Hullabaloo

Tuesday, June 07, 2005

 
The Coolest Robots In The World

I just saw Kraftwerk, the Beatles of electronica, outdoors at the Greek Theatre on a beautiful summer night in LA.

Sometimes life is really sweet.



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digby 6/07/2005 12:10:00 AM |

Monday, June 06, 2005

 
A Land Called Honalee

Those liberal activist judges are at it again. They really are. A majority, which includes the moderates on the court, just ruled that the federal laws against medical marijuana are constitutional (as opposed to federal laws against guns near schools or violence against women.) If this were a case about, say, a federal law that overrode state laws against gay marriage, I suspect you'd be seeing a slightly different reaction from the wingnuts and probably on the court. The moderates (there are no liberals) upheld federal power over states' rights which is consistent with their position.

Rehnquist, Thomas and O'Connor dissented on the basis of states' rights, which is also consistent with their position. Kennedy swung with the majority --- he has no discernible position. The "surprise" is that Little Nino, who is proving himself to be more and more of a straight-up whore every day, voted with Ginsberg and Stevens and the rest. Not because he agrees with the legal doctrine involved --- nothing in his judicial history would suggest that --- but because he just doesn't want people smoking pot. Or perhaps he just thinks that federal power is ducky when it's in the hands of his friends. Either way, he's intellectually bankrupt.

The court is operating on the same basis that the political system operates. The liberals and moderates in the minority play by the rules thinking that consistency and intellectual integrity are important and that people will hold it against them if they deviate from their stated position.( And, of course, they are right. Even when they haven't actually deviated from their position they are accused of it and called "flip-floppers.") The shrinking number of real conservatives pay lip service to their belief system as long as it won't affect the outcome: they are subject to the same intimidation as the moderates and liberals if they don't. The right wing radicals just power their way through using any means necessary, willingly taking the help of liberals and moderates who perform the function of useful idiots with their fealty to process and institutional integrity in a time of pure power politics. I'm sure they are greatly soothed by the fact that all good children go to heaven.

The good news is that, as Stevens says in the opinion, it preserves the right of federal legislators to change the laws, so that's nice. When we finally get over our reefer madness in this country, which I expect to be in a couple of hundred years or so, maybe the Armageddon Party can join with the Theocrats and make it legal. But of course, it won't be necessary because Pfizer will have found a way to perfectly re-create the effect of marijuana in a pill form and will have made millions selling it by prescription to those who can afford it --- which is, after all, the whole point.



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digby 6/06/2005 08:23:00 AM |

Sunday, June 05, 2005

 
The Drinking Debate

I hope that everyone is making a habit of checking out Harry Shearer's column over on the Huffington Post because he's got access to some of the most amazing footage you are ever going to see.

Check this out. George and Laura on Larry King talking about "the drinking debate" in South Carolina in 2000. As Shearer points out, the strange, mummified puppet who calls himself Larry King didn't have the wherewithall to follow up. He was too busy pimping himself, as it seems he does constantly, to his guests.

Has anyone heard anything to the effect that everyone was drunk during the famous South Carolina debate between Mccain, Bush and Keyes? Oddly, Karen Hughes didn't mention it in her memoir.



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digby 6/05/2005 09:00:00 PM |

 
Whose Party Is It Anyway?

Atrios is on fire today. This explication of the Democrats' position and challenges on Iraq is spot on.

He mentions Matt Yglesias' observation that the liberal hawks are unwilling to admit they were wrong because to do so would create a hit to their credibility. This is very interesting. We know that Bush and his cronies believe they will lose credibility if they admit they are wrong about anything and they are probably right. Without their claim to God-like infallibility, I suspect they know that their whole delicate house of cards might collapse. They do not want their base to ever get it in their heads that the emperor has no clothes and they will fight like hell to see that they don't.

However, there are plenty of liberal hawks like Joe Biden, for instance, who also seem to be backed into a corner because they think that they will lose credibility with...who, exactly? Fred Hiatt? Tim Russert? Because they sure as hell won't lose credibility with the base of the Democratic party --- they'd be heroes. See, to us, admitting you were wrong about Iraq means that you gain credibility, not lose it. Indeed, the reality based community tends to believe that it's important to admit when you were wrong. It's all part of that whole godless scientific method, empirical data, age of reason, enlightenment lah-de-dah we hold so dear.

But then it's obvious they have no respect for the base of the Democratic party. Just this morning, both Biden and Edwards dissed Howard Dean big time. While Bill Frist bumps and grinds the pole to James Dobsons' every command three years before the presidential election, our presidential hopeful club is already running to the middle as fast as their chubby little legs will carry them. Or perhaps they are just running toward their nannies, the liberal punditocrisy who get ever so upset at the harsh rhetoric being flung by that rabble rouser, Dean:

Dean ''doesn't speak for me with that kind of rhetoric and I don't think he speaks for the majority of Democrats,'' Biden, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Sunday on ABC's ''This Week.''

While discussing the hardship of working Americans standing in long lines to vote, Dean said Thursday, ''Republicans, I guess, can do that because a lot of them have never made an honest living in their lives.''

Oh mercy me, pass me ovah the smellin' salts, daddy! I'm like to be bowled ovah with a feathah!

Dean's words are actually quite powerful to anyone who isn't a hypocrite, a member of the Sally Quinn circle jerk society or a paid spokesman of the RNC. It's the kind of thing that real people say in real life. It's authentic, Real Murica speak, not Washington pearl clutching bullshit. The presidential race is three long years away and Joe and John both should have laughed and said, "Howard was talking about the Republican leadership and their lobbyist buddies who can't seem to get anything done for the American people --- but they sure do take care of themselves. I think a lot of people probably agree with him on that." Instead they twisted their little lace hankies like a couple of rich old biddies and sniffed and whimpered about how they don't agree with such tawdry sentiment. It's really a wonder we get any votes at all.

Which brings me to Rick Perlstein's guest post on Political Animal the other night. I still haven't received my copy of his new book, and I'll discuss it in much greater depth when I have, but I think that Perlstein's quite correct when he asks:

Here's a riddle: what is a swing voter? More and more, it is an American who thinks like a Democrat but refuses to identify as one.

...If it is true that party identification — which, as Stan Greenberg argues, is a form of social identity that endures over the long term — is the best predictor of voter behavior, isn't getting this selfsame public to identify with the Democratic Party much, much more than half the solution?

There is much more to his prescription, of course, than merely respecting the base. But if party ID is a form of social behavior that endures over the long term, it is a necessary first step. The grassroots of the Democratic Party were the ones who pushed for Howard Dean to become the chairman of the DNC. When you treat him like an unruly child or a slightly crazed relative, you are saying to the voters who have already committed to the party and strongly identify as Democrats that they are a bunch of losers. Why on earth would anyone join a party that does that?



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digby 6/05/2005 06:46:00 PM |

 
You Gotta Ask Me Nicely, Danny

This pretty much ruined my day. (Goes directly to taser video --- not for the faint hearted.)

This woman was tasered with 50,000 volts by the police for not getting out of her car fast enough at a traffic stop. The officer waited less than 40 seconds before tasing her. Then she is tasered again for not responding properly after she fell out of the car and was writhing on the ground in pain.

I realize that police officers face a lot of danger. And this woman was driving with a suspended license. (They didn't know this when they jolted her, however.) All they knew was that she was talking to someone on the phone and narrating what was happening to her and did not respond immediately to the officer's demand that she get out of the car. She did not appear to pose any physical danger to them, only to their authority.

Evidently, because the officers had been tased in their training they believe that it isn't "that bad." (Someone needs to instuct them about pain threshholds and adrenaline and how it feels to fall from the open door of an SUV onto ashphalt with 50,000 volts coursing through your system and two angry cops pointing loaded guns at you.) Apparently, police credit the taser with preventing shootings, and perhaps they are right. But then so would simply bashing suspects over the head with a baton if they don't cooperate within 30 seconds. Or shooting them. It certainly does make the job easier if you don't have to evaluate the situation or try to talk sense into a young woman who is incooperative but instead can simply stun her into compliance like something out of a science fiction movie.

