Hullabaloo

Monday, July 04, 2005

 

digby 7/04/2005 12:44:00 PM |

 
All American Dissent

As I read yet another one of these vacuous and ill-informed reactionary screeds that inevitably turn up every independence day, I find that as the years go by they make me more patriotic rather than less. It's comforting to know, I suppose, that some things never change. It's even more comforting to know that things do.

I don't subscribe to the chauvanistic notion that says we must hail America as the greatest country the world has ever known, despite the fact that I love America as much as I love my family. And that's mainly because, as with family, I don't see that as actually being much of a compliment considering all the countries the world has ever known. Talk about faint praise. The problem in my mind is not one of country, culture, religion or ethnic identity; it's one of species. The human species to be exact. There can be no "greatest" country as long as a country is comprised of imperfect and flawed human beings. That doesn't mean I don't love it. But I see it with my eyes wide open.

If we're lucky, we muddle along, taking two steps forward, one step back and eventually make some progress. And to that extent, America has done pretty well, particularly seeing as we started out with the greatest hypocrisy imaginable --- a country whose essence is defined by the concept of freedom was founded as a slave nation. If people want to say we are exceptional, that's one of the most exceptional things about us, that's for sure.

But, there is one thing that has been present from the very beginning and it's the thing that has saved us and will continue to save us. It is the freedom of speech. It often comes under seige during war and from the beginning there has been tension about what level of dissent was acceptable. But perhaps because we were a country formed out of a revolution, there is always a surprisingly strong attachment in the body politic to tolerance of free speech, even if it doesn't feel like it at the time.

Today, Ellen Goodman describes those of us who are against Bush's policies in iraq as the "silenced majority," made mute by the political correctness and intimidation that often emerges during wartime. She is right that the majority of those who oppose Bush on the war feel tremendous pressure --- and there is, as yet, not much cultural approbation for public dissent on the subject. But we should not be afraid. If this country has ever stood for anything it's this. And there have been times worse than this in which people who had much to fear took a stand.

Perhaps the most famous speech by an African American before MLK's classic "I Have A Dream" speech was Frederick Douglass' fourth of July speech of 1852. Talk about politically incorrect. He not only pointed out the incongruity of a slave owning nation celebrating freedom, he did it in no uncertain terms. And he spoke at a time when the country was moving toward violence and in a culture that was racist to the bone. But it didn't shut him up. And the government allowed him to speak. I'll excerpt the speech beginning with its most famous passage:

...At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation's ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy -- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival....

Yes, Frederick Douglas was one of the "blame America First" crowd for sure. And rightly so. The shocking hypocrisy of a freedom loving country that had to fight a civil war to free its own slaves is so mind-bogglingly ironic that to even suggest that America is or was ever perfect is absurd.

But, among many things, we did do one thing very, very right and it's enshrining in the Constitution the right of dissenters like Frederick Douglass (at the time only in the north, to be sure) to speak so frankly about America. Dissent has been this country's savior. If this country is great, it is because we believe that it is the inalienable right, if not the duty, of all Americans to push her to be better than she is.

Read Douglass' entire speech to remind yourself that there have always been dissenters in this country who were willing to call it as they see it. But also read it to absorb Douglas' conclusion. He was right then and he's right now:

...Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented, of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery. "The arm of the Lord is not shortened," and the doom of slavery is certain. I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. While drawing encouragement from "the Declaration of Independence," the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age. Nations do not now stand in the same relation to each other that they did ages ago. No nation can now shut itself up from the surrounding world and trot round in the same old path of its fathers without interference. The time was when such could be done. Long established customs of hurtful character could formerly fence themselves in, and do their evil work with social impunity. Knowledge was then confined and enjoyed by the privileged few, and the multitude walked on in mental darkness. But a change has now come over the affairs of mankind. Walled cities and empires have become unfashionable. The arm of commerce has borne away the gates of the strong city. Intelligence is penetrating the darkest corners of the globe. It makes its pathway over and under the sea, as well as on the earth. Wind, steam, and lightning are its chartered agents. Oceans no longer divide, but link nations together. From Boston to London is now a holiday excursion. Space is comparatively annihilated. -- Thoughts expressed on one side of the Atlantic are distinctly heard on the other.

The far off and almost fabulous Pacific rolls in grandeur at our feet. The Celestial Empire, the mystery of ages, is being solved. The fiat of the Almighty, "Let there be Light," has not yet spent its force. No abuse, no outrage whether in taste, sport or avarice, can now hide itself from the all-pervading light. The iron shoe, and crippled foot of China must be seen in contrast with nature. Africa must rise and put on her yet unwoven garment. 'Ethiopia, shall, stretch. out her hand unto Ood." In the fervent aspirations of William Lloyd Garrison, I say, and let every heart join in saying it:

God speed the year of jubilee
The wide world o'er!
When from their galling chains set free,
Th' oppress'd shall vilely bend the knee,
And wear the yoke of tyranny
Like brutes no more.
That year will come, and freedom's reign,
To man his plundered rights again
Restore.

God speed the day when human blood
Shall cease to flow!
In every clime be understood,
The claims of human brotherhood,
And each return for evil, good,
Not blow for blow;
That day will come all feuds to end,
And change into a faithful friend
Each foe.

God speed the hour, the glorious hour,
When none on earth
Shall exercise a lordly power,
Nor in a tyrant's presence cower;
But to all manhood's stature tower,
By equal birth!
That hour will come, to each, to all,
And from his Prison-house, to thrall
Go forth.

Until that year, day, hour, arrive,
With head, and heart, and hand I'll strive,
To break the rod, and rend the gyve,
The spoiler of his prey deprive --
So witness Heaven!
And never from my chosen post,
Whate'er the peril or the cost,
Be driven

The heart of the American liberal on the fourth of July is always full with the knowledge that there ain't no stopping progress. We'll keep speaking out and step by step, inch by inch, we will get there. Happy 4th everyone.


.
digby 7/04/2005 11:20:00 AM |

Sunday, July 03, 2005

 
Who Could Have Ever Predicted This?

Democrats' hopes of blocking a staunchly conservative Supreme Court nominee on ideological grounds could be seriously undermined by the six-week-old bipartisan deal on judicial nominees, key senators said yesterday.

With President Bush expected to name a successor to Justice Sandra Day O'Connor next week, liberals are laying the groundwork to challenge the nominee if he or she leans solidly to the right on affirmative action, abortion and other contentious issues. But even if they can show that the nominee has sharply held views on matters that divide many Americans, some of the 14 senators who crafted the May 23 compromise appear poised to prevent that strategy from blocking confirmation to the high court, according to numerous interviews.

The pact, signed by seven Democrats and seven Republicans, says a judicial nominee will be filibustered only under "extraordinary circumstances." Key members of the group said yesterday that a nominee's philosophical views cannot amount to "extraordinary circumstances" and that therefore a filibuster can be justified only on questions of personal ethics or character.

The distinction is crucial because Democrats want to force Bush to pick a centrist, not a staunch conservative as many activist groups on the political right desire. Holding only 44 of the Senate's 100 seats, Democrats have no way to block a Republican-backed nominee without employing a filibuster, which takes 60 votes to stop.

GOP leaders, sensing the Democrats' bind, expressed confidence yesterday that the Senate will confirm Bush's eventual nominee, no matter how ideologically rigid. "I think there is every expectation, every reason to believe that there will be no successful filibuster," Majority Whip Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said on "Fox News Sunday."

Under the "Gang of 14" accord, the seven Republican signers agreed to deny Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) the votes he needed to carry out his threat to bar judicial filibusters by changing Senate rules. The seven are implicitly released from the deal if the Democratic signers renege on their end. Yesterday, key players suggested the seven Democrats will automatically be in default if they contend a nominee's ideological views constitute "extraordinary circumstances" that would justify a filibuster.

Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), one of the 14 signers, noted that the accord allowed the confirmation of three Bush appellate court nominees so conservative that Democrats had successfully filibustered them for years: Janice Rogers Brown, William H. Pryor Jr. and Priscilla R. Owen. Because Democrats accepted them under the deal, Graham said on the Fox program, it is clear that ideological differences will not justify a filibuster of a Supreme Court nominee.

"Based on what we've done in the past with Brown, Pryor and Owen," Graham said, "ideological attacks are not an 'extraordinary circumstance.' To me, it would have to be a character problem, an ethics problem, some allegation about the qualifications of the person, not an ideological bent."

Yes, they were just as thick and stupid as we thought. Once they confirmed the wingnut freakshow, they lowered the bar to confirm all wingnut freakshows.

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.

I wouldn't be surprised if he picked him. I'm not sure what it will take to make Democrats understand that making a deal with Republicans is akin to stabbing themselves in the back. It never fails.

Truthfully, I think Bush is going to nominate Gonzales, which would be sort of unremarkable under these circumstances if it weren't for all the executions and the war crimes. Of course the crazies are all saying he's too liberal --- and they'll probably succeed in convincing the dipshit gang of 14 that they got Bush to nominate a moderate. In the end, of course, it's all about rewarding Bush's cronies --- which is, after all, his central governing philosophy. And the nutballs will fall in line and be very happy when he turns out to be somewhere to the right of Clarence Thomas and Pinochet.

And let's not forget that Rehnquist is hanging by a thread so they'll get another bite of the apple by which time the Gang of 14 will have convinced themselves that they've saved the republic by turning the Supreme Court into a federalist society circle jerk.



.
digby 7/03/2005 09:48:00 PM |

 
Telling The Right Story

Atrios questions the WaPo's skepticism (in its article quoting Rove's lawyer Luskin) and points to Lawrence O'Donnell's follow-up post today on The Huffington Report in which he subtly says that Luskin is full of shit.

I don't know that I'd characterize Luskin as a liar, however. He doesn't know exactly what Rove told the grand jury because defense lawyers aren't allowed in there. He knows what his client told him. He also has absolutely no idea what Cooper's notes really say --- and neither does Karl Rove.

Unless there is something really off the wall developing, it seems pretty obvious that the reason that Fitzgerald wanted to talk to Cooper and Miller is to verify that what Rove said was true, whatever it was --- and it's also reasonable to believe that Fitzgerald has some substantial reasons to think it might not be. The law pretty specifically requires prosecutors to exhaust all other possibilities before a judge cites a reporter with contempt for refusing to reveal sources. Fitzgerald knows full well what a hot potato this is. He's not fucking with Time magazine, the NY Times and Karl Rove for his health. He has reason to believe that Matt Cooper and Judith Miller have something to tell him or he wouldn't have gone this far.

I hesitate to bring this up, but it's relevant to this case. From Peter Tiersma, law professor at Loyola University and expert on the language of the law:

One of the famous (or infamous) scenes from the impeachment proceedings is Clinton's remark about the meaning of "is."

During the deposition, Clinton’s lawyer, Robert Bennett, objected to questions being asked about Lewinsky, and made the following statement:

"I question the good faith of counsel, the innuendo of the question. Counsel is fully aware that Ms. Lewinsky has filed--has an affidavit, which they are in possession of, saying that there is absolutely no sex of any kind in any manner, shape or form with President Clinton."

Clinton said nothing.

During the grand jury proceedings, Kenneth Starr accused Clinton of making an “utterly false statement” by not speaking up and correcting his lawyer’s comment. Clinton responded that Bennett’s statement was not necessarily false. He explained: “It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is” and remarked that in the present tense, the statement was true.

Even though Clinton was subjected to much ridicule for this reponse, it is actually completely true. Clinton’s physical relationship with Lewinsky had ended some time before the deposition.

As I mentioned, Rove may have lied to his lawyer or withheld the truth. Clinton certainly didn't come clean with Bennett about Lewinsky, although he was a very clever lawyer himself and understood the language of the law and didn't need a lot of advice about how to avoid perjuring himself. Rove is not a lawyer.

In that light, I find Luskin's language a little bit interesting. He says Rove never "identified" Valerie Plame to Cooper. What does that mean exactly? Did he not identify her by name? Or did he not identify her as a CIA operative? In other words, did Karl Rove call up Matt Cooper and say, " Joe Wilson's wife is a CIA operative and she got him the job," which technically means that he didn't "identify" her, but he sure put old Matt on the trail. It wouldn't have been hard to find out who Joseph Wilson was married to. Or maybe he meant something else entirely. But the wording is unusual -- just as Clinton's wording "I did not have 'sexual relations'with that woman" was strange. Why didn't just say "sex"? Because he was carefully using a legal definition. When lawyers word things in a careful way like this, there's usually a reason for it.

But public opinion doesn't care about such nuances. To them sex and sexual relations are the same thing. And the meaning of "is," is is. And "identifying" and identifying are the same thing. And it is in the court of public opinion that this is finally moving.

So, in spite of what I wrote above, I don't think we should get ourselves caught up in some sort of legal mumbo-jumbo legal definition of what "identify" means. It's their turn to squirm on the parse machine and try to explain why the clear meaning of cover-up isn't cover-up. That's the key my friends, and that's the level on which the American people will come to understand this if we do it right.

People forgave Clinton for lying about an affair. Most Americans, including a good many people reading this blog today, have some personal experience with situations like that. Infidelity is a common occurence of everyday life. People didn't need experts to explain to them what was going on. And they decided that they didn't like the spectacle of the politicians and the law sticking its nose into something so personal.

This isn't about some middle aged jerk getting excited over a chubby eager beaver exposing her thong. This is about a powerful political operative exposing an undercover CIA agent in order to exact revenge and cover up the president's lies about the Iraq war.

Kevin Drum wrote correctly back in 2003, Keep It Simple:

Top White officials blew the identity of an undercover CIA agent, potentially endangering both lives and intelligence operations, solely to gain political payback against a guy who had risen to the top of their enemies list.

That's not so complicated, is it?

That remains true. But the context has changed quite dramatically and there is more to it now. It has become obvious to a majority of Americans that the Bush administration was lying when it made its case for war. The public is much more likely to see this Plame leak for what it was. A cover-up by smear and intimidation. And it looks much more serious in this new light. Here's how I would update it:

The Bush administration lied about its reasons for the war in Iraq. When a critic stepped up to expose one of the lies the Whitehouse blew his wife's identity as an undercover CIA agent. They did this to exact revenge against what they saw as a political enemy and to intimidate those who would further expose the administration, potentially endangering both lives and intelligence operations around the world.

That's the story. And regardless of what comes out about who leaked what to whom first, the sick fucking thing is Rove has actually already admitted to being the biggest asshole on the planet regardless of his legal culpability. When they are apprised of this, in the context of the Iraq lies, people may not be as amenable to forgive or write off as some think. Even if Karl Rove didn't break the law, here is what we already know he did do:

President Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, told the FBI in an interview last October that he circulated and discussed damaging information regarding CIA operative Valerie Plame with others in the White House, outside political consultants, and journalists, according to a government official and an attorney familiar with the ongoing special counsel's investigation of the matter.

But Rove also adamantly insisted to the FBI that he was not the administration official who leaked the information that Plame was a covert CIA operative to conservative columnist Robert Novak last July. Rather, Rove insisted, he had only circulated information about Plame after it had appeared in Novak's column. He also told the FBI, the same sources said, that circulating the information was a legitimate means to counter what he claimed was politically motivated criticism of the Bush administration by Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.

Rove and other White House officials described to the FBI what sources characterized as an aggressive campaign to discredit Wilson through the leaking and disseminating of derogatory information regarding him and his wife to the press, utilizing proxies such as conservative interest groups and the Republican National Committee to achieve those ends, and distributing talking points to allies of the administration on Capitol Hill and elsewhere. Rove is said to have named at least six other administration officials who were involved in the effort to discredit Wilson.

Here's the thing, though. Let's not forget that Wilson was right. There was no yellowcake. Rove and his minions discredited Wilson and destroyed his wife's cover because he was telling the truth.

If Democrats start going on Matthews to talk about this, they need to hammer this point home over and over again. They can debate the Barbizon school of blond former prosecutors all they want, but every single time, their point must be that this was a very serious matter of national security, weapons of mass destruction, lying about war ---- life and death. There was no yellow cake and there were no WMD and Bush and Rove and the rest have been lying their asses off from the beginning. And when anyone in a position to know spoke up, they were subjected to what Karl Rove openly admits to believing is a "legitimate means to counter criticism" --- leaking and disseminating derogatory information about Bush's critics. In common parlance that's called character assasination. And when you do it to discredit someone who is telling the truth it's a cover-up.

Democrats really need to rise to the occasion this time. There remains a serious danger of the whole thing getting purposefully muddied by GOP spin artists as it usually is and there is just no excuse for it. As David Corn said back in 2003:

The strategic point here -- and there is one -- is for the GOP'ers to make this scandal look like another one of those nasty partisan mud-wrestles that the public never likes. Turn it into a political controversy, not a criminal one. Then it all comes out blurry and muddy in the wash. (Bad metaphor, I know.) But that is the intent: to fuzzy up the picture and cause people to shrug their shoulders and say, "it's just politics."

That's why we have to be prepared with a story people can understand and be prepared to tie it in to what they are beginning to see happened with the Iraq war. In Hollywood, screewriters and readers are asked to distill the plot into a single sentence called a logline. Here's the logline for the Plame Scandal:

Karl Rove and others in the White House exposed an undercover CIA agent in order to cover up their lies about Iraq.

Update: Needlenose has a very interesting theory about Judith Miller's role in all this --- and Josh Marshall seems to be leaning in a similar direction.

.
digby 7/03/2005 10:35:00 AM |

 
Grover's Darkroom

I'm sure that most of you have read that the Rev. Lou Sheldon, unofficial new head of the National Park Service, made a stink that there wasn't any footage of conservative protests in a Lincoln Memorial tourist film and successfully got the NPS to add such footage to its reel:

The video gave the impression that Lincoln would have supported abortion and homosexuality," said the Web site of Rev. Louis Sheldon's Traditional Values Coalition. It cited footage showing rallies at the memorial by abortion and gay rights supporters and war opponents but no similar footage from Christian and conservative interests.

"Absent from the video were any Promise Keepers marches or Marches for Jesus rallies at the capital. The video was totally skewed to present only a leftist viewpoint," the Web site said.

What I didn't know until I read it at The Capetbagger Report is this:

Here's a classic example of how far conservative thinking has strayed from reality. In order to make the Lincoln Memorial's tourist video more conservative, the NPS will add video of a 1997 rally held by the Promise Keepers and footage of a well-attended march in Washington after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. What's wrong with these? Nothing — except they weren't held at the Lincoln Memorial.

For whatever reason, most of the major events at the memorial, throughout the 20th century, have dealt with progressive caucus (civil rights, opposition to war, gender equality, etc.). In the interest of "balance," the right is demanding the addition of footage from events that took place elsewhere.

Now what does this remind me of? Oh yeah.







What's really funny is that the progressive tradition of mass protest seems to have become something the "traditional values" people want a piece of. NOW they want to be hippies. It figures. They wait until they are deep into middle age to finally get hip --- 35 years too late. Next thing you know they'll take up pot smoking and student sit-ins.



.
digby 7/03/2005 08:48:00 AM |

Saturday, July 02, 2005

 
Everyone Should Hate France

Tom Friedman is right. France is a real hellhole. Ask anyone who spends any time there. Like Richard Perle, neocon France-hater.

I can't understand those fools who think that France has the best definition of the good life. Who would ever think that great food, great weather, great wine, interesting political conversation,great museums, great writers -- long vacations, long meals, light religion, universal health care, laid back sexual attitudes, and beautiful countryside are worth giving up shopping for? They trade money for time to read, think, rest, talk and all those other useless wastes of time.

That's unacceptable. Nobody should go there. Especially workaholic Americans. Not that there's anything wrong with workaholism. I realize it's the highest state of Randian being. Especially if you are working a couple of low paying, low satisfaction jobs. God wants you to work hard and buy a lot of shit at Walmart for Jesus. So don't go to France. They don't have anything good to buy.



.
digby 7/02/2005 05:27:00 PM |

 
The Iraq Group


Update: The story originally posted to E&P WAS the story I refer to below from February of 2004. They've since removed it. The Sam Gardiner stuff is still interesting, however, as we contemplate the DSM's --- the other white meat.


Atrios links to this new E&P scoop that says the Plame Grand Jury just subpoenaed documents from the Iraq Group, which set off some bells. It turns out the Grand Jury has asked for documents from this group before and I wrote about it back in February of '04. (Good to know I haven't completely blown all my brain cells.)

Here's what I wrote at the time. Looking at it now it takes on some unusual (although likely completely coincidental) significance:

According to Newsday(link now broken) today:

Also sought in the wide-ranging document requests contained in three grand jury subpoenas to the Executive Office of President George W. Bush are records created in July by the White House Iraq Group, a little-known internal task force established in August 2002 to create a strategy to publicize the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

So, it now turns out that the "Iraq Group," the supervisory marketing arm of the Iraq march to war is in the sights of the Plame grand jury. Jim Wilkinson is the one member of the administration who is simultaneously a member of the OGC and the Iraq Group.

The thing to remember about both the OGC and the Iraq Group is that they are not just spin artists. They are propagandists. They were very involved with Alisdair Campbell in the "sexing up" of the WMD threat, so it will be very interesting to see if these documents are turned over without a lot of national security hoo-hah.

There is a big story in those documents, perhaps much bigger even than Plame, although the subpoenaes are only for July 2003 so they won't reveal the really interesting stuff about the blatant WMD lies. Because, not to go into too much tin-foil hat territory, there is a very interesting story to be told about the unprecedented "PR" sell-job that the White House coordinated to convince the American (and British) people that Saddam was a "grave and gathering" danger.

Many of you have probably read the paper written by Sam Gardiner, the retired colonel who taught at the National War College, the Air War College and the Naval Warfare College ( in PDF here) in which he claims to have found more than 50 instances of demonstrably false stories planted in the press in the run up to the war and charges the OCG and the Iraq Group as the culprits. This overview of the paper, originally published in The Edge brings up something quite interesting that ties it into the Plame affair:

Colonel Sam Gardiner (USAF, Ret.) has identified 50 false news stories created and leaked by a secretive White House propaganda apparatus. Bush administration officials are probably having second thoughts about their decision to play hardball with former US Ambassador Joseph Wilson. Joe Wilson is a contender. When you play hardball with Joe, you better be prepared to deal with some serious rebound.

After Wilson wrote a critically timed New York Times essay exposing as false George W. Bush's claim that Iraq had purchased uranium from Niger, high officials in the White House contacted several Washington reporters and leaked the news that Wilson's wife was a CIA agent.

Wilson isn't waiting for George W. Bush to hand over the perp. In mid-October, the former ambassador began passing copies of an embarrassing internal report to reporters across the US. The-Edge has received copies of this document.

The 56-page investigation was assembled by USAF Colonel (Ret.) Sam Gardiner. "Truth from These Podia: Summary of a Study of Strategic Influence, Perception Management, Strategic Information Warfare and Strategic Psychological Operations in Gulf II" identifies more than 50 stories about the Iraq war that were faked by government propaganda artists in a covert campaign to "market" the military invasion of Iraq.

[...]

According to Gardiner, "It was not bad intelligence" that lead to the quagmire in Iraq, "It was an orchestrated effort [that] began before the war" that was designed to mislead the public and the world. Gardiner's research lead him to conclude that the US and Britain had conspired at the highest levels to plant "stories of strategic influence" that were known to be false.

The Times of London described the $200-million-plus US operation as a "meticulously planned strategy to persuade the public, the Congress, and the allies of the need to confront the threat from Saddam Hussein."

The multimillion-dollar propaganda campaign run out of the White House and Defense Department was, in Gardiner's final assessment "irresponsible in parts" and "might have been illegal."

"Washington and London did not trust the peoples of their democracies to come to the right decisions," Gardiner explains. Consequently, "Truth became a casualty. When truth is a casualty, democracy receives collateral damage." For the first time in US history, "we allowed strategic psychological operations to become part of public affairs... [W]hat has happened is that information warfare, strategic influence, [and] strategic psychological operations pushed their way into the important process of informing the peoples of our two democracies."

So many secrets. Is it ever possible to keep things like this from unravelling eventually?

Thanks to commenter S who lifted this great 2003 Gore Vidal quote from Americablog:

Yet you saw in the '60s how the Johnson administration collapsed under the weight of its own hubris. Likewise with Nixon. And now with the discontent over how the war in Iraq is playing out, don't you get the impression that Bush is headed for the same fate?

I actually see something smaller tripping him up: this business over outing the wife of Ambassador Wilson as a CIA agent. It's often these small things that get you. Something small enough for a court to get its teeth into. Putting this woman at risk because of anger over what her husband has done is bitchy, dangerous to the nation, dangerous to other CIA agents. This resonates more than Iraq. I'm afraid that 90 percent of Americans don't know where Iraq is and never will know, and they don't care.

Yep. It's often the little things, the sloppy things that trip them up. 3rd rate burglary. Pissant revenge for a critical op-ed. Dumb stuff. We don't know if any of this will stick, it's actually unlikely. But if something does, it will be something like this --- Karl Rove personally involving himself in outing Valerie Plame because he was ticked off --- and then lying to the FBI about it.

There's a lot of speculation that this is a rat-fuck and it may be. But, I think that Karl's playing very close to the edge if he's doing this on purpose. He's the guy who stands to get scalded if this grand Jury turns up something. Unless this entire investigation is a corrupt White House inside job (and you never know) it's very risky. He's a guy who takes risks, so he may have done this, but my guess is that in the summer of 2003, facing the firsrt real criticism of Bush's presidency, he got mad and fucked up and he has been dog-paddling ever since, hoping it goes away.




.
digby 7/02/2005 01:20:00 PM |

 
Wonkette Knows All

Last night I wondered if the journalistic brotherhood was breaking a silence on what they know about the Plame case now that Matt Cooper has been thrown to the wolves. Back on Wednesday, Wonkette wrote this:

Facing jail, Matt and Judy might talk, or -- worse for He Who Must Not Be Named (Karl Rove) -- they'll go to jail with lips still sealed but outrage on the part of friends and colleagues will shake lose which White House source outed Plame to smear Wilson.

I suspect this is exactly what happened with O'Donnell. The question now is how many other people in Washington know who the leaker is? Clearly, Wonkette thinks she does. The panel on Mclaughlin was unruffled at the revelation. Perhaps the real question, though, is how many members of the press corps know that is was Karl Rove who leaked Plame's name?

Now I understand that whores like Cliff May and others would feel no compunction about covering for karl Rove. That's their bread and butter. But what about these buddies of Matt Cooper who apparently know all about this? And what ethical guidelines say you must keep this quiet until your friend's boss stabs him in the back? I don't get it. If Cooper had folded and then everybody piled on saying they knew, then maybe I could at least understand the logic. But what's the logic in doing it like this?

