrats for Nazis. "The Democrats are the enemy!" Wade into them! Spill their blood! Shoot them in the belly!"

That is what the Republicans have been doing for more than 20 years now. These are the times in which we live, unfortunately. We didn't create this environment, but we cannot ignore it and pretend that we are back in the Truman administration. And, even then let's not forget that the anti-communists of that era are the granfathers of today's liberal haters. We should have learned.



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digby 5/05/2005 09:40:00 AM |

Wednesday, May 04, 2005

 
Tin Soldiers

Wow.

Apparently, that execratory slice of gelatinous offal, Ann Coulter, spews her Nazi vomit with police protection these days. And when some wiseacre on campus asks whether her views on gay marriage apply to men who only fuck their wives in the ass, he's manhandled and arrested.

And, as we know, they are strip-searching 50-something female schoolteachers who protest Bush now, too.

Oh. And by the way, today is the 35th anniversary of Kent State.



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digby 5/04/2005 05:07:00 PM |

 
Useful Idiots

Here's another example of one of those allegedly liberal pundits who have been so tough on George W. Bush:

He proposed that the system be made solvent by reducing benefits on a sliding scale, according to income. This utterly responsible and progressive proposition was greeted by phony bleats of outrage from leading Democrats, who proved once again that they are more interested in the demagogic exploitation of the issue than they are in the impact of baby boom retirement on their grandchildren

Joe Klein, as I have written before, is invested in the idea that private accounts are one of those issues he and Bill Clinton cooked up when they were holed up in a bull session in the late 80's together, creating the fabulous image of what the handsome and virile New Democrat would be like. Sadly when he looked at Clinton, he seems to have thought he was looking at himself.

I have long held that the biggest problem for Democrats is not the so-called "Vichy Congressman," who at least has to answer to consitutents and has pressures that are not always apparent, but the goddmaned liberal punditocrisy that consistently writes trash like the quote above. Why, in Gods' name, does any established mainstream writer have to brown nose and genuflect to the degree these liberal beltway pundits do? Common street whores don't sell themselves so completely and maintain at least a modicum of pride.

This is the public image of liberalism, with its mealy-mouthed, enabling, sycophantic forelock tugging and constant expressions of obeisance to a GOP esatablishment that holds them in contempt. These are what the country thinks liberals are and why so many hate us so much. They think that, like Richard Cohen and Joe Klein, liberals are all a bunch of cowardly little ass kissers who don't believe in anything, don't fight for anything and don't care about anything. These are the people who are killing us.


Update: And that goes for Democratic consultants, who as Atrios points out, are still partying like it's 1994. The New Dems are now old. I know this because I am one. All the lefties put their marxist toys away a long time and nobody's arguing anymore about whether we should have "free" markets. What we are arguing about is whether we should all be whores for big business, slaves to the theocrats, or some lukewarm version of both. Most of us learned from the past few losing elections that we cannot win by appealing to the middle with warmed over DLC talking points. It may have been fresh back in 1992, but today it has all the spontaneity of a Seinfeld re-run. The dream is over boys.



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digby 5/04/2005 11:57:00 AM |

 
McCarthyite Watchdog

I would imagine that most people have heard of Walter Winchell, the McCarthyite radio commentator and newspaper columnist. Fewer of you have probably heard of another influential McCarthyite radio commentator and newspaper columnist of the period, Fulton Lewis Jr. But, you should probably read up on him a little bit because it's actually going to be important in your own life right here and now:

That he was considered a controversial commentator is mostly reflected in his strong conservative stances in a time of increasing liberalism. Throughout the Roosevelt/Truman administrations, Lewis continued to defend his beliefs. In pre-war America Lewis supported and encouraged the America First stance of Charles A. Lindbergh, which espoused that America spend its money and resources on building up our own defenses and stay out of the European conflict. Lindbergh was an admirer of the military capability of National Socialist Germany.

As the medium of radio waned during the rise of television in the late forties and early fifties, Lewis' appearance on the small screen was simply not good television. He appeared too much out of place and so he continued on radio. It was in the fifites that Lewis' star began to wane. He was a strong supporter of Joe McCarthy, the Wisconsin Senator who presided over the committee investigating communists in the government.

That really doesn't give you the full flavor of Lewis's right wing hackery. He was a Drudge of his day, the happy recipient of nasty information about McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover's enemies and targets. And unlike Winchell, who had at least been as hostile to Hitler as to Stalin, Lewis had a bit of a soft spot for Naziism, something that the liberals of the day (as they are today) were too polite to use as a weapon against his anti-communist zealotry and character assassination. Alan Ginsberg remembered Lewis speaking of the Rosenberg case:

...especially, there was one commentator on the air, called Fulton Lewis, who said that they smelt bad, and therefore should die. There was an element of anti-Semitism in it. But I remember very clearly on the radio, this guy Fulton Lewis saying they smelt bad. He was a friend of J. Edgar Hoover, who was this homosexual in the closet, who was blackmailing almost everybody.

(This "smell" thing, which Ginsberg notes is long associated with anti-semitism, is commonly used today by fine mainstream humorists and commentators like Ann Coulter to describe liberals.)

In any case, what makes Mr Fulton, long dead and mostly forgotten, important you you, my friends, is that his ghost writer for five years was none other than William Schultz, one of the new ombudsmen for the Public Broadcasting System.

I'm not kidding. The man who wrote Joe McCarthy's stongest supporter's newspaper column is now on the payroll of the corporation of public broadcasting as an ombudsman.

Here's what the guy said in an interview with Rick Perlstein in 1997:

[Were you anamolous in New York?]

"well, I went to a high school where, for reasons I cannot figure out, there was a real conservative and libertarian nucleus: The Bronx High School of Science in New York. Bob Schuchman went Bronx Science, and others did who went on to positions in politics and academia. So I was not unfamiliar with it.

"As Allan said, we were journalists; Allan was, I was. I went to Antioch College in Ohio, and they had a work-study program, and I got a couple of newspaper jobs, and then I worked for Human Events, and worked for Stan Evans, who had a tremendous influence on me. Then I went to work for Fulton Lewis Jr., who was a radio commentator and columnist.

"He had a fifteen minute broadcast at seven o'clock on the Mutual Network and then a five minute broadcast at noon. And I arrived from Yellow Springs, OH, thinking I was going be his leg-man--I had never met him before--and the first thing he said was, 'can you write a newspaper column?' The guy who had been ghostwriting his five-day-a-week newspaper column had just went to work for Nixon getting ready for the 1960 campaign--this would have been 1959. So I said, 'sure, I can write a newspaper column.'

"So I started ghosting his newspaper column! Then I would go back to Yellow Springs, OH every three months and write the 'Inside Washington' column from Yellow Springs and send it off to Washington by Western Union the time '64 rolled around I had been writing the Lewis column for five years. So I was in San Francisco not as a delegate or an activist but as a journalist, but as one who believed fervently in Goldwater, and as I said that was the most..."

When they were out of power, the right wing insisted that public broadcasting was a commie plot and should be destroyed. It was a perennial in the GOP platform. Now that they own the government, the movement radicals of the GOP have discovered the joys of taxpayer sponsored government propaganda and they are seizing upon public broadcasting as a fine means to produce and spread it. "The Journal Editorial Report" is the likely future of Public Television. And now they have gone and appointed a real live McCarthyite as their "ombudsman."

Media Matters has more on Schultz, and the contact numbers for him and his close personal friend Kenneth Tomlinson, the newly named Republican chairman of the corporation for Public Broadcasting who recently told members of the Association of Public Broadcasters that they should make sure their programming better reflected the Republican mandate. He later said he was joking. Except nobody laughed.

FYI, as Media Matters points out:

According to The Ombudsman Association's code of ethics, an ombudsman is a "designated neutral" who "strives for objectivity and impartiality."

It's kind of hard to imagine how a Joe McCarthy fan can be considered a "designated neutral," but then I suppose if Ann Coulter is considered good clean fun, then anything is possible.



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digby 5/04/2005 08:58:00 AM |

Tuesday, May 03, 2005

 
Charlie Brown Pundits

Kevin Drum endorses EJ Dionne's column today in which it is finally clearly set forth by someone other than the shrill Paul Krugman that the Republicans aren't playing by any rules and therefore cannot be trusted to act in good faith on Social Security. This has been obvious for some time, but it's good to see Dionne writing about it in a major establishment paper. Reportedly Howard the Fine was so taken aback that he said on Air America today that this charge would have to be taken seriously now that Dionne, a reasonable liberal, had brought it up. Good news. But as Kevin points out, this is hardly the end of the tale:

There are plenty of other examples of this kind of thuggish Republican behavior. Keeping floor votes open for hours of arm twisting and vote buying, for example, instead of the usual 15 minutes. Preventing Democrats from so much as offering amendments to Republican legislation. Increased use of "emergency" late night meetings. Keeping the text of legislation secret until mere hours before scheduled votes. Squeezing the time for debate by allowing no more than one or two days a week for work on real legislation. Slashing the number of bills considered under open rules. And, of course, threatening the "nuclear option" to cut off judicial filibusters. You can get more details here in Rep. Louise Slaughter's detailed report.

The first step was the hardest --- getting Democrats in congress to recognize what was happening. They persisted for much too long in believing in the good intentions of their Republican counterparts but it seems they may have finally come to understand what has been obvious for ages --- the modern Republicans do not act in good faith. Their governing philosophy is brute force. Now there is word that the liberal punditocrisy may be catching up at long last.

That's interesting considering that today, Howard Kurtz wrote one of his most ridiculous articles ever in which he says that liberal pundits have never been willing to give Bush credit where credit is due, like they would have in the old days:

There was a time, a million years ago or so, when pundits of one persuasion would occasionally praise pols of the other persuasion, just to show they weren't relying on one party's talking points. You know, I disagree with the president on foreign policy, but his environmental proposal makes a great deal of sense.

That was before the rise of shout TV and the hardening of partisanship and the growing attempts by each side to demonize the other. Conservative commentators rarely had anything nice to say about Bill Clinton (except on NAFTA and Bosnia, perhaps), although he helped move the country toward the ostensibly conservative goals of welfare reforms and balanced budgets. And liberal commentators have consistently portrayed Bush as a deceiving warmonger who wants to gut Social Security while slashing taxes for his rich buddies.

After the Iraqi elections, there was a flurry of gee-maybe-Bush-was-right pieces by some left-leaners, but on domestic policy--where the Democrats are absolutely united against W's agenda--opposition by liberal pundits has been remarkably consistent.

That's why I think it's noteworthy that a couple of libs are making favorable noises about the president's news conference last week. After all, if Clinton had proposed to protect the poorest Social Security recipients and penalize more affluent ones and the Republicans were refusing even to negotiate, wouldn't some liberals have supported that stance?

Well, maybe, if that's what Bush was proposing there might be some support for it. Sadly, Bush is actually sticking it to the middle class as usual, doing nothing really positive for the poor and laughing his ass off over brie 'n cheese with his rich friends at how stupid the rubes are --- and I'm not talking about rubes in the heartland, I'm talking about the cosmopolitan rubes at the Washington Post.

But it's even more astonishing that old Howie had such a hard time thinking of examples of liberal pundit saying in the last few years something like, "You know, I disagree with the president on his domestic program, but when it comes to terrorism and national security I bow at his feet like the dog I am and worship him like a golden God." It certainly seems as if I've heard that somewhere before.

Does anyone know how much a ticket to Howard Kurtz's alternate universe costs, because I hear it's really nice this time of year? For month after month after month, virtually every mainstream liberal pundit spoke of George W. Bush in reverent tones normally reserved for tribal deities and international box office stars. What good did it do them? Now, because every last one isn't signing on to social security destruction like good little lemmings, the liberal pundits are accused of being equivalent to guys like Charles Krauthamer who spent the 90's as a timorous, conspiracy peddling isolationist whenever Clinton said boo and then turned into an avenging warrior the minute Junior was anointed. Sorry, liberal pundits just aren't that flexible.

Today you have Dionne speaking the plain unvarnished truth, which is good. But, sadly, you also have that plodding tool, Richard Cohen (who Howie didn't mention in his kudos to "reasonable" liberals who had seen the light --- Michael Kinsley and Dan Kennedy, both of whom misunderstood and jumped the gun on Bush's plan and are now co-presidents of the Premature Ejaculator Club of America.) Here's the reliably wrong Cohen:

It just so happens that I think George Bush is doing something interesting with Social Security. The program does need to be fixed or recalibrated or something, and he has had the guts to take it on. Moreover, I kind of like the idea of personal investment accounts if funding them does not weaken the overall program or add to the nation's incredible debt. After all, there is something to be said for expanding the number of American worker-capitalists and having a nest egg an heir could inherit, or one that would not be eliminated by death. The idea is not all that radical, after all. It's being done in other countries -- Australia, Sweden, Chile, Britain.