According to this series of reports by the Palm Beach Post, tasering is commonly used to shut up loudmouths. It's "safe" you see. Doesn't leave any marks and is considered perfectly legal.

The company that makes this convenient, lawful device is under intense scrutiny by authorities for securities violations as well as serious safety concerns:

Since the summer, reports in The Republic and the New York Times have brought to light contradictions about Taser's claims of safety.

For years, Taser maintained that its stun guns never caused a death or serious injury. As proof, Taser officials said no medical examiner had ever cited the weapon in an autopsy report.

But Taser did not have those autopsy reports and didn't start collecting them until April. Using computer searches, autopsy reports, police reports, media reports and Taser's own records, The Republic has identified 88 deaths after police Taser strikes in the United States and Canada since 1999.

Of those, 11 autopsy reports have linked deaths to the stun gun. Medical examiners cited Taser as a cause or contributing factor in eight deaths and could not rule it out as a cause in three others.

The Republic has also reported that several police officers have sustained career-ending injuries that they attribute to being shocked with Taser.

In reports to bolster safety claims, Taser officials have said more than 100,000 police officers have been shocked during training exercises without suffering a serious injury.

In October, Taser issued a press release saying a Department of Defense study, whose full results have not yet been released, found that its guns were safe. But The Times reported that the Air Force researchers who conducted the study actually found that the guns could be dangerous and that more data was needed to evaluate their risks.

Of course, whether or not tasers inflict permanent damage or death is beside the point. They clearly administer terrible pain to people who are officially only suspects or witnesses and it's clear that they are being used to simply make people behave in a docile manner when in the presence of police. It makes the policeman's job easier. But again, so would hitting them over the head.

From yesterday's Palm Beach Post editorial:

The review of three years' use by police from Boca Raton to Fort Pierce, starting in 2001 when the weapon arrived in South Florida, revealed that one of every four suspects zapped was not armed, violent or posing any immediate potential threat to anyone, including themselves. In at least 237 incidents, the stun gun was used to achieve compliance from passively resisting or fleeing suspects — who often were not even arrested.

Police agencies recognize that they have a problem in their widely varying policies for recording and tracking Taser use, which often require no explanation for why officers fired the weapon. The manufacturers' marketing also skates past questions about respiratory, cardiac, neurological, psychological and other effects, including the effect of being zapped multiple times.

There are reasons why it is a bad idea for police to be allowed to inflict pain on people who are uncooperative or disagreeable --- the most important being that this means police are sanctioned to commit violence on the public under color of law in instances where their safety is not at issue. That's one of the hallmarks of a police state not a free society. (And yes, I realize that Saddam pulled the legs off of puppies on Christmas morning and I'm damned lucky not to be living under that kind of hellish nightmare. But every lil' totalitarian has to start somewhere.)

It's not just Gitmo. Sophisticated torture techniques are becoming common policing and interrogation methods in America. I remember watching the excrutiating video of police meticulously applying q-tips dipped in pepper spray to the inside of logging protesters' eyelids when they refused to unchain themselves from one another. It was explained that because they weren't actually blinded or permanently harmed, this was really the humane way to get them to cooperate. The most chilling thing about this was the dry, benign way the police calmly went about methodically pulling the immobile protesters' heads back and then their eyelids, to carefully daub the painful chemicals directly into the eye as they screamed in agony. Don't ever think that the systematic "banality of evil" regime couldn't happen here. The police didn't seem to be enjoying themselves, nor were they bothered. It was just all in day's work.



(It should be noted that police had dealt with this form of protest -- in this case blocking a congressman's office -- many times before and had always simply cut the steel armbands with no ill effect. This was a method to force the protesters to willingly bend to the authorities' will.)

They sued and had two hung juries, the first of which had the judge stepping in after the mistrial with a verdict for the defendants ("no reasonable person could conclude that this was excessive force.") Many appeals followed, including the one that overturned that first judge's unbelievable ruling and removed him from the case for bias. Just last April, they finally won on the third try. (I wonder if Abu Ghraib may have had an influence?)

The common rationale for the torture regime is that policemen must have the right to inflict great pain (if not permanent damage) on the spot, at their discretion, to gain the cooperation of suspects or witnesses because they have a dangerous job. Tasers have made that call a little bit easier because they allegedly cause no lasting damage. I would imagine that many people instinctively think that is not such a big deal. Until they get pulled over by a cop in bad mood who goes from 0 to 60 in 30 seconds and determines for whatever reason that you must be physically subdued. Or maybe he just doesn't like your looks. After all it's "not that bad." No harm no foul. Why if it weren't for the Bill of Rights we wouldn't have to think about it at all.



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digby 6/05/2005 02:40:00 PM |

 
Expanding the Cult

Kevin at Catch catches Ben Stein deep throating Richard Nixon's corpse again. Aside from peddling the latest Peggy Nooner dolphin fantasy --- that Mark Felt is responsible for genocide because the Mahatma Nixon died for our sins, or something --- he comes up with some especially colorful rhetoric to describe him:

Have you noticed how Mark Felt looks like one of those old Nazi war criminals they find in Bolivia or Paraguay? That same, haunted, hunted look combined with a glee at what he has managed to get away with so far?

He goes on to say how odd it is that Felt would betray the savior of the his people.

If he even knows what shame is, I wonder if he felt a moment's shame as he tortured the man who brought security and salvation to the land of so many of his and my fellow Jews. Somehow, as I look at his demented face, I doubt it.

Click the link at Catch to read some of Isaac Bashevis Nixon's inspiring words about the Jews.

I have once again misunderestimated Republicans. I had thought they had cast all their considerable historical revisionist desires totally into Saint Ronald. As the obsessive object of their fear and love had done with Lenin, I had assumed the Reagan cult would serve as the Republican historical example of perfect leadership and humanity. I was wrong. Being the great winners of ideological struggle apparently entitles them to raise all Republican leaders to the status of gods. In fact, there is no Republican leader on earth, from Joe McCarthy to Richard Nixon, who has not been entirely misunderstood until now. They have all not only been great warriors and leaders of men, they are also, each in their way, Jesus-like in their transcendent love for their fellow man and devotion to peace. All of them. Even the paranoid drunks and crooks.

Perhaps this is something necessarily present in the totalitarian mindset. The movement is infallible and all leaders of the cause must, therefore, be perfect. We've seen this before, of course. Caligula made his horse into a senator (and you know, Bill Frist does have a rather equine visage...) Still, it never fails to amaze me that somewhere along the line the right wing in America came to identify so closely with their left wing nemeses. Perhaps obsessing about communism all those years created a kind of mass Stockholm Syndrome. Whatever the explanation, they become more and more like them every day.



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digby 6/05/2005 09:11:00 AM |

Saturday, June 04, 2005

 
Shoes Tumbling To The Ground

If any Democratic Senators are looking for a way to shine light on the Downing St Memo(and I'm not holding my breath) this may be the way to do it. And the beauty of it is that they can use that loudmouthed cretin John Bolton to do it:

John R. Bolton flew to Europe in 2002 to confront the head of a global arms-control agency and demand he resign, then orchestrated the firing of the unwilling diplomat in a move a U.N. tribunal has since judged unlawful, according to officials involved.

A former Bolton deputy says the U.S. undersecretary of state felt Jose Bustani "had to go," particularly because the Brazilian was trying to send chemical weapons inspectors to Baghdad. That might have helped defuse the crisis over alleged Iraqi weapons and undermined a U.S. rationale for war.

[...]

The Iraq connection to the OPCW affair comes as fresh evidence surfaces that the Bush administration was intent from early on to pursue military and not diplomatic action against Saddam Hussein's regime.

An official British document, disclosed last month, said Prime Minister Tony Blair agreed in April 2002 to join in an eventual U.S. attack on Iraq. Two weeks later, Bustani was ousted, with British help.