Moreover, is it normal that members of the press know the answer to a major mystery but they withhold it, as a group, from the public? I thought their job was to reveal the answers to major mysteries. In fact, this seems like the scoop of the decade. Back in the day, reporters were racing to get the news of semen stains and talking points on the air mere seconds before their rivals. Now, they all keep quiet?

This is a very interesting professional and ethical question for the media. Does the reporter's privilege extend to his friends? Here you apparently have quite a few members of the DC press corps with a piece of very juicy information (allegedly) about the most powerful political operative in the United States --- information that also has to do with an important matter of national security and a Justice department investigation. In some sort of friendship extension of the reporter's privilege they say nothing. Amazing.

And during the time they say nothing an election is held in which the political operative in question works feverishly to smear his client's opponent with scurrilous charges of borderline treason and cowardly behavior during wartime. The entire election is premised on the fact that the president, this man's client, is the only one capable of handling national security. His prior campaign had been waged with an overt promise to bring honor and integrity back to the White House. Still nothing.

Finally, when their friend seems headed to jail and his boss has agreed to turn over notes, they start to step up and reveal what they know.

Hookay. I think it's time to convene another conference on blogger ethics and professional journalistic standards. I get so confused about these things.


Update: Here's O'Donnell's explanation on the Huffington Post today:

Rove Blew CIA Agent's Cover

I revealed in yesterday's taping of the McLaughlin Group that Time magazine's emails will reveal that Karl Rove was Matt Cooper's source. I have known this for months but didn't want to say it at a time that would risk me getting dragged into the grand jury.

McLaughlin is seen in some markets on Friday night, so some websites have picked it up, including Drudge, but I don't expect it to have much impact because McLaughlin is not considered a news show and it will be pre-empted in the big markets on Sunday because of tennis.

Since I revealed the big scoop, I have had it reconfirmed by yet another highly authoritative source. Too many people know this. It should break wide open this week. I know Newsweek is working on an 'It's Rove!' story and will probably break it tomorrow.

Well, at least Karl got his boy elected instead of that traitor John Kerry, so that's good.


.
digby 7/02/2005 09:31:00 AM |

 
Lead, Follow or Have A Drink

Happy belated Birthday to Martini Republic, a vastly entertaining blog in all respects, and one that is particularly indispensible for astute commentary on LA and California politics. And that's important because something's happening here (what it is ain't exactly clear.) I think I'm seeing the beginnings of a middle class revolt. It's hard to know if it's going to go anywhere or if its roots are deeper than Arnold dissatisfaction, but the face of rebellion in California is the face of a fresh faced, soccer mom school teacher. This is something to keep your eyes on as the debt squeeze and the generational squeeze of kids on one end and grandparents on the other begins to really take its toll on the middle class.

But for a little walk in LA sunshine, and there's always plenty of that, check out MR's Joseph Mailander's tribute to our latin heritage on the occasion of our first latino mayor's (can you believe it?) inauguration day.


Here's looking at you, kidz.


.
digby 7/02/2005 08:03:00 AM |

 
Who Told Rove?

As long as we're enjoying ourselves speculating about frog marching and the like, here's an interesting theory from super-smart commenter Sara:

Has anyone here carefully read Joe Wilson's Book?

He provides plenty of carefully crafted information -- for example see p. 443-445.

Wilson indicates that the work up on him beginning March, 2003, turned up the information on Valerie -- which was then shared with Karl Rove who then circulated it through Administration and neo-Conservative circles. He cites conservative journalists who claimed to have had the information before the Novak column.

So the question is -- in the work-up process beginning about March 2003, who had the information re: Plame?

I think it was John Bolton. At the time he was State Department Deputy Secretary with the portfolio in WMD and Nuclear Proliferation. Assuming that Valerie Plame's identity was that of a NOC (No Official Cover) the information about her would have been highly classified, compartmentalized, and only those with a need to know would know. Bolton's Job probably gave him that status. However to receive it he would have to sign off on the classification -- that is he would have to agree to retain the security the CIA had established.

At the time, Bolton had two assistants who also worked in the White House in Cheney's office, David Wurmser and John Hannah. Their names have been around as the potential leakers -- Hannah if you remember is the guy who kept putting the Yellow Cake back in Bush's speeches even though Tenet had demanded it be removed.

So -- I think we have a game of catch going on here -- or maybe some version of baseball, and the scoring is Bolton to Wurmser and Hannah, to Cheney (and/or Libby) to Rove.

I suspect getting Rove on Perjury is more or less step one in walking back the path of the ball.

Lest there be any doubt about Bolton's true calling, remember, he was king of the Florida Recount.



.
digby 7/02/2005 07:35:00 AM |

Friday, July 01, 2005

 
Big Fish

According to Catch, Lawrence O'Donnell named Karl Rove as the guy who fingered Plame to Matt Cooper and said he (O'Donnell) expects to be subpoenaed for saying it.

Interesting, if true. Are some members of the entertainment industrial complex prepared to storm the barricades now that one of their own has been left dangling in the wind?

UPDATE:

Here's the dirt from E&P

MSNBC Analyst Says Cooper Documents Reveal Karl Rove as Source in Plame Case

By E&P Staff

Published: July 01, 2005 11:30 PM ET

NEW YORK Now that Time Inc. has turned over documents to federal court, presumably revealing who its reporter, Matt Cooper, identified as his source in the Valerie Plame/CIA case, speculation runs rampant on the name of that source, and what might happen to him or her. Tonight, on the syndicated McLaughlin Group political talk show, Lawrence O'Donnell, senior MSNBC political analyst, claimed to know that name--and it is, according to him, top White House mastermind Karl Rove.

Here is the transcript of O'Donnell's remarks:

"What we're going to go to now in the next stage, when Matt Cooper's e-mails, within Time Magazine, are handed over to the grand jury, the ultimate revelation, probably within the week of who his source is.

"And I know I'm going to get pulled into the grand jury for saying this but the source of...for Matt Cooper was Karl Rove, and that will be revealed in this document dump that Time magazine's going to do with the grand jury."

Other panelists then joined in discussing whether, if true, this would suggest a perjury rap for Rove, if he told the grand jury he did not leak to Cooper.

UPDATE:

Talk Left examines the possibility of a perjury charge.


.
digby 7/01/2005 06:24:00 PM |

 
FYI

Last week Karl Rove appeared on Joe Scarborough. Here is part of what he said:

SCARBOROUGH: Talking about getting—getting things through the United States Congress, let's talk about not so much about John Bolton, but what the problems with Bolton may mean when this summer, the president may be trying to get a Supreme Court nominee through.

You had John McCain and six other Republicans team up with Robert Byrd. And they came up with this anti-filibuster deal. Did you feel like John McCain and those Republican senators betrayed the president, betrayed the Republican Party, betrayed conservatives across America?

ROVE: Look, John McCain, for example, is one of the strongest advocates for an up-or-down vote on John Bolton. We wish that the issue of judicial nominations had been settled once and for all.

As you know, for 200 and some-odd years, judges, judicial nominations were not routinely filibustered. In fact, the only time an appellate nominee faced a filibuster was in—under Lyndon Johnson. And if you go back and read the words of Democrats and Republicans who were discussing the filibuster, they were anguished-filled, because they felt it was the only way that they could cause Lyndon Johnson to rethink the nomination of a person who had received payments under the table from a foundation while in public service.

And, eventually, for those reasons, Johnson withdrew him, because it became an ethical concern.

SCARBOROUGH: So, what happens this summer? Obviously, you know as well as anybody—you can go back to Thomas in '91 -- Bork in '87. These summer appointments can be some of the dirtiest political battles that America sees.

ROVE: Well...

SCARBOROUGH: How is the president going to get a conservative through the United States Senate for the Supreme Court if he is having trouble getting John Bolton through?

ROVE: Well, first of all, look, John Bolton is going to be the United States ambassador to the United Nations. We will get either an up-or-down vote or he will be the ambassador one way...

(CROSSTALK)

SCARBOROUGH: A recess—possible recess appointment?

ROVE: Well, I'm not going to—we have got plenty of options we're going to...

(CROSSTALK)

SCARBOROUGH: But that's one possibility that is open...

(CROSSTALK)

ROVE: The best way for the United States to effect reform at the United Nations is to send a straight-talker to the United Nations.

And if the Democrats think they are doing themselves some favor by blocking his nomination, they are kidding themselves.

SCARBOROUGH: They're just not going to succeed?

ROVE: They are not going to succeed.

And if there is a—we don't know if there will be a Supreme Court vacancy. But if there is, I am confident the president will nominate a qualified mainstream conservative, somebody who will strictly interpret the Constitution and not legislate from the bench. And I am also confident that, because of the ability and talent of that individual, that they will be approved by the United States Senate.

If the Democrats attempt to filibuster, they will suffer politically, like they did in '02 and '04.

What a fucking thug.

They don't want people to see them losing the war in Iraq or failing to quell terrorism. Instead the chickenhawk army is going to stage a summer pageant in which they will take the fight to the only enemy they have ever beaten (barely) --- Democrats.

But with a 40% approval rating and allies like the wild-eyed Dobson freakshow, it may not be as easy as they think. It could be that the big tough Republican bullies have worn out their welcome with the American people. We'll soon see.

I'd like to make one thing clear. I don't see this as doom for the Democrats. The public is wavering in their support for Bush and they aren't giving him the benefit of the doubt anymore. If the Dems stick together on this it is a very powerful message, regardless of the ultimate outcome. Remember, they believe that the perception of winning is more important than actually winning. That's how we get them. Deny them that perception.

Gotta keep the heat on the gang of 14.



.
digby 7/01/2005 04:32:00 PM |

 
Meltdown

I normally hate to predict things in too much detail because, you know, I can't actually tell the future. But, in the case of this Supreme Court fight I honestly think that Brad Plumer and Kevin and some of my commenters to the post below are on the wrong track. I doubt very seriously that Bush is gaming this in this way:

Some lunatic winger will get nominated — maybe even Jance Rogers Brown — the Democrats in the Senate will say, "Oh hell no" and launch a filibuster. So the battle will rage on for a while, Bush's "base" will get riled up and motivated to send in lots and lots of money, conservative judicial activists will blast their opponents with fairly superior firepower, and bobbing heads in the media will start carping on those "obstructionist" Democrats (bonus carping here if the nominee is a woman, minority, and/or Catholic).

Finally Bush will give a very somber speech about withdrawing his nominee, announce that he's very disappointed in the Senate, toss in a few bonus 9/11 references, and nominate some slightly-less-lunatic ultraconservative instead.

That's the Bork-Scalia scenario. And it worked out very well for the wingnuts, indeed. They've been feeding off the Bork defeat for years while they have the King of Opus Dei running amuck on the court. What's not to like?

But, let me ask you, when has Bush ever done a strategic retreat on anything? Homeland security is the only thing I can think of and I think that stemmed from a belated realization that they really would like to have some fat patronage jobs and a new entrenched "security" bureaucracy that tilted Republican by nature and temperament. It wasn't a plan.

Here is how this White House views itself:

President Bush subscribes to the momentum theory of politics: that success breeds success, and political capital accrues to the one who spends political capital.

That comes from this column by Dan Froomkin which examines that stunning article in which it is revealed that the National Security Council has hired an expert on public opinion during wartime. That expert, widely quoted in various places for the last couple of years, pretty much sums up what the White House believes about the war --- and I think what they believe about governing generally. You govern by giving people the impression that you are winning:

Yes, the very same White House that outwardly exudes contempt for polls has in fact recently hired a prominent academic pollster onto the National Security Council staff and has concluded that the key to public support for the war is not the number of casualties in Iraq, nor whether the war was right or wrong -- but whether people feel like we're going to win.

Being willing to stage a retreat --- particularly on something about which the base is rabid and out of control --- at a time when his popularity is sliding precipitously is not believable to me. I think they are desperate to show strength and get a big win that makes the Dems look weak. That is their theory of governance. The more you win the more people love you.

In their minds it's the public perception of losing on Bolton, social security, Schiavo and Iraq that is causing their problems, not Bolton, social security, Schiavo or Iraq themselves. I think they want a big fight and they expect a big win. And they want that win to "create political capital" with which to consolidate their majority.


Update: Jeffrey Dubner says the same thing:

But this president will not allow himself to appear to be defeated on something so important. He certainly won't set himself up for failure, as Brad predicts, even if such a failure is deemed to be a PR victory that results in an ultra-conservative justice anyway. Just not, as his father might say, gonna do it.

Correction: The Bork-Scalia analogy is entirely wrong. Scalia was confirmed before Bork. But he still is the King of Opus Dei running amuck --- and they'd like nothing more than to have a few more of him. Luckily, while he was confirmed 98-0, the Democrats have since wised up. The question is whether they have the will to "Bork" from the position of a minority party.




.
digby 7/01/2005 11:32:00 AM |

 
Nucular Summer

O'Connor Retires. I'm sure everyone realizes this, but the fact that it's O'Connor means that we are going to have a political bloodbath. If it had been Rehnquist, it would have been no harm no foul if Junior had placated his base with another wingnut. O'Connor is a swing vote, which means that the theocrats and the anti-environmentalists and the corporate whores have a chance to do some real damage. The base is slavering for a chance to overturn Roe vs Wade and Karl needs to give them something for all their trouble.

I would suggest that everyone get ready to bombard the "gang of fourteen" the minute that Bush announces his choice, who I have little doubt will be completely unacceptable. They want this fight. It's the essence of their play to the base strategy and it gets the news off Iraq.

There can be no compromise on this seat.

7 Republicans:

* John McCain
* Lindsey Graham
* John Warner
* Olympia Snowe
* Susan Collins
* Mike DeWine
* Lincoln Chafee


7 Democrats:

* Joe Lieberman
* Robert Byrd
* Ben Nelson
* Mary Landrieu
* Daniel Inouye
* Mark Pryor
* Ken Salazar

Oh, and perhaps today is a good day to recall that while Sandra day O'Connor will always be remembered as the first female Supreme Court Justice, her legacy was tarnished irreparably during election 2000:

[A]t an election-night party on Nov. 7, surrounded for the most part by friends and familiar acquaintances, [Justice O'Connor] let her guard drop for a moment when she heard the first critical returns shortly before 8 p.m. Sitting in her hostess's den, staring at a small black-and-white television set, she visibly started when CBS anchor Dan Rather called Florida for Al Gore. "This is terrible," she exclaimed. She explained to another partygoer that Gore's reported victory in Florida meant that the election was "over," since Gore had already carried two other swing states, Michigan and Illinois.

Moments later, with an air of obvious disgust, she rose to get a plate of food, leaving it to her husband to explain her somewhat uncharacteristic outburst. John O'Connor said his wife was upset because they wanted to retire to Arizona, and a Gore win meant they'd have to wait another four years. O'Connor, the former Republican majority leader of the Arizona State Senate and a 1981 Ronald Reagan appointee, did not want a Democrat to name her successor. Two witnesses described this extraordinary scene to Newsweek. Responding through a spokesman at the high court, O'Connor had no comment.

Jeffrey Toobin reported this:

On . . . the day of the Supreme Court's first opinion on the election, O'Connor and her husband had attended a party for about thirty people at the home of a wealthy couple named Lee and Julie Folger. When the subject of the election controversy came up, Justice O'Connor was livid. "You just don't know what those Gore people have been doing," she said. "They went into a nursing home and registered people that they shouldn't have. It was outrageous." It was unclear where the justice had picked up this unproved accusation, which had circulated only in the more eccentric right-wing outlets, but O'Connor recounted the story with fervor.

She had to stay another four years just to save face after that, but now she's free to let Bush appoint her replacement, which was always her intention. That man owes her big time, both for his presidency and now the chance to shape the supreme court for a generation. Her tenure as the first female justice will very likely end with a replacement who will vote to overturn Roe vs Wade. That's quite an achievement.

Still, despite her partisanship, she's been incoherent enough that she could be counted on to at least give some cases a 50/50 chance at a decent outcome. Another Scalia and we are entering a new dark age.

It's probable that Bush will be looking at replacing her with another woman. On the other hand, being Republicans, they will likely think that having one token female on the court is enough and use her "slot" for a more electorally friendly minority. In any case, I'll be very surprised if he chooses someone in the least bit acceptable to anyone but the James Dobbsians. The want to set loose the hounds of hell.



.
digby 7/01/2005 08:23:00 AM |

Thursday, June 30, 2005

 
Scariest Thing I've Read All Week

Frances Fragos Townsend, the White House homeland security adviser, said the changes would allow Mr. Negroponte to wield influence and seek information down to the level of each of the F.B.I.'s field offices, though she noted that the attorney general, Alberto R. Gonzales, would remain responsible for ensuring that intelligence activities in the United States did not violate American law.

I feel so much safer now.




Via Daou Report and Corrente



.
digby 6/30/2005 12:55:00 PM |

Wednesday, June 29, 2005

 
Thug Life

It's bad enough that that hideous little creep Tom Davis (R-jackboot) drops a horsehead in major league baseball's bed saying that it shouldn't give the DC franchise to an investment group that includes George Soros. The real insult is that he does it so openly to tilt the field to the president's friend, fundraiser and former business partner in the Texas Rangers, Fred "count the Jews" Malek.

I know that it does no good to bring up Clinton rules and wonder what the allegedly responsible press would have made of such a thing if it had happened in 1993. We know that it would have been turned into a non-stop feeding frenzy with blond former prosecutors and strange looking Republican men with comb-overs dolefully wringing their hands night after night on Matthews as they bemoaned the corruption of mom, apple pie and Murika's pastime by Bill and his corrupt hillbilly friends.

But you would think that a Republican congressman (with the clout to haul all the MLB owners in front of his kangaroo steroid committee again and ream them out for another 8 hours) publicly strong-arming them with threats to lift their anti-trust exemption and clearly indicating that he'd prefer they picked a Nixon stooge and Bush pal, would cause a little ripple. The only place I've seen any speculation about this is in the WaPo sports section:

You can't help wondering what's behind the outrageous attack on Soros, who isn't even a major partner in the bid for the Nats. (Local entrepreneur Jon Ledecky is the real bidder.) Isn't it strange that rival bidder Fred Malek, the head of the Washington Baseball club, just happens to be a very big GOP fundraiser? And isn't it strange that, in a telephone interview, Davis went out of his way to praise Malek's bid? And isn't it strange that these attacks on Soros from Republicans came on the very day that Ledecky and his partners were being interviewed by MLB?

Forget Soros (although the irony is so thick you can slice it, considering the "jeweyness" of the whole thing.) Malek is the story. I know that the press thinks this Iraq thing and the whole Bush lying and incompetence thing is so, like, 2004. But can't they even get it up to complain about baseball being threatened by Republican thugs? Not even that?

Now that I think about it, I've long noticed that sportwriters are among the last real journalists around. Whenever politics and sports converge they are the first ones who get to the essence of the story. Costas was tough last night on Larry King. Olbermann is always good. Since the political writers love the horse race stories so much maybe the major dailies should just have them switch places with the sports staff. It could be the answer to everybody's problems.


Update: Jesse has more on Malek. And I see that TAPPED tilled this soil yesterday.


.
digby 6/29/2005 06:16:00 PM |

 
Requiem For Jeff Gerth

I thought it was rather strange that Michael Tomasky wrote a column justifiably skewering Ed Klein for his shoddy journalism and then threw in this bit toward the end:

The problem runs deeper even than Klein. Today, with the explosion of Web sites, all sorts of propagandists and provocateurs who aren't journalists can hide behind the label when it comes to First Amendment protection. Can they write anything they please about public figures, knowing that they can print lies as long as Sullivan is in force?

He explains himself today:

I didn’t mean to impugn the established liberal blogs, which I explained to Duncan Black when I ran into him just a few hours after seeing Markos. My list of bloggers to whom I was definitely not referring includes but is by no means limited to: Josh Marshall, Mark Schmitt, Matt (and all his cohorts, at Tapped of course and at TPMCafe), Markos, Duncan, Kevin Drum (and guests), Jerome Armstrong, Arianna Huffington et alia, Ezra Klein, &c &c &c.

My point, which I think remains valid, was that the blogosphere in general is a milieu that is somewhat more likely than the milieu of traditional journalism to produce reckless error.

I don't think that's possible. I've read a lot of garbage on-line, but none that had the kind of corporate backing and public relations push that Klein's book has gotten from a mainstream publisher --- and Klein's book, as Tomasky points out, is just filled with lies. And mainstream news organizations are giving him a national platform with which to spread them.

The only time that I'm aware of outright reckless error is from the rightwing blogosphere during the Rather scandal --- and mainstream journalism was just as bad and rewarded them for it.

The truth is that after watching the three ring circus known as the Whitewater scandals remain uncorrected even after all this time --- and reading pathetic explanations like this from top Washington reporter John Harris --- it's clear that mainstream news constantly commits reckless errors, on both the micro and macro level, and then rationalizes them with all the aplomb of a second grader caught with his hand in the cookie jar:

People tend to forget, for understandable reasons because the Lewinsky scandal was such a sensational affair, that 1997 was in its own way a very sullen, snippy, disagreeable year in the relationship between the White House and the press. Most news organizations -- the Washington Post included -- were devoting lots of resources, lots of coverage, to the campaign fund-raising scandal which grew out of the '96 campaign, and there were a lot of very tantalizing leads in those initial controversies. In the end they didn't seem to lead anyplace all that great. But there were tons of questions raised that certainly, to my mind, merited aggressive coverage.

The White House was unbelievably resentful -- they thought it was much ado about nothing, they thought that this was a scandal-obsessed press corps. Mike McCreary -- and he's a really great guy -- even before Lewinsky he was in a really pissy mood and I don't blame him for him for it, and I don't doubt that it was unpleasant and that his feelings of resentment were genuine, but he was snapping back at us, angry phone calls and whatnot. From the White House's vantage point the whole thing was not on the level, they thought this was standard political fund-raising that was undeniably a little sloppy but wasn't that big a deal, and we were trying to turn it into the next Watergate.

It was much ado about nothing. The fund-raising scandals didn't rise from the 96 campaign. They rose from the right wing noise machine like all the rest. And what he fails to mention is that this was after four long years of one David Bossie/American Spectator bullshit spoonfed psuedo-scandal after another.

In a cluttered office tucked away in one of the many red-brick office condominiums that ring Washington, D.C., David Bossie, source par excellence to journalists dredging the Whitewater swamp, handles one of the eighteen calls he says he gets each hour. This one is from Bruce Ingersoll, a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal. The discussion centers on bonds. "I have a whole file on bond transactions," Bossie tells Ingersoll. "I will get a report on what I find. I know you are trying to move quickly on this. You want to come out before they come out." A few minutes later Bossie says, "I don't know what I have to give you," but promises to spend the next couple of hours going through materials. "You're on deadline, I understand that." He then points Ingersoll in another direction. "Have you done anything on Beverly? [Presumably that is Beverly Bassett Schaffer, former Arkansas Securities Commissioner.] You guys ought to look into that. There will be lawsuits against the Rose law firm," he adds.

All that has been known since the above article was written for Columbia Journalism Review in 1994 and was fully explored by 1996, when Gene Lyons published the articles that became "Fools For Scandal" in Harper's magazine.

The press performed abominably throughout that period and all the way through the 2000 election, using the same methods of accepting Republican gossip and smears as the basis for their stories:

In the film we see RNC glee as AP accepts their oppo research on a Gore misstatement during the first debate . During their months of filming BBC producers also observed producers for NBC's Tim Russert among others calling to enquire if the team had any new material. This was apparently normal trading on both sides.

RNC researcher Griffin comments in the film: "It's an amazing thing when you have topline producers and reporters calling you and saying 'we trust you.... we need your stuff.'"

And it's not like it's exactly covered itself with glory since then. (Got WMD?)

Really, the blogopshere is the least of journalism's credibility problems. And while I'm sure that it's quite frightening to think of rogue character assassins running around the internet smearing people, it's very hard to see how they could be any worse than the mainstream press already is.



.
digby 6/29/2005 03:55:00 PM |

 
God Told Him

Kevin writes here about how the administration short-changed the VA budget and says:

It's one more piece of evidence that the Bushies really did expect a cakewalk in Iraq and didn't bother planning for additional casualties.

We have a witness who says that Bush absolutely didn't count on casualties. remember this?

Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson says he warned President Bush before U.S. troops invaded Iraq that the United States would sustain casualties but that Bush responded, "Oh, no, we're not going to have any casualties."

White House and campaign advisers denied Bush made the comment, with adviser Karen Hughes saying, "I don't believe that happened. He must have misunderstood or misheard it."

[...]

Robertson, in an interview with CNN that aired Tuesday night, said God had told him the war would be messy and a disaster. When he met with Bush in Nashville, Tenn., before the war Bush did not listen to his advice, Robertson said, and believed Saddam Hussein was an evil tyrant who needed to be removed.

"He was just sitting there, like, 'I'm on top of the world,' and I warned him about this war," Robertson said.

"I had deep misgivings about this war, deep misgivings. And I was trying to say, 'Mr. President, you better prepare the American people for casualties.' 'Oh, no, we're not going to have any casualties.' 'Well,' I said, 'it's the way it's going to be.' And so, it was messy. The Lord told me it was going to be, A, a disaster and, B, messy."

The evidence suggest that Bush really did believe that there wouldn't be any casualties. But, of course, the evidence also suggests that Pat Robertson is a delusional head-case. So which religious conman was lying?



.
digby 6/29/2005 02:16:00 PM |

 
Sophisticated

Not wanting to risk remaining in Russia, Vakhitov went to stay with relatives in Tajikistan. Then events became even more fantastic. Vakhitov and his friends were taken hostage by militants from the Islamist “Uzbekistan” movement, and took them to Afghanistan. In Kabul, the hostages were accused of collaborating with the FSB. The tortures and interrogations began anew.

That was in the fall of 2001. Afghanistan was attacked by the Americans. The regime in the country was overturned, while the prison where Vakhitov was being held had its flag changed.

Vakhitov and his friends were waiting to be rescued from day to day. But the U.S. military instead acted exactly like their Russian counterparts. After September 11, they needed culprits. And all Muslims became suspects.

Especially valuable were Arabs. According to Vakhitov, they were bought in Afghanistan for $5,000 each and taken to Guantanamo.
"They sold everyone. Beggars off the street, the deaf, dumb, and blind. I had a 104-year-old man along with me. And once again, no court investigation," Vakhitov says. And that was how he ended up in Cuba at the Delta camp.

"In Russia the torture is primitive. They mostly just beat me. They would hang me up, and burn me with cigarettes. At Guantanamo, the torture was more sophisticated than in Russian prisons. Our special forces are way behind in that sense. There was more psychological pressure: you couldn’t be left alone for a minute. We fought to have the toilet covered with a blanket. We went on hunger strikes to protest against officers trampling on the Koran and throwing it in the toilet."

