Hullabaloo

Saturday, March 11, 2006

 
GUEST POST


DEADBEAT-HIPSTER-JOURNO-MASTER BILL CARDOSO, DEAD AT 68

By Lucian Truscott IV

Bill Cardoso died last weekend in Kelseyville, CA, of heart disease. He was a deadbeat-hipster-journo-master and friend to many of the ink-stained-ilk, and as writer and editor he had a surprising amount of influence in the early days of so-called "new journalism" for someone who wasn't terribly well known and whose work wasn't widely distributed.

His work was published in Rolling Stone, Harper's Weekly, CITY Magazine, New Times, Ramparts, and other more obscure publications, and it should be noted that much of his best work appeared in numerous and lengthy letters to his friends, many of which were so crazed and hilarious, they ended up being copied and passed around hand-to-hand, samizdat-style. In 1984, Athenaeum published "The Maltese Sangweech and Other Heroes," a collection of his pieces that is sadly now out of print.

Bill will be memorialized this week as guy who coined "gonzo" to describe a 1968 article he had assigned Hunter Thompson to write for him at the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine on Nixon's primary campaign in New Hampshire, but I remember him for other reasons, beginning with the way he left us.

Thompson shot himself in his kitchen with his wife on the phone, but Bill had the grace to take a cab, as he always said he would. ("Take a cab" is old hipster slang for dying with your boots on ... with a final measure of self-respect and class.)

I will never forget the story he wrote on the Ali-Foreman "Rumble in the Jungle" in Zaire, which New Times refused to print. I think I can remember the lede, because I was the one who typed it in a room on the backside of the Chelsea Hotel when a tooth fell out of Bill's mouth and he collapsed, taking to his bed complaining of having had a spell put on him in Kinshasa by someone he referred to darkly as an "Ndoke." I think it went something like:

"From my window here in room 236 in the Membling Hotel in downtown Kinshasa, Zaire -- the only hotel I have ever stayed in where your room is number may be 236, but your phone number is 628 -- I can see the broad, green leaves of the Giant Hyacinth floating in the brown waters of the River Zaire, nee Congo, as it flows slowly, inexorably toward the sea. The International Press is here in force, of course, but they do not know what I know: every single Hyacinth leaf conceals a crocodile, lying in wait...."

He took the view of the river from his hotel room and turned it into the most hilarious, yet ominous image of deep, dark Africa you've ever read in your life. And the piece got darker and weirder and funnier from there.

One of my fondest memories of Bill was when I would pick him up at the Burbank airport back in the early-mid 70's, when I was on a magazine assignment in LA. He was always down on his luck and "short," as he said, so I would buy his ticket at the airport (about $25 in those days from SF) and just sit down and wait for a couple of hours and he would show up on the shuttle. We were usually not even out the door of the airport -- Burbank was and still is a small airport, so it wasn't very far to the door -- when Bill would whisper out of the side of his mouth: Slip me 50. The first time he did it, I thought I didn't hear him right, so I asked him what he said. Slip me 50, will ya? A man can't walk around without something in his kick.

So I would slip him 50 and that would last him until I put him back on a plane to SF, sometimes days later, after we had "holed up," as he put it, in a somewhat less than luxurious suite at the Sunset Marquis in West Hollywood, which at that time cost exactly $23.00 a night. I have a clear memory of one time I arranged our flights so Bill and I met at the airport when I flew in from NY or somewhere else. I rented a car and we drove over the hill to the Marquis and checked in. We had barely closed the door of our "suite" when there came a loud knock at the door. Bill was already in the bathroom, staking his territory by laying out the contents of his Dopp Kit on the sink and checking his "coif" (that's what he always called his curly Portuguese locks...his "coif"), so I opened the door. A skinny, wiry guy with hooded, darting eyes, dressed all in black, rushed into the room right past me. "Bob Neuwirth," he rasped. "Truscott, right?" I nodded. I had heard of him. He was Dylan's road manager on his early tours, and he had achieved something of a reputation as a songwriter and musician. I had seen him from across the room at clubs and a couple of parties in New York. He was wired into every scene you could think of and a few he's probably forgotten by now.