[...]

After U.N. arms inspectors had withdrawn from Iraq in 1998 in a dispute with the Baghdad government, Bustani stepped up his initiative, seeking to bring Iraq - and other Arab states - into the chemical weapons treaty.

Bustani's inspectors would have found nothing, because Iraq's chemical weapons were destroyed in the early 1990s. That would have undercut the U.S. rationale for war because the Bush administration by early 2002 was claiming, without hard evidence, that Baghdad still had such an arms program.

In a March 2002 "white paper," Bolton's office said Bustani was seeking an "inappropriate role" in Iraq, and the matter should be left to the U.N. Security Council - where Washington has a veto.

Bolton said in a 2003 AP interview that Iraq was "completely irrelevant" to Bustani's responsibilities. Earle and Bohlen disagree. Enlisting new treaty members was part of the OPCW chief's job, they said, although they thought he should have consulted with Washington.

Former Bustani aide Bob Rigg, a New Zealander, sees a clear U.S. motivation: "Why did they not want OPCW involved in Iraq? They felt they couldn't rely on OPCW to come up with the findings the U.S. wanted."

Bustani and his aides believe friction with Washington over OPCW inspections of U.S. chemical-industry sites also contributed to the showdown, which went on for months.

The article discusses at some length what an asshole Bolton was, menacing and inapprorpiate, but then what else is new. What is interesting is that the article connects the dots between Downing St and this explicitly.

This is an AP article. Unfortunately, it is also on the wires on Saturday where it is most likely to be overlooked. Unless we refuse to let it.

The media needs a hook to start talking about Downing St. I think Bolton's toast, but if the nomination goes forward I would certainly hope that the Democrats would use this as an opening to start talking about it. If Bolton ends up withdrawing because of this (and he might) then the media also has an excuse to talk about it.

I wonder if Monsignor Russert will see fit to discuss this between Hail Mary's on Press the Meat tomorrow morning?


Hat tip to samela



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digby 6/04/2005 06:35:00 PM |

Friday, June 03, 2005

 
What's Good For The Goose Is Only Good For The Goose

It is interesting that the ACLU got a ruling requiring that all the Abu Ghraib pictures be released to the public. What is really interesting is that the government argued that releasing them would be contrary to the Geneva Conventions. (Via Talk Left)

"It is indeed ironic that the government invoked the Geneva Conventions as a basis for withholding these photographs," said Amrit Singh, a staff attorney at the ACLU. "Had the government genuinely adhered to its obligations under these Conventions, it could have prevented the widespread abuse of detainees held in its custody in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay."

It's nearly impossible to be as obtuse as is the Bush administration without having either some sort of cognitive problem or psychological impairment. I suspect it's the latter.

This recent phony outrage about Amnesty International is another example of this pathology. They had no problem using Amnesty to buttress their case against Saddam, but balk at being called to task for our own very obvious and well known human rights abuses in Guantanamo. Of course, there is little mention of this (except by Jon Stewart) so it doesn't matter. Patriotic correctness requires that any criticism of the United States be immediately struck down as treasonous, if not blasphemous.

If anybody still wants to know why they hate us, this would be a good place to start.



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digby 6/03/2005 12:09:00 PM |

 
Who Cares What We Think?

Matt Yglesias, blogging from his fancy new digs at the TPM Cafe, says today:

At today's Take Back America conference I saw some interesting polling data from Diane Feldman on a subject I'd pondered now and again. Unfortunately, the written summary of the presentation doesn't contain the exact numbers and I didn't write them down because I assumed this question would be included in the summary. The point, however, was that when you ask if America is "the greatest country in the world" most voters say that it is. When you ask if Democrats believe that America is the greatest country, most voters say that they do not.

I think it's clear that this perception creates some electoral problems. Indeed, it's a particularly serious kind of electoral problem because my guess is that the perception is probably correct.

It seems to me that if you are a member of the "reality based" community, as so many of us liberals claim to be, that you can't answer such a question without qualifiers. This means that we are unable to respond in appropriate knee jerk fashion and are therefore assumed to be unpatriotic. The question is simple minded and it demands a simple minded answer and that's a problem for us. Perhaps we should just lie, like everyone already does about going to church or whether they are faithful or all the other things Americans are forced to lie about in our right wing PC times.

Patriotism is defined in the dictionary quite simply as "love of one's country and a willingness to sacrifice for it." That is not the same thing as believing that your country is the greatest country in the world. I love many things in life that aren't "the greatest" and I don't see the conflict. One doesn't have to abandon all intellectual integrity to love something, imperfect and not-so-great as it may be. America is certainly the most powerful country in the world. One would think that people could be satisfied enough with that, but apparently not.

What does it mean to be the "greatest country in the world, or as I've heard it put, "the greatest country the world has ever known" anyway? Is it measured by how fair and just our system of government is or standard of living or military prowess, or what? Is it, as George W. Bush pushes incessantly, because its people are "good?" Or is it that by all measures of all things it is simply the best?

I raise this because I suspect that what people really want from liberals is not patriotism, but chauvinism, one important facet of which is characterized in this context by the belief that your national culture and interests are superior to any other. (Our vaunted "exceptionalism" is not made up of a whole lot more than that simple definition.) And, yes, some liberals do not sign on to that, for good reason. Because it's bullshit. And America, the home of mutts from all over the world, the give-me-your-tired-your-poor immigrant nation, should be more aware of the shallowness and idiocy of this than any other country in the world. It's not as if we are Germans trying to preserve the fairy tale of a thousand year Reich. It's one of the good things about not being European, with all that baggage --- or would be if we thought about it for half a minute.

Simple observation of the world shows that all nations are made up of human beings, which automatically taints the project. America and Iraq and China and everywhere else are comprised of this very flawed species. If you live long enough you see that, as much as our fearless leader likes to claim otherwise, Americans are not "better" and therefore our country is not "better." Only individual people can be judged better or worse and it is without regard to nationality, culture or religious belief.

Our democratic experiment has been a worldwide inspiration and our Bill of Rights is one of the most important contributions any nation has made to mankind. This country has welcomed immigrants (in fits and starts) from all over the world and created a wealthy, successful nation because of it. I would easily sacrifice for the country, it's my home. I love it the way anyone loves their home, with a deep and emotional connection that transcends intellectual thought. But I don't need to suspend my judgement or my faculties and further say that this country is the greatest country on earth. There is no such thing as the greatest country on earth.

Matt feels that this presents an electoral problem. I would agree if people like me were expressing these views in a political campaign. (Just call me Ward Churchill, I guess.) However, the perception that Matt talks about isn't fueled by some quasi intellectual argument about chauvinism. It's fueled by Rush Limbaugh and his band of flaming gasbags who have spent the last fifteen years saying that liberals hate America day after day.

John Kerry volunteered for Vietnam, fought bravely, and came home and devoted himself to ending what he saw as an unjust war. Meanwhile his rival George Bush spent the war drinking beer and fucking off. Yet Kerry was made out to be a coward and Bush a hero. I suspect that my candidate, Wes Clark, would have been similarly reduced to sissy status despite the fact he was a four star general. Proof of love and devotion to country is not particularly relevant --- just as what liberals really think about America is not particularly relevant.

Our political problems stem from some very deep and ongoing cultural anxieties that we need to think about and confront. What we can't do anything about is the idea that liberals tend to be more --- dare I say it --- nuanced than conservatives. It is a characteristic not a policy. We're stuck with that and we're just going to have to find a way to make it work for us.



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digby 6/03/2005 08:26:00 AM |

Thursday, June 02, 2005

 
Common Sense

Dear FEC,

I write to you today to request your kind advisory as to whether this pamphlet defines me as an ACTIVIST or a JOURNALIST. Whilst I am loathe to corrupt our pristine electoral system with my calls to political action, neither would I wish to cause our sanctioned press any undue hardship due to its perceived affiliation with rabble like myself. I do understand that "citizen journalists" not being PROPERLY CREDENTIALED creates terrible confusion amongst the leaders of government and society. I humbly request, therefore, that you peruse my pamphlet with an eye toward giving me the designation I shall need going forward if I wish to publish and disseminate my words without government interference. I anxiously await your verdict.