Gradually, Russians are beginning to use the experience of their Western colleagues. Vakhitov says that after the Americans handed him over to Russian prosecutors, he was blindfolded and kicked, then forced to kneel and told to "pray to Jesus Christ like a Christian." Vakhitov said that the Americans honestly admitted that because they have a democracy, they could not use all the possible methods to draw out confessions, but that their Russian colleagues would be able to get to work on him.

I know this will come as a shock, but it turns out that the Russians eventually concluded that he wasn't a terrorist after all:

After several months in a detention center, Vakhitov was found not guilty -- once again without any trial -- and released.

When I first started reading these stories from released Guantanamo prisoners I was skeptical. They sounded too strange, too bizarre, too freakishly sexual and sadistic. Then came Abu Ghraib and the pictures of forced masturbation. And it was revealed that female interrogators were smearing fake menstrual blood on prisoners and that interrogators were using fierce dogs to threaten naked men. And we know that prisoners were held in "stress positions" for many hours on end in sharply hot and cold temperatures.

It has been known for years now that many of the prisoners were sold to the US by Afghan warlords for $5,000 a piece. It is clear that three years after they were captured that none of the prisoners in Guantanamo have any intelligence to offer. And it is a proven fact that we imprisoned and roughly "interrogated" many people for years who were completely innocent.

It's interesting that this ex-prisoner says that the Americans are much more sophisticated in their methods. Perhaps this is true in comparison to the Russians, although that's quite a statement, if true. I wrote a post some months back in which I discussed these sophisticated techniques in some detail. Here are reports from prisoners who underwent them:

Many men were handcuffed or tied to a stool as a means of slow torture. The [detainee] sat in one position, day and night. Each time he would fall over, the guards would sit him upright. He was not allowed to sleep or rest. Exhaustion and pain take their toll. When the [detainee] agreed to cooperate with his captors and acquiesced to their demands, he would be removed. Here, I have pictured a guard named "Mouse," who liked to throw buckets of cold water on a man on cold winter nights.

You're always sitting either on the floor or on a stool or concrete block or something low. The interrogator is always behind a table that's covered with cloth of some kind, white or blue or something. And he sits above you and he's always looking down at you asking you questions and they want to know what the targets are for tomorrow, next week, next month. You don't know. You really don't know. But he doesn't -- he's going to have to have an answer of some kind. Now the back of the room comes the -- the torture. And he's a -- he's a big guy that knows what he's doing. And he starts locking your elbows up with ropes and tying your wrists together and bending you.

[...]

Some men were tied to their beds, sometimes for weeks at a time. Here, I have drawn a picture showing the handcuffs being worn in front, but the usual position was with the wrists handcuffed behind the back. A man would live this way day and night, without sleep or rest.

The guards come around the middle of the night just rattling the lock on your door. That's a terrifying thing because they may be taking you out for a torture session. You don't know.

"... obviously this is an emotional thing to me, was listening to the screams of other ... prisoners while they were being tortured. And being locked in a cell myself sometimes uh, in handcuffs or tied up and not able to do anything about it. And that's the way I've got to spend the night."

[...]

The ten months that I spent in the blacked out cell I went into panic. The only thing I could do was exercise. As long as I could move, I felt like I was going to -- well, it was so bad I would put a rag in my mouth and hold another one over it so I could scream. That seemed to help. It's not that I was scared, more scared than another other time or anything. It was happening to my nerves and my mind. And uh, I had to move or die. I'd wake up at two o'clock in the morning or midnight or three or whatever and I would jump up immediately and start running in place. Side straddle hops. Maybe four hours of sit ups. But I had to exercise. And of course I prayed a lot.

My original post has much more detail.

Of course, these are all quotes from American POW's who were held in North Vietnam.



"When word of torture and mistreatment began to slip out to the American press in the summer of 1969, our public-relations-minded captors began to treat us better. I'm certain we would have been a lot worse off if there had not been the Geneva Conventions around." John McCain



.
digby 6/29/2005 12:14:00 PM |

 
Fight Back

From Liberal Oasis:

The Minneapolis Star Tribune (which has kindly published a few pieces from LiberalOasis) offers an editorial page that, of all the nation’s major dailies, is arguably the most devoted to the truth and the least afraid of the Bush White House.

And it is under attack from the Right for just that reason.

Last week, the Strib not only ran an editorial defending Dick Durbin when Durbin lacked the courage to defend himself, it also ran a lengthy excerpt of Durbin’s speech so readers could examine his words in context and make up their own minds.

Since then, the right-wing Hugh Hewitt has launched a campaign encourage people to cancel their subscriptions to the Strib, in hopes of pressuring the paper to end its defense of real American values.

And Hewitt’s allies at the blog Powerline are trying to keep up the pressure by directly attacking the top editor.

These thuggish attempts to silence brave American voices must be countered.

The best way to do so is to show that speaking truth to power sells.

So if you live in Minnesota and don’t subscribe, now’s the time!

Click here to subscribe, and then email the publisher, Keith Moyer at kmoyer@startribune.com to let him know you’re subscribing because you support the paper’s editorial policy.

Even if you don’t live in Minnesota, you can subscribe and receive the paper via mail, or digitally on your computer.

The Strib is one of the very few unabashed big city liberal papers in the country. The idea of Unctuous High and the Highpockets boys intimidating them is somewhat laughable, but everybody has to answer to the man on some level. This is a paper worth supporting --- particularly since the geek squad are after them.


Update:

A couple of commenters tell me that cancelled subscriptions are unnerving the publisher and that some advertisers are suing because of what they say are false circulation numbers. I suspect that this last is thuggery on the part of the wingnut cabal that is coordinating this effort to get the editorial page director fired for his political beliefs.

I would suggest that people start looking around for some "advertisers" to sue all the conservative papers that inflate their advertising numbers. I'd start with the Washington Times. This is a very ugly genie that rightwingers should probably not want to let out of the bottle.



.
digby 6/29/2005 09:15:00 AM |

 
Inside Knowlege

NEW YORK (CNN) -- A Republican congressman from North Carolina told CNN on Wednesday that the "evidence is clear" that Iraq was involved in the terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001.

"Saddam Hussein and people like him were very much involved in 9/11," Rep. Robin Hayes said.

Told no investigation had ever found evidence to link Saddam and 9/11, Hayes responded, "I'm sorry, but you must have looked in the wrong places."

Hayes, the vice chairman of the House subcommittee on terrorism, said legislators have access to evidence others do not.

Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, said that Saddam was a dangerous man, but when asked about Hayes' statement, would not link the deposed Iraqi ruler to the terrorist attacks on New York, the Pentagon and Pennsylvania.

"I haven't seen compelling evidence of that," McCain, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told CNN.

I have heard this from others. I think it must be a wingnut e-mail talking point or something. I've been told more than once, as a conversation ender, that the government has the proof but they can't share it because it would endanger civilians. And it's used as evidence of Bush's selflessness that he won't provide the proof even though he has to take shit from liberals like me.

I kid you not.



.
digby 6/29/2005 08:38:00 AM |

Tuesday, June 28, 2005

 
Same Old Same Old

This makes Nixon sound like Cicero. The only news here is that he forgot to say "and then I had a choice to make: take the word of a madman, forget the lessons of September the 11th, or do what's necessary to defend this country. Given that choice, I will defend America every time," and "we will form a coalition of the willing and we WILL disarm Saddam Hussein." We've heard all the rest before. Ad nauseum.


I notice the props are having a hard time keeping their eyes open, though. Poor guys.


CNN UPDATE:

Is anybody watching Joe Biden saying that the president has leveled with the American people tonight (as opposed to Cheney and Rummy) and he hopes that it has bought him some time? Nice. Paula Zahn has been very skeptical of the speech, particularly all the 9/11 talk, but Joe very helpfully told her that Bush really did a pretty good job and that hopefully he'll now have the time to fix the problems in Iraq. He was actually more supportive than David Gergen who was personally "offended" by the evocation of 9/11 but made the political judgment that it would work.

Begala says he made progress on the question of credibility. But by the same token it was probably not so good to evoke 9/11 so much since it had nothing to do with Iraq. It's a good thing for Democrats to support our commander in chief, though. But we do have a few questions.

Democrats are so helpful to the president. They're still stinking traitors and all, but they are very nice people. They've managed to convince Blitzer and Zahn that their own reactions to the speech were too harsh.
digby 6/28/2005 05:12:00 PM |

 
Really?

This morning the research shop at the Republican National Committee sent out an email headlined "Democrats Still Wrong on Iraq."

Yeah. Find any of those WMD yet, flyboy?



.
digby 6/28/2005 03:14:00 PM |

 
Chickenhawkery

I think that Kevin is wrong on this:

I actually agree with the overall gist of Christopher Hitchens' latest column in Slate. He argues that it's absurd to think you've scored some kind of withering putdown of war supporters by pointing out that most of them (and their sons) haven't volunteered for duty. Since I support police, fire, and social welfare programs despite the fact that I'm not a police officer, a firefighter, or a social worker, I think he's right on this.

Joining up to fight a war you support is quite different from these other things. A war is a temporary emergency while police work and firefighting are ongoing necessities to deal with everyday occasions of individual misconduct or accident. If there was an earthquake in Kevin's neighborhood and they called for able bodied men and women to volunteer to help dig bodies out of the rubble, I suspect he'd be there.

But this war in Iraq, like Vietnam, presents an even more obvious illustration of why this is true. Any nation that wages a war of choice wholly for ideological and political reasons, particularly when it is opposed by large numbers of its own citizens, should require that those who share those ideological and political goals help with the physical fighting. In fact, they should lead the fighting. It is unfair in the extreme that stop loss orders and extended tours are being forced upon the "volunteer" army when those who support the war are unwilling to put themselves in physical danger. Self defense is one thing. Requiring others to die for your crusade is another.

This is a bad argument for the right and I hope they keep making it. There is something quite primal and instinctive about the old "put your money where your mouth is" logic of expecting people who support a war to be willing to lay down their lives to fight it. People get this one in their gut. It most certainly is a withering put-down and the the put-downees know it very well.

UPDATE: Max Blumenthal in The Nation

I chatted for a while with Collin Kelley, a senior at Washington State with a vague resemblance to the studly actor Orlando Bloom. Kelley told me he's "sick and tired of people saying our troops are dying in vain" and added, "This isn't an invasion of Iraq, it's a liberation--as David Horowitz said." When I asked him why he was staying on campus rather than fighting the good fight, he rubbed his shoulder and described a nagging football injury from high school. Plus, his parents didn't want him to go. "They're old hippies," Kelley said.

Munching on a chicken quesadilla at a table nearby was Edward Hauser, a senior at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas--a liberal school in a liberal town in the ultimate red state of Texas. "Austin is ninety square miles insulated from reality," Hauser said. When I broached the issue of Iraq, he replied, "I support our country. I support our troops." So why isn't he there?

"I know that I'm going to be better staying here and working to convince people why we're there [in Iraq]," Hauser explained, pausing in thought. "I'm a fighter, but with words."

At a table by the buffet was Justin Palmer, vice chairman of the Georgia Association of College Republicans, America's largest chapter of College Republicans. In 1984 the group gained prominence in conservative circles when its chairman, Ralph Reed, formed a political action committee credited with helping to re-elect Senator Jesse Helms. Palmer's future as a right-wing operative looked bright; he batted away my question about his decision to avoid fighting the war he supported with the closest thing I heard to a talking point all afternoon. "The country is like a body," Palmer explained, "and each part of the body has a different function. Certain people do certain things better than others." He said his "function" was planning a "Support Our Troops" day on campus this year in which students honored military recruiters from all four branches of the service.

Standing by Palmer's side and sipping a glass of rose wine, University of Georgia Republican member Kiera Ranke said she played her part as well. She and her sorority sisters sent care packages to troops in Iraq along with letters and pictures of themselves. "They wrote back and told us we boosted their morale," she said.

By the time I encountered Cory Bray, a towering senior from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business, the beer was flowing freely. "The people opposed to the war aren't putting their asses on the line," Bray boomed from beside the bar. Then why isn't he putting his ass on the line? "I'm not putting my ass on the line because I had the opportunity to go to the number-one business school in the country," he declared, his voice rising in defensive anger, "and I wasn't going to pass that up."

And besides, being a College Republican is so much more fun than counterinsurgency warfare. Bray recounted the pride he and his buddies had felt walking through the center of campus last fall waving a giant American flag, wearing cowboy boots and hats with the letters B-U-S-H painted on their bare chests. "We're the big guys," he said. "We're the ones who stand up for what we believe in. The College Democrats just sit around talking about how much they hate Bush. We actually do shit."

I'm very impressed with their contribution, aren't you?


.
digby 6/28/2005 01:53:00 PM |

 
Silent Majority Redux

Rick Perlstein wrote me an e-mail and reminded me that it was just two weeks after the biggest peace march in American history that Dick Nixon gave his famous "Silent majority" speech on Vietnam --- November 3, 1969. He laid out his plan to "win" the war and successfully marginalized what was becoming a very mainstream anti-war movement. Perlstein thinks that the Bush people probably studied this speech very closely and I suspect he's right.

Read the whole thing, but here's the conclusion of the speech:

My fellow Americans, I am sure you can recognize from what I have said that we really only have two choices open to us if we want to end this war.

--I can order an immediate, precipitate withdrawal of all Americans from Vietnam without regard to the effects of that action.

--Or we can persist in our search for a just peace through a negotiated settlement if possible, or through continued implementation of our plan for Vietnamization if necessary--a plan in which we will withdraw all of our forces from Vietnam on a schedule in accordance with our program, as the South Vietnamese become strong enough to defend their own freedom. I have chosen this second course. It is not the easy way. It is the right way.

It is a plan which will end the war and serve the cause of peace--not just in Vietnam but in the Pacific and in the world.

In speaking of the consequences of a precipitate withdrawal, I mentioned that our allies would lose confidence in America.

Far more dangerous, we would lose confidence in ourselves. Oh, the immediate reaction would be a sense of relief that our men were coming home. But as we saw the consequences of what we had done, inevitable remorse and divisive recrimination would scar our spirit as a people.

We have faced other crises in our history and have become stronger by rejecting the easy way out and taking the right way in meeting our challenges. Our greatness as a nation has been our capacity to do what had to be done when we knew our course was right.

I recognize that some of my fellow citizens disagree with the plan for peace I have chosen. Honest and patriotic Americans have reached different conclusions as to how peace should be achieved.

In San Francisco a few weeks ago, I saw demonstrators. carrying signs reading: "Lose in Vietnam, bring the boys home."

Well, one of the strengths of our free society is that any American has a right to reach that conclusion and to advocate that point of view. But as President of the United States, I would be untrue to my oath of office if I allowed the policy of this Nation to be dictated by the minority who hold that point of view and who try to impose it on the Nation by mounting demonstrations in the street.

For almost 200 years, the policy of this Nation has been made under our Constitution by those leaders in the Congress and the White House elected by all of the people. If a vocal minority, however fervent its cause, prevails over reason and the will of the majority, this Nation has no future as a free society.

And now I would like to address a word, if I may, to the young people of this Nation who are particularly concerned, and I understand why they are concerned, about this war.

I respect your idealism.

I share your concern for peace. I want peace as much as you do. There are powerful personal reasons I want to end this war. This week I will have to sign 83 letters to mothers, fathers, wives, and loved ones of men who have given their lives for America in Vietnam. It is very little satisfaction to me that this is only one-third as many letters as I signed the first week in office. There is nothing I want more than to see the day come when I do not have to write any of those letters.

--I want to end the war to save the lives of those brave young men in Vietnam.

--But I want to end it in a way which will increase the chance that their younger brothers and their sons will not have to fight in some future Vietnam someplace in the world.

--And I want to end the war for another reason. I want to end it so that the energy and dedication of you, our young people, now too often directed into bitter hatred against those responsible for the war, can be turned to the great challenges of peace, a better life for all Americans, a better life for all people on this earth.

I have chosen a plan for peace. I believe it will succeed.

If it does succeed, what the critics say now won't matter. If it does not succeed, anything I say then won't matter.

I know it may not be fashionable to speak of patriotism or national destiny these days. But I feel it is appropriate to do so on this occasion

Two hundred years ago this Nation was weak and poor. But even then, America was the hope of millions in the world. Today we have become the strongest and richest nation in the world. And the Wheel of destiny has turned so that any hope the world has for the survival of peace and freedom will be determined by whether the American people have the moral stamina and the courage to meet the challenge of free world leadership.

Let historians not record that when America was the most powerful nation in the world we passed on the other side of the road and allowed the last hopes for peace and freedom of millions of people to be suffocated by the forces of totalitarianism.

And so tonight--to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans--I ask for your support.

I pledged in my campaign for the Presidency to end the war in a way that we could win the peace. I have initiated a plan of action which will enable me to keep that pledge.

The more support I can have from the American people, the sooner that pledge can be redeemed; for the more divided we are at home, the less likely the enemy is to negotiate at Paris.

Let us be united for peace. Let us also be united against defeat. Because let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.

Fifty years ago, in this room and at this very desk, President Woodrow Wilson spoke words which caught the imagination of a war-weary world. He said: "This is the war to end war." His dream for peace after World War I was shattered on the hard realities of great power politics and Woodrow Wilson died a broken man.

Tonight I do not tell you that the war in Vietnam is the war to end wars. But I do say this: I have initiated a plan which will end this war in a way that will bring us closer to that great goal to which Woodrow Wilson and every American President in our history has been dedicated--the goal of a just and lasting peace.

As President I hold the responsibility for choosing the best path to that goal and then leading the Nation along it.

I pledge to you tonight that I shall meet this responsibility with all of the strength and wisdom I can command in accordance with your hopes, mindful of your concerns, sustained by your prayers.

Thank you and goodnight.

God knows it's not unfashionable these days to talk about patriotism and national destiny. And I'm sure we are going to hear a whole boatload of it tonight. But the point in tonight's speech is very likely the exact same point as Nixon's was --- to divide America clearly into two camps and push those who are wavering on the war to see withdrawal as shameful and detrimental to America's security. Perlstein points to the key phrase in this speech: "lose the war in Iraq --- bring the troops home."

That's what the Rove roll-out of the Move-on, "liberal" therapy bullshit is all about. They have to frame withdrawal as a bunch of hippies arguing for "losing" and they have to do it quickly.

According to Perlstein, at the time of the Moratorium, the war was becoming dramatically unpopular. Polls said that 57% of the public wanted withdrawal by a date certain. The march was not perceived as a fringe event --- it was huge and middle class and showed that the nation as a whole was turning against the war. And the media, for the first time,was not presenting this in a hostile manner. The anti-war movement had gone mainstream.

After the speech, things turned around dramatically for the Pres. Here's how Richard Reeves put it in "President Nixon: Alone in the White House":

"A quick national Gallup poll by phone indicates 77 percent approval of the President's's message. A few days later Gallup's overall approval for the President had climbed from 52 perent before the Moratorium to 68 percent. Congressional resoulutions exressing bipartisan suport for the President's position were signed by 400 of the House's 435 members and 58 of the 100 Senators.... 'The euphoria continues,' Haldeman wrote in his diaries... Nixon had his feet up among the telegrams, telling anyone who came in: 'We've got those liberal bastards on the run now!'"

There are three reasons why, in my opinion, the speech worked.

First, he spent about a third of it explaining how we got into Vietnam and showing how it wasn't really his war. This was terribly important because it made people willing to give him the benefit of the doubt early in his first term. There were many people who understood at that point that Vietnam was a quagmire but who truly wanted to see us able to pull it off without what seemed like an ignominious defeat. I remember plenty of people during that time who were willing to give Nixon a break. In 1969, the villian of the war was still LBJ.

Bush cannot do this. He cannot blame his predecesors, or the Democrats or even his allies for getting us into this. He strutted around that aircraft carrier with the words "Commander in Chief" emblazoned on his codpiece and he's stuck with it. Iraq is Bush's war.

Second, Nixon actually unveiled "Vietnamization" in this speech. It was a solution and people were desperate for a solution --- hence the bi-partisan love-fest. Unless Bush has something completely new in mind, he is likely stuck with re-hashing his Iraqification plans and sexing up the numbers to imply that the Iraqis are just minutes away from being able to take over. In this sense, Iraq is Vietnam on crystal meth. It took years to realize that Vietnamization wasn't working. We already know that Iraqification is a bust. He will get no mileage from that.

Third, there was a widespread distaste for the counter-culture movement as a whole. No matter how mainstream the anti-war movement became, its association in the minds of the "silent majority" with long hair and sexual liberation and racial violence and the rest, meant that it was easy for Nixon to conflate "losing" with "withdrawal" and have at least some people who were sympathetic to withdrawal think twice. I don't think those conditions are present today.

The zeitgeist in America is much less shocking than it was then. (At least in the fashion/pop culture sense.) There is no large visible liberal movement for radical social change, no frightening urban violence. Indeed, as I wrote earlier, I think most people would agree that the radical zeitgeist these days is with those who are holding Justice Sunday rallies and having revival meetings at bill signings. And the crazed street theater isn't Jerry Rubin style yippiedom --- it's the nutty extremists that camped out in front of Terry Schiavo's hospice. This isn't 1969.



But, they don't have anything else. And, lord knows, the fear of the enemy within has always worked very well for them in the past. It should be very interesting if they can turn a little known internet group like Move-On into the anti-war movement circa 1969. If they can roll out their tired red-baiting/liberal-baiting one more time in the face of a liberal movement that barely even has breath and make it stick, then I'll really have to believe that there is no stopping them. But I doubt that it will work.

The party of new ideas is reaching back to the days of Richard Nixon at the height of Vietnam for tactical advice. There's a whiff of desperation in the air.



.
digby 6/28/2005 11:19:00 AM |

 
Principle Failure

Josh Marshall writes that Democrats may be folding up their tent on Social Security in the false belief that it is won. Dear Gawd, I cannot believe that my party could actually be this dumb. Protecting social security is going to be a full time seige for as long as the Republicans are in power. In one way or another they are going to try to dismantle it. Unlike us, the Republicans commit for the long haul on these big ticket items. Even if Bush is seen as a big loser, they won't give up.

Which leads me to Josh's second point:

According to CNN, President Bush's worst numbers came on the issue of Social Security. He clocked in at 31% approval and 64% disapproval.

(I'd actually be curious to hear from pollsters out there what the lowest ratings for a president has ever been on any significant issue. I mean, how much lower than thirty percent does it go? With the possible exception of Nixon at the very end of Watergate, how often has a president been under, say, 25% on any issue of significance?)

With numbers like that, is there really any reason imaginable why any Democrat should feel even the slightest need to move even an inch toward accomodation with President Bush's agenda of phasing out Social Security? How unpopular would a president need to be before his unpopularity made it safe to follow the dictates of your own principles?

Do we know that the Democrats as a whole actually are operating out of principle on social security? After the debacle of the bankruptcy legislation, in which many Democrats truly seemed to think that Americans in financial crisis due to divorce, unemployement and health catastrophe needed to be taught a lesson in responsibility, I don't think we should take anything for granted. The Joe Klein wing of the party may very well believe that social security as we know it is obsolete and that we have to introduce "market forces" and "competition" into it or some such nonsense. And there may be more than a few who really believe that benefits have to be cut and that now is the time to do it.

In other words, I don't actually think that holding the line against social security privatization was a matter of principle for all the Democrats. I don't doubt that it was for most. But, I suspect that there are a few of the MNBA-Big Pharma Dems who really do think that social security should be "reformed" and that Bush has the best chance to do it. And there are more than a few who would like to be accepted as one of the boys on a really big ticket item like social security.

That's why we should stay engaged with everything we've got. There is every chance that a "gang of 14" will develop at some point to begin the dismantling. After all, you have CW experts like Joe Klein, who is perceived (and perceives himself) as a New Democrat, saying things like "in the Information Age, you don't deliver public services the same way you did in the Industrial Age. You don't rule out huge bureaucracies, what you do is give targeted cash payments," which makes no sense, of course, but distances you so nicely from all those icky liberals.

This is one of the ways in which GOP liberal baiting affects the discourse. It's aimed at "moderates" of both parties as a way of making them move away from liberal policies. We now have a large number of Democrats in the caucus who have spent their entire careers denying they are liberals and working feverishly to show that they are "different" than the rabble that forms the base of the Democratic party ---- unions, feminazis, uppity African Americans. Like their timorous forbears who capitulated to Joe Mccarthy, these Dems are the ones who cringe when Karl makes sweeping denunciations of "liberals" and who will sub-consciously try to find ways of re-establishing their "reasonable" bona fides.

We unreasonable liberals need to make sure that we push back just as hard. No compromises on social security. Not even one. If we don't I'll bet you money that there will be a rose garden ceremony with Bush smirking and Dems beaming and we will have been screwed one more time.



.
digby 6/28/2005 08:59:00 AM |

Sunday, June 26, 2005

 
Rogue State

It certainly is interesting that the Italian authorities have finally gotten fed up with America's illegal behavior and issued arrest warrants for 13 CIA agents accused of kidnapping terrorist suspects and rendering them to Egypt for "interrogation."

But we've done this with Guantanamo prisoners as well. I wrote about this last February in a long post about "how great we are." This story is from the New Yorker by Jane Meyer called "Outsourcing Torture":

Nadja Dizdarevic is a thirty-year-old mother of four who lives in Sarajevo. On October 21, 2001, her husband, Hadj Boudella, a Muslim of Algerian descent, and five other Algerians living in Bosnia were arrested after U.S. authorities tipped off the Bosnian government to an alleged plot by the group to blow up the American and British Embassies in Sarajevo. One of the suspects reportedly placed some seventy phone calls to the Al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah in the days after September 11th. Boudella and his wife, however, maintain that neither he nor several of the other defendants knew the man who had allegedly contacted Zubaydah. And an investigation by the Bosnian government turned up no confirmation that the calls to Zubaydah were made at all, according to the men’s American lawyers, Rob Kirsch and Stephen Oleskey.

At the request of the U.S., the Bosnian government held all six men for three months, but was unable to substantiate any criminal charges against them. On January 17, 2002, the Bosnian Supreme Court ruled that they should be released. Instead, as the men left prison, they were handcuffed, forced to put on surgical masks with nose clips, covered in hoods, and herded into waiting unmarked cars by masked figures, some of whom appeared to be members of the Bosnian special forces. Boudella’s wife had come to the prison to meet her husband, and she recalled that she recognized him, despite the hood, because he was wearing a new suit that she had brought him the day before. “I will never forget that night,” she said. “It was snowing. I was screaming for someone to help.” A crowd gathered, and tried to block the convoy, but it sped off. The suspects were taken to a military airbase and kept in a freezing hangar for hours; one member of the group later claimed that he saw one of the abductors remove his Bosnian uniform, revealing that he was in fact American. The U.S. government has neither confirmed nor denied its role in the operation.