Whatever the merits of personal investment accounts, they would do nothing to alter the dismal math of Social Security projections. But raising the cap would. Why $90,000? Why not $140,000? Better yet, why not raise it to $140,000 and then raise it to confiscatory levels on obscene payments such as Michael Eisner's $575.6 million back in 1998 or -- brace yourself -- the $105,000 Moonves got for using his own home in New York rather than a hotel or the $43,000 Freston got for spending time in his place in Los Angeles. (Moonves is based in L.A.; Freston is based in New York.) Somewhere, ladies and gentlemen, is a CEO who's angling to be paid for sleeping with his wife. It's just a matter of time. Get mad, people. Get mad.

[...]

A deal can be made on Social Security. If Bush raised the cap, the Democrats could permit some sort of move toward private accounts. Both objectives make sense. What matters is not ideology or political advantage but a dependable retirement for the average American. Bush should take the first step. All it takes is making Day Two more like Day One

Nothing he says is desirable or possible. He makes a case for raising the cap on payroll taxes for millionaires in exchange for private acounts, which is like making a deal with Osama bin Laden tomorrow that if he'll promise to stop saying bad things about America, we'll supply him with nuclear bombs.

The liberal punditocrisy is more likely than not to support Bush's destructive policies and always have been. Like Cohen here, who can hardly wait to punt with a string of brown-nosing paeons to Junior's courage and dedication to the working man. Nothing new about that. Remember these immortal words?

Given the present bitterness, given the angry irresponsible charges being hurled by both camps, the nation will be in dire need of a conciliator, a likable guy who will make things better and not worse. That man is not Al Gore. That man is George W. Bush."

And then there was this revealing gem:

I'm not sure if panic is quite the right word, but it is close enough. Anthrax played a role in my decision to support the Bush administration's desire to take out Saddam Hussein. I linked him to anthrax, which I linked to Sept. 11. I was not going to stand by and simply wait for another attack -- more attacks. I was going to go to the source, Hussein, and get him before he could get us. As time went on, I became more and more questioning, but I had a hard time backing down from my initial whoop and holler for war.

Dionne has the right of it, as do Reid and Pelosi, so far. It is patently absurd, however, for Howard Kurtz to lament the rigid partisanship of liberal pundits when you have sell-out, buckets of lukewarm spit like his colleague Richard Cohen to prove how very obsequious and servile the liberal establishment punditocrisy has long proven itself to be.


Correction: Dan Kennedy, not Savage.
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digby 5/03/2005 07:29:00 PM |

 
All Together Now

Man, we liberals can't win for losing, can we? First we are told that we're a bunch of immoral libertines who are trying to destroy the fabric of our nation with our nasty talk and perverted big city ways, and then John Tierney says today that we are a bunch of stiffs who don't understand what a bunch of rollockin', ribald partiers those real American Red Staters are.

I admit that I'm a little bit confused, but I'm sure David Brooks will clear it up for me in his next column, being the world's foremost expert on heartland values and jumbo shrimp platters and all. Meanwhile, I guess what I don't understand is why it's ok for the First Lady to make horse cock jokes on television but it's not ok for a professional comedienne to make "bush" jokes at a private fundraiser. That's the part that seems a little bit odd to me. Remember this:

Comic Whoopi Goldberg's sexual puns on President Bush's name at a John Kerry fundraiser got her canned Wednesday as spokeswoman for Slim-Fast weight-loss products.

The freepers were terribly upset at the vulgarity:

Hollyweird does NOT represent American values, or the heart and soul of our country, in any way whatsoever!!

This election is shaping up to be a contest between anyone with decent or Christian values (whatever his or her usual political leanings) and the moral FILTH and POISON represented by Hollyweird and the media and advertising community, the feminazis, and the gays. I vote NO to all of them!!!!

As for SlimFast, it doesn't work anyway, in terms of long-term weight loss and health. Don't beleive their hype, whether spread by Whoopi the Obscene or by anyone else. Boycott SlimFast for ALL the right reasons!!!!

By the way, I see from your screen name that you are a Christian, as I am. May God bless you!!!!

Mychel Massie clutched his pearls and bravely held back the tears as he related the horrors on World Net Daily:

I am profoundly offended by Kerry's foolish and base support of such filth – and America, you should be, too.

What type of future does Kerry envision for America if he applauds the rawest of trash as "the heart and soul of our country"? How does Kerry view the voters, his church, the family and education if he postulates those things as "values inside you"? To laughingly support such an extraordinarily tasteless, vulgar, public display, one must ask not only how Kerry views the office of president, but exactly what respect has he for himself?

Republican leaders, if you'll recall, demanded an apology from the Kerry camp. Junior made the line "my opponent likes tah say that Hollywood is the heart 'n soul 'o America. but I think the heart 'n soul 'o America is right here in _______, heartland USA" one of his rapturous applause cues throughout the campaign.

That was a different time. Now it seems that the moral Red Staters have finally decided to admit that they love a good horse cock joke as much as the next guy and that's just fine with me. I always knew they did. We're all about horse cock jokes in this country, from sea to shining sea. Nothing makes a First Lady more downhome and fun than talking about horse cocks on TV. Bring 'em on. Horse cocks for everyone.

But I'd really appreciate it if they'd can the phony sanctimony from now on and shut the fuck up about "Desperate Housewives" and dirty talk on TV. If it's ok for the First Lady of the United States to joke publicly about her husbands limp dick and jerking off farm animals then it's ok for Whoopie Goldberg and everybody else to make Bush jokes.


Ezra makes the same point but without even one horse cock reference, a weakness I often notice in his writing.


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digby 5/03/2005 01:36:00 PM |

 
Business As Usual

I missed this one. Apparently, two female schoolteachers in their 50's who had the nerve to attend a public Bush rally without the proper Republican approvals were arrested and strip-searched.

Alice McCabe and Christine Nelson, both in their 50s, were among five protesters arrested at the Sept. 3 rally. The pair were handcuffed, taken to the county jail, strip-searched and charged with criminal trespass. The charges were dropped months later.

"I believe the federal government behaved very badly in this situation," said David O'Brien, the women's attorney.

The lawsuit claims the strip search violated constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure. Typically suspects are searched only if authorities have cause to believe they possess a weapon or illegal drugs, O'Brien said.

"We don't think they had a reasonable belief that these two, 50-year-old school teachers had a weapon or contraband in their possession that day," O'Brien said, whose clients requested a jury trial and unspecified damages.

A spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office in Cedar Rapids said the office had not yet seen the complaint and could not comment.

McCabe and Nelson — described in the lawsuit as political novices motivated by their opposition to Bush administration policies in Iraq — attended the rally at a city park, where McCabe held a sheet of paper urging, "No More War," and Nelson wore a John Kerry button.

A Secret Service agent allegedly told McCabe, who was on a sidewalk near the rally, that she was on private property and would have to move. When they moved to a parking area, the agent approached again and repeated the order.

After asking why, McCabe was arrested by a state trooper. Nelson was arrested later by another trooper, according to the lawsuit.

Obviously, strip searching these women was an intimidation tactic, the same kind of tactic used to such great effect at Abu Ghraib. Sexual humiliation seems to be quite the rage among the macho these days. It was probably done by some cops who worship the phony Codpiece and think that American citizens who don't are traitors. Why, all you have to do is read TIME magazine at the dentist's office and you'll see Ann Coulter on the cover telling the whole country that. Or just turn on the radio.

Arthur Silber wrote about the hilarious South Park Republican Rush Limbaugh the other day on the anniversary of the revelation of the Abu Ghraib scandal. Here's a little of what Rush had to say:

CALLER: Just to keep you with the season, I want to wish you a Happy Abu Ghraib. And I apologize that I didn’t get my Abu Ghraib present in the mail. I was wondering what I could get you for Abu Ghraib this year and how are you going to decorate your Abu Ghraib tree sir?

RUSH: You want to know what to get me for Abu Ghraib? You know what? That is a good question. I don’t really want anything for Abu Ghraib. The Democrats, that is who we need to get presents for. One thing, have you thought about handcuffs? Those have multiple uses for Democrats. A whip. You know, to go along with the handcuffs. Dawn says a good present would be to give a Democrat a digital camera so that he or she can document their own atrocities. All you have to take it to a Madonna concert. You got the whips, and the handcuffs and chains right there on stage and people are paying for this.

CALLER: They may have military intelligence, Rush. Who knows?

RUSH: That is a great question. What kind of gift to give Democrats here on the anniversary of Abu Ghraib. I’m glad you called, Christopher.

We’ll think of more as they, as they come up. You know, you might give them a little pyramid game, something that is in the shape of a pyramid. Wire tap kit. Could borrow that. Ted, actually could borrow one from Raymond Reggie, a wire tap kit. What else? Autographed picture of Mary Mapes. Boy, if you could score, come up with an autograph of Mary Mapes, she’s the mother of the Abu Ghraib scandal. Jumper cables. A pair of jumper cables—superb idea, Mr. Maimone. And these are things we all have lying around the house, folks. Just get rid of it. It is junk. Give them a German shepherd. Oh, yeah, a German shepherd dog, little German shepherd puppy. You can train yourself.

Gotta love that jumper cable stuff. Whew. That's a good one. He does some side-splitters on waterboarding, too. Read all of Silber's post for the full rundown. That's just an excerpt of the psychotic ramblings from that day.

This is what more than 20 million Americans listen to constantly. This is their entertainment and their religion.

Get ready to be strip-searched America. Rush Limbaugh and all his little sick clones are training ever more people to believe that you deserve it. And worse.


I'm depressed today. Don't expect any inspiring words from me. The worst elements of our culture are on the rise. We have delivered massive government police power into the hands of authoritarian freaks whose followers are being told every day that liberals are a greater danger than terrorists are. Middle aged schoolteachers are being strip searched for protesting at a political rally.

This must be what that freedom they hate us for looks like.



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digby 5/03/2005 12:21:00 PM |

 
Nanny's Not A Wingnut

So I watched the show "Super-Nanny" last night to get a sense of this "Focus on the Family" shill job. The ad is perfect for the show, which featured a very dysfunctional family on the verge of chaos -- the two kids (aged 3 and 7) were rude, undisciplined and out of control and the parents were in way over their heads. The FOF ads were very slick; they could have been a clever government sponsored spot, like those produced for Partnership For A Drug free America. They appeared to be connected to the show --- and one would guess that the show endorsed the program by the way it was presented. The show featured a couple of very undisciplined brats which the ads, featuring little demon children saying they are going to wreak havoc on their parents' lives, seemed to indicate the FOF program could cure. I bet they got some calls.

Having read Dobson's torture manual "The Strong Willed Child" however, I can say that after watching the show, they bear no relationship to one another. Dobson's book is extremely heavy on corporal punishment and strict authoritarian control. The nanny show consisted of common sense approaches like setting rules, scheduling activities and play time, communication and consistency. There was no hitting, although there was the expected sturm and drang over discipline, which had been a total disaster up to that point. The biggest problem in this family, it seemed to me, was that the mom didn't seem to relate very well to small children, which is not unprecedented I would think. Why would every woman automatically be good at such a thing? (Not that the Dad was much better, but he seemed a little more natural around them, even if he was a putz and a control freak.)

It was obvious that she loved them, but she was frustrated by her inability to be herself, which appeared to me to be a somewhat reserved type of person who wasn't very interested in kid stuff. She seemed quite depressed, or at least worn down, and she probably felt guilty for not liking the kid games she was being asked to do. The structure the nanny gave the mom appeared to give her something to hold on to, but I suspect she might be more comfortable as a mother when her children get a little bit older. I thought this was one family that could have benefitted from sending the kids to day care, where they could be around other little kids and grown-ups who are into playing with them.

Anyway, these kids were the children from hell, but anybody could see that it was because the parents were completely inept. They were the ones who needed guidance and I suspect that this is usually the case. There seemed to be a lot of improvement during the course of the show, but who knows how much these shows are edited for dramatic purposes. Still, these seemed like decent people who love their kids so they'll probably be ok.

If they had taken Dobson's advice, however, they would right now be indulging in child abuse instead of patience, discipline and understanding. His view is that children must be taught to obey because they must observe the hierarchy of the family which means that father, then mother are always to be obeyed without question. The point is not to raise happy, healthy people, but oppressed, subservient kids who turn into rigid authoritarian adults. He is in the business of creating Nazis, not normal human beings.

I pity the many poor little children who are going to be subjected to Dobson's torture after their desperate parents saw that slick ad last night and called the FOF number. Those parents are going to learn that they are justified in being angry at their children and that violence is the proper way to express that anger, "for the good of their child."

And I pity the country that takes another step back into the dark ages when torture was considered acceptable. We are now one of the torture cultures. That's quite an achievement.


Update: For some very thoughtful commentary on this subject, read the comments to this Patrick Neilsen Hayden post on Electrolite.


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digby 5/03/2005 09:31:00 AM |

 
Life Lessons

Kevin at Catch gets schooled by Joe Scarborough on what a South Park Conservative is:

JOE SCARBOROUGH: Why don't we just show a clip of "South Park" to help define what "South Park" conservatives are.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, "SOUTH PARK")

UNIDENTIFIED ACTRESS: Kids, this is the Costa Rican Capitol Building.