Neuwirth sat down on a sofa that had seen better days and picked up the phone. "You on assignment?" I nodded. "Who for?" I think I said Penthouse. "Great! They pay good expenses!" He dialed the phone and started barking out a lengthy liquor order: "Two quarts of Jack Daniels, three cases of Bud, a quart of Beefeaters..." He paused, turning to me. "You drink vodka?" I nodded. "Two bottles of Smirnoff...uh...make that four cases of Bud." Just then Cardoso appeared in the door of the bathroom. "Two quarts of Dewars," he called loudly. Neuwirth spun around and spying Cardoso, practically dropped the phone in shock. Recovering quickly, he finished the order. "Two quarts of Dewars. Yeah. Room 217. Right." He hung up.

Tapping a cigarette out of his pack of Picayunes (I have an entire sub-section of stories on the lengths we sometimes went to in order to find Picayunes in places like Twin Falls, Idaho) Cardoso slid across the room to Neuwirth and stuck the Pic in his mouth. "Got a light, Bobby?" Neuwirth fumbled for a pack of matches. He looked like he was in the presence of a ghost. Cardoso lit the Pic and sat down on the aging "modern" sofa and crossed his legs. Grinning at me he said, "The last time I saw Bobby was in the alley behind the Club 57. Hemway and I and the drummer for the loneliest plunk (that's what he always called Thelonius Monk) were huddled together smoking a joint and Bobby was jumping up and down around us in a little circle yelling, lemme have a toke, Bill! Al! Al! Lemme have a toke! Please! Please? Cardoso took a drag on his Pic and gave Neuwirth a quick appraisal. "Nice threads, Bobby. Looks like life's treatin' you good. Why don't you let us in on the scam on the phone."

It turned out that Neuwirth was the de facto Mayor of the Marquis, had the whole place wired. Somebody at the desk must have informed him anytime a likely suspect checked in. He would make for the suspect's room, and after checking on whether a record label was picking up the room tab, or there were travel expenses being picked up by Rolling Stone or some other magazine, he would place a generous order with Turner's Liquor's, a notorious outlet just up the street on Sunset Boulevard. "This is the Sunset Marquis, man," Neuwirth explained in his speedy rasp. "At the Sunset Marquis, you dial 411 and you get information. You dial 114 and you get Turner's Liquors and the tab goes on your room bill." When I asked about the rather large size of the order, Neuwirth shot me a what-planet-are-you-on look and said, "There's a lot of people stayin' here, man. Stuff's gonna be happenin' tonight, tomorrow night...you don't want us to run out, do you, man?" At the time, the logic of his question seemed inescapable.

It seems that Neuwirth studied the concept and practice of hip at the feet of Bill Cardoso and friends like Al Hemway and Larry Novick and other bohemians who were around the Boston jazz club scene in the early 60's. It occurred to me that some years later, Neuwirth may have passed along to Bob Dylan some of the bohemian wisdom he had picked up from Cardoso and Hemway, but I was never able to confirm that. When I once broached the subject with Bobby, he gave me an indulgent look, like if you don't know the answer before you ask questions like that, you shouldn't ask them. Bobby always treated Bill with a rare kind of respect you don't see much any more, and Bill, in his way, reciprocated. It wasn't like Bobby ever said anything; nor did Bill acknowledge it. Both of them having received wisdom from unsung Bohemian masters like Al Hemway, they were way too cool for that. But it was there. I remember later one night when at Neuwirth's invite, we showed up at Ben Keith's "suite." (Ben Keith is a famous steel guitar player who has played with Neil Young and most of the Nashville stars you've ever heard on the radio.) Donny Everly, Neuwirth, Geoff Muldaur and several other musicians were sitting around strumming and laughing and singing. When Cardoso entered, Neuwirth wordlessly signaled somebody to move so Bill had a place to sit. Nobody stopped strumming or singing or laughing. As was his wont, Bill took his sweet time sliding across the room to take his seat, giving Ben Keith a nod as he passed. Bill bent at the waist and examined the chair carefully, sweeping an imaginary crumb from the seat before he did a slow pivot and sat down. I think Ben Keith was wearing a cowboy hat, and when there was a pause in the music, Bill nodded to Keith and said, "Nice sky." He motioned with with his fingers around his head, as if he were aligning the brim of a hat. "I should get one of those." He grinned widely, his fingers frozen on the imaginary hat brim. "What do you think?" His words and the elegant little ballet of his fingers were so perfect, it was like you could see a cowboy hat perched ridiculously atop his the black curls of his "coif." Everyone laughed. Bill Cardoso was in the house.