Six days after the abduction, Boudella’s wife received word that her husband and the other men had been sent to Guantánamo. One man in the group has alleged that two of his fingers were broken by U.S. soldiers. Little is publicly known about the welfare of the others.

Boudella’s wife said that she was astounded that her husband could be seized without charge or trial, at home during peacetime and after his own government had exonerated him. The term “enemy combatant” perplexed her. “He is an enemy of whom?” she asked. “In combat where?” She said that her view of America had changed. “I have not changed my opinion about its people, but unfortunately I have changed my opinion about its respect for human rights,” she said. “It is no longer the leader in the world. It has become the leader in the violation of human rights.”

In October, Boudella attempted to plead his innocence before the Pentagon’s Combatant Status Review Tribunal. The C.S.R.T. is the Pentagon’s answer to the Supreme Court’s ruling last year, over the Bush Administration’s objections, that detainees in Guantánamo had a right to challenge their imprisonment. Boudella was not allowed to bring a lawyer to the proceeding. And the tribunal said that it was “unable to locate” a copy of the Bosnian Supreme Court’s verdict freeing him, which he had requested that it read. Transcripts show that Boudella stated, “I am against any terrorist acts,” and asked, “How could I be part of an organization that I strongly believe has harmed my people?” The tribunal rejected his plea, as it has rejected three hundred and eighty-seven of the three hundred and ninety-three pleas it has heard. Upon learning this, Boudella’s wife sent the following letter to her husband’s American lawyers:

Dear Friends, I am so shocked by this information that it seems as if my blood froze in my veins, I can’t breathe and I wish I was dead. I can’t believe these things can happen, that they can come and take your husband away, overnight and without reason, destroy your family, ruin your dreams after three years of fight. . . . Please, tell me, what can I still do for him? . . . Is this decision final, what are the legal remedies? Help me to understand because, as far as I know the law, this is insane, contrary to all possible laws and human rights. Please help me, I don’t want to lose him.

As I wrote back in February, I don't know if this woman's husband is a terrorist. But I do that it's incomprehensible that the "tribunal" wouldn't have looked at the evidence collected by the Bosnian Supreme Court that exonerated him before declaring him a "non-combatant" and locking him away indefinitely with no appeal.

We kidnapped this man off the street as he left a courthouse that freed him for lack of evidence. He was sent to Guantanamo. And he has no further recourse anywhere to assert his innocence.

We have no way of knowing how many people we have done this to, but clearly there are quite a few. It makes me sick to my stomach to contemplate that innocent people are caught up in it. And without due process we simply cannot be sure that there aren't. In fact, we know there are.

I'm getting old now and I don't know how long it will take for this stuff to sort itself out. Maybe I won't be alive to see it. But at some point there is going to be some sort of reckoning. It's happening in Argentina right now. Cambodians are beginning to come to terms with what was done. And no I'm not comparing us to them, except to say that unless we get some transparency there is every reason to fear that we are heading into that territory. As I wrote in that post in February:

We are disappearing people, rendering them to friendly governments that aren't afraid to put the electrode to genitals and threaten with dog rape. And we are building our own infrastructure of torture and extra legal imprisonment. It is a law of human nature that if you build it, they will come. This infrastructure will be expanded and bureaucratized. It's already happening.

John Yoo, one of the primary architects of the Gitmo regimes said:

“Why is it so hard for people to understand that there is a category of behavior not covered by the legal system?”

Because we are supposed to be a nation of laws, not men. If we can fashion laws that cover behavior like genocide, war crimes, child molestation and serial killing, surely we can find a way to cover terrorism. But then, Yoo also believes:

Congress doesn’t have the power to “tie the President’s hands in regard to torture as an interrogation technique.” He continued, “It’s the core of the Commander-in-Chief function. They can’t prevent the President from ordering torture.” If the President were to abuse his powers as Commander-in-Chief, Yoo said, the constitutional remedy was impeachment. He went on to suggest that President Bush’s victory in the 2004 election, along with the relatively mild challenge to Gonzales mounted by the Democrats in Congress, was “proof that the debate is over.” He said, “The issue is dying out. The public has had its referendum.”

We are all torturers now, apparently.



.
digby 6/26/2005 02:21:00 PM |

 
Sunday Freeper Fun

As his final American revival meeting continued Saturday, a fragile Billy Graham was met onstage by former President Clinton, who honored the evangelist, calling him "a man I love."

Clinton spoke briefly before Graham's sermon and recalled how the man known as America's pastor had refused to preach before a segregated audience in Arkansas decades ago when that state was in a bitter fight over school desegregation.

"I was just a little boy and I'll never forget it," said Clinton, who was joined by his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (search). "I've loved him ever since. God bless you, friend."

Graham called the Clintons "wonderful friends" and "a great couple," quipping that the former president should become an evangelist and allow "his wife to run the country."

It seems that some people are a little miffed:

Looks like "the man known as America's pastor " is stumping for Beelzebub.

----

It won't fool the evangelical voters. They know who and what Clinton is. They know a revival isn't about social justice. It just shows how clueless the Clintons are to think that what you talk about in church is racism and politics. That's what they talk about in "liberal" churches -the heck with Jesus.

---

Graham called the Clintons ... "a great couple"

"He's a great serial adulterer and, my gosh, what a stunning power-drooling succubus she is!"

Just providing translation...

---

"The evangelist is suffering from fluid on the brain"

That explains it.

---


With all due respect, Mr Graham, if Bill Clinton doesn't "allow" his wife to run the country she will crash his Sunday morning sermon with a herd of Code Pink heffers and bitchslap'm upside head with a lamp.


---

You're right. It really was a shameful thing to do. If Billy Graham has lost a few of his marbles, you would at least THINK that his son, Franklin, might have steered dear old dad away from hosting these reprobates on "his" stage. What an utterly dreadful message that sent. What an embarrassing way to end his evangelizing career.

He should have quit while he was ahead, because I really believe that a lot of evangelicals are going to be very upset about this.

---

Why in God's name are they(Clinton's) there! Isn't that like Satan going to mass? Hitler going to a Jewish Deli?

These Clinton's have no shame. Two of the most Godless creatures that walked this earth and their getting face time with a Christian hero.


----
It is very much my honest opinion that alot of elderly people make the stupidest comments of their lives during the last one or two years here on earth. I think Mr. Graham has joined that unfortunate club.

---
Remember how Killery The Killster said, right after the '04 election results, "I've always been a praying person?" She got the message loud and clear about red staters.......and so now, here we see this blatantly AMORAL, non-religious couple playing the evangelist fiddle, trying to keep time with the new music to their ears!......what utter gall these two vultures have!

This is just too much! I'm prostrate with fury at how they get away with their travelling circus act!

---

Of course Schummer spoke

What was that antiChristian smuck doing there? I wouldnt care if he was there. We all need Christ - but between that man, Biden and Hillary - every single thing Christians stand for would be ripped apart at the seems and we would begin to see the outright oppression of Christians in this nation. We already see that oppression in the selection process which he is part of.

And then, of course, there are the deep theological discussions:

Nah ... I've got a few skeletons of my own - things I'm not proud of.

I had the advantage of NOT coming from a dysfunctional family, nor willing to do anything for fame or fortune. Having said that, I still don't walk on water.

I believe that all will bend their knee to Him. Of those that are in heaven there will be favorites. Not all will have the same status. God sees through us. If Bill slips in, he won't have the stature he has on this earth. I'm sure BG will do well in heaven. He has been faithful. No scandals. No cheating on his wife. No money scandals etc.. BG has really lead a clean life and so humbly.


---

Honey, the fact that you admit those skeletons is positive and shows the fruit of repentance.

Not sure about the favorites deal, though. God isn't a respecter of persons; He died for everyone's sins and was raised for everyone's justification. All sin is worthy of death, but because of the sacrifice of Jesus, we are all cleansed. Top to bottom. All wrongs made right.

I'm not proud of my crap either, but I know that I am forgiven.


----
Don't be too sure that he doesn't have His favorites ... John was His "beloved disciple". Enoch and Elisha did NOT experience a physical death. Notice later in Revelation where depending on things ... it's easy to see how the 12 disciples and certain folks in the Old Testament will be helping Him rule heaven.

He loves ALL but sum have served Him better than others while on this earth. They will be rewarded accordingly otherwise He would not be a just God.

.
digby 6/26/2005 12:54:00 PM |

 
College HiJinks

It's very tempting to make fun of these college Republicans because they are such earnest little shitheads:

Me: What makes you conservative?

SG: Really It’s b/c I believe in freedom…the freedom to live your life, really. …I believe in free market, free enterprise…I think we should have a right to do what we want. Gov’t. should play as little a role as possible.

Me: Where is the campus conservative movement headed?

SG: I think the conservative movement is headed in the RIGHT direction (haha) …in 3 diff ways. 1) children of the Reagan generation, which ultimately inspires more conservative parenting.
2) I think most ppl believe in the same things I believe in.

3) Because I believe in the same things most people believe in, which is right.

However, it is a big mistake to treat these kids as anything but what they are --- the next generation of Republican strategists and operative. This is because the current generation of Republican strategists and operatives came right out of the college Republicans and I have no doubt that those waiting in the wings were trained at their feet. If you want to know where they learn their shit, it's here.

They cut their teeth playing dirty tricks on each other (see Perlstein's "Before The Storm": Blackwell, Morton, 1964 GOP Convention) and then go on to playing dirty tricks on Democrats. It's kind of adorable in a Rottweiler puppy kind of way. Here's a rundown from last week of the College Republican chairman race:

One of the most controversial solicitations carried the letterhead "Republican Headquarters 2004" and asked for $1,000 "because you have been such a patriot, a Republican stalwart and a loyalist to President Bush and the GOP agenda." The letter was signed by "Paul Gourley, National Director."

Gourley said that he never saw the letter until it was posted on a blog, and that he never approved either the content or the use of his name. He, Hoplin and others in national headquarters led a long negotiation to end the contract with Response Dynamics, he said.

Davidson's platform calls for the College Republicans to "align our fundraising practices with our principles."

Davidson declines to publicly criticize Hoplin and Gourley. But a pro-Davidson blog titled "CRNC Chatter: Truth Fears No Trial" declared: "Paul Gourley was the one who signed the fundraising letters that has brought this organization so much negative attention."

Meanwhile, the pro-Gourley "CR Veterans for Truth" ran a statement from Rhode Island College Republican Chairman Pratik Chougule charging that the Davidson campaign is spreading lies about Gourley. "I was mislead into changing my support," Chougule said. " I discovered that it was given to me from a Davidson insider."

Of course, we are now dealing with layers and layers of dirty tricks operations, most of them the brainchild of Morton Blackwell. The college Republicans with their "Liberalism Is A Mental Disorder" t-shirts are too mainstream for the kind of work that needs to be done on campus these days. This is his new baby:

One recent Sunday, at Morton Blackwell's Leadership Institute, a dozen students meet for the second and final day of training in grass-roots youth politics. All are earnest, idealistic and as right wing as you can get. They take careful notes as instructor Paul Gourley teaches them how to rig a campus mock election.

It's nothing illegal -- no ballot stuffing necessary, even at the most liberal colleges. First you find a nonpartisan campus group to sponsor the election, so you can't be accused of cheating. Next, volunteer to organize the thing. College students are lazy, and they'll probably let you. Always keep in mind that a rigged mock election is all about location, location, location.

"Can anyone tell me," asks Gourley, a veteran mock electioneer, "why you don't want the polling place in the cafeteria?"

Stephen, a shy antiabortion activist sitting toward the rear of the class, raises his hand: "Because you want to suppress the vote?"

"Stephen has the right answer!" Gourley exclaims, tossing Stephen his prize, a copy of Robert Bork's "Slouching Toward Gomorrah."

[...]

Blackwell says conservatives are underdogs on college campuses. Conservative students may be better organized, but they're still outnumbered. The Leadership Institute contends that liberal higher education is robbing the conservative movement of new blood -- and thereby handicapping the institute's efforts. "You know, the most conservative students are the freshmen," Blackwell told me. "There is an acculturation there."

And that's where the institute is taking its fight. For most of its 25-year history, it has focused on grooming students to work in conservative politics; it's now increasingly devoting its efforts to making campuses more conservative places. Through its Campus Leadership Program, the institute is leading a growing effort to found and support a national network of conservative student groups and publications capable of permanently altering the intellectual and social environment of universities to conservatives' advantage. That goal alone is a stark rejection of the standard conservative complaint that post-Vietnam War higher education is not just grossly liberal, but irredeemably so. Already, the program has shown considerable success. Asked about his campus initiative, Blackwell simply says, "You're talking about the major project for the rest of my life."

The College Republicans are now too high profile to be doing the kinds of serious work that needs to be done to dismantle the last remaining institution that isn't radically right wing. They needed a couple of degrees of separation and Old Mort was just the guy to do it:

"You can get away with stuff that you would take a lot of flak for doing in the College Republicans," says CLP director Dan Flynn. "Because we're independent, we can do activities that push the envelope," agrees University of Miami senior Sarah Canale, whose CLP-organized Advocates for Conservative Thought threw an affirmative action bake sale last year in which the price of a cupcake varied according to the race of its buyer. That it was controversial, she believes, was a victory in itself.

Oh, and by the way, the guy who was teaching the students about suppressing the vote at the "non-partisan" Leadership Institute class and who signed the fundraising letter bilking little old ladies of thousands of dollars, Paul Ghourley?

As of yesterday, he is the new president of the College Republicans. Meet the next Karl Rove. Same as the old Karl Rove.



Here's a shout out to the blogosphere. In their usual fealty to Stalinist tactics, the College Republicans have removed a document from their site called "The History of the College Republicans." It was there fairly recently when I was writing about the Abramoff, Norquist scandals. It's a pdf file that was referenced by quite a few other sites, although I can't seem to find it replicated in its entirety.

I am, admittedly, naive and I didn't download the file, merely bookmarked the link. My bad. Does anyone out there have it? This was the link:

http://www.crnc.org:8013/admin/editpage/downloads/CRNChistory.pdf

It was a fascinatingly candid rundown of all the big names who got their start in the College Republicans, with a particular emphasis on the legendary trio of Abramoff, Norquist and Reed. It's no wonder they don't want to draw attention to their affiliation with crooks --- and that requires obliterating their entire history, I understand that.



.
digby 6/26/2005 09:58:00 AM |

Saturday, June 25, 2005

 
Limp

I've been reading around the blogosphere this morning quite a bit of advice that the Democrats should ignore Rove's comments. That by responding we are "playing into his hands" and "doing exactly what he wants us to do." I would reiterate what I wrote below and say that Karl's not playing chess; he's playing dodgeball.

Neither did Rove invent this technique of derisively referring to Democrats as liberal hippie fags and dykes. Republicans have been doing this for a long, long time. As long as we've been losing they've been doing it with gusto.

Dukakis didn't respond. Gore didn't respond. Clinton did respond, (although I suspect that the real reason it didn't work as well with him was because his womanizing problems made it difficult to subtly label him unmanly.) They just spent a hundred million dollars calling Kerry a "flip-flopper" which in case you didn't get it, was designed to make you think of a flaccid penis. These guys aren't very subtle.

The truth is that to ignore this stuff it is to play into Rove's hands. Because the whole point is to make us look weak. When you don't respond when people call you weak, you reinforce the charge.

Now, how you respond is the real question. I would like to have seen some Democrats say "Karl, why don't you say that to my face." I'd like to see women like Hillary and Pelosi pull out the ferocious mother card and angrily say "how dare you say that I would recklessly put America's children at risk the way you people have done!" No demands for apologies --- veiled threats. Bring it on.

Or we could respond with laughter and eye-rolling derision designed to make them look ineffectual and silly. The Republicans are also very good at doing this. I can't think of a single time we ever have.

This is ultimately about simple leadership archetypes. (The "gender studies set" will know what I'm talking about --- king, warrior, lover blah, blah, blah.) And we are failing to embody them on a very basic level. Asking for an apology is better than nothing. Hitting back in simple ways that convey strength and conviction is even better. If we could come up with something more sophisticated that would work, I'd be all for it. But ignoring it is the guaranteed wrong thing to do.

Republicans are very successful at connecting with the primal instinctive feelings voters have about people in charge. We aren't. It is their greatest weapon against us and it has nothing to do with policy or positioning or demographics. It has to do with the fact that a lot of people make their decisions about leadership on the basis of who looks the strongest. It's primitive shit. And the Republicans strip it down even more simply than it has to be. There is some room for experimenting with this in innovative ways if we would just accept that it exists and work within it.

It's very hard for me to believe that a party led by limp, myopic chickenhawks and closet cases is getting away with this, but they are. And they have for a long time. We are fools if we let it continue.



.
digby 6/25/2005 08:41:00 AM |

Friday, June 24, 2005

 
Greatest American?

"Reagan is credited with engineering the downfall of communism and restoring a nation's spirit."

By whom? Grover Norquist and Peggy Noonan?


Go to the site and vote for anyone but him. Jayzuz.

Update: Ok, it's been pointed out that St Ronnie will win because we are all splitting our votes. (And we're supposed to be the Stalinists.) I understand that Washington is in the number two spot so perhaps we should all vote for him.

The good news is that the Party of Lincoln can no longer call itself the Party of Lincoln. Which is correct because they are actually the party of Richard Nixon who surprisingly was left off the list.



.
digby 6/24/2005 04:53:00 PM |

 
Who's Your Daddy?

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg a Republican running for re-election in an overwhelmingly Democratic city, issued a statement urging both sides to keep politics out of the war on terrorism. 'We owe it to those we lost to keep partisan politics out of the discussion and keep alive the united spirit that came out of 9/11,' he said."

"Both sides" have made intemperate remarks about the war on terrorism.

Iraq is a central front in the war on terrorism.

Therefore, "both sides" should stop criticising the war in Iraq.

I watched the Rove interview on Scarborough last night and it's quite clear that this is a coordinated public relations "rollout." The Bush administration clearly believes that creating this controversy will result in turning down the heat on Iraq and boosting their prospects on other issues. I think they are counting on the press and the distracted public to see "partisanship" running amuck, which is how the Republicans have already positioned themselves for the '06 elections. Bush and his speech condemning the Democrats as the "party of the stop sign" has already laid out the roadmap. But the immediate agenda is to rile up the base with red meat attacks on "liberals," re-brand Democrats as wimps on national security and intimidate ... wavering Republicans.

There are two ways we can play this. We can step back in the hopes that the Republicans will look like slavering beasts, or we can slug it out and see who comes out on top. The first is probably the instinctive reaction of the Dems because we keep relying on the public to "wake up" and realize what crazy fuckers we have running the country. But I think that works against us --- they may look like slavering beasts but we look like a bunch of wilted pansies. No matter how crazy the Bushies are, wilting pansies aren't an appealing alternative. I don't think we have any choice but just keep pounding away. The Democrats really have one meta-issue that they must contend with --- wilting pansy-ism. Everything else flows from that.

As Jeffrey Dubner pointed out yesterday, next week a Supreme Court justice is rumored to be resigning. And I think we know that things are going to escalate dramatically. Bush is going to nominate someone completely unacceptable and he's going to do it for a reason --- he wants the nuclear option. Rove pretty much said it last night on Scarborough. (I don't know if the "gang of 14" will go along; they may decide that James Dobson on the Supreme Court is just fine.) The Republicans are going to spend this summer throwing red meat to their base and hoping that the voices of the noise machine drown out everything else.

This is Karl's overarching theory of everything. Feed the base. Threaten and intimidate anyone who strays from the party orthodoxy. Demonize the opposition. That's pretty much it. Oh and he's also a big fan of the bandwagon effect, if you'll recall. He thinks that if he can give the appearance of winning (which he thinks that a hopped-up rightwing base does) that a fair number of people will always jump on board to be with a winner. In the case of the press, he's right.

His big problem right now is that he's starting to lose Republicans, which is why they are escalating the traitor talk. If Republicans know what's good for them they'll stop airing any misgivings about Iraq or risk being lumped in with us liberals. Rove cannot let them start to drift off.

Like many Republican strategists, Rove was convinced that in order for any president to be "great," he must have a war.(Reagan got to claim victory in the cold war which sufficed very well, thank you.) Certainly, Bush signed on to that theory:

One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.’ And he said, ‘My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.’ He said, ‘If I have a chance to invade….if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.

Do you think he thought that up all by himself?

And the GWOT just isn't good enough. It got the people behind him, but he needed the pictures with the invading army racing across the desert and the codpiece on the carrier and the big speeches to the congress. So, when Rove was consulted about Iraq, I have no doubt that he saw it as the key to victory for Bush in 04, and figured that the GOP could ride both 9/11 and Iraq for years. A war that never ends is a gift that keeps on giving.

The problem is that he didn't realize that while people love a war president, they hate a president who loses a war. He failed to factor in the political price if things didn't go well --- or maybe he did and nobody listened to him, I don't know. In any case, Iraq is now Bush's albatross. It's his war and he's losing it. And the public is blaming him for it. For the first time public opinion is showing that more people believe that Bush started the war than Saddam. And he's losing. Nothing could be worse --- ask the last real Texan who sat in the White House, Lyndon Johnson.

Here's what they are afraid of. When asked about whether they would support a draft, here are a couple of people's answers:

One draft supporter said expanding the size of the armed forces might help move the Iraq campaign along faster.

"If we had more manpower in the Middle East we could get this over with," said James Puma, a retiree from Buffalo, N.Y. "I'm a Republican, I'm with the president. But things in Iraq are not going good at all."

However, Jeremy Miller, a sales manager from Denver, said the Iraq war is "a situation the president has gotten us into and should be able to get us out of" without bringing back the draft.

That's a big, big problem and they are now reduced to Cheney's "you can believe me or you can believe your lying eyes" defense while Rove claims that it would have been even worse if the liberals had had their way --- we're all Hanoi Janes, giving aid and comfort to the enemy and tying the military's hands behind their backs with condemnations of their conduct of the war.

But as Harold Meyerson pointed out the other day, there are no long haired hippies in the streets and there are no street riots and the liberal enemy within looks remarkably like plain old everyday working Americans. The practitioners of political street theatre are the ones who put tape over their mouths with the word "life" written on it. The political revolutionaries are the ones who demand that the government intervene in people's most private and complicated medical decisions. The easily demonized hippies of yesterday are a nostalgia show for kids, like the depression was to me. There's a brand new group of radicals in politics and they certainly aren't liberal. Which is why this has to be troubling as well:

According to the Pew poll, at this point more of the public believes the Republicans are too conservative on social issues (38 percent), than believe the Democrats are too liberal on these issues (35 issues). (Roughly the same pattern, incidentally, obtains in the public’s views on the parties and economic issues.)

Independents are particularly likely to believe Republicans are too conservative on social issues (38 percent), rather than that the Democrats are too liberal (29 percent). More generally, on a six point ideological scale (1=very conservative; 6=very liberal), independents place themselves (3.6) twice as far away from Republicans (2.8) as from Democrats (4.0).

Ooops. More people now think the Republicans are too conservative than think Democrats are too liberal on social issues. That's the Schiavo effect and it's yet another example of Rove making a mistake and overplaying to the base. Republicans would very much like to get people thinking of liberals as a bunch of cowardly peaceniks and conservatives as upright defenders of the nation again. One wonders if they will be able to do that if we have a huge Supreme Court battle this summer. This is a risky time for them.

But it was only a few short months ago that the administration thought they had finessed their war, through demonization of their opponent and anti-gay marriage initiatives, and got themselves re-elected. And they thought that because they had their war they had the political capital to do "great things." Bush would be America's Margaret Thatcher, with an even bigger codpiece.

But Rove was wrong. Bush had almost no political capital at all. His narrow victory, hardball tactics and "play to the base" strategy meant that he couldn't get any Democrats to support his "bold" plan to privatize social security, which was rolled out immediately after the election as his signature domestic issue. This was the conservative issue that was designed to finally secure his place in the pantheon of great presidents --- the book-end to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. (Tax cuts in a time of surplus, as in 2001, aren't exactly "bold.") But Rove failed to recognise that a tried and true political reality --- that you can't do "big things" without a huge majority in congress or bipartisan consensus --- is still operative. And, of course, you don't get political capital from a war that you are losing --- you lose it.

These are all political decisions I'm talking about. They are decisions for which the alleged Magus, Karl Rove, is responsible. The jury is still out, of course, and he may yet succeed. But he didn't actually get Bush elected in 2000 as we all know, despite having more money than God and the unified support of Republicans. 2002 wasn't a huge victory either. (If one can assume that tradition holds, the party that won the previous election, which in this case was the democrat Al Gore, always loses in the first mid-term because of places where he had weak coattails. Jean Carnahan would be a good example of that.) They didn't win big, even though we were just one year from 9/11 and Bush was heralded in the media as being the second coming of Alexander the Great. And in 2004, he had the massive power of a wartime incumbency and he still barely managed to pull it out.

A win is a win, so there's little point in belaboring how narrow it was except to wonder whether Karl Rove's feed the base strategy can keep on working forever in an environment where Bush is rapidly losing support everywhere else. At what point does it become a zero sum game in which he loses one voter for every loudmouthed wingnut?

I don't know. Maybe never. But what I see happening right now is a concerted effort to shore up Republicans before the bottom falls out. Democrats --- excuse me "liberals" --- are the preferred whipping boys to get the GOP base blood pumping. And it is a very thinly veiled warning to any Republican who is tempted by these numbers to not play ball. This is Bush doing what he does best --- putting his boot to the throat. Look at what they did to the hapless Bill Frist just this week:

Reversing field after a meeting with President Bush, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said Tuesday he will continue pushing for a floor vote on John R. Bolton for U.N. ambassador.

Frist switched his position after initially saying Tuesday that negotiations with Democrats to get a vote on Bolton had been exhausted.

Talking to reporters in the White House driveway after he joined other GOP lawmakers for a luncheon with Bush, Frist said: "The president made it very clear that he expects an up or down vote."

Just over an hour earlier, Frist said he wouldn't schedule another vote on Bolton's nomination and said that Bush must decide the next move.

What an embarrassment. Bush "made it very clear" did he? Did he tell the majority leader of the senate to go to the naughty room? This was a very public rebuke to any Republicans who are thinking about defying Bush's agenda.

That's your genius Rove's plan. Intimidate all opposition. Feed the base. Play chicken. It ain't Machiavelli. It ain't even Dick Morris.