This is where all the leaders of the Costa Rican government make their...

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: Oh, my God, it smells out here.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTRESS: All right, that does it. Eric Cartman, you respect other cultures this instant.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTRESS: I wasn't saying anything about their culture.

I was just saying their city smells like ass.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTRESS: Wow. Staying in a place like this really makes you appreciate living in America, huh.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTRESS: You may think that making fun of Third World countries is funny, but let me...

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: I don't think it's funny. This place is overcrowded, smelly and poor. That's not funny. That sucks.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

Lord knows South Park Conservatives know what ass smells like --- their heads being buried up there and all.

Seriously, my friends, this a deep and meaningful lesson, not just a puerile, unfunny swipe at poor people. You see, the SP conservatives are just pointing out that it sucks to be poor. And they do it in a lighthearted, funloving way that makes everyone understand that it is better to be an American because our cities smell like vanilla cookies and lemon Pledge. Because we're better.

I feel sorry for this generation. We had MAD magazine (the greatest influence in my life.) They have this.



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digby 5/03/2005 09:08:00 AM |

Monday, May 02, 2005

 
Greenlight This Baby!

Roy Edroso gives us shorter Jane Galt:

Not only are Hollywood actors liberal and wrong -- they don't even know how to act! Jane Galt must school them in empathy!

She says:

America enjoys Forrest Gump, but it's not really that hard to learn to deal with someone who talks a little slow. Where are the movies covering the people who seriously discomfort us--the unverbal, or inappropriately verbal, or whose verbal skills just aren't up to sermonettes on love

She's right, you know. We certainly don't see enough characters whose skills aren't up to sermonettes on love. And I have the perfect project to correct that. Just imagine George Clooney playing that dreamy he-man John Galt with Nicole Kidman as the sensual yet plucky industrialist Dagny Taggert --- in the big Hollywood remake of "Atlas Shrugged: The Rapture."

Haven't I? -- he thought. Haven't I thought of it since the first time I saw you? Haven't I thought of nothing else for two years?. . . He sat motionless, looking at her. He heard the words he never allowed himself to form, the words he had felt, known, yet had not faced, had hoped to destroy by never letting them be within his own mind, Now it was as sudden and shocking as if he were saying it to her…Since the first time I saw you…. Nothing but your body, that mouth of yours, and the way your eyes would look at me, if…. Through every sentence I ever said to you, through every conference you thought were so safe, through the importance of all the issues we discussed…. You trusted me, didn't you? To recognize greatness? To think of you as you deserved -- as if you were a man?

Get me a cig and a coupla dexies, stat.



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digby 5/02/2005 02:27:00 PM |

 
Mainstream Child Abuse

Via MAX BLUMENTHAL I see that ABC is going to allow that psychopath James Dobson to advertise his S&M child training techniques on their network, when they refused to allow the United Church of Christ to air its "controversial" ad. No no no --- if you're going to start making these kinds of judgements, you don't get to allow sick fuck animal and child beating fundamentalists to advertise either.

Obviously, it's time to let the good people of this country know who they are dealing with in Mr Dobson. His book, "The Strong Willed Child" --- the precepts of which will be featured in the Focus on the Family "program" being advertised on ABC's "Nanny" show, features the following little vignette, which many of you have already read here, but which deserves to be read by everyone, particularly those at ABC:

"Please don't misunderstand me. Siggie is a member of our family and we love him dearly. And despite his anarchistic nature, I have finally taught him to obey a few simple commands. However, we had some classic battles before he reluctantly yielded to my authority.

"The greatest confrontation occurred a few years ago when I had been in Miami for a three-day conference. I returned to observe that Siggie had become boss of the house while I was gone. But I didn't realize until later that evening just how strongly he felt about his new position as Captain.

"At eleven o'clock that night, I told Siggie to go get into his bed, which is a permanent enclosure in the family room. For six years I had given him that order at the end of each day, and for six years Siggie had obeyed.

"On this occasion, however, he refused to budge. You see, he was in the bathroom, seated comfortably on the furry lid of the toilet seat. That is his favorite spot in the house, because it allows him to bask in the warmth of a nearby electric heater..."

"When I told Sigmund to leave his warm seat and go to bed, he flattened his ears and slowly turned his head toward me. He deliberately braced himself by placing one paw on the edge of the furry lid, then hunched his shoulders, raised his lips to reveal the molars on both sides, and uttered his most threatening growl. That was Siggie's way of saying. "Get lost!"

"I had seen this defiant mood before, and knew there was only one way to deal with it. The ONLY way to make Siggie obey is to threaten him with destruction. Nothing else works. I turned and went to my closet and got a small belt to help me "reason" with Mr. Freud."

What developed next is impossible to describe. That tiny dog and I had the most vicious fight ever staged between man and beast. I fought him up one wall and down the other, with both of us scratching and clawing and growling and swinging the belt. I am embarrassed by the memory of the entire scene. Inch by inch I moved him toward the family room and his bed. As a final desperate maneuver, Siggie backed into the corner for one last snarling stand. I eventually got him to bed, only because I outweighed him 200 to 12!"

This is the basis of Dobson's child rearing advice. He thinks of children as animals and he believes that animals and children should be beaten. He believes that nine month old babies should be switched on the bare legs. He believes they should be pinched hard, on the neck, so it will hurt. He believes in things that could get parents arrested in many states in the union.

Yet his program is considered to be more wholesome and less controversial than a church that allows gays to be a member.

Max Blumenthal has the addresses and phone numbers of the various ABC offices to which you can lodge your complaint. I think this one is worth fighting. Dobson is real menace and he should be marginalized as quickly as possible.



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digby 5/02/2005 11:16:00 AM |

 
Ya Think?

Doubts About Mandate for Bush, GOP

The day after he won a second term in November, President Bush offered his view of the new political landscape.

"When you win there is a feeling that the people have spoken and embraced your point of view," he said, "and that's what I intend to tell the Congress, that I made it clear what I intend to do as president . . . and the people made it clear what they wanted, now let's work together."

Six months ago, this comment was widely viewed as more than just a postgame boast. Among campaign strategists and academics, there was ample speculation that Bush's victory, combined with incremental gains in the Republican congressional majority, signaled something fundamental: a partisan and ideological "realignment" that would reshape politics over the long haul.

As the president passed the 100-day mark of his second term over the weekend, the main question facing Bush and his party is whether they misread the November elections. With the president's poll numbers down, and the Republican majority ensnared in ethical controversy, things look much less like a once-a-generation realignment.

Where do they come up with this stuff? Of course he has a mandate. Of course it's been a sweeping realignment. He won 51-49, a completely unambiguous indication of huge popular support, particularly for the centerpiece of his campaign, his social security plan. Why would anyone think otherwise? I thought we all understood that the vast majority of the country are social conservatives who support overturning Roe vs Wade, a constitutional amendment against gay marriage and remaking the courts in the image of Tom DeLay. Nothing could be clearer.

Now the press is wondering if that interpretation of the last election is wrong. In the article, of course, they claim that's the administration's interpretation, but we all know that administrations tend to exaggerate their mandates, so it's up to the media to properly put these things into perspective. And, needless to say, they were convinced from the beginning that Bush could claim support for anything he chose to do, given his "impressive" victory in November (which was impressive only in comparison to his previous "impressive" showing.) And the Democrats, properly chastened by their embarrassing defeat would support it also, because they are losers and wouldn't have the nerve to stand up to the codpiece collosus.

But it hasn't worked out that way. And the press is scratching their little noggins and wondering if maybe Karl Rove's talking points didn't quite capture the limits of Bush's victory. Certainly, one could have interpreted a 2% win in the presidential race as something less than a validation of the president's most extreme positions, but why dwell on the negative?

Nobody in the mainstream press bothered to consider for even one moment that Bush might not be able to get support for the destruction of what was up to now known as the third rail in politics or that the public did not support the notion of fundamentalist preachers involved in the government. They just assumed it would be so.

Among the press it has been as if Bush has magical powers. He and Uncle Karl are thought to be so spectacularly gifted, in ways that they can't even comprehend, that they can accomplish the impossible. Apparently, they think that cutting taxes and lashing out in inchoate anger after being attacked is some sort of difficult task --- completely misunderstanding the true difficulty of governing which is to not run deficits and keep the people from lashing out in inchoate anger after being attacked. It was never going to be difficult to talk the country into taxcuts and killing after 9/11. That they gave Karl and George credit for something really courageous in that is a testament to their shallowness. President Britney Spears could have gotten that done.

After 9/11 (or maybe even before, when they anointed him in 2000 and told the rest of us to "get over it") they never once gave up the idea that Bush was a popular, extraordinary leader who only a few hippies in Hollywood and a couple of stiffs in New York didn't like because he talked funny. We had to fight that every step of the way in 2004 and still we came extremely close to winning.

There is no realignment. We are in a period of pure political combat in which the power could change dramatically in each election. There is no real middle, there are only two opposing forces. Nothing is predictable and anything could happen. The Republicans hold institutional power by only the most tenuous means, despite all their bluster about political dominance. And their biggest achilles heel --- as it has been forever --- is hubris. Clearly, that is the story that one would have thought the press would see from the beginning; an administration that overreached its non-existent mandate in an intensely polarized political climate.

Better late than never, I suppose. Still, it would be nice, if just once, the media could play this administration straight. They are always given the benefit of the doubt at the least, and portrayed as masterful political players most of the time --- and then the ditzy media is surprised when Bush and Rove gamble and lose. It happens over and over again. For reasons I will never understand, the Washington press corpse invested itself in Junior's success early on. It's past time they woke up and realizes that the Republicans aren't political wizards.

Without 9/11 Bush wouldn't be president today. It's all he has, and all he ever had. No mandate, no realignemnt. No nothing. Karl Rove is not a genius.



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digby 5/02/2005 09:23:00 AM |

Sunday, May 01, 2005

 
Geniuses

Kevin at Catch links to Little Green Footballs so I don't have to. While gingerly tip-toeing through the dreck, I came across the dumbest, dumass rightwing post of the week (and you know how tough the competition is for that.)

Reacting to a quote from Al Gore's speech last week (which was, btw, just great) one of the tiny chartreuse pee-wee players said:

“This aggressive new strain of right-wing religious zealotry is actually a throwback to the intolerance that led to the creation of America in the first place,” Gore said as many in the audience stood and applauded.

Another thing that gets me about this statement is the hypocracy of it. I get told by Leftists all the time that this nation was founded by enlightened folks who wanted to create a secular nation. Does anybody else see the logic error in stating that religious zealots wanted to create a secular nation?

Are these people allowed to drive?



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digby 5/01/2005 12:50:00 PM |

 
Naughty, Naughty

I read these Wonkette excerpts of Laura Bush's speech at the WH correspondence dinner last night and I thought it was satire. But I just saw the tape and it's for real:

"I am married to the President of the United States and here is our typical evening. Nine o'clock, Mr. Excitement here is sound asleep, and I am watching Desperate Housewives. With Lynne Cheney. Ladies and gentleman, I am a desperate housewife. I mean if those women on that show think they're desperate, they ought to be with George. One night after George went to bed, Lynne Cheney, Condi Rice, Karen Hughes and I went to Chippendales....I won't tell you what happened, but Lynne's Secret Service code name is now Dollar Bill."

"George always says that he's delighted to come to these press dinners. Baloney. He's usually in bed by now. I'm not kidding. I said to him the other day, George, if you really want to end tyranny in the world, you're going to have to stay up later."

"The amazing thing is that George and I were just meant to be. I was a librarian who spent 12 hours a day in the library, yet somehow I met George."

"I'm proud of George. He's learned a lot about ranching since that first year when he tried to milk the horse. What's worse, it was a male horse."

Now that I see it again, it really does have the ring of truth.

Thank goodness she's such a good Christian or someone might get the idea she's alluding to equine hand jobs, thong stuffing and a very limp husband. I'm sure James Dobson would interpret these comments correctly as her desire for her husband to take his proper leadership role. And, of course, if she doesn't respond to his leadership George can always take a belt to her as if she's a dauchshund.

Did anyone happen to notice if FauxNews covered this little story?



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digby 5/01/2005 08:51:00 AM |

Friday, April 29, 2005

 
Goldilocks Logic

By the logic of modern journalism, in which they are considered to be "getting it right" if both sides of an issue criticize them, we now know that James Dobson is a moderate on gay rights:

Gay rights supporters from around the country, angry at James Dobson's stance against homosexuality, are expected to converge Sunday and Monday on his Focus on the Family headquarters.

A second demonstration is also set for Sunday by a handful of extreme anti-gay activists from the Rev. Fred Phelps' Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan.

Ironically, both groups will be protesting the stand taken by Dobson and his ministry on homosexuality. The gay rights advocacy group Soulforce accuses Dobson of "spreading lies about same-gender families."

Phelps' group says Focus officials are headed to hell because the ministry is soft on homosexuality.

One's too hot, one's too cold and this one's juuust right.