So late at night, we would hang-out in Marquis "suites" with the likes of Keith, Kinky Friedman, Iggy Pop, and others even less reputable. Somehow, Neuwirth's "suite" was never the site of any of the revelry, a move Cardoso observed had been something of a rule back in Boston. "Why mess up your own crib?" Bill explained. At least once every time we met in LA for a summit conference at the Marquis, we would take a drive down to Southgate to visit his old Boston friend, Al Hemway, an aging hipster who lived with his mother in a bungalow in a neighborhood which even then you practically had to shoot your way in and out of. Cardoso introduced me to Hemway as the first guy to "import" pot from Mexico into Boston, principally by driving down there in a car and picking it up and driving it back. Hemway was far more than that, as I soon learned. Bill would describe Hemway completely deadpan to an outsider as "one of the guys I worked with when I drove for Volvo." Long story.

Can I tell one more story? It's the one Bill told about a night he spent carousing Kinshasa with Budd Schulberg and Harold Conrad, who were there for the Rumble in the Jungle. Conrad, for the uninitiated, was the real person the character Humphrey Bogart played in Schulberg's classic fight film in the 50's, "The Harder They Fall." He was a former Brooklyn Eagle sports writer who once did "PR" for Meyer Lansky and later turned fight promoter -- he promoted Ali's first three fights, back in the days when he was called Cassius Clay, and he was the guy who introduced Ali to Norman Mailer and George Plimpton and started him on his high-flying act amongst the NY intelligentsia.

Cardoso was in Zaire for New Times Magazine, which unbeknownst to him was on its last legs, and when Foreman cut his eye in training and the fight was put off for something like 70 days, the entire international press corps went home, except Cardoso, who was stuck by New Times in Kinshasa without a promise that they would fly him back for the delayed fight if he returned to NY with everyone else. Having spent his meager "expenses," Cardoso did what any enterprising Boston boy would do: he started dealing Zaire weed to the small American community in Kinshasa. By the time Conrad and Schulberg returned to Kinshasa some two months later, Bill had an entire chest of drawers stuffed with Zaire weed, and the night they got back to town, Bill treated them to some of his stash. When they returned to the Membling from their night of carousing in Kinshasa, the three of them got on the Membling's aging wire-cage elevator to go up to Bill's room so he could send them back to their digs at the Intercontinental (which Bill referred to somewhat snootily as the "Inter" in his piece) with some weed. According to Bill, as they got on the elevator, Schulberg was telling a Hollywood story, and Conrad was chiming in with his usual sideways observations and Bill was howling with laughter as the two older men fed each other lines. One story led to another and the three of them were cracking each other up. Finally there was a pause in the merriment and someone -- Bill thought it was Schulberg -- commented on how slow the elevator was. Bill looked through the old accordion door of the elevator at the lobby, then he checked his watch. They had been standing in the elevator on the first floor for more than 30 minutes. When he announced this fact to the others, Conrad stroked his pencil-mustache and smiled. That's some weed you've got there, Bill. It felt like we were going up the whole time.

Then there's the story about Bill stealing Francis Coppola's CITY Magazine car (logo emblazoned on a Hondo civic or something like it) when they wouldn't pay his expenses for covering the world series back in '76, sometime around then. It was right when Patty Hearst had just been kidnapped. Bill wrote three or four stories on the Series for CITY, and when he returned to SF, handed in an expense bill for about $1700, and Coppola just flat refused to pay him.