It's time for the Democrats to stop thinking so much about what Karl Rove is doing.He is not god. He does not have supernatural powers to control events. And he's not hard to figure out. The only thing he ever does is rile up neanderthals by making Democrats look like wimps. Look at the campaigns he's run. (It is the opposite with a woman candidate --- he makes them look like man-hating harpies.) The whole schtick comes down to exploiting masculine and feminine archetypes. And he didn't invent this. This has been the main political staple of the modern Republican party. He just does it with more relish and less decency than others.

We need to stop worrying about Karl and play our own game. And right now that's keeping the heat on Iraq, stifling any SS plan (it's important that Bush gets NOTHING) and continuing to fight back with fury and authority when we are unfairly attacked. The only way Rove's plans ever work is if the opposition rolls up. Let's not do that.



Update:And here's the in-depth analysis we can expect the gasbags to set forth this week-end, via John Moltz:

Rove’s comments — and the response from the political opposition — mirrored earlier flaps over Democratic chairman Howard Dean’s criticism of Republicans, a House Republican’s statement that Democrats demonize Christians and Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin’s comparison of the Guantanamo prison to Nazi camps and Soviet gulags.

I can hardly wait to hear the Gods of Mt Olympus, Gwen and David and Monsignor Tim, have a good chuckle over all this silly partisanship. But, we should not care what they think, ever.


Update II:

Did little Rickey have permission to stray off the reservation because his poll numbers are as bad as Bush's? Or will he be sent to the naughty room too?



.
digby 6/24/2005 02:14:00 PM |

 
Oh Please

Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman said a litany of comments by Democratic elected officials and their liberal allies underscored Rove's point. "It is outrageous," he said, "that the same Democratic leaders who refused to repudiate or criticize Dick Durbin's slandering of our military are now attacking Karl Rove for stating the facts. . . . Karl didn't say the Democratic Party. He said liberals."

I think the thing that gets me the most is this kind of insulting nonsense, particularly after enduring years of snotty whining about "what the definition of is, is."

For the record, the president ran entire campaign last year on the premise that the Democratic party's nominee was a liberal. He was chosen, pretty much without challenge after February, by Democrats throughout the land. More people voted for him than any Democratic nominee in history. I know it seems like years ago, but it was only eight months ago that the president was saying this sort of thing every single day on the stump:

THE PRESIDENT:My opponent now has a running mate. I look forward to a spirited debate. Senator Kerry is rated as the most liberal member of the Senate, and he chose a fellow lawyer who is the fourth most liberal member of the Senate. Back in Massachusetts, that's what they call balancing the ticket. (Laughter.)

THE PRESIDENT: There is a mainstream in American politics and John Kerry sits on the far left bank. (Applause.) He can run from his liberal philosophy, but he cannot hide. (Applause.)

THE PRESIDENT: But you're not going to have fiscal sanity if John Kerry is the President. He's been the most liberal member of the United States Senate, which means he likes to spend your money. That's what that means. Now, he can try to run from his record, but I'm not going to let him hide. (Applause.)

He isn't the only one:

VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: On the core values of this great country, it's a choice between our President, who has advocated and supported these values throughout his career, and his opponent, who is the most liberal member of the United States Senate.

VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY:But the problem has been, frankly, that the Senate Democrats including Senators Kerry and Edwards -- have consistently supported that filibuster that kept Bill Myers off the 9th Circuit; kept Priscilla Owens, of Texas, from getting to the floor for a vote; it kept Charles Pickering, from Mississippi, from getting to the floor for a vote. Anybody that might disagree with their liberal philosophy isn't allowed to come up to a vote on the floor of the Senate, and that's wrong. (Applause.)

JOHN MCCAIN: And someday, the Democrats will be in the majority. And then the scenario would be, a liberal Democrat president, liberal Democrat judges-liberal judges, and great damage.

You can go to the link and find scores of quotes from Republicans in which liberal and Democrat are interchangeable and which it is claimed that John Kerry the nominee of the Democratic party for president is an extreme liberal. I think it's pretty clear that when they are talking about "liberals" they are talking about the Democratic party.

And that's just fine with me. The Republicans wear their "conservative" label with pride and go out of their way to claim it. It's one of their strengths. We, on the other hand, run from the name they have turned into an all around epithet for their political opposition. There's no getting away from it --- that is a fantasy --- so we might as well embrace it. I never stopped.

lib·er·al


1. Not limited to or by established, traditional, orthodox, or authoritarian attitudes, views, or dogmas; free from bigotry.
2. Favoring proposals for reform, open to new ideas for progress, and tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others; broad-minded.
3. Of, relating to, or characteristic of liberalism.
4. Liberal Of, designating, or characteristic of a political party founded on or associated with principles of social and political liberalism, especially in Great Britain, Canada, and the United States.

Karl Rove was talking about the Democratic Party. If Ken Mehlman wants to start distinguishing among us then it's time to name names. Just who are the "liberals" who wanted to give bin Laden therapy?



.
digby 6/24/2005 09:58:00 AM |

Thursday, June 23, 2005

 
Rovism

I'm going to be very rude here and quote an entire post from Glen Smith on BOP. (Do click over to read the comments.) I think it's important that people think about this:

Karl Rove's un-American attacks on those who disagree with him deserve the condemnation they're receiving. I've known him for 20 years, and I'm not surprised he said them. He's a socially inept but patient thug whose willingness to haunt the nation's dark political alleys for years, waiting for the right time and the right victims, is too often taken for unparalleled political intelligence.

Being attacked by Rove is a little like being criticized by the Boston Strangler. At least you know you're alive. If we want to understand Rove, maybe we should get an FBI profiler.

Rove's a hack. His strength comes from his immorality. There are no barriers. If power didn't corrupt, Rove would have corrupted it.

I've been on the road in America for much of the last two years. I'm asked all the time about the need for Democrats to find their own Karl Rove. If we ever find such a monster in our midst, we should exile him.

I like the black hat Rove wears, but it troubles me that so many people believe he really is a political genius. He's just pathological.

For years I've suspected that Rove is stuck in an adolescent rage, taking revenge upon the Civil Rights marchers (whose courage he couldn't match), the anti-war organizers (who beat him), and those who believe in and struggle for democracy (who drove off Nixon).

I don't recommend therapy for Bin Laden. But Rove might give Dr. Laura a call.

I am currently working on a project about Rove and have done a lot of research on how people perceive him as compared to his actual success. I agree with the assessment above. He is highly overrated as a strategist --- indeed Democrats have imputed to him almost magical powers to shape events in the most complicated ways. It's much simpler than that.

He is just someone who has no limits. And he has a client and a party that are willing to do as he advises. That is a powerful thing, but it is not genius. It is useful in elections, but it is a disaster in governance, as we are seeing. Brute force cannot accomplish every task, as any plumber or mechanic can tell you.

But barring a total meltdown, which is unlikely, Rove is going to be running the Republican party for some time to come. We need to start looking at this man realistically. The key is that the Republicans think he's magical too.


Bravo to Peter for telling it like it is. (And nice new re-design too. Check it out.)


.
digby 6/23/2005 06:29:00 PM |

 
Liberals Filing Lawsuits For Therapy and Understanding

This chaps my hide:

Q Scott, just again on Karl's remarks last night, when he talked about the indictments, was he simply reflecting the sentiments of the President, who, as we know, in many, many speeches, perhaps in jest, talked about referring to the terrorists as saying maybe they thought after 9/11, we would just file a lawsuit?

MR. McCLELLAN: The war on terrorism brought us, to our shores -- let me back up, because the President -- this was talked about at length over the course of the last four years, Ed.

[snip]

And I think all Karl was talking about last night was the different approaches to how you go about winning the war on terrorism. So, you know, some can try to make more out of it than they should, but he was simply talking about the different approaches.

Q So when the President many times in the past actually has evoked laughter from his audiences when he talked about they thought we'd just filing a lawsuit, was he saying that in jest or not?

MR. McCLELLAN: No, Ed. In fact, he was saying it with all seriousness, because if you look back to how things were dealt with prior to 9/11, people knew exactly what he was talking about. When we were attacked previously on our own shores, people were prosecuted.

Of course, it wasn't exactly "filing a lawsuit." It was a federal terrorist prosecution. And the perpetrators are locked up for life. We gave them due process and convicted them without any torture at all. There is no question of their guilt, the American people and the entire world have all the facts and we didn't have to use the constitution as toilet paper to do it. What a failure. We should have picked them up, thrown a bag over their heads, rolled them in their own excrement and put them in a naked pyramid to blow off some steam. Perhaps then 9/11 could have been prevented.

And please don't tell me that Republicans still think we should have invaded Iraq after the first World Trade Center Bombing. The nutball Myleroie cabal have said for years that Ramsi Yousef, the missing conspirator, is really an Iraqi operative under an assumed identity and Wolfowitz and Perle both blurbed her books about it glowingly. It's total delusional crap and the fact that these high level Bush officials put their impramatur on it should have been a huge tip-off to the entire world that the Bush administration had some scary freaks in charge of the war machine. Fifty years from now they'll still be insisting this nonsense is proof of a conspiracy and will probably be saying that martians hijacked the WMD on orders from Barbara Boxer.

As for 9/11, I think it's just a little bit presumptuous for anyone to blame the criminal trials of the first world trade center bombings for it when the Bush administration didn't think the August PDB was worth shortening the Pres's vacation for. There is ample proof that Bush and the Iraq obsessed retreads didn't give a busted fuck about terrorism until 9/11.

Oh, and by the way, we still don't have Osama bin Laden even though the head of the CIA says we know where he is. And we can't get him because it might upset some sensitive relations with "sovereign nations" which is really rich considering that we have put forth a doctrine that says we can invade any sovereign nation we please if we think a "threat is gathering" or "they hate us for our freedom." It's called the Bush Doctrine and it pretty much puts to rest any illusions anyone in the world should have about "sovereignty" or international law. Sovereighty and international law is what we say it is.

And can there be any doubt that Al Jazeera is broadcasting Porter Goss' words all over the arab world and making the US Government look weak and ineffectual?

Talk about giving aid and comfort to the enemy:

CIA Director Porter Goss says he has an "excellent idea" where Osama bin Laden is hiding, but that the al Qaeda chief will not be caught until weak links in the war on terrorism are strengthened.

In an interview with TIME magazine published Sunday, Goss said part of the difficulty in capturing bin Laden was "sanctuaries in sovereign nations."

The magazine asked Goss when bin Laden would be captured.

"That is a question that goes far deeper than you know," he said. "In the chain that you need to successfully wrap up the war on terror, we have some weak links. And I find that until we strengthen all the links, we're probably not going to be able to bring Mr. bin Laden to justice.

"We are making very good progress on it. But when you go to the very difficult question of dealing with sanctuaries in sovereign states, you're dealing with a problem of our sense of international obligation, fair play.

Yeah, that Republican "philosophy" on terrorism is very impressive. The mastermind of 9/11 is holed up in a "soverign country" and we know it, but we can't do anything about it. Meanwhile, we have low-level nobodies down in Guantanamo being forced into excruciating immobile positions for 18 hours a day, sitting in their own urine and feces, being slowly driven mad. This is a very interesting interpretation of international obligation and "fair play."

Amd of course, we have Iraq --- the inexplicable war that nobody really understands, including those who willingly spew happy horseshit about "freedom and democracy" every five minutes --- a war that's costing us our future (to the tune of a billion a week) and the future of America's kids, for no good goddamned reason.

So, please let's talk some more about how liberals don't know how to fight the war on terror. Tell us again how tough the Republicans are and how only they know how to protect the United States because all I'm seeing is fuck-up after fuck-up after fuck-up. In fact, what I'm seeing is the biggest non-stop fuck-up in American history.

But who knows, maybe they stomped their little feet and held their breath til they turned blue and insisted in no uncertain terms that bin Laden be denied "therapy and understanding" in his friendly sovereign haven. That's what separates the men from the boys, my friends. Therapy.

And, by the way, here's one of Bush's quotes about "filing lawsuits" from 2002. Perhaps Democrats ought to arm themselves with this for when the Republicans start trotting out the "file a lawsuit" line:

I can't imagine what was going through the minds of the killers when they hit America. Oh, they must have thought we were so materialistic and selfish, so self-absorbed that after September the 11th we'd file a lawsuit or two. (Laughter.)

But they found out that we're thinking a little differently in America, and that when it comes to our freedom we will do what it takes to defend freedom. And I want to remind you all that this is a long struggle that's going to take a while, that there are al-Qaida killers still on the loose. There are people who hate America, they hate what we stand for, they hate the fact that Democrats and Republicans both love our country equally. They hate the idea that we worship freely. They hate the concept that we debate issues in open. They hate freedom. They just hate it. And they are going to try to hurt us; they are.

.
digby 6/23/2005 05:48:00 PM |

 
Cashew Sized Brains

How do people like this get big time gigs with national political magazines? If you have an IQ under 80 you're in?

I need a drink.


.
digby 6/23/2005 04:57:00 PM |

 
Lieberman's In

That makes this Rove spew an official shitstorm. When a sanctioned "good Democrat" who is known for his support of the war and his moral rectitude says that Karl needs to apologise, the somnambulent establishment wakes up. (If only he'd step up on torture and presidential lying to get us into the war we might really get someplace.)

The big question is whether we are seeing miscues by the administration or whether they are simply trying to rile up the base to change the conversation. Some signs point to a tactical decision. Bush himself recently gave quite a petulant little speech recently in which he blamed all his troubles on the Democrats (I guess having a majority in both houses just isn't what it used to be) --- although he didn't stoop to puerile Ann Coulter level snottiness as Rove did. The message is pretty consistent:

President Bush on Tuesday unleashed his harshest criticism yet on Democrats for thwarting his second-term agenda, demanding they put forward ideas of their own or "step aside" and signaling a more aggressive administration strategy of attack.

[...]

Bush said the Democrats, in contrast, were employing a "philosophy of the stop sign" and an "agenda of the road block," and warned: "Political parties that choose the path of obstruction will not gain the trust of the American people."

He issued a challenge to the Democrats: "If leaders of the other party have innovative ideas, let's hear them. But if they have no ideas or policies except obstruction, they should step aside and let others lead."

Their timing is off, though, if this is by design. In the post below, I wrote that Durbin's forced apology was just the most recent ritual humiliation of many.It's a patented technique --- outraged phony sanctimony over something obscure and misunderstood. It's theoretically possible that because of the very recent strong-arming of Durbin, a very popular senator, that the Democrats are still smarting and have decided to pull out their big guns and go for it. I don't know how many of you saw John McCain's very smug and threatening "prediction" last Sunday that Durbin would apologise, but it was kind of chilling. It was obvious that the Republicans were going for blood, and they luckily found good old meathead Richie Daley to be their useful idiot for them.


For Rove to go after the Democrats so explicitly by saying that liberals wanted to give bin Laden therapy and understanding after 9/11 is throwing down the gauntlet. Those are fighting words and they know it. Check out the gaggle to see just how ridiculous it is to try to spin them. Also check out the video over on Crooks and Liars to see how nervous and flat Rove sounds. Perhaps he always sounds nervous and flat, I don't know. But his remarks didn't seem to penetrate to the crowd, so maybe the red meat isn't working all that well. Or maybe it's because he chose conservative New Yorkers who aren't quite as convinced that liberals are all traitors. They likely know quite a few. In fact many of them are probably intermarried with them and everything.

The press looks like it's willing to chase this story and the White House is acting very flat-footed. Look for Bush to dig in his heels, however. He does not like to be challenged. I suspect that yesterday's Frist freakshow was a function of Bush simply refusing to accept reality. He had to jettison Kerik and I think he's still pissed about it. Bolton is also his boy --- a snarling bully. (How much do you want to bet that Bush would love to rip off that rug and rub that bald head until it shines? Just as a show of manly affection ... and to make sure he knows who's boss.)

If Rove is crumbling publicly, I'd love to see what's going on behind the scenes in the White House. Social Security privatization, a Rovian pet project, is dead. The polls are showing serious weakness only 6 months into his second term. Being a lame duck for three and a half years would be excruciating, particularly with a dead albatross named Iraq around your neck. Let's just say I don't think they are able to "compartmentalize" very well.

Now's the time for reporters who have so carefully maintained maintained their access, to call in some chits. This is when all the whoring is supposed to pay off --- when things go to hell on the inside. I'll be watching for it with bated breath.

In the meantime, it's probably a very good idea to communicate with your representatives on this as Atrios and others are advising --- and not just the Republicans. The Democrats also need to know that their constituents are behind them.

Or, if you're so inclined, sign the Fire Karl Rove petition.


Update: According to John Aravosis, who is as astute about these things as anyone around, says this is a coordinated plan. It's risky. They are going to try to bludgeon their way through these poor poll numbers and convince people that Bush is a great president because he is so tough and strong. The question is whether they can squeeze out one more drop from 9/11. My sense is that this is pretty thin gruel and the people are tired of it. We'll see.



.
digby 6/23/2005 03:01:00 PM |

 
What He Said

The Poorman:

What we are looking at here is a stark illustration of what political speech is in this country, what the right wing has known for some time, and what liberals and centrists are belatedly coming to understand - it is a way of expressing and exerting power. I’m not saying that reasoned political debate is useless - it is essential to democracy - I’m saying that the O’Reilly-ized political climate is so pathological at this point that to treat political discourse with the right as anything other than an exercise in brute force is to concede without a fight. So, sticking with the torture issue, it is worse than pointless to get into the debates that the right wing wants to have - what if there was a ticking bomb? how can one define torture to infinite precision? what are appropriate and inappropriate historical analogies? - are distractions, and distractions by design. Guantanimo Bay is a fantastic place where all guilty brown people recieve far better than they deserve and anyone who says different hates America; then, lose a few contracts and stir up some bad publicity and, suddenly, there are all these shades of grey you never considered. Amazing, that.

Yeah. And don't count on the press to sort it out. Like Monsignor Tim sez "You get it from the left and the right, and I think that kind of confirms you’re doing a pretty good job.."

How convenient, eh? Gray is the color of dirty dishwater, no matter what the shade.


.
digby 6/23/2005 02:21:00 PM |

 
De-Kleining Support

Check out BagNewsnotes' deconstruction (click on the picture to the left) of the Bill Clinton "mouth-kissing" photo from Ed Klein's hatchet job --- which Drudge took to the next level by cropping and darkening it, completely changing its context. It turns out the photographer is none too pleased about what either of the rightwing scumbags Klein or Drudge did to his picture.

(And it turns out that this photo was taken right after Clinton's heart surgery at a huge outdoor Kerry rally. Is that Clinton a real man or what? Soul kissing poor unsuspecting Kerry supporters with photographers all over the place and his heart barely pumping. Damn.)

I haven't read the full hatchet job and probably won't until I can find it at a used book store where I won't be lining his (or Sentinel's) pockets. The Vanity Fair excerpt was enough to make me puke. From what I can tell, the whole book is a thinly disguised "outing" of Hillary Clinton, which after reading the excerpt, one would surely believe --- and yet not exactly know why. He doesn't come out and say it, he just says things like this:

Over the years, Thomases had become Hillary's best friend, alter ago, and chief enforcer. She looked the part. With her frizzy salt and pepper hair, frumpy clothes, down-at heels shoes and expletive laden vocabulary, Thomases was just the kind of tough, strong-willed, ideologically passionate woman Hillary had always admired...Thomases was anything but a traditional political wife: she kept her own name after marrying carpenter-turned-artist, [the late] William Bettridge, who stayed home and took on many of the child care responsibilities.

This is the same guy who claimed in his "Walter Scott" parade column that Chelsea was a slut --- "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree." He is a despicable prick.

But what's interesting here is that the anti-Hillary forces haven't yet settled on a storyline. For some reason, some of the big kahunas are distancing themselves from it.. I don't know if it's because all this lesbo talk makes Hillary look "tough enough" to lead the war on terror or because they are squeamish about saying Hillary is a lesbian who to all intents and purposes has done exactly as they say gays should do --- marry a man and live as a straight woman. I certainly understand that many of them may be a little bit worried that a lot of this sounds an awful lot like an attack on working women. Hillary has always benefitted from these kinds of attacks on her.

Whatever the case, much of wingnuttia has decided that the book must be discredited. And they're doing in in the most hilarious way possible (with the usual self-serving whining and snivelling):

LIMBAUGH: Yeah, I think that's a distinct possibility. I mean, if you want to talk about conspiracies, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if this whole thing is a left-wing idea -- put the book out there, label it a right-wing hatchet job, and use that to inoculate any information in the book or to inoculate her against any criticism down the road. Forget what's in the book, but just say, "Well, you can't believe the critics. They're all right-wingers."

It's sort of like good old Donovan McNabb. The guy is very lucky. Because I deigned to criticize the media's coverage of McNabb, McNabb is now inoculated against any criticism whatsoever by media people in the NFL. Because they don't dare risk being on the same side of the issue with me. So, you know, that's why McNabb wants to hire me or should hire me as his marketing agent because he's been inoculated against criticism.

Well, the same thing with Hillary here. Hillary, because of this book, the real risk is that after this book comes out and if the press successfully tars and feathers the right for having anything to do with this it's gonna -- any further criticism of her down the line after this book will be shrugged off as, "Ah, it's no big deal," to personalize it again.

[...]

What really ticks me off about this is that this whole Hillary book has nothing to do with anybody in the conservative wing of any party. It has nothing to do with a bunch of right-wingers. No right-winger wrote the book. No right-winger collaborated -- well, there might have been.

I don't know about that, but I do know that no right-winger wrote it and no right-winger works at this publishing house, and it's not a right wing publishing house. They may have a conservative imprint, and that's another thing. I forget who published this book, but this is the first book in their new "conservative imprint." Well, that alone is designed to discredit the thing. Don't you think? With the mainstream -- "Oh, yeah, probably just another one of these Regnery books. Ah, it's probably just somebody from Human Events. Ah, it's something out there from The American Spectator. You can't trust these people, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah."

[...]

And it's the same thing -- that if I can go back to it -- this Hillary book. This Hillary book, even though it's written and published by a bunch of left-wingers, this Hillary book is all of a sudden the fault of Republicans and conservatives -- conservatives are trying to trash Hillary. We had nothing to do with this book.

It just shows up in the stores today, so it's just the same old thing. Democrats accuse Republicans of doing what they, the Democrats, do.

(I'm always shocked at how incoherent he is. But anyway...)

The only time I remember a book being pre-emptively discredited and thus innoculating a politician from further inquiry into a personal matter was the Bush book by J.H. Hatfield, which a lot of people believe may have been a set-up to do exactly what Limbaugh suggests. If Hillary's people have actually engineered this the way Limabugh says they have, then hallaujah. We're finally playing by the same rules. Go Hillary.

Needless to say, I really doubt it. The Bush stuff was never fully aired, but if anybody thinks there's even one thing about Bill and Hillary's sexuality that hasn't been cut up and autopsied by the entire alumni of the Barbizon School of blond former prosecutors, they are kidding themselves. Hillary doesn't need to innoculate against being called a lesbian --- she is already widely referred to on the right as Hitlery fergawdsake. If innoculation requires that a scurrilous accusation against someone is discredited due to lack of credibility of the accuser, then Hillary has been vaccinated and innoculated against every fetid Republican lie imaginable. They've all been said a million times, by the entire right wing establishment, for more than 15 years. It's not like Ed Klein's swill is anything new.

Clearly, there is something about this book that is spooking the right. It's a full-on smear job in the best tradition of Republican smear jobs, so even if it isn't a sanctioned Regnery character assasination, there's no reason why they shouldn't love it anyway. All that gay bashing and rape talk and sexy analysis of Clinton's mighty member. You just know it's the kewl kidz's and the punditocrisy's favorite "private" reading material. Yet, the big wingnuts are distancing themselves very publicly and probably hurting sales among the target demographic. The question is, why?




Update: it could be as simple as the right wing noise machine trying to muscle out the competition. That Clinton hating pie is not infinite --- there is a limit to how many slices they can get out of it.


.
digby 6/23/2005 11:07:00 AM |

 
Dick Cheney Is French

Hesiod does an admirable job of addressing the shame, impotence and anger many of us feel every time one of these faux outrage fests on the right result in a Democrat giving a teary eyed apology for something he didn't actually do. This has become a political form of ritual humiliation and it is one of the main reasons why we are having so much trouble politically in this macho era.

Indeed, these ritual humiliations actually serve as proxies for a political war in which it is not only required that a Democrat grovel, but that he grovel insincerely --- it's important that he be seen by his own party to be rejecting reality and embracing the Republican (also insincere) alternate version of the truth. It is an exercise of purer power in which the cackling courtiers of the media also hold the Democrat's metaphorical feet to the fire as a measure of their own fealty to the established order.

The ritual also requires that one Democrat, if not more, join the chorus of condemnation. He or she is publicly acclaimed for "courage" and "integrity" for agreeing that the truth is not the truth. But their real function is to serve as as living examples of disloyalty and weakness to both sides. They are humiliated as well, although they often don't know it, and many times they continue to serve as universally loathed sycophants to be trotted out as "the good Democrat" whenever the Republicans wish to congratulate themselves on their broadmindedness.

Dick Durbin was reciting from an FBI file, not a story in Pravda. It was a US government document. The contents of that file have not been disputed. They are horrible. His crime was pointing out that if one were to read that file without knowing which country it described, one would assume it from was a repressive regime like Hitler's Germany. This is indisputably true.

Mayor Daley played the executioner for the right wing humiliation shaman:

"It's a disgrace and [Durbin] is a good friend of mine. But I think it's a disgrace to say that any man or woman in the military acts like [Nazis] or that a report is like that," Daley said. "You go and talk to some victims of the Holocaust, and they will tell you horror stories and there are not horror stories like that in Guantanamo Bay."

It just doesn't get any worse than that. The report was "like that." People in the government are acting like that --- many of them unwillingly, like the FBI agent who filed that report. Or like Sergeant Joseph Darby who reported the activity at Abu Ghraib (and was treated as a pariah in his home town for doing it.)

I think that it's time, however, to find a better analogy for what is going on down in Gitmo and Iraq (and the rest of the ghost prison system.) "Gulag" is out. Comparisons to Nazi torture techniques are out. Dick Durbin died for our sins. But I think I have the answer.

We can't point out the ways in which we are acting like the Nazis or the Russians so perhaps we should just point out all the ways in which we are acting like the ... gasp ... French. (And I suspect the French would be the first to agree.) From now on, when we or any of our elected representative draw parallels to repressive regimes and their interrogation and torture methods, I think we should specifically cite the French in Algeria.

I don't know if you remember, but the Pentagon held screenings of "The Battle of Algiers" In August of 2003 (just as we were beginning to realize that the cakewalk had been left out in the rain) for officers and others to discuss the challenge of putting down an "insurgency" in an occupied Muslim country. The interesting thing is that the point of the screening was to show that the French failed strategically because of their tactics. Here's the Pentagon flier about the movie:

How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas. ... Children shoot soldiers at point blank range. Women plant bombs in cafes. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar? The French have a plan. It succeeds tactically, but fails strategically. To understand why, come to a rare showing of this film.