Sincerely,


Thomas Paine


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digby 6/02/2005 07:32:00 PM |

 
For The Record

Yesterday I mentioned the fact that that FoxNews had the incredible chutzpah to discuss openly why nobody is reporting the Downing Street Memo --- without actually reporting on the Downing St memo. It turns out that there is a movement afoot to gain some attention for this thing and I think it's worth doing, if only for history's sake if nothing else. There should be a record of some Americans' interest in such a damning document that proves the president of the United States knowingly took the country to war on false pretenses. It may come in handy someday.

Shakespeare's Sister informs me that theBig Brass Alliance is a collection of bloggers who are supporting a group called After Downing Street that is dedicated to gaining exposure for this issue. One positive thing that anyone can do is sign (along with 88 members of congress) this letter that John Conyers has written to the president requesting some answers to the obvious questions this document raises.

This isn't some pie-in-the-sky lefty kumbaya petition (not that there's anything wrong with that.) This memo is smoking gun proof that Bush lied us into war. Many of us knew this from the get. But, I think it's probably true that most others already know this on some level as well --- a fair number are glad he did, a few more don't care, and the rest just don't want to confront their own bloodlust or willfull blindness. It's hard to admit you were wrong about something so deadly.

The rest of us need to keep a clear head and insist that this not be swept under the rug to the extent that we can. We have to keep the idea that there will be some sort of rational accountability for such acts alive in this culture or we are goners.



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digby 6/02/2005 09:41:00 AM |

 
Losing Their Religion

Regarding right wing Christians putting their embryos up for adoption and insisting they not be adopted by gays or non-Christians (preferably not a working woman either) AMERICAblog wonders how this Bush promoted religious discrimination can get past the editors of the NY Times unaddressed.

I'll tell you how:

Though we have our lapses, (pdf) individual news stories on emotional topics like abortion, gun control, the death penalty and gay marriage are reported and edited with great care, to avoid any impression of bias. Nonetheless, when numerous articles use the same assumption as a point of departure, that monotone can leave the false impression that the paper has chosen sides. This is especially so when we add in our feature sections, whose mission it is to write about novelty in life. As a result, despite the strict divide between editorial pages and news pages, The Times can come across as an advocate.

The public editor found that the overall tone of our coverage of gay marriage, as one example, “approaches cheerleading.” By consistently framing the issue as a civil rights matter -- gays fighting for the right to be treated like everyone else -- we failed to convey how disturbing the issue is in many corners of American social, cultural and religious life.

[...]

Too often we label whole groups from a perspective that uncritically accepts a stereotype or unfairly marginalizes them. As one reporter put it, words like moderate or centrist “inevitably incorporate a judgment about which views are sensible and which are extreme.” We often apply “religious fundamentalists,” another loaded term, to political activists who would describe themselves as Christian conservatives. ...

The editors didn't fail. They succeeded. They "re-framed" the issue of religious discrimination and gay rights. They are simply being "sensitive" and "conveying how disturbing the issue us in many corners of American social, cultural and religious life" when they uncritically report on a White House endorsed publicly funded group that enables Christian bigots to discriminate even though it's clearly against the law.

I think it's time we called out the PC police on the wingnuts. Nobody likes political correctness, not even liberals, really. And our day is long past. This is the new province of the right and they have finally hammered the press into thinking that discrimination and bigotry are really just normal expressions of religious belief and must be treated with kid gloves. I call bullshit every time one of these timorous cowards clutch their tiny lace hankies and blubber something about how they are being sensitive to the beliefs of bigoted assholes.

Just in case James Dobson and his new friends, the intellectuals at the NY Times, have forgotten their eighth grade American history class, Confederates used the Bible to justify slavery, too. Bin Laden uses the Koran to justify terrorism. Just because they wrap themselves in the Holy Books doesn't mean these theo-fascists they aren't breaking the laws of both God and Man.



For a more in depth analysis of the NY Times "credibility" report, see Reading A1
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digby 6/02/2005 09:28:00 AM |

Wednesday, June 01, 2005

 
Buy This Book

The Stock Ticker and the Superjumbo : How the Democrats Can Once Again Become America's Dominant Political Party

I have ordered it and await it eagerly. Rick Perlstein is one of the clearest observers of American politics around and one of the very few historians who really understands how the right wing works.

It's only 8 bucks and I guarantee that it will be worth reading even if you don't agree with his conclusions:

A majority of Americans tell pollsters they want more government intervention to reduce the gap between high- and lower-income citizens, and less than one-third consider high taxes to be a problem. Yet conservative Republicanism currently controls the political discourse. Why?

Rick Perlstein probes this central paradox of today's political scene in his penetrating pamphlet. Perlstein explains how the Democrats' obsessive short-term focus on winning "swing voters," instead of cultivating loyal party-liners, has relegated Democrats to political stagnation. Perlstein offers a vigorous critique and far-reaching vision that is a thirty-year plan for Democratic victory.

If you are very good, I may even be able to persuade the author to do a little blogospheric interview if he's so inclined. It's long past time that liberals supported their writers and thinkers the way the wingnuts support theirs.


Update:

Speaking of books, are any of you libertarians out there a little bit discomfited by the fact that "On Liberty" by JS Mill got an honorable mention in the 10 worst books list by HumanEvents magazine? I mean, "Mein Kampf" and "Das Kapital" aren't big surprises. I'm not shocked by "The Feminine Mystique" or even the inclusion of John Maynard Keynes (although you have to love this commentary: "FDR adopted the idea as U.S. policy, and the U.S. government now has a $2.6-trillion annual budget and an $8-trillion dollar debt." Haha.)

But "On Liberty"? What, he wasn't sufficiently agitated about stem cell research? The capital gains tax?

Jesus, I now have not one single intellectual connection to the right. Not one. They are aliens from another planet.



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digby 6/01/2005 06:24:00 PM |

 
The Party Of Krugman

Somebody asked me what my favorite columnist was the other day and I said that I thought most liberal bloggers like Krugman because he writes the way we write --- he doesn't suffer fools and he writes with all the righteous indignation he feels at what he sees. And, I suspect that this is why establishment journos like Daniel Okrent don't like him. He just refuses to play the game by establishment rules.

This post by Brad DeLong exposes the entire silly social aspect of this and gives us a window into why liberals are being marginalized in the mainstream media. We are supposed to be nice. The other side is expected to be tough and uncompromising. Krugman is a fighter and he never gives ground when he thinks he's right. That's unbecoming in a liberal because it means that you have to engage in the facts and have a real argument instead of just hurling insults or bumper stickers as you can when dealing with right wing critics.

Daniel Okrent finds his behavior unseemly and annoying:

For a man who makes his living offering strong opinions, Paul Krugman seems peculiarly reluctant to grant the same privilege to others. And for a man who leads with his chin twice a week, he acts awfully surprised when someone takes a pop at it

[...]

On Prof. Krugman's defense of his unfamiliarity with it, he's effectively saying, "If I didn't know about it, it must not be important." This is a polemicist's dodge; no self-respecting journalist would ever make such an argument.

[...]

Believe me -- I could go on, as could a number of readers more sophisticated about economic matters than I am. (Among these are several who, like me, generally align themselves politically with Prof. Krugman, but feel he does himself and his cause no good when he heeds the roaring approval of his acolytes and dismisses his critics as ideologically motivated.) But I don't want to engage in an extended debate any more than Prof. Krugman says he does. If he replies to this statement, as I imagine he will, I'll let him have what he always insists on keeping for himself: the last word.

I hate to do this to a decent man like my successor, Barney Calame, but I'm hereby turning the Krugman beat over to him.