Bill called me up and announced that I had been promoted from Colonel to Marshall Field of his newly-formed ZLA, the Zinger Liberation Army, named after John Peter Zenger, one of Bill's heroes and the only newspaperman jailed for sedition. Patty Hearst had recently been kidnapped by the SLA, and the city of San Francisco was consumed by the story, so Bill named himself Marshall Field of the ZLA, promoted me from Colonel to Chief of Staff, and named his roommate, the mad-crazed VN war photographer Tim Page (who had more shrapnel in head than brains) as Minister of Information.

I flew immediately from wherever I was to SF. Cardoso had the CITY car stashed in a garage in Daly City, and we drove over there with a recorder and taped a message from the car in the style of the dispatches issued by the SLA. First the car's engine started, and then somebody -- I think it was Bill -- mimicked Patty Hearst's voice in a first-person "communication" from the stolen car: I'm being held hostage by the ZLA and won't be released until Francis Ford Coppola pays Bill Cardoso's CITY Magazine expenses, etc etc. Bill released the tape to Pacifica and within a day or so it was all over Bay area radio. Warren Hinckle ran a photo of a tourist with a Pelican sitting on his head in his column, identified the loon under the Pelican as Bill and wrote this hilarious gibberish about the outrageous kidnapping of Coppola's car and demanded that any reader who saw "this man" should immediately call the police, because he was known to be armed and dangerous.

The whole thing went on for days. Coppola had been holding fast, refusing to pay, but when the tape hit the airwaves, reporters and TV cameras staked out his Pacific Heights mansion, and he caved. I think Bill spent most of the $1700 on a week of celebration, and he was back where he was before, cadging cocktails from pals as he held forth at his local watering hole with a new stash of stories about the ZLA's war against Coppola's forces of darkness.

I'm rambling here, but I think there's room for one last story about the two-plus months Bill spent in Africa, a time which haunted him for years and after which his appearances in print became fewer and fewer.

It occurred to me over the last few days that while Bill may have named gonzo journalism, he didn't practice it. Gonzo was a kind of shorthand to describe Thompson's twisted take on things, which included stuff he quite literally made up. The scene of Ed Muskie’s collapse in the 1972 Democratic primaries, which Thompson blamed on Muskie having been addicted to the South American drug Ibogaine, was the example of his gonzo journalism cited most frequently after Thompson's death.

Bill's best stuff was frantic, written like he was a man on the run. It had an edgy noir-ish paranoia -- a motel clerk who looked like a biker who had just finished filing his teeth peered at him darkly through thick bullet-proof glass and gave him the wrong change on purpose when he paid for his room. He was convinced that everyone else had proper terry cloth bath mats, and the paper one placed next to his tub was there to remind him of his place in the world.

But Bill didn't make anything up. Everything he wrote was real, and while most of it was hilarious, a lot of it was as painful for him to write as it was for us to read. I finally concluded that's why his Zaire piece never ran in "New Times" or anywhere else. "New Times" was owned and edited by Jon Larsen, the preppy and wealthy son of one of Henry Luce's partners in Time Magazine. Larsen simply couldn't stomach the Zaire piece. Bill's story about an American prize fight staged in Zaire under Mobutu Seze Seko wasn't profane, but it had a raw and primitive feel that reflected Bill's take on the African continent more than it informed readers about the fight. He was spooked by Africa, and although his writing was hilarious, it was also deeply disturbed.

When he first arrived in Zaire, Bill was amused by the sight of hundreds of night-watchers who were hired by home owners and businessmen to sit on their haunches outside doorways in Kinshasa where they kept oil-fires going in tin cans to ward off evil spirits. "Ndokes" were the zombie-spirits of dead relatives and enemies who came out at night to enter unprotected houses and sit at your bedside where they would watch you sleep and cast a spell if you had the misfortune to awaken and see them. A month or so later, his amusement had turned to fear. Bill swore to me that he woke up one night in his room at the Membling to find an Ndoke sitting in a chair watching him. He was spooked, and when his tooth fell out of his head on the street outside the Chelsea Hotel the day after he returned to the United States, he was convinced it was as a result of the spell that had been cast on him by the Ndoke he saw in his room at the Membling. When he wrote about it in the Zaire piece, it wasn't gonzo, it was real.