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digby 4/29/2005 07:13:00 PM |

 
"They're talking about my burrito"

A call about a possible weapon at a middle school prompted police to put armed officers on rooftops, close nearby streets and lock down the school. All over a giant burrito.

[...]

The drama ended two hours later when the suspicious item was identified as a 30-inch burrito filled with steak, guacamole, lettuce, salsa and jalapenos and wrapped inside tin foil and a white T-shirt.

[...]

Russell said the mystery was solved after she brought everyone in the school together in the auditorium to explain what was going on.

"The kid was sitting there as I'm describing this (report of a student with a suspicious package) and he's thinking, 'Oh, my gosh, they're talking about my burrito.'"

Afterward, eighth-grader Michael Morrissey approached her.

"He said, 'I think I'm the person they saw,'" Russell said.

The burrito was part of Morrissey's extra-credit assignment to create commercial advertising for a product.

"We had to make up a product and it could have been anything. I made up a restaurant that specialized in oddly large burritos," Morrissey said.

The terrorists have won.


Hat tip to senior blog research assistant, Gloria
digby 4/29/2005 04:09:00 PM |

 
Hello-oh? Pope Is Dead

I know that most of you probably read The Howler and don't need any reminding, but this one is a particularly good observation and I haven't heard anyone mentioning it. Tim Russert has turned his show into a religious seminar for the last month and a half. Last week really was the final straw. Here's Sommerby:

THROUGH THE TUBE DARKLY: Refresh us—when exactly did Meet the Press become an openly Catholic program? Last Sunday, for the third time in the last five weeks, Tim Russert devoted his entire show to a religious discussion. Early on, Russert popped this question to Father Thomas Bohlin, U.S. vicar of the conservative Catholic group, Opus Dei:

RUSSERT (4/24/05): Father John McCloskey, who was also an Opus Dei with you, was on this program. He has a Web site where he predicted basically in 2030 that the number of Catholics would go from 60 million to 40 million; almost a smaller and purer church. Is that, do you think, the vision of our pope? [Russert’s emphasis]

No, Russert’s emphasis didn’t make sense, but it was quite pronounced. Moments later, we heard from Joseph Bottum, one of two other guests whose bull-dog conservatism made Bohlin seem like a poodle. Bottum responded to the claim that the Catholic hierarchy needs to consult with Joe Sixpack more often:

BOTTUM: I'm not sure that there's any solution in all of that... I'm not sure it's any solution to the problem the church faces addressing the concerns that arise in a democratic experiment like the United States. We have characteristic abuses, as I said, that are going to happen in these places. And the church needs to be to some degree countercultural, to stand against that and to speak out and say, "We can't kill our babies."

Did we say conservative? Yes, when Bottum discussed the “characteristic abuses” that occur “in these places,” he was referring to democracies—to “places” like the U.S.!

Question: Were we the only ones who gazed with surprise at Sunday’s Meet the Press discussion? Who wondered what this odd debate had to do with the American news agenda? Who wondered why we were hearing this on NBC’s one weekly news hour?

SISTER MARY AQUIN O’NEILL: I'm grateful for an opportunity to return to the question of truth. Truth is another name for God and so it cannot be something that we possess. It's something that we hope to dwell within. The truth is always larger than we are, greater than we are. And it is not something that we can attain by ourselves.

Say what? O’Neill seemed like a very nice person, but were we the only ones wondering why this rumination was occurring on Meet the Press, which was once a well-known news show? In fact, we found ourselves puzzling again and again as the conversation veered into the weeds. For example, why was Father Joseph Fessio, siting in Rome, saying this on a one-time news program?

FESSIO: The point is if Jesus Christ is the bridegroom of the church, if God has sent his son to us as a man to unite himself in a marital act, a nuptial act to his whole people, to make us one flesh and one body with him, there's something very deep and mysterious about that. It's what the church has always taught is that, not that men are better than women, not that men should be given more honor than woman, but that men image forth the bridegroom because Christ is essentially someone who's married to us, and therefore you can't have a woman who gives that iconic image of Christ who's the bridegroom of the church.

But why exactly is that “the point” on a weekly news program? And why exactly was this a topic for such a weekly show:

O’NEILL: Frederic Herzog wrote many years ago that the two things that distinguish Catholicism are the sacraments and the Blessed Mother, Mary. They are both under siege right now. And the sacraments are in trouble because we don't have ministers. That's the question for me. We must find a way to solve that. The people are hungry for the sacraments, and without the sacraments, we don't have the church.

That’s a perfectly fine conversation—but what was NBC News presenting it? O’Neill continued, but what was the connection between her rumination and the traditional Meet the Press?

O’NEILL: I believe that one of the most important things for this church now is to really act on Christici Fidelis Laici, where we were told there's a complementarity between the laity and the ordained. Complementarity means one cannot trump the other. And so, in all the questions that the church faces, the lay-people and their experience and their insights have to have an equal place at the table with those who are ordained.

Of course, you know how these news shows can be. Once one guest opines about Christici Fidelis Laici, everyone has to spout off:

BOHLIN: I think there's another way of looking at this whole issue, which is the way that John Paul II has looked at it, coming out of Christici Fidelis Laici, the great document on the lay-people in the church, which is that, really, talking about priests, bishops, Catholic professionals, is talking about an infinitesimal portion of what the church is, and really, the forefront of the battle of the church is waged by every baptized person. And that's what's has to be—that's the battle. That's where the battle is, where those people are.

For ourselves, we don’t have a view on this great document. Meanwhile, why would the Meet the Press audience have a dog in the following hunt?

RUSSERT: But if you're a sacramental church, you need priests to administer the sacraments. And if there's a shortage of priests, what do you do?

Why can’t “our pope” just figure it out, then tell us what we should do in “these places?” In the meantime, why couldn’t Russert spend a few minutes on the actual news, which might affect the actual American people, the people who live in such lands?

But enough of the negative! In the good news department, the very ’umble Parson Meacham was there, preaching the gospel according to Newsweek:

MEACHAM: If you are a person of faith, particularly in the United States, you live in hope. You live in the hope that one day there will be a God who will wipe away all tears from your eyes and there'll be no more pain, an image from Revelation that's drawn from Isaiah. And if people of faith are to play a role in the public square, they must, I believe—a humble layman's opinion—they must practice humility and be—understand that the peace of God does passeth all understanding and that no one has, I believe, a monopoly on truth.

Of course, this ’umble layman is always inspiring. Just consider this earlier bite, where he ’umbly impressed with his detailed knowledge of every known item of scripture:

MEACHAM: You know, in the words of the Elizabethan Prayer Book, we are all seeking the means of grace and the hope of glory, and the road by which we—the road we take to attempt to do that can be different and obviously have been throughout history. I would draw a distinction between the teachings of the church and ultimately the broader force of Christianity. There is a sense, I think, of—as God said to Job in the Old Testament in the longest sustained monologue from the Lord in the Bible, "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the world?" So he should not be presuming to act as though we know everything and that we understand all truth.

In fact, St. Paul said, "For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face-to-face. Now, I am known in part, soon I will be known in full." So we are all on a journey. St. Augustine defined this as the soul's journey back to God. And my sense is, the more that Benedict XVI can speak in the spirit of the past week as opposed to the past generation, he will become a force for at least an ecumenical spirit if not reconciliation.

Let’s face it—Meacham really isn’t the man to be talking about “longest sustained monologues.” Or, as we normally paraphrase Meacham, Blah blah blah blah harrumph zzzzzzz.

Meachum is, of course, the dunce who wrote:

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

Hookay.

I was rather stunned by Russert's show this past week-end. It was, after all, Justice Sunday, a "religious" event that was actually newsworthy. Russert spent the hour talking Catholic theology instead. And it wasn't as if we hadn't just spent five long weeks with wall to wall religion on all the networks covering every possible issue that could be of interest to anyone who hadn't actually taken vows --- which I'm expecting to see Little Russ do any day now. That priest shortage is a big problem. His pope needs him.



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digby 4/29/2005 01:54:00 PM |

 
Storytelling

Matt Yglesias over on TAPPED makes a good point about the new parental notification law. It pretty much clears up any remaining notion that repealing Roe vs Wade will solve the abortion issue once and for all so we can put all that unpleasantness aside as various progressive states will do as their constituents require and everybody will live happily ever after.

Pro-lifers are driven by a very serious moral commitment to the idea that aborting pregnancies is a serious wrong. They're not going to be happy sitting idly by while Virginia women travel to Maryland or the District of Columbia to have abortions any more than they're happy with inter-state travel to avoid parental notification laws.

That is correct. I don't know how long it's going to take Democrats to understand that those who vote one way or the other on that issue alone cannot be finessed. We can try to sound sympathetic to the "ick" factor and whittle away at the rights of women over time until there is only the most bare right to abortion if the woman's life is threatened and it won't make a difference to those who believe it is a fundamental issue of morality. We have to fight this one on the merits.

This reminds me of an interesting article by Paul Rogat Loeb in USA Today from a while back in which he writes that one of our problems with abortion is that we have not told personal stories:

Even if you've heard enough about Terri Schiavo, it seems useful to consider why President Bush's political grandstanding in her case backfired. More than 70% of Americans, including solid majorities of self-described evangelicals, opposed the intervention of the White House and Congress. Those surveyed mistrusted the Bush administration's disregard for local control, the rule of law and the right to be protected from a capricious federal government.

Their responses also speak to a broader shift in how we deal with difficult end-of-life issues. For 20 years, gradually increasing majorities have agreed that for all our technological inventiveness, what some people need most is the right to die in peace. You'd think this belief — that the most difficult decisions must be our own — would also raise support for maintaining the right to abortion. But it hasn't. In the 30 years since Roe v. Wade, support for keeping abortion legal has stayed even, at most, and new onerous restrictions keep getting imposed.

The difference comes, I suspect, from the stories we tell, and those we keep hidden. Many families have wrestled with end-of-life choices. But they're brought on by the illness and aging of loved ones, not by our own actions. No one judges us for having a sick parent as they might for our sexuality. So we're likely to talk in public about such choices.

But most women don't publicly discuss their abortions. Although a third of all U.S. women have abortions by age 45, they're more likely to view the dilemma as a product of their own failures — to use adequate birth control or to have the financial or emotional resources to afford another child. They're more likely to feel shame.

When the movement to legalize abortion began, advocates talked about the human costs of prohibition. They told the complex stories of why women would choose to value their own lives, choices and possibilities over the potential life of the fetus. They framed abortion as an act of compassion. We see this in the recent film, Vera Drake. Its working-class protagonist in postwar England views her actions "helping young girls in trouble" as part of the same ethic of caring as looking after her aged mother. Pro-choice activists eventually told their stories powerfully enough to convince America that its abortion policies had to change.

Since Roe, these voices have been neutralized by those speaking for the humanity of the fetus. Some oppose abortion from compassion and conviction. The motive of others, who also campaign against sex education, access to birth control and financial support for poor families, seems more like punitive vindictiveness. As the stories of the women involved faded, the reasons why women have always made this difficult choice, and will keep doing so, got told far less often.

Schiavo was a soap opera that everyone could understand in narrative terms. And most people underestood that it was a complicated story in which all of the characters were drawn in various shades of heroism, love, selfishness and grief. The discussions around the Easter table in many homes, I suspect, were characterized with sighs and stories of "remember your Aunt Millie's first husband Bill back in Baltimore? She had to pull the plug and her son wasn't happy about it at all" kind of dialog. "Morality" was probably not the way in which this topic was overtly discussed because the morality of the issue was so complicated.

Abortion, I think, has always been difficult to talk about because it had to do with sex --- and therefore, in some people's minds, sin. But I do remember back in the day that one of the things that made abortion finally come out of the closet was the willingness of people to talk about the issue. The stories were of the horrors of the back alley abortions they endured and the complexity of circumstances that led them there. For instance, here's just one example from Gloria Feldt's book "Behind Every Choice is A Story" of a complicated situation and the horrible way the women was forced to deal with it:

In 1970 I had a back-street abortion. I had a young daughter of 18 months at home and was separated from an abusive husband. When I found out I was pregnant with another child right after finally having the courage to leave an abusive man, I cried and cried. This was before abortion was legal. I told a close friend who said she knew of a doctor who performed these abortions.

I went to his clinic, which was dirty and sleazy underneath an underpass in Metairie, Louisiana. I was treated as a criminal and so were all the other women in the room. You had to give $150 in cash before they would even speak to you. I was led to a back room where there was no caring or anesthetic to be found. It was very painful and I threw up immediately and kept throwing up for over an hour after the procedure. My girlfriend who went with me was worried as I did not come out right away as others had. She inquired about me and was led to the back room where she saw that I was in pain and throwing up. She held my hand and got a washcloth to wash my face and help me. She asked the nurse if there wasn't something wrong and she replied "this is how some of them get." My girlfriend was horrified at the coldness and uncaring atmosphere of the place. We left sometime after and she drove me home and called a friend who was an intern at the time. He came to the house and prescribed some antibiotics and pain medication. He was very kind.