Oh Boo hoo hoo. God forbid a liberal should accuse one's critics of being ideologically motivated. You would think that the ombudsman of the NY Times would have a slightly bigger bone to pick with the right wing which has been calling them ideologically motivated for 40 fucking years. But then, that would require they acknowledge reality and that is what cannot happen.

Paul Krugman is an in-your-face, unapologetic member of the reality based community. He calls it as he sees it and he doesn't mince words in doing so. As he amply demonstrated in his response to Okrent's shallow criticisms (which, even if true, would hardly back-up his calumnous accusations in his last piece) Krugman does not particularly enjoy being told he is wrong on the facts when he isn't. World class economists may be used to being called to task for their conclusions or their predictions, but saying that he is cooking the numbers for partisan reasons are fighting words. His reputation rests on his intellectual integrity. Of course he is going to fight when challenged by lame conventional wisdom and spoonfed propaganda. If only more liberal pundits had his guts we might not be where we are today.

Paul Krugman is tough and fearless and we need more like him -- people who are not part of the cliquish Sally Quinn social scene (it about made me puke to read that unctuous little screed again) and who do not depend upon the approbation of aging social mavens for their self esteem.

Tell me that the party of Krugman is a bunch of soft cowards who can't fight terrorism or run a disciplined economic agenda. Tell me the party of Krugman doesn't know what it believes in. The party of Krugman believes in reality, that the emperor has no clothes, that up is up and down is down. And it isn't afraid to tell snivelling little babies like Daniel Okrent to stick it where the sun don't shine. The party of Krugman doesn't lay down and take it. It fights.



Update! Somerby takes Okrent, skewers him quickly and then slowly roasts him over a very high flame. It is awesome. Okrent, the Manhattan fop.
digby 6/01/2005 04:27:00 PM |

 
No Mirrors Available

This is too much. Shakespeare's Sister spots a FoxNews headline that says: Downing Street Memo Mostly Ignored in US.

Can you believe it? And then Fox goes on to wonder why that might be. They simply can't figure it out. They interview people and ponder the question and go to great lengths to explain why it isn't being reported. I don't see that they interview Roger Ailes or John Moody, however. Perhaps they were too busy.

They even point out that the left has been trying in vain to get attention for the issue:

Several popular left-leaning blogs have taken up the cause to keep the story alive, encouraging readers to contact media outlets. A Web site, DowningStreetMemo.com, tells readers to contact the White House directly with complaints.

"This is a test of the left-wing blogosphere," said Jim Pinkerton, syndicated columnist and regular contributor to FOX News Watch, who pointed out that The Sunday Times article came out just before the British election and apparently had little effect on voters' decisions.

"In many ways that memo might prove all of the arguments the critics of the war have made," he added. "But the bulk of Americans don't agree, or don't seem that alarmed, so it is a power test to see if they can drive it back on the agenda."

I guess the fact that most people don't know is irelevant. Certainly, it can't be because FoxNews itself isn't reporting it. Except, of course, to report that nobody cares.

Even though Pinkerton is trying to turn this into a test of the liberal blogosphere for gawd knows what reason, it is an important story that we should continue to press. Sometimes these things take time.

Check out DowningStreetMemo.com. They'll tell you where to send your angry lefty e-mail.



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digby 6/01/2005 02:05:00 PM |

 
Your Lovin' Don't Pay My Bills

John Aravosis wonders if liberals have "issues" with money --- he sees a hostility toward money on the left and wonders where it comes from. His readers offer some very interesting opinions on the matter, so be sure to read the comment thread if you find this topic intriguing.

I have a slightly different perception on the matter than most, it seems. I admit to having issues with it, probably because I always valued time over money. (Of course, as you get older you begin to realize that you run out of that too.) However, I don't harbor resentment toward others. I made my choices and I don't live a life full of regret about much of anything. I have no moral qualms about making money (in a decent way) and I don't think that it's my business to judge others on what they choose to spend it on. I appreciate what it can do to make life comfortable for the individual and how it motivates people to work. I certainly accept that there is something intrinsic to human nature in the acquisition of wealth and the desire to succeed. But I do have issues, nonetheless.

John's readers more than adequately explain what I think is the common liberal argument against money and it's the general belief in egalitarianism --- that it is not really moral to have too much when others have so little. These are ideas that, ironically enough, stem from Christian teaching. So much for the godless heathens of the left.

I don't approach this from a moral standpoint, although I'm sympathetic to the notion just from a human empathetic standpoint. If you've ever spent much time in the third world, you realize right quick that human life is valued very differently on our planet and it won't make you feel particularly terrific about your own (except, of course, for the South Park Republicans who apparently can't think beyond their good luck --- what they would call their natural superiority --- at being American.)

It has been my experience that money confers power over others and that is where I personally get uncomfortable. This is not directly related to marxist theory, although I would suspect that there isn't a lefty (or a righty for that matter) who hasn't been influenced to some degree by it, so it's certainly relevant to my thinking on the issue. (He diagnosed the illness, it was his prescription that wasn't so hot.) Mostly,though, I think it's a matter of human psychology. People who work for wages, particularly those lower on the scale, are simply not in control of their lives in the same way as are those who work for themselves or those who are independently wealthy. From being treated like a lackey by the boss to having to answer to your mother-in-law because she loaned you money for the down payment, there is a slight, and sometimes not so slight, corruption of your freedom every time you are dependent upon another individual's goodwill. And it is a rare person who will not immediately exercise this power over others if they feel threatened or angry and a rare person who will not feel the metaphorical lash at having to answer for it.

As much as I am concerned as they are with individual freedom, this is why I find it so hard to relate to libertarians; I think that the common experience of working for wages and being beholden to another individual is more of a tangible infringement upon personal liberty than the extraction of taxes for the greater good. The infringement on personal freedom that is most immediate and constant in most people's lives is having to brownnose another human being or play fast and loose with the rules because their financial survival depends upon it. It's why I support unions and workplace rules and consumer rights. In the everyday lives of most people, the biggest limits on their freedom and challenges to their integrity come not from government regulators but greedy and powerful employers.

And yet, it is the way of the world and we each have to find a way to live with a modicum of decency and integrity within it. And I think it is a much more complicated and difficult row to hoe than we Americans think it is. It is not as easy to obtain financial freedom as some would have it nor is financial success a perfect illustration of an individual's merit. That's why I don't much like money, in a general conceptual way. It has corrupted friendships, family, jobs and relationships in ways that nothing else in my life ever has. It can and is used as a weapon as often as a tool. In a hyper capitalist society such as ours, it's perhaps the single most powerful method the individual has (or doesn't have) to create his or her own destiny. It's both a blessing and a curse.

It's a good thing to think about how you really feel about it --- most Americans never question their assumptions. In many ways, it's probably easier that way. Bravo to John for bringing it up.

And by the way, I hope this makes it clear that I do not hold with the idea that because a blogger accepted donations that he or she is required to answer to the donors. Indeed, I think the opposite. People give money because they appreciate the work. When they don't appreciate the work they don't give money. It's one of the cleanest exchanges of goods and services around, fully voluntary and without further obligation on either part.

This reminds me of a relative who wanted to help out her grandfather in his later years. He was living with an aunt who also had little money. This relative agreed to send a hundred dollars a month. When she went to visit she found out that granddad was drinking a couple of beers every night and the aunt played bingo on Saturdays. The relative considered these expenses to be a waste. She figured her hundred a month entitled her to straighten up these people's bad habits and she insisted that because she had sent them, by this time, more than a couple thousand dollars that they already owed her quite a lot, even if she withdrew her monthly stipend. They gave up the beer and the bingo but the relative continued to find their spending habits objectionable and made sure that they knew it and did as they were told. Granddad was reduced to sneaking around and the aunt was isolated from all the friends she used to see at weekly bingo. They felt like children. Luckily they both died before long and ended the ritual humiliation the whole thing had evolved into. The money was not worth it.

If Aravosis wanted to blow all his donations on lottery tickets they'd be his to blow. If that bothers you, don't donate again. But making a donation doesn't entitle anyone to think they own John or his blog. He owns himself, always.