Sadly for us today, some of best stuff Bill Cardoso wrote was never written down at all. He lived a life rich enough to fuel a half-dozen literary careers, and if I may take my liberties, Bill Cardoso was a national treasure. Hopefully, one day there will be a Great Reckoning, and someone will add up what we lost when Bill, and Conrad, and Hemway each took a cab.

Unless I miss my guess, somebody else will have to pay the fare, because none of them -- not a one -- would stoop so low as to dig into his own kick and pay for the privilege of going out with class.

So here's $50, Bill. Have a nice ride. We owe you at least that much.

Earlier this week, I posted Lucian Truscott IV's provocative insights into the Dubai port deal on this humble blog. I gave a very slight overview of his credits at the end of that post. His eulogy to Hunter S. Thompson appeared in the NY Times, here.


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digby 3/11/2006 11:05:00 AM |

 
Poster Boy

by digby


Favorite Claude Allen Katrina Quote:

"Just the mere fact you have pictures of the president on TV embracing grieving mothers, embracing pastors of churches that have been destroyed," Allen said. "That speaks about the personal character of our president, who is truly concerned about healing our nation."

Favorite Claude Allen Bigoted Remark explanation:

During his confirmation hearing, Senate Democrats quizzed Allen about a comment he made in 1984 when he served as spokesman for the reelection campaign of then-Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.). He told a reporter that then-Gov. James B. Hunt Jr., Helms's Democratic opponent, was vulnerable because of his links to the "queers."

Critics charged that Allen used the word to disparage gays. But during his judicial confirmation hearing, Allen told skeptical members of the Senate Judiciary Committee that he intended the word to convey "odd, out of the ordinary, unusual," not to denigrate gays.

Favorite Claude Allen Macabre Republican "Life" moment:

Robert G. Marshall, a Republican state delegate in Virginia, worked closely with Allen when the nominee served as Virginia's health secretary. Together, they fought - and lost - a battle to prevent the family of Hugh Finn, a popular TV news anchorman from Kentucky, from removing his feeding tube when he was sick in a Virginia nursing home. Marshall and Allen insisted there was not enough evidence that Finn was in a permanent vegetative state, despite that conclusion from several doctors.

"The media made it look like we were pumping air into a corpse, but I knew my duty and Claude knew his," recalled Marshall, who says Allen rightfully put a state's duty to protect life above public pressure. "I want a federal judge who protects human rights, despite public opinion being whipped up."

But Finn's wife, Michele, wrote a scathing letter to the Judiciary Committee this summer, saying Allen was "unsuitable" for the bench and had tried to "impose his personal agenda and beliefs over the legal and moral rights to which my husband was entitled."

He was Schiavo before Schiavo was cool.

Claude Allen is a Rove republican through and through --- a cheap, opportunistic phony preying on people's prejudices. He rose to the very top of the GOP heap by insulting the intelligence of all around him and daring them to call him on it. Very few people did.

You've gotta love this:

After his nomination was announced, some of Allen's fraternity brothers from Chi Psi, a mostly white and liberal frat at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, called each other to talk about a man who they felt might have always inflated his conservative views.

"Some people have considered that, maybe, when he worked for Helms, he thought that by being an African-American male who holds these views, he could move up fast as a Republican," said Donald Beeson, one of the fraternity brothers. "But I disagree. I don't think he is someone who would do that.

Right.


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digby 3/11/2006 10:32:00 AM |

Friday, March 10, 2006

 
Happy Days

by digby


There must be great joy on the right tonight. One of Rush's loathed leftist feel-good hand-wringers has been shown reality in a big way.

Only "Hillary's face on a milk carton" could make them happier.