(This wouldn't be the first time that Bush administration officials used TV and movies to guide their tactical military decisions:

Following one White House meeting at which he'd asked for more time and more troops, Stormin' Norman reports, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell called to warn the Desert Storm commander that he was being loudly compared, by a top administration official, to George McClellan. "My God," the official supposedly complained. "He's got all the force he needs. Why won't he just attack?" Schwarzkopf notes that the unnamed official who'd made the comment "was a civilian who knew next to nothing about military affairs, but he'd been watching the Civil War documentary on public television and was now an expert."

And then, twenty pages later, Schwarzkopf casually drops the information that he got an inspirational gift from Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney right before the air war finally got under way. Cheney was presenting a gift to a military man, and he chose something with an appropriate theme: "(A) complete set of videotapes of Ken Burns's PBS series, The Civil War."

)

The Slate article to which I link above, discusses why "The Battle of Algiers" as a movie is not particularly illustrative of why the French ultimately lost. There were larger issues at play. But even this skeptical view of the film admits that the one thing it gets right is the fact that the French tortured insurgents in Algeria.

What does any of this have to do with Baghdad?

Terror. The Mideast learned the efficacy of insurgent terror from Algeria. The PLO, Hamas, and other groups are indebted to the Algerian strategy of so-called "people's war." Its lessons are now apparent in Iraq, too. Yet the film treats the Algiers terror campaign as a failure: Its later bombings and shootings are made to appear increasingly desperate and strategically pointless. "Wars aren't won with terrorism," says one key revolutionary. "Neither wars nor revolutions." But that depends at least in part on how the other side reacts to terror, whether the other side is France in Algeria or the United States in Iraq. Wars may not be won with terror, but they can be lost by reacting ineffectively to it.

This is where The Battle of Algiers is potentially most valuable and most dangerous as a point of comparison for the U.S. military. While The Battle of Algiers has next to nothing to say about overall French strategy in Algeria, its most obvious military lesson—that torture is an efficient countermeasure to terror—is a dangerous one in this particular instance. Aside from its moral horror, torture may not even elicit accurate information, though the film seems to suggest it is foolproof.

The French military view of torture is articulated by Col. Mathieu in the course of a series of exchanges with French journalists. As reports of torture spread, the issue becomes a scandal in France. Mathieu, however, is unwavering in defense of the practice: To him it is a military necessity. Informed that Jean-Paul Sartre is condemning French tactics, for example, Mathieu responds with a question that would warm Ann Coulter's heart: "Why are the liberals always on the other side?"

That sure sounds familiar. Colonel Mathieu in the movie is based upon a real French General named General Massu:

In 1971, General Massu wrote a book challenging"The Battle of Algiers," and the film was banned in France for many years. In his book General Massu, who had been considered by soldiers the personification of military tradition, defended torture as "a cruel necessity." He wrote: "I am not afraid of the word torture, but I think in the majority of cases, the French military men obliged to use it to vanquish terrorism were, fortunately, choir boys compared to the use to which it was put by the rebels. The latter's extreme savagery led us to some ferocity, it is certain, but we remained within the law of eye for eye, tooth for tooth."

In 2000, his former second in command, Gen. Paul Aussaresses, acknowledged, showing neither doubts nor remorse, that thousands of Algerians "were made to disappear," that suicides were faked and that he had taken part himself in the execution of 25 men. General Aussaresses said "everybody" knew that such things had been authorized in Paris and he added that his only real regret was that some of those tortured died before they revealed anything useful.

As for General Massu, in 2001 he told interviewers from Le Monde, "Torture is not indispensable in time of war, we could have gotten along without it very well." Asked whether he thought France should officially admit its policies of torture in Algeria and condemn them, he replied: "I think that would be a good thing. Morally torture is something ugly."

It seems to me that the Pentagon planners who held that screening of "The Battle of Algiers" were, perhaps, trying to get that message across, at least if one were to take the movie at face value. Its central premise is that it was French tactics (like torture) that fueled the FLN rather than defeated it in the long run. But, as the Slate article points out, it also shows (incorrectly) that torture works in the short run --- and that may have been the lesson that was taken to heart.

But regardless of whether the Pentagon actually studied and approved of French tactics in Algeria, or if anyone took those screenings seriously, it's pretty clear that we're on the same path. (And don't be too sure they didn't. Apparently, half of Washington was devouring "The Arab Mind" a completely discredited piece of sociological crap, so it wouldn't be surprising. These Republican Intellecutals, after all, tend to believe what they want to believe.)

And, since Nazis, Soviets and Commies of all stripes are off limits when describing our failing and immoral tactics, I think we should just fall back on every Republican's favorite whipping boy -- the cheese eating surrender monkeys.

I can't wait to hear Orrin Hatch stand up in the Senate, bursting with wounded national pride as he reflexively clutches his antique pearl choker, and dolefully expresses his outrage that the Democrats would ever say that Americans are like the French. I have no doubt that the high priests of right wing radio would start speaking in tongues and the FOX News analysts would go into full-on head spinning, green vomit, Linda Blair mode.

And maybe, just maybe, the absurdity of it all will finally hit home with the Democratic establishment, the press and the American people. After all, in the "who's the traitor" game, the Democrats are supposed to love the French, who hate America just like they do only...now they hate the French? Whose side are we on again?

And if that doesn't work, there's always Canada.



Update: My ironic style is much too inscrutable this week -- perhaps I shouldn't have given up coffee.

Having the Dems denounce the US as being like France is a rhetorical device --- more than half tongue in cheek. We could just as easily be tarred for comparing America to Heaven --- or even itself (which is better than heaven, apparently.) Imagine if we said that our tactics were like the tactics used on slave plantations. The outcry would be the same. It's not about the substance of the charge, it's about, as one of my commenters says, speaking heresy. Which is what speaking the truth has become. Heresy.

I do not sincerely suggest that we take to the Senate floor and denounce America as being like the French. They could do it, and there are ample historical parallels, but it won't do any good. We are not allowed to make any historical parallels with America today because we are the greatest country in the history of the world and we are incapable of doing the kinds of things that others have done. Period.

The only way we will ever stop this is to stop apologising for telling the truth and just tell it. It's that simple.



.
digby 6/23/2005 08:50:00 AM |

Tuesday, June 21, 2005

 
Phenomenon Of Anger

Via Jack O'Toole I see that Governor Schwarzenegger's toppling poll numbers have led him to take a new tack, finally proving that he is a real Republican. (Nice work Maria. Uncle Jack would be so proud.)

The governor unveiled the strategy Tuesday before the earnest faces of elderly homeowners seated in folding chairs in the backyard of a well-worn ranch home outside San Diego. He derided what he called an insidious Democratic effort to overhaul the landmark Proposition 13 property tax limit.

"They want to back us into a corner so eventually they can force us to raise taxes,'' he added. "From now to election day, I want to talk about all the specific taxes (they) want to change."

[...]

Clearly, Schwarzenegger is appealing to the Republican base with this talk on taxes,'' said Tony Quinn, a GOP political analyst. "No one really knows much about the upcoming election, so he has to find something to get his supporters motivated.''

That strategy was outlined by the governor's media expert, Don Sipple, in campaign calls this month to wealthy contributors. Sipple said that "based on a lot of polling,'' the governor's special election campaign will aim to create a "phenomenon of anger'' among voters, particularly toward public employee unions, which the governor has charged are behind much of the Democrats' push for more spending and higher taxes, according to a recent Los Angeles Times report.

A separate initiative, one largely financed by the Republican Party and people close to Schwarzenegger, to limit the ability of public employee unions to contribute to political campaigns also has qualified for the ballot.

Going after the public employee unions has worked awfully well for him so far. I suppose he can pull off making it impossible for them to contribute to campaigns. But he can't force them off TV. And they are killing him. People like nurses and firefighters and teachers. They depend on them in times of crisis. They trust their children to their care. They don't see them as members of the Soprano family. In fact, when you put them up against Schwarzenegger, you are reminded that he made his name playing an evil cyborg.



.
digby 6/21/2005 01:07:00 PM |

 
Nope

Atrios writes:

Believed in WMDs they hyped? Perhaps. Believed in the threat they hyped? Nope.

They didn't believe in the WMD's they hyped either and we know this for a fact. Gene Lyons pointed out the obvious at the time:

The administration's strategy of loudly proclaiming that Iraq poses a dire threat to U.S. security while making a public spectacle of massing troops along its border as if it were scarcely capable of self-defense makes no sense.

Clearly, they didn't really believe that Saddam had any WMD capability. The governments of the US and Britain would have leveled Iraq before they put over a hundred thousand soldiers out in the open on the Kuwait border if they had. They knew.



.
digby 6/21/2005 12:35:00 PM |

 
Old Times There Are Not Forgotten

I haven't been following the latest Mississippi racist retrial all that closely, but app arently they just returned a verdict of guilty of manslaughter rather than murder, an alternate charge that was added at the last minute. I'll be interested to hear the reasoning. (It may have just been because the defendant is so old.)

Apparently, his lawyers used the "old news" and "looking forward, not backward," defense. Not that I blame the lawyer. He's just doing his job. But it is ironic because one of the things I really love about right wingers is how they castigate others for being irresponsible and unaccountable while refusing to ever admit they were wrong. They're still defending McCarthy fergawdsake. Nixon's a hero and Deepthroat a traitor. They will never, ever, accept responsibility for anything. When someone catches up with them it's always a call to "move on" and "stop living in the past."

I googled Killan, the ex-clansman, and found this interview by Richard Barrett, one of the state's most famous white supremicists from 2004:

Barrett: What about your background?

Killen: I have pastored churches all through Neshoba County for over fifty years. I am well thought of by most everyone. I have taken part in many political campaigns, especially for Ross Barnett and "Big Jim" Eastland. I have a big picture of Barnett hanging on my wall. I would get up and give speeches for candidates and organize speakings. One told me that he didn't even need to show up, so long as I was speaking for him. I have been encouraged to run for office, myself.

Barrett: Is there someone you most admire?

Killen: "Big Jim" Eastland. I used to go to see him a lot. The security guards would always let me in. I got stopped for speeding on the way to his house, one time, and the patrolman just waved me through. We would talk a lot and he would say that he would do anything he could for me. He was a powerful man and could bottle up laws that were wrong. He even told me that Bobby Kennedy once asked him to pick someone to succeed J. Edgar Hoover, because his brother was fixing to fire Hoover. When "Big Jim" said that he was supporting Hoover, no matter what, Bobby came back and said that he gave in. Hoover stayed on.

Barrett: You were put on trial, once, over trying to keep Communists out of Mississippi.

Killen: Old John Doar kept staring at me, like he was trying to look right through me. I stared right back at him and sent him a signal that made him mad. He was really mad when he could not convict me. During the trial, I wrote a note for my lawyer, Laurel Weir, to bring up about the plan by Negroes to rape white women that Summer. He did and the judge rebuked him for it, but the point got made.

John Sugg, the reporter who is covering the trial for Truthout, wrote about Barrett, the other day:

Later Wednesday, I ran into Richard Barrett, the paragon of Mississippi white supremacists. He was handing out his booklet, From Southern to American around the courthouse. The screed argues that blacks should be airlifted back to Africa, among other innovative solutions to social ills. Oh, despite his Southern nationalism, he's a New Yorker by birth, but what the hell.

Barrett, when not championing the virtues of being white - he's a ubiquitous figure in the state's fringe politics - is a lawyer. From a distance, he looks the part. Closer, his suit is a little threadbare and needs dry cleaning. His tie is stained. But bright and shiny is a lapel pin - a cross with four sharp points, symbol of his "Nationalist Movement."

"Killen asked me to represent him," Barrett says, "but I didn't think he was competent."

I can't resist, and ask: Is that why he wanted you?"

Barrett: "Hah!"

Barrett also says that he would have put on a "political trial," and he didn't know if Killen would have allowed that.

I ask Barrett to explain "political trial."

"Take a choice," he replies. "It's either Watts and Detroit" - referring to race riots - "or Highway 515, peaceful farms and churches."

State Road 515 is where the three civil rights workers - Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney - were murdered by the Klan. Barrett elaborated, contending the brief violence resulted in community tranquility. I rolled my eyes and said, "C'mon," and he retorted, "It's true."

"Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney came here saying they wanted to register Negroes to vote," Barrett says. "What they really wanted was to run white people out of the county. They did that in Jackson, where I live. Last election, there wasn't anyone I could vote for."

I ask: No one on the ballot?"

Barrett: "No, I mean there were no white people on the ballot."

As he walks away, he throws out a quicky: "They were not civil and they weren't right. They were communists and they were wrong."

Nice. I'm sure these are pretty much fringe people in today's Mississippi. But I would bet you money that the pro-lynching faction in the Senate is actually giving cover to Trent Lott, the former majority leader who still has some favors to call in. He's the reigning political leader of the neo-confederates. These are his people.

Update: Here's a nice op-ed by Mississippi writer Mitch Cohen on this very subject. Jesus, decent southerners must be getting tired of this crap.



.
digby 6/21/2005 09:07:00 AM |

 
Special Election

I saw a "Recall Arnold" bumper sticker yesterday.

This post from Atrios tells me we're going to be seeing a lot of them:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger suddenly ranks among the most unpopular governors in modern California history, as residents grow increasingly unhappy about the action hero-turned-politician's budget plans and his call for a special election, according to a new Field Poll.

Less than a third -- 31 percent -- of the state's adults approve of the job the governor is doing in Sacramento, down from 54 percent in February. The numbers are only slightly better among registered voters, 37 percent of whom are happy with Schwarzenegger's performance and 53 percent dissatisfied.

"There's very little for the governor to cheer about in this poll,'' said Mark DiCamillo, director of the Field Poll. "There's a very broad-based view that the governor is off on the wrong track.''

[...]

We've seen these type of reversals and downturns before, but almost always because of an external event, like the declining economy for Wilson or the energy crisis for Davis,'' DiCamillo said. "But here, almost nothing has changed. It's almost a self-inflicted thing.''

Well, when you run as a superhero who is going to magically solve all problems by the sheer force of your supernatural powers, people tend to be quickly disappointed when they realize that you are actually a pampered movie star who doesn't have a clue.

Ronald Reagan gave speeches several times a week for many, many years before he ever ran for Governor. He was a fixture of the Republican establishment of California. Schwarzenneger didn't do any of the (ahem) heavy lifting that a person needs to do before they are ready to run the 7th largest economy in the world. It shows.

It is pathetic that Californians bought the ype, but then that's what we do. But like the good little faddists we are, when the fad dies we reject it with a vehemence . Nobody wants to be seen in last year's fashions. Live by the trend, die by the trend.

We do have a special election coming up --- one that will cost more than 70 million dollars and that Schwarzenneger insists we hold even though a regularly scheduled election is next June. Maybe we should make it worth our while. It only takes around 900,000 signatures to get a recall on the ballot. If we were smart, we'd get a right winger to finance it. They hate him too.



.
digby 6/21/2005 08:34:00 AM |

Monday, June 20, 2005

 
Breaking the Code

Andrew Sullivan notices the vile language used against gays by many on the right quite strikingly resembles the sick anti-semitism that prevailed for eons. I remember writing something similar about this a couple of years ago when I pondered why all the southern heritage groups were so freaked out about gay rights, which seemed slightly incongruous to me.

Back when Atrios was all over Trent Lott I did a bunch of research on the neo-confederates. Here we have a movement that claims it is all about their "southern heritage” and denies any accusation of racism. Their web-sites don’t use the “n” word and they try (and fail) to contain their hatred of African-Americans by bleating unconvincingly about history and ancestors and birthright, blah,blah,blah.

They hammer about affirmative action and highlight crime statistics and discuss the horror of a breakdown of American values and all the other unsubtle appeals to racism that we see throughout the Southern wing of the mainstream GOP. But, what you don’t see (and I’m not talking about full-on white supremacy neo-Nazi garbage) in the neo-confederate movement is no holds barred racist language. They have learned to use code words because even stone racists realize that it is no longer ok to spew their unadorned hatred in public. So, they go on and on about the illustrious history of the antebellum south and how special it all is.

But, strangely, I found that they also spend a vast amount of time spewing the most vile commentary about gays and lesbians. Who knew this was such a huge part of America’s Southern heritage? These confederate historical associations are so obsessed with the “homosexual rights” agenda that you can only conclude that the “threat” of homosexuality was the most hotly debated issue in the pre-1860 south. Why else would these benign heritage societies spend such an inordinate amount of time and energy detailing the dangers of the “gay lifestyle?”

Unless, of course, discussing gays and lesbians as if they are less than human is a convenient way of signaling your bigot credentials in all things. Then, it makes sense for these historical organizations to take a bizarre stand against gays, while proclaiming their mission is a simple desire to celebrate their heritage.

Here's how they explain it in polite company:

When I served on the State Textbook Committee, I asked each publisher, "what is your definition of family?" Almost without exception, the publishers, out of deference to the homosexual, lesbian, and feminist movements, define family as two or more people living together who care for one another. By their definition, any two people living together – men, women, married, unmarried – are now defined as a family.

The antebellum South was a society founded on the traditional family of husband, wife, and children. Even today, more than the rest of the US, the South is still more family oriented. Southerners still do not move as often as other people do. More than 75% of the people living in Alabama today were born in Alabama.

Because the South was, and is more family oriented, and because our definition of family is increasingly unacceptable to many Americans, all things Southern, including our concept of family, are attacked.

I think that both Sullivan and I are right. Gays have become the all purpose repository for American bigotry --- and we have a whole lot of it that needs a place to go. Without being able to use race or religion to assuage their soulless sense of insecurity, racists have found the only group that they feel they are still allowed to openly treat like animals. Gay bashing is the new code for all our lovely homegrown hatreds --- and some European imports like anti-semitism too.



Just so that nobody misunderstands, I do not mean to imply that all southern heritage groups are homophobic or even racist. I'm speaking of certain clearly racist groups that are only slightly less reprehensible than straight up white supremecists. (And the white supremecists are seriously into gay bashing as well.)



.




.
digby 6/20/2005 08:42:00 PM |

 
Patriot Act Too

Before Monsignor Tim releases his new book ("Big Russ and Me: The Bedwetting Years") and makes another appearance on his good friend Rush's radio show to hawk it, maybe somebody ought to send him a couple of these t-shirts his pal is selling before the dittoheads buy out the inventory.

The t-shirts read, "Your Tropical Retreat from the Stress of Jihad," "I Got My Free Koran and Prayer Rug at G'itmo," and "My Mullah went to Club G'itmo and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt."

This is some funny stuff. Especially when the FBI questions you for wearing t-shirts that proclaim you are a terrorist. Read those babies again. Swarthy males probably ought to think twice --- there're some militia types with itchy trigger fingers out there. And we've all been warned more than once to watch what we say.

I see a "Law and Order" episode in my future.



.
digby 6/20/2005 07:29:00 PM |

 
No News Is Bad News

Arianna has an interesting post up about blogs expanding the news cycle. But what I found most astonishing were these statistics:

Here are the number of news segments that mention these stories: (from a search of the main news networks’ transcripts from May 1-June 20).

* ABC News: "Downing Street Memo": 0 segments; "Natalee Holloway": 42 segments; "Michael Jackson": 121 segments.
* CBS News: "Downing Street Memo": 0 segments; "Natalee Holloway": 70 segments; "Michael Jackson": 235 segments.
* NBC News: "Downing Street Memo": 6 segments; "Natalee Holloway": 62 segments; "Michael Jackson": 109 segments.
* CNN: "Downing Street Memo": 30 segments; "Natalee Holloway": 294 segments; "Michael Jackson": 633 segments.
* Fox News: "Downing Street Memo": 10 segments; "Natalee Holloway": 148 segments; Michael Jackson": 286 segments.
* MSNBC: "Downing Street Memo": 10 segments; "Natalee Holloway": 30 segments; "Michael Jackson": 106 segments.

Wow. Is anyone in denial that cable news is just an arm of the entertainment industrial complex? Arianna suggests that we tune out all these non-stories the minute they come on. I'm actually giving up altogether. I can't find anything to watch on cable news anymore. And I'm a news junkie.



.
digby 6/20/2005 05:51:00 PM |

 
In Our Faces

In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility ... it would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation.

I suppose it's a waste of breath to try to convince the media and the rightwingers that Bush is the biggest bald faced liar in history, but still, the internet is such a nice repository of documentary proof of this that it seems a worthy exercise, nonetheless, if only for the history books.

I had the sad experience of accidentally deleting one of my own posts over the week-end, one on which I spent a great deal of time. (I can only assume that my subconscious was trying to tell me something.) However, in the course of researching that post, I happened upon a very nice resource that handily catalogues all the president's speeches (as well as other politicians') and I came to realize something quite astounding. During the campaign Bush repeatedly lied about the reasons for the Iraq war, even based upon the irrefutable public record, and as best I can tell the travelling press corp never bothered to comment upon it.

I recall a slight kerfluffle a while back about Bush saying that Saddam refused to allow the inspectors into Iraq, which those of us in the blogosphere noted with stunned surprise, but which was pooh-poohed by the press as being just another Bushism. But he actually continued to say it; he just said it more artfully. It was still an outright lie. And the only people who paid any attention to these words were voters who hadn't followed the lead up to the war in all its subterfuge and Machiavellian detail --- many of whom undoubtedly believed the president.

As I was searching through the archives of Bush's speeches, I found that these lies were part of his stump speech until just before the election in October of 2004 at which point he suddenly switched gears and started talking about "freedom on the march." Up until then, however, he had consistently said something virtually every single day on the stump that was a lie.

More than one actually, and they are all doozies:

6/27/03

In Afghanistan and Iraq, we gave ultimatums to terror regimes. Those regimes chose defiance, and those regimes are no more. (Applause.)


8/26/03

We gave a clear ultimatum to Saddam Hussein that he must disarm. He chose to defy us, and Saddam Hussein is no more. (Applause.)

09/12/2003

And we have pursued the war on terror in Iraq. Our coalition enforced the demands of the U.N. Security Council, in one of the swiftest and most humane military campaigns in history. Because of our military, catastrophic weapons will no longer be in the hands of a reckless dictator. (Applause.)(Applause.)


10/18/2003

But it wasn't just us who recognized a threat. Free nations recognized the threat. The United Nations passed resolution after resolution after resolution calling upon Mr. Saddam Hussein to disclose his weapons and to disarm. And finally, in Security Council resolution 1441, led by the United States, he was told that he had one, final chance to disarm -- disclose what he had and disarm, or there would be serious consequences. The world spoke, he chose defiance, and Saddam Hussein is no more. (Applause.)


10/22/03

Since the liberation of Iraq, we have discovered Saddam's clandestine network of biological laboratories, the design work on prohibited long-range missiles, his elaborate campaign to hide illegal weapons programs. Saddam Hussein spent years frustrating U.N. inspections, for a simple reason -- because he was violating U.N. demands. And in the end, rather than surrender his programs and abandon his lies, he chose defiance, and his own undoing.


1/15/04

Terrorists declared war on the United States of America, and war is what they got. We've captured or killed many of the key leaders of the al Qaeda network, and the rest of them know we're on their trail. In Afghanistan, and in Iraq, we gave ultimatums to terror regimes. Those regimes chose defiance, and those regimes are no more. (Applause.)


2/24/04

September the 11th affected my way of thinking when it came to the security of the country. We saw a danger, and so I gave him an ultimatum-the world really gave him an ultimatum. And he refused. (Applause.)

3/4/04


In 2002, the U.N. Security Council yet again demanded a full accounting of Saddam Hussein's weapons programs. As he had for over a decade, Saddam Hussein refused to comply. (Applause.)


5/3/04

Now, anytime an American President says, disarm, or face serious consequences, the American President better mean it. When the Commander-in-Chief speaks for the country, I believe the person ought to speak clearly and mean what he says. And so I acted on those sentiments, as well. I said, Mr. Saddam Hussein, disarm, or face serious consequences. He chose not to. He defied the world again.

5/13/04

My administration looked at the facts and the history and looked at the intelligence in Iraq, and we saw a threat. Members of the United States Congress from both political parties looked at the same intelligence, and they saw a threat. In 2002, the United Nations Security Council yet again demanded a full accounting of Saddam Hussein's weapons programs. They did so because they saw a threat. And as he had for over a decade, Saddam Hussein refused to comply. He deceived the inspectors. He did everything he can to deny access to the truth.

7/14/04

The larger point is, and the fundamental question is, did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program? And the answer is, absolutely. And we gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in.

8/29/04

Because the use of force should be the last option of the Commander-in-Chief, the very last option, I went to the United Nations in the hopes that diplomacy would solve the threat. You might remember, the debate went on, and after consideration, the U.N. Security Council voted 15 to nothing to say to Saddam Hussein, disclose, disarm, or face serious consequences. So the world spoke.

As he had for over a decade, he defied the demands of the free world. This wasn't the only U.N. resolution he ignored. We then sent inspectors in-or the world sent inspectors in, and he systematically deceived the inspectors.(Applause.)


9/27/04

Before the Commander-in-Chief commits troops into harm's way, he must try everything possible to prevent war. And so I went to the United Nations hoping that diplomacy would finally work with Saddam Hussein. That's why I went there. I have a duty to the moms and dads and husbands and wives of those who wear the uniform to try everything to protect our country without the use of the military. And so I stood in front of the United Nations and made the case. They looked at the same intelligence I did, they remembered the same history, and they voted 15 to nothing to say to Saddam Hussein: disclose, disarm, or face serious consequences. I believe when an international body speaks, it must mean what it says. (Applause.)

Saddam Hussein didn't believe it. He didn't believe it. Last year -- after all, for 16 years, he had ignored the United Nations -- excuse me, 10 years, 16 resolutions. That's resolution, after resolution, after resolution. As a matter of fact, when they sent inspectors into his country, he systematically deceived them. Diplomacy wasn't going to work. He wasn't about to listen to our demands. So we gave him a last chance; he ignored the last chance. And then I had a choice to make: take the word of a madman, forget the lessons of September the 11th, or do what's necessary to defend this country. Given that choice, I will defend America every time. (Applause.)

At about this time in the last month of the campaign, his stump speech changed:

October 6, 2004

I understand some Americans have strong concerns about our role in Iraq. I respect the fact that they take this issue seriously. It's a serious matter. I assure them we're in Iraq because I deeply believe it is necessary and right and critical to the outcome of the war on terror, and critical for long-term peace for our children and grandchildren. (Applause.)