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digby 6/01/2005 12:52:00 PM |

 
Maybe He Won't Be Back

Check out this fascinating pictorial deconstruction of Schwarzeneger's ad on BagNewsNotes today. (Or just click the ad at left.) For those of you who don't live in California, this ad is just pathetic, and it's chock full of product placement. I don't think I've ever seen this many brand names in a political commercial before.

But, as BNN points out, it's also aesthetically just a terrible ad --- even by political ad standards which aren't very high. It's not that it has some sort of cinema verite authenticity in its badness. It's just ugly and ineffectual.

This is the mega star of the 1980's we're talking about here. The man whose entire claim to fame is his celebrity. Yet his people produce an ad that could have been done by someone(with lots of high placed friends in the food and beverage business) running for the San Bernardino school board. And it comes on the heels of months of very effective ads done by the public employees unions featuring the the sunny smiles of elementary schoolteachers and nurses and the rugged all American features of heroic firefighters. (Jon Stewart said "those are some MILFS.")

I think that people expect Schwarzenneger's ads to be professional show business quality. That is, after all, the only thing he's got going for him. Nobody voted for Arnold because of his great ideas or policy prescriptions. He didn't have any then and he doesn't have any now. They did expect him to at least play the part of the Governor well on TV. But then again, he never was the actor Ronald Reagan was in the movies, either. And that's saying something.



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digby 6/01/2005 09:33:00 AM |

 
The Incredible Shrinking President

Funny how we haven't seen any of the weekly news magazines do a cover story on the fact that Bush is the earliest lame duck in history. Considering that they were writing Bill Clinton's epitaph within three months of his first term, one might conclude that they are using a different standard. How unusual.

But then again, it isn't his fault and it isn't his job. Unlike Clinton he doesn't have a congressional majority of his own party to lead. Oh wait...

Bush Rejects Talk of Waning Influence:

President Bush dismissed yesterday suggestions that his influence is waning less than six months into his second term, blaming partisanship and timidity in Congress for the lack of action on his plans to bring change to the United Nations, restructure Social Security and enact a new energy policy this year.

"I don't worry about anything here in Washington, D.C.," Bush said during a news conference in the White House's Rose Garden. "I feel comfortable in my role as the president, and my role . . . is to push for reform." With Democrats and Republicans alike questioning the clout of a president whose approval ratings have sunk to new lows, Bush said it is Congress that must prove it is "capable of getting anything done."

His job is to "push for reform?" I thought he was keeping the babies safe and fending off drone planes with his bare hands. What's going on here? The man with the codpiece can't get a Republican congress to enact his agenda? Man, those panting security moms must be disappointed. The difference between the 85% Collossus of 2002 and the petulant powerlessness of today is stark.

And he clearly didn't like the way people were talking about his soul brother Vladimir:

Speaking a few hours after former Russian oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky was sentenced to nine years in prison after a trial that many democratic activists called politically motivated, Bush said he has expressed concerns about the legal proceedings to President Vladimir Putin and will watch the appeals process closely. "Here, you are innocent until proven guilty, and it appeared to us, at least people in my administration, that it looked like he had been judged guilty prior to having a fair trial," Bush said.

I guess he wanted to preserve his personal deniability for when he and Vlady next meet over beers and pork rinds at the ranch set. Or he just didn't see the problem. After all, this is the man who said several thousand times that Saddam had to be disarmed and then pulled out the weapons inspectors when they didn't find the proof. Seems to me that he has an affinity for the concept of judging guilty before having a fair trial.

And, of course he and everyone in the press corpse are too thick to see the utter vacuity of his statement in light of what he said just a few minutes before about alleged human rights abuses Guantanamo:

"It seemed to me they based some of their decisions on the word of -- and the allegations -- by people who were held in detention, people who hate America, people that had been trained in some instances to disassemble -- that means not tell the truth,' Bush said."

Yes, he actually said "disassemble" --- and then had the nerve to be snotty about it and define it. There is no end to the man's arrogance and ignorance.

Bush apparently has no idea that when he starts lecturing Moscow or Beijing about "fair trials" everyone now collapses in convulsive laughter. Guantanamo has changed forever the idea that Americans have a fair and impartial judicial system based upon the rule of law and the constitution. Bush and his cronies have shown that we are more than capable of suspending those things at will. If we ever had any moral authority, it has been officially flushed down the toilet.

Not that it really matters to these people. They don't believe that it's important to have moral authority. They only believe that it's important to have big guns and a willingness to use them. Unfortunately, we don't seem to be all that good at the Empire building thing. Maybe keeping our moral authority backed by the threat of force rather than a clumsy and useless demonstration of our ineptitude might have been a better way to go.

This is going to be a long 3 and a half years. But I'm beginning to think I may enjoy them more than Junior will.



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digby 6/01/2005 08:44:00 AM |

Tuesday, May 31, 2005

 
New Ideas

This is good. Some in the administration are apparently questioning whether waging a "Global War on Terror" is an effective way to deal with the threat of islamic fundamentalism. Wow. Next thing you know they'll be wondering whether taxes and expenditures ought to be in balance or something. Weird.

The review marks the first ambitious effort since the immediate aftermath of the 2001 attacks to take stock of what the administration has called the "global war on terrorism" -- or GWOT -- but is now considering changing to recognize the evolution of its fight. "What we really want now is a strategic approach to defeat violent extremism," said a senior administration official who described the review on the condition of anonymity because it is not finished. "GWOT is catchy, but there may be a better way to describe it, and those are things that ought to be incumbent on us to look at."

Yeah. "GWOT" is a catchy phrase that's been sweeping the nation like wildfire.

So they've decided that what we really need is a strategic approach to defeat violent extremism. Hmmm. I have an idea. How about we invade and occupy a non terrorist country in the middle of the region, create political chaos and foment a civil war? Surely that can only be seen as a gesture of goodwill on our part. But just in case we should probably say that the country has nukes strapped to drone planes that are ready to attack the eastern seaboard at any moment. (Nobody will remember any of that in a year anyway.)

Well, maybe that's not such a hot idea after all.

Much of the discussion has focused on how to deal with the rise of a new generation of terrorists, schooled in Iraq over the past couple years. Top government officials are increasingly turning their attention to anticipate what one called "the bleed out" of hundreds or thousands of Iraq-trained jihadists back to their home countries throughout the Middle East and Western Europe. "It's a new piece of a new equation," a former senior Bush administration official said. "If you don't know who they are in Iraq, how are you going to locate them in Istanbul or London?"

Interesting. Who would have ever dreamed this could happen? Oh, that's right. Those of us who were against the invasion. In fact, it was the central practical argument that I and most others I know set forth at the time. It was always obvious that invading Iraq was going to foment terrorism, not quell it. Anybody with a sixth grade education could see that. Well, except for some Republicans who went to Andover, Yale and Harvard, that is.

I really can't believe it. After they just ran a ruthless, mendacious, presidential campaign of character assasination against anyone who diverted even a half step from their party line, here they are, basically admitting that their entire GWOT is a fucking goddamned mistake.

The good news though is that just as they were before 9/11, the administration is focused like a laser beam on combatting terrorism:

The review may have been slowed somewhat by the fact that many of the key counterterrorism jobs in the administration have been empty for months, including the top post at the State Department for combating terrorism, vacant since November, and the directorship of the new National Counterterrorism Center. "We're five months into the next term, and still a number of spots have yet to be filled," Cressey said. "You end up losing valuable time."

The counterterrorism center was created nearly a year ago by Bush to serve as the main clearinghouse for terrorism-related intelligence but is not yet fully operational, and has been run by an acting director and caught up in the broader wave of bureaucratic reorganization that resulted in the creation of the new directorate of national intelligence, whose fiefdom the center will join.

As part of the reorganization, a new office of strategic and operational planning is slated to become the focal point for operations aimed at terrorists, but that, too, has yet to start working fully, the senior counterterrorism official said.