This ABC News poll says that 81% of the public believe that abortion should be available to rape and incest victims. That is not an absolutist "culture of life" position. However, 57% of the public believe that abortion should be illegal if the reason is to end an unwanted pregnancy. The question, of course, is what does "unwanted" mean and who decides? If you were to tell that personal story, a woman with a toddler already and an abusive husband she is trying desperately to leave, would 57% agree that this particular unwanted pregnancy should be dealt with in that horrible back alley situation? Should she have been forced to have this child under those circumstances? I doubt it.

Certainly, a fair number would say "tough" --- that women should have to carry the preganacy to term and give it up for adoption. But suppose that meant that the abusive father would have the right to take full custody? And, after all, how easy is it to give the sister or brother of your two year old up for adoption? And what about money or health care or legal fees? People don't want to think about the practical, financial aspects of having a child under stressful stituation, but it is likely to be a primary concern of the person who is going to have to pay the price. I know that in the discussions I had about the Schiavo case, the issue of cost was somthing that came up in every single conversation. Who pays and where will the money come from are things that real people talk about when they deal with these issues.

I understand the impulse of those who say "I'm not sorry" as a way of expressing their right to dominion over their own bodies. As a knee jerk civil libertarian, I am very sympathetic to a straight forward expression of individual rights. But from a political point of view, it makes far more sense to present this issue as one of complicated morality which individuals see differently in different circumstances and which politicians are much too craven and self-interested to intervene.

There are probably cases in which large numbers of people would see abortion as repugnant on some level. But there are many, many cases that would evoke the dinner table conversations that happened around the Schivo case if people knew the stories. 16 year old girls who made mistakes and 34 year old struggling mothers of two whose birth control failed and women who have no money and low paying jobs and medical students with a mountain of debt and a year to go. These stories may or may not meet every single person's criteria of what constitutes a "good reason" for having an abortion. But every single one of those women might very well decide that the circumstances are so dire for them that they will take their chances with a back alley abortion if a legal one is unavailable. That is the stark, dramatic choice that this country faces in this debate. And as Matt says, don't count on being able to just drive to California or Canada (even if you can come up with the money) because repealing Roe vs Wade will not be the end of it. They will not stop until it is outlawed nationally.

It is important to introduce back into the dialog the fact that this is not an abstract moral issue, but a multi-dimensional, intensely human dilemma. When people understand things in those terms they are far more likely to want the government to step back than step in. It seems they know instinctively that the blunt instrument of government in the hands of moral absolutists is a bad idea.


Update: And yes, it would have been very helpful if people knew the horrible situations in which some of these young girls affected by the new parental notification laws find themselves. Parental notification laws do not hurt the healthy familites that just want to help their girls make a good decision. Those kinds of families can deal with complexity and have probably built up a lot of trust over the years. These laws hurt the girls whose families are cruel, violent and authoritarian. Many adult women have had their lives ruined because they were forced to bear the burden of their parents' obsessive religious or political zealotry.



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digby 4/29/2005 12:19:00 PM |

 
Duped

Ezra notices this Andrew Sullivan post and argues with Sully's complaint that Democrats just love raising taxes for its own sake. He makes the observation that Democrats don't really care how we raise the money, we are interested in how it's spent. He contrasts that with the Republicans for whom cutting taxes is a virtue, no matter how much is being spent --- leading to George W. Bush. (I'm pretty sure that Democrats prefer to raise money from filthy rich plutocrats who should be patriotic enough not to begrudge the country that gave them everything a little piece of the action, but maybe I'm wrong on that.) In any case, it's true that Democrats see taxation as a tool that must be used to ensure a stable and prosperous society, while Republicans see it as evil in itself --- or more precisely, they like to market it as evil in itself while they spend like Paris Hilton.

I have noticed this new singular reliance on the tax and spend canard among Republicans who are appalled at the current warm embrace of bigoted theocrats and/or inchoate, messianic global adventuring. It seems to be the last GOP identifier these people have and they are rather desperately clinging to it.

Sullivan says in this unusually (for him) confused article in TNR:

Retreating to the Democrats is not an option. Small government conservatives are even less powerful within the opposition's base than in the GOP's. Bill Clinton's small-c conservatism was made possible only by what now looks like a blessed interaction with a Republican Congress. The only pragmatic option is to persuade those who run the Republican Party that religious zeal is a highly unstable base for conservative politics: It is divisive, inflammatory, and intolerant of the very mechanisms that keep freedom alive.

Good luck with that.

All that remains of Sullivan's Republicanism is a knee jerk conviction that Democrats love taxes and big government for its own sake. But the truth is that most of the time Democrats are forced to raise taxes to fix the messes that Republicans have left us in. For decades we've been bailing out these reckless bastards. And when we have the opportunity, we like to put some brakes on their future rash and irresponsible economic performance by creating some social insurance so that average Americans don't get ruined every time these assholes take power. Ezra is right; we don't believe in "government" and "taxes" as some sort of values in themselves. They are the necessary tools to mitigate the excesses of the market --- and most often these excesses were exacerbated and enabled by Republican governments in the name of individual economic freedom. We just don't think that freedom from taxes trumps the gritty reality of being well and truly economicaly fucked by Republican policies. I guess that's just the difference between us.

Yes, we would like to roll back tax-cuts on the rich because somebody has to pay for all this and they are the ones with all the money. To ask that they pay a higher percentage of their already huge incomes is simply not an outrageous request --- particularly since they are mostly GOP cronies who financed and benefitted from raping the treasury in the first place. We do not believe that rich people are morally superior because the "market" rewards "productivity" with wealth, so they must be more productive and, therefore, more important to a successful economy. (Paris Hilton creates jobs, but I don't think the kind of "jobs" she creates are what we have in mind here.) We believe that the backbone of the economy is a thriving middle class and we believe that the government has to offer some support to make that happen.

Sadly, Democrats are undoubtedly going to have to spend a generation cleaning up the horrible mess the Republicans are creating right now. This is why it's so important that we preserve the social safety net and enhace it in the areas of health and job retraining. People are going to need it. They always need it after the Republicans come along and wreak havoc on the economy.

"Small government" whatever that really means, is a chimera. Nobody actually does it. The way you tell the difference is that the Democrats pay their way honestly and then clean up after the Republicans once they've spent the country into oblivion. Who are the grown-ups again?



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digby 4/29/2005 09:21:00 AM |

 
Editor, Jeff Gannon

This sounds pretty funny, to be sure. But I wouldn't laugh too hard. Where's the money for this little venture coming from?


Link fixed


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digby 4/29/2005 09:07:00 AM |

Thursday, April 28, 2005

 
Check It Out Now

I'd just like to make a plug for the advertiser over to your left --- BagNewsNotes. I happen to love the ever-changing news photos when I see them on other blogs and I really like them here. But you should click on them and take a look at the site itself. It's an unusual look at the way our politics and culture are seen by people in this country --- or, at least, should be.


(And, hey, if anybody feels like complaining that I'm endorsing one of my own advertisers, take it to Paul Harvey.)



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digby 4/28/2005 03:37:00 PM |

 
Born To Rule

Billmon has written a wonderful review of Shadia Drury’s book, Leo Strauss and the American Right which I urge everyone to read. I was reminded of a conversation I had with my older brother (the smart one in the family) about fifteen years ago. We were listening to Newt Gingrich smarmily intone about God and family values on CSPAN and my brother turned to me and said, "They want to repeal the enlightenment." I thought, as I have often thought in my life, that my brother was full of shit. And as has often been the case, I was wrong. When the neos really started to flex their muscles back in the late 90's it was clear that they were, shockingly, hostile to the enlightenment. I had many an argument with libertarians(which I have since abandoned for lack of hours in the day and cells in the brain) trying to tell them that the modern Republicans think John Stuart Mill was a dangerous radical and that the American constitution is a piece of toilet paper.

I would only add a couple of thoughts to Billmon's extremely interesting post. The first is that I think one of the untold stories with the neocons is how they have put post-modern techniques in service of pre-modern ideology --- and how that may undo them. That is to say that while they fully believe in their own inate superiority, they have quite masterfully used modern marketing and business techniques to sell the exact opposite concept to the public --- that everyone is master of their own destiny. As Billmon puts it in his piece, they believe "the people just need their opium" and they decided that the opium of the modern era was an illusion of freedom. At the same time they introduced the idea that we need more traditional values and that we should have no taxes but high spending, culture of life and culture of war, and a myriad of impossible to reconcile ideas. (It's possible that they originally thought to supplant opium with confusion.)

The problem is that when you have consciously created several competing discourses out there in the ether, it becomes quite difficult to control them. The concept of the winner writes the history may be true --- but it's damned hard to do it in real time. It's just not a simple as it used to be to round up the rubes and tell them what they believe. And I don't think this Elmer Gantry Salvation Show is going to fix it. They are part of the entertainment industrial complex with an agenda all their own.

Billmon also says:

One of the Straussians’ most important innovations has been to reconcile their brand of elite conservatism with Southern fried demagogic populism ala Huey Long and George Wallace. That’s a pretty radical concession for a movement with its mind (or at least its heart) planted firmly in the fifth century BC. But it's solved the traditional dilemma of old-style conservatives in America: How to win power in a society that has no landed gentry, no nobility, no established church – none of Europe’s archaic feudal institutions and loyalties.

The rationale – or rationalization – for the populist ploy is that the common folk are a hell of a lot less liberal (again, using the Enlightenment definition of the word) than what the Straussians like to call America’s “parchment regime” – that is, the ideas and principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. The masses want their opium, in other words, and with the right guidance, will happily sweep away the liberal elites who have been denying it to them.

This makes quite a bit of sense in another way as well. There actually is an echo of feudalism in America, isn't there? It's in the Lost Cause confederacy. In that sense, there is a lot more in common between the Straussians and the southern demagogues than might be readily apparent. Just as the feudal lords and the church could be counted upon to keep the masses in line, the right wing decendents of the old confederacy can be counted upon to also answer smartly to their higher authority and serve their leige lord.

As I mentioned, however, the southern church is going to cause some problems. Not because it doesn't agree that they and their allies are preturnaturally gifted with the ability to govern the masses as they see fit --- but because they are not truly organized around a hierarchy. The religious right is a bunch of loosely affiliated entrepreneurial businesses, not a top down corporation. They are quite nicely sharing the overlord duties right now, but I do not expect that human nature has been repealed. With power will come competition among them. In fact, it may end up being a world wide wrestling, NASCAR flame out, free-for-all, right in front of God and everybody.

And lest we forget, it was that bullshit that led to the enlightenment in the first place.

The problem for the Straussians and the Southern feudalists, I think, is that both the Po-mo marketing and the religious right fervor are taking on lives of their own. It's getting away from them. And I think it is because neither modern media with its diffusion and reliance on sensation and spectacle, or evangelical religion with its newfound populist insistence that it actually knows better than the party mandarins, are controllable in the long run. These are not entirely manageable or malleable cultural instruments the way that feudal institutions were. I'm sure the right would like nothing more than to institute these feudal institutions in the US --- it's clear that William F Buckley and his confederate bretheren veritably yearn for it. But America is not a very good cultural fit for these ideas. Mega Churches are circus tents, not cathedrals. And we fought a very bloody war already, essentially over the idea that the Southern aristocrat knew what was best for everyone.

I don't believe that there is any putting the enlightenment genie back in the bottle. But I do believe that that is what they are trying to do and the result is going to be a mess beyond our imagining --- as Billmon says "insane, potentially catastropic."

My smart brother, by the way, emigrated for good back in 1996.



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digby 4/28/2005 11:41:00 AM |

Wednesday, April 27, 2005

 
They're Heee-ar

Kevin Drum, citing a very interesting article in Dissent by Michael Walzer, says:

In the end, then, we have a stalemate. The left in America has limited energy because its goals are fairly modest and its story is disjointed. The right has energy and vision to spare but its goals aren't widely supported. Someone — or something — is likely to come along in the near future and smash this stalemate, but what? Or who?

It's already happening. See post below:

Read Kevin's entire post for context and read the Dissent article as well. Very interesting stuff.



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digby 4/27/2005 02:53:00 PM |

 
Slow Boil

I didn't have a lot to say about The Pope Show because I like to show respect for other people's beliefs and when a pope dies it's a very big deal to catholics. (And judging by the wall to wall TV coverage, it was a big deal to many other people as well.) I also haven't said much about the new Pope because while I know that he has had an influence on politics in this country, I haven't felt that it was primarily my business to weigh in on religious dogma that I don't share.

But on this, I call bullshit:

A key part of the Republican strategy is to claim that it is hatred of religion that has moved the Democrats to oppose these judicial nominees. "Justice Sunday: Stop the Filibuster Against People of Faith," a TV program produced by evangelical leaders, was simulcast Sunday via the Internet, just as Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist was preparing to call for a vote on the anti-filibuster measure. Evangelical Protestants have led the way in portraying Democrats as enemies of God, but the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has chimed in on the issue of judicial nominees in a mass mailing to parishioners timed to yield constituent letters just as the matter comes to a vote.