If another terror regime were allowed to emerge in Iraq, the terrorists would find a home and a source of funding and a source of support, and they would correctly conclude that free nations do not have the will to defend themselves. If Iraq becomes a free society at the heart of the Middle East, an ally in the war on terror, a model for hopeful reform in that region, the terrorists will suffer a crushing defeat. (Applause.) And that is why Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman calls Iraq "a crucial battle in the global war on terrorism." And that is why Prime Minister Tony Blair has called the struggle in Iraq "the crucible in which the future of global terrorism will be determined." That is why the terrorists are fighting with desperate cruelty -- they know their future is at stake. Iraq is no diversion. It's a place where civilization is taking a decisive stand against chaos and terror, and we must not waver. (Applause.)

(That is particularly interesting in light of the recently revived and ever popular "flypaper" excuse. Bush just said on Saturday that it's a good thing that terrorists are flocking to Iraq so that we could fight them over there --- presumably so that useless wogs will be killed instead of innocent Americans.)

Bush slipped up again, however, as he got closer to the election and gave this speech on 10/12/04:

Before I ever commit troops into harm's way, or any President, we must try all means to deal with the threat. No President ever wants to send our young into harm's way. No President ever wants to have to do that. So I went to the United Nations, in hopes that diplomacy would work. That was my hope. I hoped that the free world would come together and make its voice clear, which it did. The Security Council voted 15-to- nothing, and said to Saddam Hussein, disclose, disarm or face serious consequences. Now, I believe that when an international body speaks, it must mean what it says. (Applause.) And that goes for the President, as well. (Applause.)

Saddam Hussein had no intention of listening to the demands of the free world. He ignored the resolution. He deceived the inspectors that were trying to get into -- that were in his country.[I think he really came to believe that Saddam wouldn't let inspectors into the country. ed] Why should he change? This is resolution number 17. Resolution after resolution after resolution had been passed, and nothing happened. He wasn't about to listen. As a matter of fact, when we gave him the final chance, he continued to deceive and evade. So I have a choice to make at this point in our history: Do I forget the lessons of September the 11th and take the word of a madman, or do I take action to defend this country? Given that choice, I will defend America every time. (Applause.)

We did not find -- we did not find the stockpiles that we all thought were there. But I want to remind you what the Duelfer report said. It said that Saddam Hussein retained the intent, the knowledge, and therefore, the capability to rebuild his weapons programs. Now, think about that.

The sheer chutzpah of that entire statement is actually quite dazzling. He was very sneaky all along saying that the security council voted unanimously for Saddam to disarm or face "serious consequence," while leaving the impression that the security council also agreed that this was all that was required for the US to invade. As we know, they didn't agree at all. With the exception of the US and Britain, the security council believed the inspections were working and that 1441 did not give any automatic authorization to invade. The security council did not authorize the US and Britain to go to war under 1441, yet Bush repeatedly implied that they did all through the campaign and nobody called him on it.

But that was slick spin that the press was too lazy to unwind. What is stunning is that all through the campaign, almost until election eve, Bush continued to say that Saddam refused to disarm, defying the world and the UN. The truth was that even at the time the consensus was that Saddam was giving the inspectors unprecedented cooperation. And more importantly,by the fall of 2004, for at least a year we had known definitively that Saddam had no arms. Therefore, Bush's reasonsing, quite artfully put together I admit, is nonetheless adsurd --- so much so, I suspect, that people couldn't quite figure out a way to approach it. It truly is the best example I've seen of "The Big Lie." It's almost as if Bush was daring people to refute him, knowing full well that it was such an illogical claim that it would make people uncomfortable to call him on it. (Indeed, he had ample reason to think so --- nobody had called him on his earlier assertion that Saddam refused to let the inspectors in at all, which is simply delusional.)

Today the media are yawning and telling us that Bush making an irrevocable decision to go to war almost immediately after 9/11 is old news. "Everybody already knew that," they say. And yet the president of the United States, time after time after time, lied directly to Americans in his campaign speeches, in addresses to fundraisers and, by extension, on the local news throughout the country by saying that the United Nations backed his decision to invade on the basis of the fact that Saddam refused to disarm. Everything about that statement is false. And yet even though he said it hundreds of times, and the press also now says they knew that Bush had decided tyo go to war as early as 2001, nobody said a word.

I didn't either. I'll be honest. I didn't because I couldn't bear to listen to Bush's stump speech so I didn't realize that he said this every day. However, the campaign press corpse, if they could hear the speech over the cacophany of piped in applause and the sound of their own drooling over all that delicious campaign food, never bothered to report this glaring lie. Neither, for some reason, did the Democrats. It's almost as if everybody just accepted the fact that the Big Lie was unstoppable and assumed that there was nothing they could do about it.

But there is really no excuse for the press to let this lie go unaddressed. He was saying this constantly all over the country and it was being picked up by local news and newspapers and repeated verbatim. I know it's hard to believe, but not everybody reads the NY Times and the Washington Post. A hell of a lot of Americans heard, without refutation, that Bush had the backing of the UN for the invasion and that he invaded as a last resort because a defiant Saddam refused to disarm. Again, that entire premise is false.

This is another reason why the Downing Street Memos mean something. It's not just that Bush and his cadre decided to go to war long before they admitted it --- they also lied repeatedly after the fact about their reasons and legal basis for doing it. It may be the most baldfaced lie a president has ever made to the American public --- even eclipsing "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" which Clinton only said on television once (and was repeated as evidence of his lying, thousands of times by the news media.)

As Juan Cole points out here(noticing as well that he's lying about the UN) Bush said it again just the other day:

"And so we worked hard to see if we could figure out how to do this peacefully, take a -- put a united front up to Saddam Hussein, and say, the world speaks, and he ignored the world. Remember, 1441 passed the Security Council unanimously. He made the decision. And the world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power."

It is shocking journalistic malpractice not to point out every single time he says this that the security council does not agree that 1441 authorized the president to go to war, and in fact Britain tried mightily to get authorization and couldn't do it. It is also malpractice to continue to allow Bush to say that Saddam "defied," "ignored" or otherwise thwarted the inspections leaving us no choice. HE WAS COMPLYING. WE PULLED THE INSPECTORS OUT OF THERE. AND THERE WERE NO WMD.

In this very interesting TOM Dispatch, Mark Danner, who wrote the first real expose of the DMSs in The NYRB, of all places, responds to critics who say that this is old news. (Read the whole thing, but this passage in particular is relevant to my point:

The memo, moreover, is not an anonymous statement to reporters but a record of what Britain's highest security officials actually said. It tells us much about how the decision was made, and shows decisively that, as I wrote in my article, "the idea of UN inspectors was introduced not as a means to avoid war, as President Bush repeatedly assured Americans, but as a means to make war possible."

And as I have illustrated above, even after the facts on the ground were well known, Bush continued to use Saddam's non-existent defiance of UN weapons inspections as his cassus belli throughout the presidential campaign --- and the press allowed him to do it.

For the record,
this was the situation on March 7, two weeks before the invasion:

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said what he heard from the chief inspectors' reports Friday morning was a "catalogue still of noncooperation" and that what cooperation Iraq gave came grudgingly and "primarily under the threat of force." He also said that he expected a vote next week because "I don't think this can just continue on and on and on."

Blix, executive chairman of the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, told the council that inspectors have been given prompt access to Iraqi sites and have faced "relatively few difficulties." He said Iraq's cooperation could be a result of strong outside pressure.

ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told the council that inspectors have found no evidence that Iraq has revived its nuclear weapons program.

[...]

Blix said Iraq has not resolved all of the remaining issues regarding its weapons programs. He said that verifying Baghdad's disarmament would take time and that inspectors would need to remain once it was completed.

Blix also said that he hoped Iraq would be more forthcoming with documents and other evidence. And he said Iraq has given inspectors names of people who helped destroy biological and chemical weapons in 1991. The availability of names indicates that Iraq should have records, he said.

Blix said inspectors have not found any evidence of mobile or underground weapons facilities. He said Iraq is making a serious effort to quantify biological and chemical weapons destroyed in 1991, unearthing several complete bombs from a re-excavated site.

Blix added that Baghdad also must account for how much of the weapons were produced.

ElBaradei said inspectors have found no evidence that high-strength aluminum tubes and powerful magnets Iraq has purchased were intended to produce nuclear weapons.

ElBaradei also said accusations that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger are "unfounded."

He said Iraqi scientists have agreed to be interviewed without escorts or recording devices, and that inspectors were still seeking to have those interviews conducted outside the country.

Here was the state of play a week later, just five days before the invasion:

President Bush will meet the leaders of Britain and Spain in the Azores Islands on Sunday for a "final pursuit" of a U.N. Security Council resolution on Iraq, the White House announced this morning.

"In an effort to pursue every last bit of diplomacy the president will depart Sunday morning for the Azores to Meet Prime Minister [Tony] Blair and Prime Minister [Jose] Aznar to discuss prospects for resolving the situation peacefully with diplomacy in final pursuit of a United Nations resolution," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said. The Azores, part of Portugal, are in the Atlantic Ocean about 900 miles west of Lisbon.

The three countries are sponsors of a proposed resolution that would open the door to military action against Iraq if President Saddam Hussein failed to meet specific disarmament requirements within a very short time frame, probably less than a week. The resolution has been blocked by strong opposition from France, Russia, China and Germany. All four are members of the Security Council; France, Russia and China are permanent members with power to veto any resolution.

Nothing changed. The UN refused to back to use of force. Three days later Bush gave this amazing speech [Read it. I'd forgotten what he said. ed] to the nation telling Saddam Hussein to leave within 48 hours. Ari Fleisher verified the very next day that we were invading whether Saddam left or not:

Q So the bottom line is, Americans are going to occupy Iraq, no matter what, at this point?

MR. FLEISCHER: The bottom line is, a coalition of the willing will disarm Saddam Hussein's Iraq, no matter what.

Even if they haven't any arms to dis.

While the press may find all this as hilarious as George W. Bush does, the DSMs show that Bush knew a year before the war that Saddam didn't present a threat --- and the public record shows that he knew for sure a month before the war that the inspectors hadn't found any evidence of WMD and that Saddam had been cooperating. Indeed, one could easily conclude that he rushed to war to prevent the inspectors from making that conclusive.

And then he continued to lie with impunity for the next two years, up to this very minute, when he says he went to war as a last resort, with the support of the UN, because Saddam refused to disarm --- despite the fact that we know definitively he didn't have any arms. The press is evidently so insular and so cynical that they simply accepted that Bush was lying day in and day out to the American public in the presidential campaign. And now all we hear from the them is caterwalling about "old news." That really is astonishing.

If you want to see Bush clumsily spinning like a top about Iraq, treat yourself to a re-reading of this debate transcript. Perhaps if the press had done its job during the campaign, or devoted even a fraction of the energy they devoted to Gore's mother's dog prescriptions, or Hillary donning a Yankee cap, this utter gibberish coming from the leader of the world would have been the death knell of his presidency as it should have been. Instead, it was just a "bad performance." What a tragedy.



.
digby 6/20/2005 12:42:00 PM |

Sunday, June 19, 2005

 
Father Tim and The Flyboy

I don't know how many of you bothered to sit through the Padre's eyelash batting McCainiac flirtathon on Press The Meat this morning, but Arianna did and she homes in on one of Russert's most annoying traits --- indeed, it's one of the most annoying traits I see across the TV wasteland. I don't know if it's that these people are getting so much direction in their ear pieces that they can't hear what their subject is saying or if it's that they are too self-absorbed to listen to anything but the sound of their own voices, but whatever the reason, they simply don't seem to hear the answers to their questions. If they did, their shows wouldn't become a sort of bizarre kabuki when things like this happen. From Arianna:

# McCAIN: Too often...the American people have been told that we're at a turning point, whether it be the capture of Saddam Hussein, or Uday and Qusay, or the elections...

# McCAIN: It's a hard slog, Tim. And we've made serious mistakes. And we're paying a price for those mistakes.

# McCAIN: What I think we should do, Tim, is wait until we achieve the successes, then celebrate them, rather than predict them. Because too often that prediction has not proven to be true.

# McCAIN: The biggest mistake I think we made after September 11 was not calling on Americans to serve. We shouldn't have just told them to go shopping or take a trip.

# McCAIN: The weight of evidence [in Guantanamo] has got to be that we've got to adjudicate these people's cases, and...if it means releasing some of them, you'll have to release them. Look, even Adolf Eichmann got a trial.

So after McCain ran down this laundry list of failures (and is there a more serious area for a president to fail than in war?), one would assume Russert would have asked him a question that would draw a conclusion of accountability for these mistakes. After all, these “mistakes” didn’t just happen. Shouldn’t Russert have pointed out, with all due respect to the senator, that “we” didn’t make these mistakes. That they were made, with not a small amount of hubris and incompetence, by specific people. And shouldn’t he have asked the “Straight Talk” senator to name these people?

And after that shouldn’t he have asked him if he agreed with his good friend and colleague Chuck Hagel, who is quoted in tomorrow’s US News and World Report saying: “the reality is that we're losing in Iraq."

But no, instead, he allowed him to say without a challenge:

McCAIN: On the transcendent issues, the most important issues of our day, I've been totally in agreement and support of President Bush. ... And I'm particularly talking about the war on terror, the war in Iraq, national security, national defense, support of men and women in the military, fiscal discipline...

I heard the same thing and I shook my head in wonder. Monsignor Tim gave a delicious little shudder when he heard that, I swear he did. But he didn't seem to find it curious in the least.

Oh, and one other thing. After Dick Durbin does what JJ orders him to do and prostrates himself before the US Senate begging forgiveness for even thinking that we are treating prisoners in ways that might be compared to repressive totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, I expect JJ to apologize for implying that we are treating the prisoners in Guanatanano worse that we treated the Nazis. After all, he said: "Look, even Adolf Eichmann got a trial."

Of course, what Mccain said is true. Just as what Dick Durbin said was true. We did treat captured Nazis better than we are treating captured cab drivers and assorted losers in Guantanamo. But then, I guess the Nazis weren't the "transcendent" threat that "terror" is. The GWOT is unprecedented in its horror and requires that we forswear all trappings of civilization that might get in the way at any given moment. Good thing we citizens of today have a lot of TV and shopping malls to distract us, or we'd really be freaked out.

Still and all, if McCain runs, lets hope that Grover and the boys succeed in skuttling his candidacy. He's a phony who doesn't come across as one and that's a very valuable trait. The beltway boys choir still loves the guy and they'll help him any way they can. His problem is that he's unacceptable to the theocrats and ideologues. But he's just as unacceptable to us. He might not openly condone torture, but he said today that he's open to confronting Syria. And he said a lot of other nonsense too. The guy is just as myopic about modern global threats as the rest of them.

Father Tim and his marching band love him because he's the man they see looking back at them in the mirror when they blow dry what's left of their hair. And maverick JJ loves the adulation just a little bit more than any authentic Real American should. But he hides it well, I'll give him that. He's the best actor they've got.



.
digby 6/19/2005 04:08:00 PM |

 
Lil' Blogger Sleuths

This is just adorable.

The lil'est blogger sleuths are all excited again about their biggest and bestest scoop in the whole wide world! First the lil fellas found out that icky ole Dan Rather was a bad man who couldn't validate those funny looking Killian memos. And they won a great big prize, too, and everybody tol' them what good boys they were.

So they put their little noggins together and thought really, really hard and figured out that the mean Democrats musta made up those dumb Martinez talking points about that dead girl cuzit couldn't be true. It turned out that some dumb guy in Senator Martinez's office wrote 'em, but he coulda been a mean Democrat anyway cuz he was so dumb.

And now they put on their lil' thinkin' caps and figured out all by themselves that the Downing Street memos are fakes too --- all the icky memos just have to be fakes even when people who wrote 'em and read 'em say they aren't! Cuz the lil'est blogger sleuths are on the case, an' they know when memos are good and bad, so be good for goodness sakes!

Don't tell anybody, but they look like Batman and Superman an' the Flash, too and they can drive really fast cars and they can see through walls and beat up Democrats allthetime cuz ... they're the lil' blogger sleuths of America! Yea! All the bad memos are fake, fake, fake!



.
digby 6/19/2005 12:50:00 PM |

 
We CAN All Get Along

People talk a lot about cultural decay and declining values and the blame is usually placed on evil liberals. I suspect it is something much more simple than that. It's because we are dumb as posts. If you don't believe me, read this:

A recent Gallup survey shows that just about three in four Americans hold some paranormal belief -- in at least one of the following: extra sensory perception (ESP), haunted houses, ghosts, mental telepathy, clairvoyance, astrology, communicating with the dead, witches, reincarnation, and channeling. There are no significant differences in belief by age, gender, education, or region of the country.

Now, since we all know that a vast, vast majority of Americans are Christians and huge numbers of them are flocking to church pretty much seven days a week veritably drenching themselves in sanctimony, these numbers would seem to show that a good many of the pious Christians also believe in reincarnation or ghosts or astrology. I'm not sure how that works, but then I don't find a whole lot of difference, personally, between any of it. But that's just me.

However, it's now obvious that we should be prepared to teach astrology, clairvoyance, witches and channelling alongside creationsim in the science classroom. After all, a lot of people "believe" in those things --- and these beliefs have been around for millenia --- so it isn't right not to have them be part of any comprehensive science curriculum.

I expect, by the way, to see this movment come out of Un-Real America, in places like my own town, where "psychics" form a rather large part of the local new age belief systems. (People around here talk about psychics as if they are professionals.) But hey, if the Bible can be taught in science class, I see no reason to exclude the works of Shirley McClain or John Edwards (the ugly one.) And according to this poll it doesn't sound as if most people would have a problem with that, even in Kansas.

Since more than three quarters of the public believe these things, then it's possible that Real America has more in common with Un-Real America than we think. Maybe this is a Kumbaya moment in which we can all join hands and celebrate our common tradition, across all regional, gender, ethnic and religious lines, of believing in utter bullshit. Let the healing begin.


Thanks to Lindsay for the link.
.
digby 6/19/2005 09:34:00 AM |

Thursday, June 16, 2005

 
Why oh Y

Matt Yglesias took up the "why did we invade Iraq?" meme on Tuesday and others have followed. Matt says:.

... there's a difference between observing that the United States went into war without a plan -- without a realistic assessment of what we could accomplish, how it could be accomplished, and whether the costs of such a course of action would outweigh the benefits -- and the news that our main ally in the conflict made that observation long before the war happened. Yet the Brits joined up anyway. Why?

To this day, no one really knows. The impression one gets from the British memos is that Prime Minister Tony Blair's assessment was that the United Kingdom is well served by a policy of standing by the United States under virtually any conceivable circumstances, no matter how ill-advised any particular venture may happen to be. That's not the kind of thing you tell your voters, but I think a surprisingly strong case can be made in its favor.

But what was the White House after? Why did they do it? We have plenty of evidence that not only were the specific claims the administration made about WMD false (often knowingly so), but also that all of this was basically irrelevant to their actual thinking about why we should go to war.

But what were they thinking?

Maybe someone will someday be in a position to press a high ranking Bush official on this. It is doubtful that it will ever happen in the normal course of events, but perhaps "Woody" can catch Junior and the Retreads at a Crawford bar-b-que one of these days and get them to tell him on the q-t.

It's quite interesting that in the responses to my post below on the subject, there are as many possible answers as there are lawyers on Larry King, which only proves my point. Meanwhile, the rightwingers are all screeching about liberal conspiracy theories as if we were talking about alien abduction instead of having a quite reasonable curiosity as to the real reason we are spending hundreds of billions of dollars, showing our intelligence services to the world as incompetent boobs, and weakening our military to the point of real risk.

Let me be clear. Nobody saying that there was a conspiracy. What we are wondering is why, in light of the information that they knew Saddam wasn't a threat to US national security and knew that there were no terrorist ties, did they really want to invade --- particularly after 9/11 when it had been made very clear that a real threat existed that needed our full attention?

For all I know they had a perfectly reasonable rationale. But whatever it was, it was not the one they said it was. We had just suffered a massive terrorist attack and the entire country was prepared to do whatever was necessary to prevent it happening again. Yet the governments of the US (colluding with Britain) decided very soon after 9/11 that invasion of Iraq was essential, a decision that has not been adequately explained. It is not conspiracy mongering to want to know why they did what they did.

Just as a reminder of what the legal rationale for the invasion was as it was presented to the congress, here is the text of the joint resolution that authorized the president to take military action:

JOINT RESOLUTION:

To authorize the use of United States Armed Forces against Iraq.

Whereas in 1990 in response to Iraq's war of aggression against and illegal occupation of Kuwait, the United States forged a coalition of nations to liberate Kuwait and its people in order to defend the national security of the United States and enforce United Nations Security Council resolutions relating to Iraq;

Whereas after the liberation of Kuwait in 1991, Iraq entered into a United Nations sponsored cease-fire agreement pursuant to which Iraq unequivocally agreed, among other things, to eliminate its nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons programs and the means to deliver and develop them, and to end its support for international terrorism;

Whereas the efforts of international weapons inspectors, United States intelligence agencies, and Iraqi defectors led to the discovery that Iraq had large stockpiles of chemical weapons and a large scale biological weapons program, and that Iraq had an advanced nuclear weapons development program that was much closer to producing a nuclear weapon than intelligence reporting had previously indicated;

Whereas Iraq, in direct and flagrant violation of the cease-fire, attempted to thwart the efforts of weapons inspectors to identify and destroy Iraq's weapons of mass destruction stockpiles and development capabilities, which finally resulted in the withdrawal of inspectors from Iraq on October 31, 1998;

Whereas in Public Law 105-235 (August 14, 1998), Congress concluded that Iraq's continuing weapons of mass destruction programs threatened vital United States interests and international peace and security, declared Iraq to be in `material and unacceptable breach of its international obligations' and urged the President `to take appropriate action, in accordance with the Constitution and relevant laws of the United States, to bring Iraq into compliance with its international obligations';

Whereas Iraq both poses a continuing threat to the national security of the United States and international peace and security in the Persian Gulf region and remains in material and unacceptable breach of its international obligations by, among other things, continuing to possess and develop a significant chemical and biological weapons capability, actively seeking a nuclear weapons capability, and supporting and harboring terrorist organizations; Whereas Iraq persists in violating resolution of the United Nations Security Council by continuing to engage in brutal repression of its civilian population thereby threatening international peace and security in the region, by refusing to release, repatriate, or account for non-Iraqi citizens wrongfully detained by Iraq, including an American serviceman, and by failing to return property wrongfully seized by Iraq from Kuwait;

Whereas the current Iraqi regime has demonstrated its capability and willingness to use weapons of mass destruction against other nations and its own people; Whereas the current Iraqi regime has demonstrated its continuing hostility toward, and willingness to attack, the United States, including by attempting in 1993 to assassinate former President Bush and by firing on many thousands of occasions on United States and Coalition Armed Forces engaged in enforcing the resolutions of the United Nations Security Council;

Whereas members of al Qaida, an organization bearing responsibility for attacks on the United States, its citizens, and interests, including the attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, are known to be in Iraq; Whereas Iraq continues to aid and harbor other international terrorist organizations, including organizations that threaten the lives and safety of United States citizens;

Whereas the attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001, underscored the gravity of the threat posed by the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction by international terrorist organizations;

Whereas Iraq's demonstrated capability and willingness to use weapons of mass destruction, the risk that the current Iraqi regime will either employ those weapons to launch a surprise attack against the United States or its Armed Forces or provide them to international terrorists who would do so, and the extreme magnitude of harm that would result to the United States and its citizens from such an attack, combine to justify action by the United States to defend itself;

Whereas United Nations Security Council Resolution 678 (1990) authorizes the use of all necessary means to enforce United Nations Security Council Resolution 660 (1990) and subsequent relevant resolutions and to compel Iraq to cease certain activities that threaten international peace and security, including the development of weapons of mass destruction and refusal or obstruction of United Nations weapons inspections in violation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 687 (1991), repression of its civilian population in violation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 688 (1991), and threatening its neighbors or United Nations operations in Iraq in violation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 949 (1994);

Whereas in the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution (Public Law 102-1), Congress has authorized the President `to use United States Armed Forces pursuant to United Nations Security Council Resolution 678 (1990) in order to achieve implementation of Security Council Resolution 660, 661, 662, 664, 665, 666, 667, 669, 670, 674, and 677';

Whereas in December 1991, Congress expressed its sense that it `supports the use of all necessary means to achieve the goals of United Nations Security Council Resolution 687 as being consistent with the Authorization of Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution (Public Law 102-1),' that Iraq's repression of its civilian population violates United Nations Security Council Resolution 688 and `constitutes a continuing threat to the peace, security, and stability of the Persian Gulf region,' and that Congress, `supports the use of all necessary means to achieve the goals of United Nations Security Council Resolution 688';

Whereas the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 (Public Law 105-338) expressed the sense of Congress that it should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove from power the current Iraqi regime and promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime;

Whereas on September 12, 2002, President Bush committed the United States to `work with the United Nations Security Council to meet our common challenge' posed by Iraq and to `work for the necessary resolutions,' while also making clear that `the Security Council resolutions will be enforced, and the just demands of peace and security will be met, or action will be unavoidable'; Whereas the United States is determined to prosecute the war on terrorism and Iraq's ongoing support for international terrorist groups combined with its development of weapons of mass destruction in direct violation of its obligations under the 1991 cease-fire and other United Nations Security Council resolutions make clear that it is in the national security interests of the United States and in furtherance of the war on terrorism that all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions be enforced, including through the use of force if necessary;

Whereas Congress has taken steps to pursue vigorously the war on terrorism through the provision of authorities and funding requested by the President to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such persons or organizations;

Whereas the President and Congress are determined to continue to take all appropriate actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such persons or organizations;

Whereas the President has authority under the Constitution to take action in order to deter and prevent acts of international terrorism against the United States, as Congress recognized in the joint resolution on Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107-40); and

Whereas it is in the national security interests of the United States to restore international peace and security to the Persian Gulf region: Now, therefore, be it Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This joint resolution may be cited as the `Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002'.

SEC. 2. SUPPORT FOR UNITED STATES DIPLOMATIC EFFORTS. The Congress of the United States supports the efforts by the President to--

(1) strictly enforce through the United Nations Security Council all relevant Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq and encourages him in those efforts; and
(2) obtain prompt and decisive action by the Security Council to ensure that Iraq abandons its strategy of delay, evasion and noncompliance and promptly and strictly complies with all relevant Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq.