Townsend just hired a deputy last week, Treasury official Juan Carlos Zarate, to take on the terrorism portfolio at the NSC; Townsend had been doing that as well as serving as the president's top homeland security aide for the past year. Several counterterrorism sources said the State job will soon be filled by CIA veteran Hank Crumpton and the counterterrorism center post is slated to go to Air Force Gen. Charles F. Wald, current deputy commander of U.S. forces in Europe.

"They recognize there's been a vacuum of leadership," said a former top counterterrorism official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. "There has been a dearth of senior leadership directing this day to day. No one knows who's running this on a day-to-day basis."

Well, that's good. We're creating terrorists by the thousands day after day but the administration can't get it together enough to hire the people it needs to fill the anti-terrorist positions. The president himself is awfully busy, as we know, tilting at his private windmill accounts and riding his trike in the woods. Cheney is undoubtedly putting all his efforts into figuring out how to justify the use of tactical nuclear weapons on California. Who has time to deal with this terrorism thing? It's so 2002.

Ooops, I forgot one very important member of the administration who is working night and day on this problem. Karen Hughes has the vital responsibility of changing the negative perception of Americans in the middle east, which is key to their new strategy of combatting violent extremism. I hear her latest campaign is about to be revealed: she's going to tell those terrorists and jihadists that the US is a compassionate crusader --- an occupier with optimism --- an inspirational imperialist with integrity! Once those terrorists hear the mellifluous melody of her awesome alliteration, just like the Red States they will all fall in love.




Update: James Wolcott tells us that Michael Ledeen is just hopping mad about all this "re-evaluation" business. You can certainly understand why. He's the guy who seriously made the case to invade France and Germany just two years ago. This has to be a blow.

Twice in the past, the president slid into a similar funk, first permitting himself to be gulled by the Saudis into believing he had to make a deal with Arafat before he was entitled to liberate Iraq, then permitting the British to drag out the run-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom with endless votes in the Security Council. Each time he realized his error, and pressed on with greater vigor. It’s time for him to do that again."

The 101st Keyboarders need to saddle up their Aaron chairs and cock their control buttons. This is bigger even than the GWOT. It's a fight for the Codpiece and that's a battle only they know how to fight with the relish and expertise that's called for. They may have lost their beloved leader General Sullivan, but they will valiantly carry on without him. These brave souls will never give in, never give in, never give in.



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digby 5/31/2005 06:29:00 PM |

 
Spent Capital

I'm Baaaack. Sorry for the interruption in service folks. I've been indisposed, but now I'm right as rain and ready to rumble. Or thunder. Or something...

And what do I see first thing? Bush's Political Capital Spent, Voices in Both Parties Suggest. Sweet.

Two days after winning reelection last fall, President Bush declared that he had earned plenty of "political capital, and now I intend to spend it." Six months later, according to Republicans and Democrats alike, his bank account has been significantly drained.

In the past week alone, the Republican-led House defied his veto threat and passed legislation promoting stem cell research; Senate Democrats blocked confirmation, at least temporarily, of his choice for U.N. ambassador; and a rump group of GOP senators abandoned the president in his battle to win floor votes for all of his judicial nominees.

With his approval ratings in public opinion polls at the lowest level of his presidency, Bush has been stymied so far in his campaign to restructure Social Security. On the international front, violence has surged again in Iraq in recent weeks, dispelling much of the optimism generated by the purple-stained-finger elections back in January, while allies such as Egypt and Uzbekistan have complicated his campaign to spread democracy.

The series of setbacks on the domestic front could signal that the president has weakened leverage over his party, a situation that could embolden the opposition, according to analysts and politicians from both sides. Bush faces the potential of a summer of discontent when his capacity to muscle political Washington into following his lead seems to have diminished and few easy victories appear on the horizon.

Well, yes. But it's because he never had any political capital to begin with. This was a big lie, just like the alleged mandate. He had neither. There was just enough of a fading vestige of 9/11 around (and enough of the media's unctuous sycophancy) to keep a little of that hi-pro glow on the Prez. But he never had a mandate for any of his policies. These guys rode a wave, they didn't win a landslide.

At some point hype, like helium, dissipates and you are left with nothing but the flaccid balloon. Junior and Rove are not geniuses or political wizards who have reshaped politics in their image. They are the guys who got in on a hummer in 2000 and were in office on 9/11. Period. The only truly impressive legislative victory has been passing massive tax cuts for rich people, which is hardly a difficult thing to ask politicians to do when you also break open the pork barrel and let them gorge on all the pig they can possibly stomach. That's quite an achievement.

The fact is that Junior has been a lame duck since January 21, 2005. And I believe he's happy with that. All he ever cared about was getting legitimately elected and doing what his father did not --- win a second term. He doesn't give a damn about legacy. As he famously said, "History, we don’t know. We’ll all be dead."

He's just going through the motions, like a high school senior who's already been accepted to college. The Republican caucus is under new leadership --- the GOP PepBoys Dobson, Frist and DeLay. I'm beginning to look forward to 2006.



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digby 5/31/2005 03:56:00 PM |

Wednesday, May 25, 2005

 
Give 'Em An Inch

TBOGG points to this statement by Dr. "Whip It Good" himself:

The rules that blocked conservative nominees remain in effect, and nothing of significance has changed. Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice Antonin Scalia, and Chief Justice William Rehnquist would never have served on the U. S. Supreme Court if this agreement had been in place during their confirmations. The unconstitutional filibuster survives in the arsenal of Senate liberals.

I assume he isn't a complete idiot and is just playing to guys like the one who wrote that mess below. Surely he can't be this stupid. Does he not know that Rehnquist and Thomas were confirmed under Democratic majorities and Scalia with a 98-0 vote?

Democrats confirmed his three ultra-conservative heroes and these are all the thanks we get. Clearly it's time we stopped doing that. This thing doesn't exactly go both ways.

The last ultra-liberal on the court was confirmed in 19-fucking-39, for crying out loud --- William O. Douglas. The only liberals of the last fifty years have been Brennan, Warren, Blackmun, Marshall, Fortas, and Goldberg. The last of them, Blackmun, retired in 1994.

There are no actual liberals on the court today, ultra or otherwise. Stevens, Ginsberg, Souter and Breyer are moderate place holders under a conservative majority. They are only liberals by comparison to the ultra-conservative triumverate and the conservative twins.

Dobson seems to think that we tried to filibuster his three fave justices, when in fact, we made the terrible mistake of trusting Republicans to be fair, tell the truth and keep their word. A mistake we have, sadly, probably just made again. Not that any of our choices are very good. We really needed to win that last election.



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digby 5/25/2005 03:35:00 PM |

 
You're Going To Love This One


From my right wing e-mailer:

STEM CELLS AND LIBERALS

Firstly, we might thank the South Koreans for stem cells since they seem to be leading the way. If a loved one is saved from a slow horrible death by stem cells you might also thank conservatives since they saw fit to invade South Korea and save it from the Liberal Communists. Instead of starving to death under big government, the freedom loving South Koreans are now inventing stem cells to save your life. Oh how it must kill the cowardly liberals to see it.

As for the slippery slope objections raised regarding stem cells, one has to wonder, since every slope is slippery and everything is on a slippery slope. We have a well respected Constitution that has kept everything nicely balanced on the slippery slope for 200 years. We have a huge military, 1000's of local police forces as well as about 22 Federal police forces, The Social Security Administration, an ever growing Federal Budget, the Supreme Court, labor unions, Congress, a one man Executive Branch who can take us to war with the phony Gulf of Tonkin Resolution or a phony search for weapons of mass destruction, but through it all our remarkable Constitution has kept power sufficiently divided so that our country has not fallen prey to many of the evils that had afflicted every society before it, throughout all of human history. And, as if that has not been enough, we have even created and preserved the freedom that much of the rest of the world enjoys.