I thought it was wrong during the campaign for the church to take sides as it did, particularly after ruling that priests were not allowed to be involved in politics. (Apparently, this was only because the priests involved at the time happened to be liberals.) But it was a political campaign and individual catholics were ultimately going to have to decide for themselves what their priorities were. I didn't like it, but it wasn't completely out of bounds.

This, however, is something else entirely. This is the church weighing in on an obscure senate rule that does not have anything overtly to do with religion or even morality. It's a partisan political power play. It's not that I don't realize that all these conservative evangelizal churches are doing the same thing. But the Catholic church is an international, political body as well as a religious institution that has up to now been quite cautious about injecting itself into American power politics. It's one thing to have that crank Donohoe preaching on the same pulpit as James Dobson; it's quite another for the Bishops of the US Catholic Church -- presumably under the direction of Pope Benedict --- to get involved.

The author mentions Fritz Stern, who I wrote about a while back, and his views on if "it could happen here." He had some very important insights into how religion plays into this. I took an unusual amount of flack for posting it (alongside the TIME cover with Dobson et al.) It's worth repeating now, I think:

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

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

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

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

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

Makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up, doesn't it?



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

 
A Reverent Moment

Josh Marshall has been following the Princeton Filibuster which is being held in front of the Frist Campus Center. Among the many things they read throughout the rainy night, along with excerpts of the constitution, was the American classic "My Pet Goat."


snigger


And to the pedants among you --- and you are legion --- please refrain from correcting the name of the book. I know it is "The Pet Goat" I prefer "My Pet Goat" because "My Pet Goat" is funnier; thus it will always be "My Pet Goat" on this blog.



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digby 4/27/2005 01:50:00 PM |

 
Impulse Control

Quick, somebody ask head security mom, Cokie Roberts, if she thinks it's ok for Republicans to act like juvenile delinquents on the taxpayers dime? The children are rewriting Democratic amendments to make them sound as if Democrats are trying to protect sexual predators. And no, this isn't happening in some obscure local backwater. It's in the US House of Representatives:

DEMS: a Nadler amendment allows an adult who could be prosecuted under the bill to go to a Federal district court and seek a waiver to the state’s parental notice laws if this remedy is not available in the state court. (no 11-16)

GOP REWRITE:. Mr. Nadler offered an amendment that would have created an additional layer of Federal court review that could be used by sexual predators to escape conviction under the bill. By a roll call vote of 11 yeas to 16 nays, the amendment was defeated.

DEMS: a Nadler amendment to exempt a grandparent or adult sibling from the criminal and civil provisions in the bill (no 12-19)

GOP REWRITE: . Mr. Nadler offered an amendment that would have exempted sexual predators from prosecution under the bill if they were grandparents or adult siblings of a minor. By a roll call vote of 12 yeas to 19 nays, the amendment was defeated.

Thank goodness the chairman of the committee stepped in and took control of his unruly charges.

Oh wait; he didn't:

"And instead of decrying what I certainly expected would be revealed as a mistake by an overzealous staffer...The Chairman stood by those altered
amendment descriptions.

"He made very clear to the Rules Committee that the alterations to these members' amendments were deliberate.

"When pressed as to why his committee staff took such an unprecedented action, the Chairman immediately offered up his own anger over the manner in which Democrats had chosen to debate and oppose this unfortunate piece of legislation we have before us today.

"In fact...He said, and I quote..."You don't like what we wrote about your amendments, and we don't like what you said about our bill."

Oh boo fucking hoo. The Republicans are in total control. The Democrats can sit around all day long and call them a bunch of fascist nazi bastards and it doesn't mean anything. And they still can't stop whining.

The problem is that these people don't really want to achieve anything. They are both in love with being victims and insist on being right. And they want everyone to acknowledge they are both right and victimized. What a bunch of big babies. It's not enough to win, the other side must completely capitulate --- and apologize.

As Tim Noah observed in this Slate article:

The fact is that the GOP doesn't have an agenda. It has impulses: to cut taxes, to increase Pentagon spending, and to mollify the Christian right wherever possible. Does it act on these impulses? Of course. But what mostly gives the party appeal to the electorate is its ability to scream and yell while seldom being granted the opportunity to ban abortion or eliminate the Securities and Exchange Commission or declare war on France. It stirs things up satisfyingly, while never requiring anybody to pay the price.

The Republican party has a bunch of action items and a bunch of constituencies who want specific things, but this erstwhile great party of sober, prudent conservatism has shown that when it comes to running the country is more like an wild gang of teen-agers, terrorizing the neighborhood and drawing graffitti on the capital building. They operate on impulses that they cannot control.

There is a strain of macho, pouty, puerile, "Lost Cause" psychology in American politics going back a long way. These same people wielding almost total power and attempting to run our government as an expression of their sense of righteous victimhood is a uniquely undignified and degrading spectacle.



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digby 4/27/2005 12:51:00 PM |

 
Charming The Ladies

There has been a lot of talk on the left about how to appeal to the married woman voters who migrated to George W. Bush.

Perhaps we should just tell them that the spiritual leader of the conservative movement for which they are voting (and dear friend of Tom Delay and George W. Bush) has this to say:

"My observation is that women are merely waiting for their husbands to assume leadership."James Dobson

I just have a feeling that the vast, vast majority of American women might find that a little but insulting. In fact, they might just find George W. Bush's metaphorical soul kiss with the religious right kind of insulting when they see it in those terms.


Check out this post by Publius at Legal Fiction for an excellent rundown of quotes that we should put on posters and bumper stickers in anticip[ation of the next election.

Here's one more from our favorite dachshund beater:

Newt Gingrich chooses somebody to respond to the president. Who did he choose? Christine Todd Whitman, the absolute antithesis of everything that [our] constituency stands for. She is pro-homosexual activism. She's pro-condom distribution. She's pro-abortion. She's pro-partial-birth abortion. . . . They put a symbol [Whitman] of the immoral, amoral constituency up in front of the people who had just handed leadership to the Republicans.

That big tent is getting a little bit claustrophobic, isn't it?



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digby 4/27/2005 12:21:00 PM |

 
Who Are We?

Ezra takes Kos to task for his proposed slogan "The Democrats are the party of people who work for a living" saying that it isn't as effective as the successful Republican mantra "small government, low taxes, family values and strong national defense." He says that the slogan should reflect an actual agenda, not some ephemeral platitude. I actually think they are both misunderstanding what that Republican list really is. Kos thinks it identifies who the party represents and Ezra thinks it's a legislative agenda.

I don't think it's that simple. The Republicans say they stand for small government, low taxes etc, not that they'd like to pass "small government, low taxes, family values etc." It isn't a specific legislative agenda. Neither does it identify who the party represents. It's a statement of belief. (Which, by the way, is used most successfully as a contrast to the "big government, high tax, 'make-love-not-war'" hippie straw man they've constructed to represent liberalism.)

I'll take a pass at a simple description of what Democrats stand for that we might successfully use to contrast our beliefs with the other side.

How about "fair taxes, a secure safety net, personal privacy, civil rights, and responsible global leadership?"




Update: Attaturk has a more straightforward idea:

"We aren't as big a fuckups as those dumbasses."

That's good too.


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digby 4/27/2005 09:11:00 AM |

Tuesday, April 26, 2005

 
Hans and Franz


Kevin worries that using John Bolton's malevolent personality as a reason for scuttling the nomination is bad news for us because it gives people like Bill Kristol an excuse to make the argument that Democrats are sissies.

It seems to me that nominations are almost always scuttled on trivial charges rather than the substantive ones. Nowadays, people are creating nanny problems for troubled nominees who don't even have nannies. There seems to be a unspoken agreement that nominees will be allowed to bow out for some mistake or character quirk rather than a charge of incompetence or malfeasance. Perhaps it's a strange form of face saving for the president who nominated the person.

And anyway, this isn't really the Democrats' play. As we all know, if it were only Democrats opposing Bolton he'd be in New York destroying the UN as we speak. It's Republicans who are standing in Bolton's way and it's Republicans who Kristol is really taunting with that painfully stupid "girly-man" line.

I guess Voinovich is a girly man by Kristol's standards, but he looks like a he-man to everybody else. He's bucking a very powerful Republican machine and that takes cojones. That's what Kristol is trying to stop. Who knows what might happen if the Republican moderates really start to flex their muscles?



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digby 4/26/2005 07:25:00 PM |

 
How Ever Will They Resolve This?

Can you believe this kabuki bullshit?

The Bush administration issued a veto threat again Tuesday against a popular highway bill, saying the president would be likely to reject any legislation that exceeds a White House-set spending ceiling or adds to the deficit.

The administration, in saying the legislation "should exhibit funding restraint," was at odds with many in Congress, including some conservatives, who say the deteriorating state of the nation's roads, bridges and public transport demands more aggressive spending.

[...]

The bill currently on the Senate floor, like the House bill passed in March, approves $284 billion over a six-year period for highway, mass transit and safety programs. The White House says anything above that number would subject the legislation to a veto.

It issued a second veto threat Tuesday on any new borrowing that "negatively impacts the deficit."

[...]

The popularity of the bill was demonstrated when the Senate voted 94-6 on Tuesday to proceed with it. All six voting no were Republicans, several because they said the bill was too expensive.

But the chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, James Inhofe, R-Okla., said, "Those of us who are conservatives really believe this is something we should be doing here."

Man, that codpiece is tight. Junior's not gonna let a renegade Republican Majority pass that deficit spending crap. He's tellin' 'em to straighten up and fly right, damn it.

Still, with a vote of 94-6, it's a little but unusual for a president to issue a veto threat since it could easily be over-ridden. How odd.

But hey, guys like Inhofe can at least say they voted for the highway bill which is almost as good as actually passing one. And heck, even if they end up passing one, The Big Kahuna shows that he's a tough guy, which is almost as good as actually being one.


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digby 4/26/2005 06:14:00 PM |

 
Giving Voice To The Voiceless

I must admit that I too am very excited about Ariana Huffington's new blog. As Roger Ailes put it so well:

The "MSM" has for too long silenced the voices of Jann Wenner, Barry Diller, Walter Cronkite and Norman Mailer.

Tony Blankely for too long has been denied a platform to slander George Soros.

Where else could Conrad Black's dogsbody, David Frum, find a space to suck up to his beleaguered master?

Where else would Michael Medved find an wide audience for his completely sane theory that "oil companies are always anti-semitic."

Where would the malnourished John Fund find a buffet that hasn't blacklisted him?

And where but such a blog could Mort Zuckerman publish his thoroughly researched, scholarly papers on tort reform?

Finally, a forum for those who've been shut out of the dialog for far too long. This could be the blogging breath of fresh air that could finally shake up the establishment.

As the New York Times reports:

Having prominent people join the blogosphere, Ms. Huffington said in an interview, "is an affirmation of its success and will only enrich and strengthen its impact on the national conversation."

Absolutely. None of these people have nearly enough influence on the national conversation. It's long past time they spoke out.


Update: Lest anyone think I'm being a snotty nobody, let it be known that I think it's great that Democrats (which Huffington now proudly calls herself) are putting some money into countering Drudge. But I do think the idea that these people need a separate media platform to be heard is kind of hilarious. Is anyone in the least bit in the dark about what Tony Blankley thinks about everything?

I am, on the other hand, curious to see if Maggie Gyllenhall has anything interesting to say. She was one of the few celebs who had the guts to speak out against the Iraq war when she was getting an acting award (Independent Spirit) so I find her admirable. Everybody ese, except for the Dixie Chicks and Michael Moore were disgustingly chickenshit. So, I'll give her posts a read, out of appreciation for her courage if nothing else.



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digby 4/26/2005 05:43:00 PM |

 
Reading The Tea Leaves

Citing Yglesias for the second time (how does he do it?) I have to wholeheartedly agree with him on this one. This report by the PPI on why we should take on popular culture seems to follow all the blog talk in which it's just assumed that this is an issue that will move votes. I've seen absolutely no actual data to indicate that people will vote Democratic if we join the moralizing bandwagon.

I do however, see evidence in the polls that says people don't like this incursion into people's personal lives by the Republican party --- which would suggest that adopting this "morals-lite" agenda may just backfire.

Here's some data from the Washington Post poll (pdf):

Do you think a political leader should or should not rely on his or her religious beliefs in making policy decisions?

Should:40%
Should Not:55%
Depends:4%
No Opinion:2%

Would you rather see religion have GREATER influence in politics and public life than it does now, LESS influence, or about the SAME influence as it does now?


Greater:27%
Less:35%
Same:36%
No opinion:1%


23; Do you think that people and groups that hold values similar to yours are gaiing influence in American life in general these days, or do you thinks that they are losing influence?