SEC. 3. AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES.
(a) AUTHORIZATION- The President is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to--
(1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and
(2) enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq.
(b) PRESIDENTIAL DETERMINATION- In connection with the exercise of the authority granted in subsection (a) to use force the President shall, prior to such exercise or as soon thereafter as may be feasible, but no later than 48 hours after exercising such authority, make available to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President pro tempore of the Senate his determination that--
(1) reliance by the United States on further diplomatic or other peaceful means alone either (A) will not adequately protect the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq or (B) is not likely to lead to enforcement of all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq; and
(2) acting pursuant to this joint resolution is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorist and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.
(c) War Powers Resolution Requirements-
(1) SPECIFIC STATUTORY AUTHORIZATION- Consistent with section 8(a)(1) of the War Powers Resolution, the Congress declares that this section is intended to constitute specific statutory authorization within the meaning of section 5(b) of the War Powers Resolution.
(2) APPLICABILITY OF OTHER REQUIREMENTS- Nothing in this joint resolution supersedes any requirement of the War Powers Resolution.
SEC. 4. REPORTS TO CONGRESS. (a) REPORTS- The President shall, at least once every 60 days, submit to the Congress a report on matters relevant to this joint resolution, including actions taken pursuant to the exercise of authority granted in section 3 and the status of planning for efforts that are expected to be required after such actions are completed, including those actions described in section 7 of the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 (Public Law 105-338).
(b) SINGLE CONSOLIDATED REPORT- To the extent that the submission of any report described in subsection (a) coincides with the submission of any other report on matters relevant to this joint resolution otherwise required to be submitted to Congress pursuant to the reporting requirements of the War Powers Resolution (Public Law 93-148), all such reports may be submitted as a single consolidated report to the Congress.
(c) RULE OF CONSTRUCTION- To the extent that the information required by section 3 of the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution (Public Law 102-1) is included in the report required by this section, such report shall be considered as meeting the requirements of section 3 of such resolution.

I defy anyone to read that and not admit that subsequent events and information raise serious questions about this invasion. The only offenses cited in that resolution that turned out to be true are:

Whereas Iraq persists in violating resolution of the United Nations Security Council by continuing to engage in brutal repression of its civilian population ... by refusing to release, repatriate, or account for non-Iraqi citizens wrongfully detained by Iraq ... and by failing to return property wrongfully seized by Iraq from Kuwait

Now, I don't know what the real reasons were. But of the reasons they cited to get legal authorization (although they would never admit they even needed legal authorization) these are the only ones that are still operative. Out of all that mumbo jumbo about threats to the United States and to the region and WMD and terrorism, this is all that's left. And if that's all we need, get ready, because there are a few dozen countries we are going to have to invade. Quite a few of them are our allies --- especially Britain. (Talk about failing to return items unlawfully seized. Anybody been to the British Museum lately?) In fact, if this holds up as a legal basis for war, we're going to have to invade ourselves.

It is not just cynical "told you so" partisan sniping to question the motives of those who took us to war based upon the reasons stated above. That resolution reminds us that the primary justifications have simply not been born out in fact and the Downing St Memos now show that they were aware they would not be borne out in fact before they submitted to the congress for authorization. The taxpayers of this country are shelling out a billion fucking dollars a week on an inscrutable action in a very dangerous part of the world and so far, they have nothing to show for it. The evidence that formed the legal bases for action as stated in that resolution has been shown to be false. We have a a right to know what in the hell they were really thinking.

As Matt points out in his article:

... we can't even begin to formulate an Iraq policy without confidence that the policymakers are telling us something resembling the truth about what they're trying to do and why.

Nor can we conduct any kind of reasonable diplomacy related to the situation as long as the nature of the situation remains shrouded in mystery and transparent deceptions. The issues are inextricably linked. The British memos have given us a tantalizing glimpse but don't get to the heart of the matter. The recent right-wing assault on the character of Mark Felt can be read as an effort to encourage everyone to keep the American people in the dark, but the truth is bound to come out sooner or later. Better that it be done in time for it to do some good.

Yes, that would be nice.

Update: Fafnir offers what I think is the best analysis I've read:

...just as America's enemies would love to know every American troop movement and battle plan, so would the jihadist foe also like to know why the United States is in Iraq at all. Is it a secret plan to lull the enemy into a false sense of winning? A grand plan to spread freedom in the form of militant Islamism? Is it all a massive fake out, a "look at Iraaaa... whooops, got yer Syria"? Is the entire War On Terror merely a front for a larger, grander, even nobler War On Something Else (War On Tyranny, War On Evil, War On War, War On Stuff)?

Only the Medium Lobster knows, and he refuses to compromise the safety and strategy of spin doctors in the field. Until victory is assured, Americans must trust that the plan is working - and that it exists.

I'm pretty sure this sums up the thinking of the 101st fighting keyboarders anyway. Trust, don't verify. All hail the Emperor.


Update II: Liberal Oasis has a very cogent post on this topic as well.

I understand that many of us as individuals believe that we know why the administration took us to war. I have my pet theories. But the fact that these answers differ proves my point. The official rationale is clearly false and there is no consensus on the real rationale. This is absurd. We live in the United States of America, not the Soviet Union circa 1956 or Nazi Germany circa 1938. It is, dare I say it, unamerican for the "greatest country in the world" to invade and occupy another country for reasons that are not crystal clear. If I recall correctly, "moral clarity" was their mantra for over two years.

We may know that there were reasons for this operation that had nothing to do with the reasons they stated --- but in order for us to properly proceed from here, they HAVE TO BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE. This means that we must relentlessly press them in whatever way we can on this subject.


Jesus, sorry for the typos. I'm in an inconvenient place for blogging.


.
digby 6/16/2005 07:42:00 AM |

Wednesday, June 15, 2005

 
More Entertainment

Freepers on Schiavo:

"Just because the vision center of her brain was blind doesn't mean her brain couldn't have compensated somewhere else."

"Considering that she died of intentionally inflicted starvation and DEHYDRATION, is it any wonder that her brain was half the size of a normal brain?"

"We have to remember that this is from the WaPo, not a credible news organization, so they might find it convenient to omit certain, necessary facts."

Well we do know that Michael owns the County Sherriff so how hard would it be for him to buy the Medical Examiner. The only way I would have trusted the autopsy is if it was done by the FBI...."

And the wingnuts lecture left wing bloggers for being conspiracy nuts when we wonder why we invaded Iraq.

What is really interesting about this thread is that there are just as many Freepers who are calling out the nutballs as there are nutballs. This issue seriously divides the right. We should flog it mercilessly. That's what they'd do to us if the shoe were on the other foot.

Every time a Christian right lunatic starts sanctimoniously pontificating about a "culture of life" we should talk about Terri. She is the symbol, in every way you can think of, of where this nation is headed if these radicals get what they are after.


Hat tip to BCF for the link.


.
digby 6/15/2005 05:06:00 PM |

 
Support Guaranteed Health Insurance, Support Osama bin Laden

From my wingnut e-mailer, for your entertainment:

MORE DEMOCRATIC TREASON

Ronald Reagan expressed it most famously when he said , "why do they always blame American first?" Ann Coulter recently wrote an entire book called "Treason" about the Democrats. I recently turned on Air America, the new liberal radio network, to hear Al Frankin pretending to shed real tears about how much he loved our troops in Iraq but two minutes later his patriotism seemed to fade instantly as he made fun of the troops in Afghanistan for not finding Osama Bin Laden. Yesterday, Paul Krugman's ultra liberal column in the Times dismissed the American free market, which is 100% responsibly for giving us the highest standard of living in the history of the world, in favor of single payer socialist healthcare.

So why do liberals hate America? The answer is simple: America, since the Revolution, has been mostly about freedom from gov't and therefore about freedom from Democrats. Throughout American History the Democrats have always been for less and less freedom from gov't despite the hundred million or so dead bodies gov't has caused during that period. One has to consider that their philosophical illegitimacy is what makes their loyalty so questionable and their style so nasty and seemingly treasonous. They want to belong here but the facts always paint them as anti-American. In a way you have to feel sorry for the painful position in which they find themselves, but you also have to wonder why it is that they seem to have an absolute inability to learn to think?

The latest liberal treason award should probably go to The New York Times. We are at war in Iraq against Saddam Hussein and his Baathist Party. By almost any standard we are the most noble country in the history of the world while Saddam Hussein's Iraq is among the most ignoble. Today, in fact, there is a story out of Iraq about an enemy soldier who blew up a bomb in a public square killing about 20 people many of who turned out to be orphan children peddling groceries in the street. Their idea of acceptable collateral damage extends to any man woman or child who might be near anyone who might be vaguely associated, if only by geographic default, with the war against them, and this is when they cannot behead a living, fully conscious, captured soldier or hostage, and all this is in support of a regime that is arguably more grotesque and has less electoral legitimacy than even Adolph Hitler's.

So in the last year how many times did the vaunted TIMES (the so called newspaper of "record") run front page headlines about how perhaps the scummiest, most illegitimate regime on earth conducts war: zero! How many times did they run front page headlines about how America conducts war? There have been 49 front page headlines about our so called conduct at Abu Ghraib alone. It wasn't that we were blowing up innocent children in the street or slowly cutting off the heads of fully conscious prisoners as the insurgents do, it was that a few Americans, later found to be criminals, were making the prisoners get in human pyramids while naked or in women's underwear.

Why is it that the liberal Times wants you to know more and care more about the way America is conducting the war than the way Saddam's Hussein's Nazi Baathists are conducting the war? The answer is simple: the liberals hate America and always have. In Vietnam they shouted, "Ho Ho, Ho Chi Minh." They are not yet shouting, "Saddam Saddam ,Saddam Hussein" but the effect is exactly the same. They are seeking to undermine America; not America's evil enemy. So what does that make a liberal? Our troops, many of them kids, are on the battlefield with the simple moral clarity to fight against pure evil. When they get wounded they heal, when possible, and then heroically and voluntarily return to fight again along side their fellow soldiers. Don't we owe them more than the treasonous, undermining liberal commentary we get on the front page of the Times? Don't the liberals know that once the war is on, and there is no way out, we're all supposed to be on the same team? Are they so alienated from the soul of America that they would rather see its children die on the battlefield than prevail against evil?

Imagine what the morale of the Nazi Baathists would be if the world's liberal press were united against their evil, instead of united against America? Imagine what the morale of our troops would be if the most significant and influential newspaper in the world at least tried to be loyal to the truth, instead of, in effect, the enemy? Imagine what the state of the world would be if the world's liberal press organized the world's citizenry against evil, instead of the American freedom that they blindly see, to the exclusion of everything else, as insensitive and uncaring. But if that happened it wouldn't be a liberal Democratic press would it?

No comment. It speaks for itself.



.
digby 6/15/2005 03:03:00 PM |

 
My Peeps

Schwarzenegger Jeered at Graduation Speech:

SANTA MONICA, Calif. (AP) - Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's return to his alma mater turned into an exercise in perseverance when virtually his every word was accompanied by catcalls, howls and piercing whistles from the crowd.

Schwarzenegger's face appeared to redden during his 15-minute commencement address Tuesday to 600 graduates at Santa Monica College, but he ignored the shouting as he recalled his days as a student and, later, his work as a bodybuilder and actor.

``Always go all out and overcome your fears,'' he told the graduates. ``Work, work, work. Study, study, study.''

Inside the stadium, the drone from hundreds of rowdy protesters threatened to drown out the governor's voice at times. Many in the crowd erupted in boos when a police officer pulled down a banner criticizing the estimated $45 million cost of the Nov. 8 special election that Schwarzenegger proposed Monday.

The governor is backing three ballot initiatives that call for imposing a cap on state spending, stripping lawmakers of the power to draw their own districts and increasing the time it takes teachers to gain tenure.

At times during Schwarzenegger's speech, cheers and boos mingled, and the graduates themselves appeared eager to hear the governor. Many applauded at one point when the noise from the bleachers briefly subsided.

``It didn't matter. I just ignored them,'' graduate Ray Lewis, 21, of Los Angeles, said when asked about the racket from protesters. Schwarzenegger's ``political views and all that had nothing to do with the graduation,'' Lewis said.

Schwarzenegger has been feuding for months with groups he calls ``special interests'' - teachers, nurses and other public employee unions who accuse him of selling out to big business while shortchanging education, health care and other programs. Those groups have hounded Schwarzenegger at his public appearances.

The special election ``is a waste of money that you could be using for education, hospital care. He's wasting it on his vanity election,'' said Sue Cannon, a nurse who was among the crowd outside the stadium.

About two dozen Schwarzenegger supporters also rallied outside the stadium. One of them, Ben Eisenberg, who heads the Santa Monica College Republicans, said the ceremony ``should be about the students.''

Schwarzenegger left the stage almost immediately after his speech, speeding across the infield in a golf cart surrounded by sprinting security guards. Across the field, he pulled up toward a waiting SUV and a large steel gate was closed behind him.

Schwarzenegger took general studies classes at the two-year community college between 1970 and 1974. He later took correspondence courses through the University of Wisconsin-Superior, where he earned a degree in 1979. "

There's more:

The protest included a group of faculty members on stage who turned their backs on Arnold during the speech and constant booing from students throughout his remarks. At the same time, Air Arnold - a plane pulling a banner with the message: "Real Governors Don't Steal From Students" - was forced to fly above the clouds, hiding the message to Arnold in apparent violation of federal aviation law, and forcing the pilot to bring the plane down.

A Santa Monica College student attended the graduation in a chicken suit to make the point that Arnold was too chicken to face criticism from students, after the school banned them from wearing pins and t-shirts of protest or displaying posters. Even though Arnold got the school to ban any signs of dissent (even those flown above the graduation!), he couldn't silence the voices of students and teachers, who don't like what they've been hearing.

That's how it's done, my friends. Movie stars and fratboy heiresses are used to being treated with deference and awe. They get all flustered when people fail to worship at their feet. Here in Soviet Monica,however, movie stars are a dime a dozen. They don't turn heads. Rich Republican phonies, however, get our attention.

And whoever told Schwarzenneger that it was a good idea to say that teachers, nurses and firefighters were sell-outs to big business must have been drunk. (Mike Murphy, perhaps?) That kind of statement doesn't exactly ring true, especially coming from multi-millionaire Republican movie stars. He has managed to radicalize the middle class.

Since Schwarzenneger wants to hold a special election this fall come hell or high water, maybe we need to start talking about making it a recall.



Update: To clarify, when I say above that Arnold Schwarzennegger says nurses teachers and firefighters are special interest sell-outs to big business, I'm operating from an out of date lexicon. For all of history, "special interests" referred to business interests. The Frank Luntz American Heritage Book (The FLAHB) has changed that phrase to mean middle class people who work for the public good. I forgot. My bad.




.
digby 6/15/2005 07:44:00 AM |

Monday, June 13, 2005

 
Apple Corp

Isn't it interesting that the bad apples who were just having some kicks on the night shift at Abu Ghraib came up with similar kinky sexual humiliation "hijinks" to those the interrogators down at Gitmo were using on orders:

Over the next month, the interrogators experiment with other tactics. They strip-search him and briefly make him stand nude. They tell him to bark like a dog and growl at pictures of terrorists. They hang pictures of scantily clad women around his neck. A female interrogator so annoys al-Qahtani that he tells his captors he wants to commit suicide and asks for a crayon to write a will.

How odd that little Lynde Englund came up with the idea all on her own of putting a leash and dog collar on prisoners like that. Is life full of coincidences, or what?



.
digby 6/13/2005 03:27:00 PM |

Sunday, June 12, 2005

 
The Elephant

I honestly don't know why there is any question that the Downing St Memo is the most important historical document to emerge showing that Bush and company took us into Iraq on false pretenses. It's true that there have been many hints --- the biggest of which is that, uh, there weren't any fucking WMD --- but this is clear proof that they lied prior to that. I'm not sure what Michael Kinsley is saying here, but I agree with Kevin that it's absurd to think that the meeting minutes of the highest levels of our closest military ally were simple impressions of Bush's body language or something. It is a full-on game plan for obfuscation and "rolling out the product" that proves they knew that Iraq wasn't a threat.

Now, it's true that many of us knew that already. I wrote back in September of 2002 over on Eschaton:

I don't object to going into Iraq because I think Saddam doesn't want nukes. Of course he does. So do a lot of people, including al Qaeda. And a lot of unstable regimes already have them, like the countries of the former Soviet Union and Pakistan. I object because I don't believe there is any new evidence that he's on the verge of getting them or that he had anything to do with 9/11, or that he’s crazy because he gassed his own people (without our objection at the time), or that he’s just plain so evil that we simply must invade without delay --- all of which have been presented as reasons over the past few weeks. There are reasons why we are planning to invade Iraq, but they have nothing to do with the reasons stated and are based upon political and ideological not security goals.

I particularly object because I deeply mistrust the people who are insisting that Saddam presents an urgent danger because they have been agitating for invasion and regime change, offering a variety of rationales, for 11 years. Pardon me for being skeptical but there is an entire cottage industry in the GOP devoted to the destruction of Saddam for a variety of reasons, none of which have anything to do with an imminent threat to the US. Until they concocted this bogus 9/11 connection, even they never claimed that the threat was to the US, but to Israel, moderate Arabs and the oil reserves.

I very much object because among these obsessives are the authors of the Bush Doctrine, which is nothing more than a warmed over version of the PNAC defense policy document that was based upon Cheney's 1992 defense dept. draft laying out the neocon case for ensuring the continued status of the US as the only superpower after the cold war. They did not take the threat of terrorism into account when they formulated this strategy and have made no adjustments since the threat emerged. Instead they are cynically using the fear created by 9/11 to advance goals that have absolutely nothing to do with terrorism and in fact will make another attack more likely. We will not be able to protect ourselves against another 9/11 by asserting a doctrine of unilateral preventive war in Iraq or anywhere else.

I'm not an insider at the pentagon nor do I have any connections with the intelligence establishment. But I'm a political junkie who obsessively follows this stuff --- and who had made it my business to investigate the writings of the neocon faction of the Republican establishment. Most Americans in September of 2002 were still in a state of shock, or felt that we couldn't take any chances, or believed that Bush and company must know something that a broken down nobody blogger in Santa Monica California couldn't possibly know. I was told by more than one Democratic friend of mine that I was being ridiculously arrogant to be so sure that they weren't holding back important information for security reasons.

But, you know, I grew up in a period in which the government repeatedly and blatantly lied about a war in which friends of mine died and that tore the country in two in ways that I'm seeing mirrored today. I have not had the illusion that one should "trust" the government in these things since I was in high school. And this group made McNamara and his best and the brightest pals look like open books. If there was ever a case to be made for open government and transparency it was with the neocons.

It is obvious that the political media had access to the same information I did, and much much more. Bob "muckraker" Woodward was inside the planning rooms in late 2001 when the administration was agitating for the war. Wolf Blitzer could get anyone he wanted on the phone. They knew. But I wrote about what I could see and discern and they didn't. As Atrios says in his post today, blogs did their best, but we all knew we had slightly less influence than a lone protestor on a freeway off ramp. Millions of people in the streets all over the world could barely get the press to look up from their safari suit fittings --- and the bosses all told the kewl kidz that this was not a story they wanted flogged.

The fact of the matter is that the media are part of the political establishment, as as such, had as much of a stake in making the case for the war as the administration did, despite the fact that many of them knew very well there was no threat. They couldn't wait to go to war. They were intoxicated by bloodlust and they sold that bloodlust like it was the best reality show in history --- "9/11: America's Revenge" and they were right. It was a hell of a show.

All of this we know and have known for some time. But that doesn't mean that there is no story now. Indeed, the Downing Street Memo presents a chance for the press to redeem itself; this isn't the end of the story. So far, it has had to be dragged kicking and screaming into even broaching the subject of what this administration has done and their own complicity in it. They may never be able to admit all that. But in that it officially documents the fact that the administration knew there was no threat and knew there was no connection to terrorism, the Downing Street Memo gives the press the chance to ask, finally, why we really invaded Iraq.

Have any of you been at a social gathering in which this question comes up? Have you felt the palpable discomfort? Nobody really knows. Those that adhere to the "CIA fucked up" rationale can't explain Downing Street. Those who think you had to back the government in a time of war, are visibly discomfitted by the fact that we never found any WMD. Flypaper is crap. The amount of money we are spedning is becoming salient. The project looks endless.

I speculated back in September of 2002 that the neocon faction was pushing its American Empire wet dream and using 9/11 as an excuse. Others believe that in the grand sweep of things we invaded to place permanent military bases to protect the oil fields.(Ann Coulter says "why shouldn't we invade for oil? We need oil.") Still others think we needed to show some muscle and Afghanistan just wasn't sexy enough. Was it Israel? I wrote the other day that it now appears that Bush may have bribed Blair into invading Iraq by promising that he'd hold back just long enough to cripple al Qaeda and keep them from blowing up London --- something which the evidence suggests that Bush and his cronies really had no interest in. And then there's the racist and revenge motives.

We really don't know, do we? Perhaps it was all those things. Which would then raise another important question. How is it possible for the United States of America in 2003 to invade and occupy another country for a handful of different, unstated reasons? What kind of fucked up process could have the president with one reason for invading, the vice president another, the Secretary of Defense yet another --- and the congress and the press simply signing off on official lies?

These are the big questions that the Downing St Memo has opened up. Yes, we already knew the intelligence was fixed, we knew they understood that Saddam was no threat, we knew they lied to the American people and we knew that they intended to go to war no matter what. But we still don't know for sure why they did all that. Until we do, I don't think we will be able to figure out how to deal with it.



Update: To answer Atrios' question, and in keeping with this post, I would submit that the pithy way to frame this is by asking the question: "Why did we invade Iraq?"



.
digby 6/12/2005 05:27:00 PM |

 
Courtiers and Fools

Press The Meat today was one for the books. After a colorless exchange between the usual ineffectual Democrat and a looney tunes, delusional Republican (Joe Biden and Curt Weldon) Monsignor Lil' Russ joined the roundtable where they ignored everything that had just been said to breathlessly offer their learned opinions on the runaway bride and Michael Jackson of the beltway --- Hillary and Howard.

Gwen Ifill pointed out that while Dean is popular with the rank and file, the Washington Democrats are very upset. The Knights of the Botox all made it quite clear that while Bush catering to his base is a smart strategy, they agree with the DC Dems that catering to the filthy Democrat rabble is quite beneath any civilized politician. But then, as we all know, Bush's base are Real Americans while the Democratic base consists of a bunch of godless, bi-coastal, terrorist sympathizers who are waaaay outside the mainstream. All 49% of 'em. No way are Judy, Gwen, Father Tim, and Dean Broder associated with those treasonous bastards. Why, everybody on Nantucket practically lives on pork rinds these days. (Atkins, don't you know.)*

Woodruff pointed out that the Republicans have wisely learned to throw their red meat "below the radar" -- through the local news and direct mail ---while the Democrats haven't. No comment on why the Republican red meat remains "below the radar" when the creme de la creme of Washington punditry clearly knows all about it. Nor was there any speculation about how it came to pass that Dean's comments dominated the cable news networks with an obsessive glee usually reserved for Bill Clinton's pants, while Tom Delay can put out a hit on federal judges and it gets a one minute segment betwen the blog report and Bay Buchanan.

Certainly, the press wasn't in any way responsible. The news is apparently an organic thing, unconnected with those who report it. The subjects of the news determine how it's going to be reported and evidently the Democrats consistently mishandle that responsibility quite badly. Dean was asking for trouble and he got it. As Ifil pointed out, Democrats need to learn to "act right all the time because someone's always watching." (Unless they can figure out how to cleverly stay "under the radar," as those awesome Republicans do.)

The roundtable also agreed that Hillary Clinton's comments this week about abuse of power and timid press coverage were simply silly little broadsides designed to get her elected in 2006 and 2008 and nothing more. Broder, especially, seemed miffed, saying that she needs to read some history books where she will see that this is common practice. As we all know, the only crime in Washington is when some cracker Rhodes Scholar and his smartmouth lawyer wife come to Broder's town and "trash the place."

All Hillary's complaints are just typical Democratic carping, particularly the complaints about the press. What does she know from press coverage anyway? They used the Downing St. Memo as an example of how the press has been just as hard on Bush as they ever were on Clinton. I'm not kidding. Broder mentioned Walter Pincus' front page article today to prove that the WaPo has been on Bush's case about Iraq from the very beginning.

They all agreed, furthermore, that all of this had been amply dealt with during the election and that the public just didn't think it was important. Strangely, however, the polls seem to suggest that they are beginning to care now. Why would that be? Nobody knew.

Their assessment of Bush's tumbling poll numbers went like this. Broder said (and the bobble heads all nodded affirmatively) that if Clinton were in the White House they would be burning the midnight oil to change course. Bush doesn't do that. He stands firm. His codpiece veritably bursts with confidence. All hail the massively unpopular George W. Bush.

And anyway, Democrats are icky and everybody knows they have no chance in 06 or 08, so whut-evuhr. Michael Moore is fat.

Christopher Isherwood once wrote:

"You have never seen inside a film studio before?"

"Only once. Years ago."

"It will interest you, as a phenomenon. You see, the film studio of today is really the palace of the sixteenth century. There one sees what Shakespeare saw: the absolute power of the tyrant, the courtiers, the flatterers, the jesters, the cunningly ambitious intriguers. There are fantastically beautiful women, there are incompetent favourites. There are great men who are suddenly disgraced. There is an insane extravagance, which is a sham; and horrible squalor behind the scenery. There are vast schemes, abandoned because of some caprice. There are secrets which everybody knows and no-one speaks of. There are even one or two honest advisors. These are the court fools, who speak the deepest wisdom in puns, lest they should be taken seriously. They grimace, tear their hair privately and weep."

The political press became a ranking member of the entertainment industrial complex some time ago. And the full flavor of the court Isherwood describes has returned to the seat of power in Washington DC. I'll leave it to you to decide in today's media and political world, which are the courtiers and which are the fools.




*In fairness, Ifil and the guy from the WSJ (can't remember his name) mentioned that Dean has raised a lot of money and that this Dean flap is mostly a beltway game that will not have lasting impact as long as Dean doesn't run for president. Ifil, in particular, made a point of puncturing the slavering Monsignor Tim's balloon over a Harold Ford quote that he would not want Dean to come to Tennessee. Small favors.


.
digby 6/12/2005 08:26:00 AM |

Wednesday, June 08, 2005

 
Nuh-uh, I Never Said That

I'm taking bets on how the wingnuts try to re-write this embarrassing history. You know they will have to eventually. They've had to rewrite their history for the last 60 years. (And in the case of the hard core confederates, the original "Ownership Society" --- 200.) But it's getting harder what with these internets and all.

This may be the ultimate reason why they have had to resort to the alternate discourses of "I know you are but what am I" and "You can believe me or you can believe your lyin' eyes." (Not to be confused with "the emperor is strutting around stark naked in the white house, but at least he isn't getting a blow job.")

Any thoughts on how Wolfie and his cadre are going to explain this to the children?



.
digby 6/08/2005 08:08:00 AM |

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.



.
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.



.
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.



.
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?



.
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.



.
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.



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