In comparison to all the evil that might have afflicted us, stem cells seem like a trivial threat, but an incredibly huge potential benefit. The threat is that one day we'll take stem stem cells from older and older embryos or even full grown human beings who are raised for spare parts or even as alter egos. The benefit is that stem cells might cure every sickness on earth. It might save billions of lives from death and excruciatingly painful illness! That this is a good thing ought to be the most painfully obvious thing in the world. If it isn't obvious, it will be when they or a loved one is dying, at least to about 99% of us in that position.

Perhaps it feels like a threat to many because it is too good to be true; it is a threat to normalcy because eternal life removes too much of the normal burden of everyday life? Indeed, life would be totally redefined. Everything could be put off till tomorrow, but every goal could eventually be reached too. It scares the religious right to death given that their religion was conceived of at a time when science was not. Or, could it be that science, with its nuclear bombs, global warming, genetic technology, and abortions is merely the weapon with which we will finally manage to destroy ourselves as per biblical prophecy?

In any case we face an inevitable brave new world. The immediate problem in which is that you have to kill the embryo to get the stem cells. Never mind that the embryo was scheduled to be killed anyway, or that nature aborts most pregnancies spontaneously, or that we kill 40 million dogs from neglect every year or kill 100 million cows each year all of whom seem far more human than a few embryonic cells too small to even see. Yet to abortion opponents harvesting these stem cells is close to an abortion since there is an embryo or embryo like thing dying in each case.

In reality it is not an embryo since it has been especially prepared by removing genetic material from the mother (egg donor) to be replaced by genetic material exclusively from the patient who wishes to be cloned, or to merely harvest stem cells that eventually can replace damaged cells in his or her own body. The embryo is not put in a human womb or incubator where it might develop into a human being, although one assumes that it will be possible to do so in the very near future.

Personally, seeing an embryo meet its end this way, not even considering the incredible possible benefits, is less troubling than seeing a live lobster being dropped into a pot of boiling water, or a puppy dog being tossed into an incinerator, which we do and ignore millions of times each year.

But, in 100 years when each of us can whip up a nuclear device, weaponized anthrax, and a clone of ourselves that will live forever, sophisticated liberals might well wish quaint religious little old Bush had been taken more seriously. This seems especially true given that today's liberals don't have the brains or the guts to go to the Axis of Evil to take away the very deadly, but still very rudimentary, technology that they are manifestly far too immature to handle. Today's liberals are failing brave new world kindergarten badly.

My own view is that the brave new technological world is inevitable, possibly very beneficial, but catastrophically dangerous as long as cowardly and dumb liberals are involved in the management of it.

This is the problem we face, ladies and gentlemen. Better learn to put on better show because reason is clearly inoperative.



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digby 5/25/2005 12:02:00 PM |

 
Changing Their Tune

It appears that the word has gone forth. The GOP voices of God have said "ye shall spin it as a win."

Sam Rosenfeld at TAPPED quotes Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council:

"... Majority Leader Bill Frist has displayed extraordinary patience and determination in the face of liberal obstinacy. We commend him and stand with him in his effort to end the obstruction and move forward with the task of restoring a judiciary that will interpret the Constitution, not legislate a liberal agenda for the nation."

Rosenfeld comments:

That's a lot of backpedalling for one day. Not only did the agreement go from "ignoble" to "long-overdue," but the Frist commendation went from muted to slavish. These religious-right powerbrokers are some real tough guys. We'll wait to see how the base they speak for reacts in the coming weeks and months. Far be it from me to call them easily led...

I'm surprised it took them so long to get with the program.

Has anyone heard Rush today? Is he still pissed or has he been "persuaded" that the Republicans are the winners in this deal?



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digby 5/25/2005 10:59:00 AM |

Tuesday, May 24, 2005

 
Talking Our Game

Oh how I wish I weren't so busy right now so that I could spend all of my time parsing the filibuster deal and thrilling my readers with my insights. Luckily, everybody else is doing it so I don't have to.

There are a couple of points that I'd like to highlight, however. I think Dwight Meredith has the right of it in how low or high the bar has been set with Janice Rogers Brown. It's actually a little bit more complicated than it seems at first glance.

On another point, I recognise that the right being upset and screaming about this is nothing unusual --- they love to be victimized --- and it doesn't indicate that we actually won anything. In the post below, I was referring to the optics of the deal; as long as the right is screeching about this as a sell out and a Democratic victory there is good reason to think that many average folks will come to believe that it is so. The right wing noise machine bleeds into the discourse whether we want it to or not. This is one instance where we want it to.

According to Dobson and Weyrich, the Dems thrust their big swinging man(and woman)hoods at John McCain and they won. This is something we want the American people to think we are capable of. Remember, we are the party that is losing white males by the bucket load. It's this kind of thing that may release them from their adolescent "manly" impulse to side with the alleged tough guys on the right against their own best interests.

The fact is that on the substance, this deal is a compromise that cuts both ways. That's what compromises usually do. But for Democrats, who have virtually no power anyway, it is as important to be seen as strong and resolute as it is to actually win. The game we are really playing is for 2006. Because let's face it, this is a Republican majority government and they can, if they really want to, do any damned thing they please whether we like it or not.

The far right and religious fanatic base is not going to convert to the Democratic party. We need to prove to the moderates, independents and western libertarians that we are tough enough. If James Dobson and Rush Limbaugh want to portray us as dragon slayers, more power to them. They have a big microphone. Let them use it to shout to the world about the big meanie Dems and the sniveling cowardly Republicans who buckled under to them. Works for me.



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digby 5/24/2005 12:54:00 PM |

 
Live To Fight Another Day

My first reaction to the nuclear fizzle was disappointment, partially I admit, because I thought this was a very clever opportunity for Democrats to do the single most important thing they have to do improve their image with the public --- stand up for themselves and show some guts. The "optics" of this were sufficiently murky to make that a risky play, but I felt that we had nothing much to lose. As the Milquetoast Party, anything that shows our willingness to stick together, act on principle and face down the Republicans is indisputably a good thing. This deal doesn't exactly get that done, I'm afraid.

On the other hand, the way the wingnuts are whining and blubbering, it did, so maybe that's all that matters. I'll be very interested in hearing what Rush has to say today. If he's gotten the word to spin this their way, that dynamic will change forthwith. The right prefers the fight so their first instinct when denied one is petulance. But they'll fall into line if their voices from God tell them to.

My only question going forward is this: if Janice Brown is not considered to be an "extraordinary circumstance" then who in the world could Bush possibly nominate who would be worse? Ann Coulter? (She does, after all, call herself a constitutional scholar.) I'm not sure that there are any judges who are to the right of Brown or who express more hostility not only to the constitution but to the enlightenment thought that guides it. The only thing absolutely worse would be to put an Islamic fundamentalist on the supreme court.

I suppose that they may have made some sort of informal agreement as to what constitutes a circumstance more "extraordinary" than this, but I don't know how much trust I would put in such a thing. If Brown, Owen and Pryor are confirmed, the bar has been set very, very low. It's hard to imagine how Bush could come up with anyone even less qualified or philosophically unacceptable than that, but they seem to be able to find the worst judicial freaks in the country so maybe they've been holding out on us. It also pays to remember that Earl Warren wasn't even a judge before he became Chief Justice. Bush could name James Dobson if he wanted to.

In the end, politically, I think the filibuster showdown is a wash. The Republicans didn't get to turn the Senate into the House of Representatives but they will get three unabashed idiots, racists and pre-modern troglodytes on the federal bench. It could have been worse.

More importantly, the fascist element, led by Dick Cheney, was denied the opportunity to flush another little piece of of our system of government down the toilet as a fun exercise of pure power. Each time these bastards rip out another bit our of the constitution or "change the rules" to favor one party government or "reinterpret" the law to favor Republicans, we move one step closer to a country that we will soon not be able to recognise as the one in which we grew up.

This action put that day off --- in the case of the nuclear option, maybe forever. That's a good thing.



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digby 5/24/2005 07:47:00 AM |

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 |