4/24/05:
Gaining:35%
Losing:58%
Neither:6%
No opin:2%

8/16/98:
Gaining:35%
Losing:55%
Neither:6%
No opin:4%


24. Which political party, the Democrats or the Republicans, do you think better represents you own personal values?


4/24/05:
Dems:47%
Reps:38%
Neither:10%
No Opin:2%

3/14/99:
Dems:47%
Reps:39%
Neither:8%
No Opin:3%

25. Generally speaking, which political party, the Democrats or the Republicans, do you think is more:

4/24/05
a. tolerant of different
kinds of people and
different points of view:

Dems:63%
Reps:24%
Both:4%
neither:5%
No opin:4%

b. sympathetic to religion
and religious people

Dems:34%
Reps:48%
Both:6%
neither:6%
No opin:7%

9/17/00
a. tolerant of different
kinds of people and
different points of view:

Dems:62%
Reps:22%
Both:4%
neither:4%
No opin:8%

b. sympathetic to religion
and religious people

Dems:41%
Reps:36%
Both:6%
neither:5%
No opin:11%


27. Do you think religious conservatives have too much influence, too little influence or about the right amount of influence over the Republican Party?

4/24/05
Too Much:40%
Too Little:17%
About the right amount:37%
No Opin:6%

Do you think liberals have too much influence, too little influence or about the right amount of influence ovewr the Democratic Party?

4/24/05
Too Much:35%
Too Little:21%
About the right amount:38%
No Opin:5%


Now, none if this proves anything with respect to whether the Democrats should attack popular culture as a way of connecting with voters on the allegedly all important values issues. Clearly, this doesn't address that specifically. But it does address the fact that people seem to be more concerned at this point that politicians are too influenced by religion than that they are not influenced enough. And that tells me that we would be going in exactly the wrong direction if we think to capture a majority by twisting ourselves into pretzels on morals and values. The proponents certainly haven't produced any data that would say otherwise.

It is true that the Republicans are perceived as more sympathetic to religion nowadays than they were back in 2000, but why wouldn't they be? They are drenched in religious rhetoric and seem to be wholly at the mercy of the religious right. (You'll note that at least some of their gain on the issue stems from many fewer people saying they have no opinion on the matter. It didn't used to be understood that politics and religion were so intertwined.)

And in that respect, it doesn't appear to be a net positive that they are now perceived as more sympathetic to religion, particularly considering the first question I highlighted, which is "do you think a politician should or should not rely on his or her religious beliefs in making policy decisions?" A clear majority say no. And 71% of people say that religion should have the same or less influence as it has today.(Significantly, more people think it should have less influence than think it should have more.) It does not appear to me that people are clamoring for more religious moralizing from politicians.

Indeed, the most interesting result in all of this is that more people say that Democrats represent their personal values than Republicans, and that number hasn't changed since 1999. So if more people have identified with Democrats on personal values since 1999, the genesis of the Bush Frist Travelling Salvation Show, it seems pretty clear to me that values aren't the reason we are losing. In fact, if they keep it up, it's looking as if the Republicans will be the ones to lose on that issue in 2006.

I think that the question that pollsters have to ask is if people think it is more important for the government to be tolerant of different kinds of people and different points of view or if they think it's more important for government to be sympathetic toward religion. In that choice lies the answer to how we should proceed.



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digby 4/26/2005 03:02:00 PM |

 
Living In The Now

Matt Yglesias makes thepoint today (along with a number of other liberal publications and intellectuals) that the Democrats would be better off without the filibuster:

"...however opportunistic the judges-only anti-filibuster stance is, the reality is that the nuclear option will pave the way for Democrats to eliminate legislative filibusters as well whenever they find themselves in the majority. When that happens, the GOP will find that while their only big legislative idea -- tax cuts, tax cuts, and more tax cuts -- is already immune to the filibuster, they can no longer block Democratic ideas."

I think that this would be true only in a world where double standards and lack of accountability did not rule. One would think that in the future, you could argue quite reasonably that the Republicans insisted back in 2005 that the filibuster against judicial nominees was undemocratic and the Democrats now just want to end that undemocratic practice altogether. Surely, since the Democrats acted out of principle then, the Republicans will act out of principle now and support this change. After all, they wouldn't want to be called hypocrites for saying one thing in 2005 and another now, would they?

Needless to say, this will never happen. The modern Republicans do not worry about such things as consistency and the press shows no inclination to hold them accountable for anything they've ever done.

Crooks and Liars has the video today of the Walter Cronkite broadcast of October 2, 1968 --- the day that Abe Fortas withdrew his nomination for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Why? Because THE REPUBLICANS FILIBUSTERED IT!!!!

Here's the quote from the Republican minority leader at the time Robert Griffin:

I believe that any chief justice should have widespread support among the people and the senate of the United States. In view of the deep division and the controversy that surrounds this nomination, I think Mr Fortas' decision was very wise.

Just as the GOP argues that the fact that Orrin Hatch routinely prevented Clinton's nominees from getting an up or down vote bears no relationship to filibustering nominees for the same end, the Republicans say that the principle involved in the Fortas filibuster was entirely different. He was being nominated for Chief justice which is nothing like being nominated for federal judgeships or just plain old Supreme Court judges. The principle is entirely different! Apples and oranges, my friends.

And I have read almost nothing in the press that makes it clear that the Republicans are being hypocritical on this issue. In fact, the Sunday gasbags and the likes of Dean Broder seem to be more concerned about the "principle" that Bush should be allowed to get anything he wants while the Democrats negotiate for the right to breathe the same air as he does. And Broder, anyway, should surely remember that Fortas was filibustered. He wasn't young, even then.

And just as the Republicans would not be held responsible for their hypocrisy on this issue, neither would the Democrats be given any credit for being consistent. Nobody in the chattering classes gives a shit about any of that so it has absolutely no salience for future battles. The only thing that matters in these situations is if one of the parties reaches a point at which it will force the other to play chicken. This only happens when one party is so arrogant that they are willing to bet that they will not be retaliated against in the future. This battle is the Democrats' way of saying that they most certainly will face retaliation --- and right here and right now. Damn the future of the filibuster. At some point you just have to let bullies know that you won't be rolled.

I suspect that the American people would find it disconcerting if they knew that the GOP is shamelessly hypocritical, but there is no evidence that they will be informed of this, so it isn't going to happen. What does appear to be happening is a common sense response to majoritarian bullying --- by more than 60%, the public doesn't want the filibuster to be eliminated. I suspect this is because they figure it's always good to have some brakes on the party in power. And that would very likely be the response if Democrats tried to end it when they are in power as well.

At this point I think there is no margin in trying to strategize with the idea that we will want to do something when we get back into power. As they have often done in the past ten years, the Republicans will merely adjust the argument to suit their needs at the time and the media will not call them on it.

Besides, we need to win as many battles as we can, right now. Our biggest problem isn't that the American people don't agree with us on the issues; I think it's that they don't think we are willing to fight for them. Look at this Washington Post poll (pdf). Not only does it show that a majority of Americans agree with our position on the issues, it shows that they agreed with our position on the issues before the election. The Repubicans have convinced themselves that our losing record on elections proves that the country is strongly behind them and that they cannot lose again. And just as they did in 1992, they are going to lose their minds when this is proven wrong.

This Democracy Corps (pdf) poll says:

The most visible political battles of the last three months have taken place around the Congress – the president’s Social Security initiative, Terri Schiavo, Tom DeLay’s ethics issues and the debate around the filibuster rule for consideration of judicial nominees. Even when presented in the most neutral way, people respond to the totality and say, most often, that something is very wrong. Indeed, in the open-ended follow-up to this discussion in the survey, the mostfrequent reactions are “wrong, wrong, wrong,” “very wrong,” “wrong in every sense.” One in five offers a simple declarative negative: “bad,” “horrible,” “pathetic,” “unbelievable,” “disturbing,”or “shocking.”

Other sets of comments, each mentioned by about 6 percent, focused on the Republicans
acting irresponsibly or recklessly (“out of control”) and the Republicans being intrusive and (interfering in personal matters.]

The open-ended reactions focused on the totality, though more about Schiavo than any
other piece – which included interfering and being moralistic – and some talked about wrong priorities, wrong direction and the conservatives’ ideological agenda, but there was very little specific recall of the Social Security reforms.

When given a list of options that might describe these events, the voters gravitated to “arrogance of power” (35 percent) and priorities (26 percent), that is, Republicans devoting their time to the wrong things. Somewhat further down were people saying “out of touch” (20 percent)and “forcing views on others” (20 percent). But for independents and moderates, 45 percent say this is arrogance, the top mention by far.

The Republicans are finally showing their spots. We must allow that revelation to unfold and as we do it, we will show that we stand for something by standing together against this arrogance of power. I doubt that eliminating the filibuster for judicial nominees will accrue to our advantage even when we obtain a majority; I'm certain it will not accrue to our benefit today. Acceding to the Republicans' arrogance and hubris is the surest way to reinforce the idea the Democrats are simply useless.


Updtae: This is rich. Read this post by DHinMI at The Next Hurrah about the Fortas nominations. The son of above mentioned Republican leader Robert Griffin, is one of the judges being denied an up or down vote. Sweet.

And be sure to read the tortured argument from that hack C. Boyden Gray about why this is entirely different. Not only is it absurd, it's factually incorrect.



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digby 4/26/2005 10:59:00 AM |

 
Public Service

I am on a couple of right wing mailing lists for which I am grateful because it allows me to keep up with the real Americans and what they are thinking. Here's what they are sending around on social security.

TO TRUST A MATTRESS OR A DEMOCRAT?

Democrats, and Republicans too, have got us all confused about Social Security, but here is an explanation that even the mentally retarded can follow. The average American makes $16.05 per hour according The Bureau of Labor Statistics; lives to age 77 according to the Center for Disease control, officially retires at age 66 according to a law passed by Congress, and contributes 12.4% of his income to Social Security according to a legalized scam perpetrated by the Democrats.

So, $16.05 (per hour) x 40 (hours per week) x 52 (weeks per year) x 46 (years worked) gives you $153,566 that is now stolen by the Democrats, but might have been put in your mattress. To disguise this grand larceny the Democrats give back $952 (average Social Security monthly check) and say, " the math is very complicated but trust us, this is a great deal; we love you and care for you, and those Republicans are just so selfish and mean."

But, if you had been free from Democrats to put the 12.4% each pay period ($153,566 in total ) in your mattress until retirement, and then lived the average 11 years longer, you could take 22% more ($1163) per month in retirement income than the Democrats give you!

For those who are fortunate enough to fall above the retarded level of intelligence it is known that money, rather than being invested in a mattress, can be invested in a balanced Republican fund of stocks and bonds where it might return, conservatively, 5%, in which case the return would not be 22% above the Democratic grand theft return, but rather 422% above the Democratic grand theft return.

In point of fact, many Americans retire to a life at or near the poverty level because the Democrats steal their money by convincing them they are the caring Socialist Party. Sadly, those who can't understand this are not functionally above the mentally retarded level, but rather have fallen prey to the same pack animal mentality that throughout history caused them to worship and trust strange Gods and stranger men who were far more likely to use that trust to kill or abuse them rather than to care for them. It all makes you wonder if the Jeffersonian concept of freedom from Gov't is too unnatural to prevail in the end.

It's interesting that they use the term mentally retarded, isn't it? But then, it's real Americans like this who elected fellow math whiz and actuarial expert, Junior Codpiece, to the presidency.



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digby 4/26/2005 08:57:00 AM |

Monday, April 25, 2005

 
Diluting The Argument

Via Talk Left, I find this interesting article by constitutional scholar (and self-professed moderate) Marci Hamilton. She seems to be a true centrist, seeing the limitations and extremism coming from both sides of the political divide. She's obviously very smart, which is why I cannot believe that she begins her argument with this:

In recent years, the Supreme Court has been pilloried by the far right for being "activist" - while at the same time also being castigated by the far left for being "imperialistic." When these kinds of allegations are trotted out by both ends of the political spectrum, it is very good evidence that what the Court is doing is neither activist nor imperialistic.

That's not good evidence at all. All it means is that both sides have criticized the court; it says nothing about whether those criticisms are correct. Her reasoning is that if two parties criticize something, the object of their criticism must,therefore, not be guilty of either sides' criticism. That's nonsense. It could very well be true that the court is activist or imperialist or both or neither.

The press often uses this fallacious reasoning to fail to investigate whether criticisms of them might be true. If both liberals and conservatives are angry with something they wrote, then what they wrote must be correct. It's lazy rubbish.

In fairness Hamilton goes on to make a persuasive case that the court is neither activist nor imperialist, but it is based upon her analysis of the arguments not the "evidence" that the court is criticized by both sides.

I would argue, however, that there is a difference in scale and power that she should have taken into account. The alleged attacks coming from the "extreme" left about imperialism are many magnitudes less significant than those coming from the right. By framing this argument as if both "extremes" are equal in the daily discourse she gives a false impression of the weight of the arguments and their practical implications in the coming judicial battles.

The liberal argument about "imperialism" is simply not on the table. Nobody is talking about it and there is no notion that any judicial nominee or any public criticism of the court is going to be swayed by this point of view. Hamilton makes an excellent argument against the idea that the Supreme Court is activist. But to offer this analysis as if the left's criticism of the Court has the same level of relevance at this time and place is to dilute the power of her reasoning.

These are difficult times for moderates of all stripes, I know. But the present danger is coming quite clearly from the far right. Left wing legal arguments are simply not important at the moment and trying to use their academic musings to create a sense of balance, when the real danger the court faces is from right wing extremists who have the ear of a very powerful and ambitious Republican establishment, is a mistake. This is no theoretical discussion. Moderates can make a real difference this time and they need to be careful that they don't give anyone reason to believe that this is politics as usual. This is one issue on which they need to take a clear and uncompromising stand --- if they don't, the default goes to those with the political power and the consequences of that are quite stark.


correction: spelling corrected


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digby 4/25/2005 01:33:00 PM |

 
Master Of Disaster

Republicans who have been lobbied by Bush say he is uncommonly engaged in the issue and more passionate than they have seen him since he was pushing his signature education initiative in 2001.

"You could see him sitting on the edge of his chair," said Rep. Bobby Jindal (R-La.).

Bush typically focuses his pitch on detailing the long-term strain on Social Security's resources and argues that it should be addressed sooner rather than later. "If we are going to be able to address and fix this problem, people need to be educated about the scope of the problem," one Republican quoted him saying.

Whereas some analysts and associates have portrayed Bush as a brusque manager impatient with policy details, lawmakers see a different picture when he discusses Social Security. He has become a master of actuarial arcana, such as the concept of a "bend point" — a feature of the complex formula for calculating benefits.

Yes. His mastery of actuarial arcana is very impressive:

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

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

One can certainly understand why people would feel comfortable trusting their financial security in retirement to this man. I'm quite sure it's why he's been so successful with the issue so far.



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digby 4/25/2005 01:06:00 PM |

 
Confirmation Conundrum

I haven't written much about the Bolton nomination because I pretty much said everything I thought about him in the first year of this blog, when I railed considerably about the bizarre notion that an insane, Jesse Helms protege should be in charge of arms control. Garance writes about this over on TAPPED today confriming one of the things that's bothered me about the Bolton fight; if he isn't confirmed for the UN, he just goes back to the State Department where he can do even worse damage in his current position. Remember, he was given the UN nomination in order to get him out of there in the first place.

I have no reason to believe that the loyal Bolton will be shamed into quitting the administration entirely. Has anyone? It just doesn't happen. No, he'll just continue running around the world having temper tantrums in front of people like Kim Jong Il and browbeating the intelligence community into giving him the names of Americans on whom they are spying.

Nobody leaves a Bush administration official in the corner...any Bush administration. Hell, they've revived Eliot Abrams and John Negroponte. Unless Bolton wants to leave, nobody will ask him to. He'll be back in charge of arms control.

Not that we shouldn't have fought to take him out. The Republicans have shown that in modern politics you fight every battle to the death and worry about tomorrow, tomorrow. It's a helluva way to run a country, but there it is.



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digby 4/25/2005 11:57:00 AM |

 
I Know You Are But What Am I

Matt Yglesias wonders why the Republicans have been so blase about nominees lying outright to the Senate during their confirmation hearings when they may very well be at the mercy of Democrats in the future. Yesterday, Bill Frist righteously rebutted the argument set forth by some Republicans that the nuclear option would leave them powerless when Democrats came into power, by saying that if it was wrong for Democrats today it would be wrong for Republicans tomorrow. In truth it doesn't matter.

The trouble is that the IOKIYAR (it's ok if you're a republican) phenomenon is not just a little blogospheric joke. It's quite real and it's been demonstrated over and over again. There is absolutely no reason for the Republicans to fear that they will be held to the same standard as they hold Democrats, ever. These lies by Bush appointees are not going to be investigated and they will always remain in the realm of he said/she said, old news, whyareyoubringingthisupnow. Fuggedaboudit.

For instance, Matt brings up the fact that the Bush administration has hired convicted congressional liars from the iran Contra era. But, one must also remember that those same convicted liars were all pardoned by George Bush Sr at a time when he was personally under investigation by a special prosecutor, thus effectively ending the probe. Immediately after Senior left office, however, there began a relentless series of demands by Republicans for special prosecutors investigating a list of shockingly trivial charges that eventually led to the impeachment of the president. The Republicans didn't worry that someone would make comparisons that would embarrass them. They are unembarrassable because they have found that they can ignore the prinicples of relevant difference, the universality principle, the golden rule or whatever you want to call it, and there will be no repercussions.

It may be that this is caused by a media that refuses to take a stance on even factual matters, which leaves people with the impression that there are no standards except those which are imposed by the loudest, the most powerful, the most entertaining or whatever. It's a big problem for us in the reality based community, however, because we remain stuck in this rational mode of argumentation while they careen off into a relativist fallacy whenever they choose.

In other words, there are no rules --- only actions that will keep them in power or strip them from it. The fight each battle separately and don't worry about the one they are going to fight tomorrow. And when the worm has turned and Democrats gain power again, everything will go back to square one and all of the the crimes that we spent that last five years screaming to get covered and investigated will be turned by the Republicans into indictments of Democrats.

Yesterday, James Dobson, alleged arbiter of moral standards, came to a ringing defense of Tom DeLay. Using the approved right wing talking points, he claimed that DeLay was the subject of a witchhunt financed by liberal millionaires. This is, of course, exactly what they did to Bill Clinton for eight long years. They have no sense of embarrassment at this; no sense of irony; not even a little bit of shame for unoriginality. No, it is as if these arguments have never been uttered before and have the full force of moral righteousness even though it is, to our eyes, infuriatingly absurd. And, in truth, because we have uttered these words for so long they are out in the ether with some feeling of received wisdom to those who don't follow the details of political warfare. (They are good at taking our received wisdom and turing it to their advantage. I wish we would start doing the same.)

The Republicans are rejecting reason in science, economics, rhetoric and governance and therefore we cannot expect that rules based upon a rational assumption that they will be applied to both sides equally are even relevant. We fight each battle anew. It's never over. Nothing is settled. This is why they hate the courts. Reason and finality are their enemy. These are the "I Know You Are But What Am I" Republicans and they have taken us into a new world of post enlightenment reality. We'd better get used to it.



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digby 4/25/2005 09:22:00 AM |

Sunday, April 24, 2005

 
Who Made Mr Gannon?

Huckster Sunday is positively reeking with big huckster news. Raw Story has the results of the Gannon FOIA requests that show that he had some very unusual access to the White House. Why, he was there on days there weren't even any press briefings. And he frequently appears to have spent the night. (Well, he didn't sign out, anyway. One wonders if that's normal protocol.)

But that's not all the Gannon goodness we have today and it's not even the best. Michael Dietz of Reading A1 has a great investigative piece on Alternet about how Jimmy became Jeff.

Reading this would almost make you think that somebody helped him form a new identity.

When JD pulled up stakes at the beginning of 2002, Bulldog went with him, at least for a time. His profiles, some of which were live on the web until recently, seem to have stopped being updated after May of that year. His last client review, though, posted Nov. 12, comes weirdly late in the game. Perhaps significantly, that review describes Bulldog as "a very well-rounded man who is interested in talking about everything from the Orioles to politics." It seems almost like a coded message, a kind of sly wink. Because politics, now, was on the agenda: and Jeff Gannon, the D.C. insider of Bulldog's dreams, had that very day published his first editorial.

The Birthing of Jeff Gannon

Jan. 18, 2003, a day of nationwide Iraq war protests, was clear and cold in Washington hovering just above the freezing point. The tens, even hundreds of thousands who rallied on the Mall and marched to the Capitol needed whatever warmth they could husband. So did the relative handful of counter-protesters organized by an apparently one-off group called MOVE-OUT (Marines and OtherOther Veterans Engaging Outrageous Un-American Traitors) and by the D.C. chapter of the national Free Republic organization. For those 50 or so pro-war right-wingers, who managed to attract almost as many attending press, warmth was conveniently available in the form of a sympathizer's apartment located close to their rally point at 8th and I Streets. Joel Kernodle of MOVE-OUT made sure to mention it in his after-event thank-yous:

I would like to thank the Marines who went there with me, the folks at FreeRepublic and especially Kristinn Taylor and Raoul [Deming], U.S. Navy Capt. Frank Davis who gave us a place to call home while we were there, [and] Jeff Gannon "The Conservative Guy" who has a web site and writes and speaks to conservative issues, who let us use his place just off the march route for an on-site headquarters.

JD Guckert had left his two-bedroom duplex in Wilmington just a year earlier, and he had left "his guys," the TKEs, under a small cloud of mystery. It was a deliberate effect. "The only time [JD] had ever actually mentioned working for a living," the Mu Alpha brother who spoke to us said, "was when he moved to D.C., and even then all that he mentioned was that he needed security clearance and that he would be working as a 'contract negotiator' for a DoD subcontractor." Though likely no more real than JD's Marine play-acting, in one respect the hush-hush fantasy rings true: having arrived in D.C., James Guckert vanished. His appearance in the background of the Free Republic rally (along with his attendance at another D.C. Freeper event, a Sean Hannity book-signing) marks one of the only times in an entire year when the man who had been JD is visible in any location outside of cyberspace.

Everything solid in JD's life -- his residence, his place of work, his circle of friends -- melts into air. We can surmise the actual date of his move only from its probable trace in the internet records: on Jan. 25, 2002, the domain "theconservativeguy.com" was created. (The registration, to a "J. Daniels" of Bedrock Corp., referenced a Delaware address, a mail drop just down the road from JD's old duplex.) It would be at least another four months of silence before a web site appeared at the new domain, and the Conservative Guy announced his existence.

What was happening in those blank, incubatory months? (An almost identical period of latency, oddly, separates the registration of "jeffgannon.com" in mid-June from the first appearance of Jeff Gannon's byline on the web in November.) With its crude layout, minimal graphic design and limited, untimely content, the Conservative Guy web site itself hardly demanded so much lead time. Perhaps the work had gone into crafting the identity.

And how, exactly, did he make a living during this period? Did someone "meet" him and think that a man who not one person remembers ever making a political remark in this life could be a perfect blank slate? Did this man whose entire life has been spent as an office worker in dull and colorless businesses in rural Pennsylvania just suddenly have a Walter Mitty fantasy that happened to come true?

Who created Jeff Gannon?



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digby 4/24/2005 06:40:00 PM |

 
Huckster Sunday

James Dobson is quoting Thomas Jefferson right now, a man who would never stop PUKING if he knew what these religions extremists were trying to do.

The delusion is so extreme that he just said that the ultra conservative Rehnquist Court is out of control --- because they aren't conservative enough.

And the Supreme Court caused the civil war.

Bill Frist said some Republicans are opposed to ending thefilibusters, because they may someday want to use the same tactics against the Democrats. He said, "that may be true. But if what Democrats are doing is wrong today, it won't be right for Republicans to do the same thing tomorrow." He could have added, "besides, right or wrong for Republicans is irrelevant because we did it yesterday and got away with it and we can get away with it tomorrow; nothing we say or do is based upon any principle whatsoever."

It is important for people to understand how the Republican Party sold its soul to these radicals and blame those who made it happen. An article from some years back in TNR called "The Right's Robespierre" which predicted a conservative crack-up back in 1997, laid it all out. The crack-up didn't happen then and it may not happen now. But if it does, there are some very particular individuals to blame --- Paul Weyrich and Morton Blackwell notably at the top of the list:

Finally, on the verge of realizing his right-wing utopia, Weyrich harvested what his friend Morton Blackwell termed "the greatest track of virgin timber on the political landscape": evangelicals. "Out there is what one might call a moral majority," he told Jerry Falwell in Lynchburg, Pennsylvania [sic], in 1979. "That's it," Falwell exclaimed. "That's the name of the organization." Weyrich, who had converted from Roman Catholicism to the Eastern Orthodox church after Vatican II, did more than coin the name; with a handful of activists, he engineered the alliance between the Republican Party and the growing number of evangelicals angry over abortion rights and federal intrusion in parochial schools. Less than a year later, Ronald Reagan walked into the White House.

It seems that people like me have been predicting that the Republican party would splinter because of these extremists in their midst for a long time now. The coalition has never made much sense. Weyrich and Blackwell and their proteges like Grover Norquist don't give a damn about religion, of course -- or at least any religion other than "conservatism." Evangelicals are just a special interest voting block to these people. And I suspect that being the hucksters they are, most of the preachers who are agitating for political power today don't really give a damn either. Most of them are simple hypocrites at best and violent immoral power mongers at worst.

Regardless, I think it's clear that they believe their time has come. They are flexing their muscles. Maybe Weyrich and Blackwell think it's just fine and maybe they will win in the end. But, when they invited religious zealots to sit at the table with them and run their movement they gambled that a majority of the American people would go along if it came down to it. It looks like we're about to see if it paid off.

And it's interesting to note that on Tim Russert's Sunday Mass, it wasn't even mentioned.


Update: Here's a sincere and righteous liberal vow on Justice Sunday from Shakespeare's Sister.
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digby 4/24/2005 05:23:00 PM |