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digby 3/10/2006 09:21:00 PM |

 
*update below

Shoplifting Extremist

by digby

Bush's Domestic Policy advisor, Claude Allen, inexplicably resigned a while back, and today it was revealed that the reason was that he had been arrested for shoplifting. Allen is not just some nobody. He was one of Bush's closest advisors and was paid at the very highest salary level along with Rove and Bartlet and a very few others. He is an extreme social conservative who the Democrats were able to keep off the federal bench when Bush nominated him for a lifetime appointment. (Let's give the Democrats some credit for doing something right on that one.) C. Boyden Gray, the shill in charge of putting far right radicals on the bench wrote this about Allen's nomination in NRO in 2004:

Claude Allen promises not to advance a political agenda from the federal bench he has been nominated to, but to be the type of judge who buttresses the foundation of American government -- by applying the rule of law however he finds it. President Bush, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, could do much worse than Allen. By the grace of democratic principles overriding a minority in the Senate, let us hope they do not have to.

I won't say it.

But here's the real kicker about Allen. From Josh Marshall, back in September 2005

(September 12, 2005 -- 02:10 AM EDT)

Not sure what to make of this small tidbit. But while I was confirming some new entries in our Katrina timeline tonight, I noticed something I hadn't heard before. According to Scott McClellan's August 31st gaggle, in the early days of Katrina, the White House Katrina task force was being run by Claude Allen.

Allen's title at the White House is Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy. But he's basically the social policy czar, big into abstinence only education, stem-cell restrictions, stuff like that.

This may simply have been a matter of convening meetings -- I have no idea. But still it seemed an odd choice.

Very odd. In the worst natural disaster in American history the Bush administration's response was assigned to a shoplifting religious extremist and a crony from the arabian horseshow association while the head of homeland security flew off to give a speech. The president and John McCain laughed and ate cake. This is Republican governance.

The administration has known about this for over a month. They lied reflexively and said he had resigned to spend more time with his family. Did they think this wouldn't come out?


Update: Apparently they are still laboring under the illusion that the country will swallow anything:

After the news of Allen's arrest surfaced Friday, White House officials provided an account of their knowledge of the events that led up to it.

The night of Jan. 2, after the alleged incident at the Target in Gaithersburg, he called White House chief of staff Andy Card to inform him of what had happened. The next morning, he spoke again, this time in person, with Card and White House counsel Harriet Miers, assuring them it was all a misunderstanding, press secretary Scott McClellan said.

Allen told his bosses there was merely confusion with his credit card because he had moved several times. "He assured them that he had done nothing wrong and the matter would be cleared up," McClellan said.

Allen told White House officials later that he wanted to resign because the job was too stressful on his family. His last day at the White House was Feb. 17, McClellan said.

The president first learned of Allen's planned departure and the January incident in early February, but since Allen had passed the usual background checks and had no other prior issues that White House officials were aware of, "He was given the benefit of the doubt," McClellan said.

"If it is true, no one would be more shocked and more outraged than the president," McClellan said. Allen has had no contact with the White House since his arrest.

First male prostitutes in the white house press room and now shoplifters in the president's inner circle. The vice president shoots an old man in the face. To say nothing of the indicted and soon to be indicted perjurers and corrupt GOP congressmen and Senators.

These are the people who are asking the nation to trust them with unfettered executive power because they are protecting the country. OK.


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digby 3/10/2006 05:47:00 PM |

 
**update below

Eunuch's Panic

by digby

"While I don't dispute the fact that we have challenges in the current environment politically, I also believe 2006 as a choice election offers Republicans an opportunity if we make sure the election is framed in a way that will keep our majorities in the House and the Senate," said Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee.

Stung by criticism, senior officials at the White House and the RNC are reminding GOP members of Congress that Bush's approval ratings may be low, but theirs is lower and have declined at the same pace as Bush's. The message to GOP lawmakers is that criticizing the president weakens him -- and them -- politically.

"When issue like the internal Republican debate over the ports dominates the news it puts us another day away from all of us figuring out what policies we need to win," said Terry Nelson, a Republican consultant and political director for Bush's re-election campaign in 2004.

What's a rubber stamp congress to do? Should they run against their man and take the chance that weakening him weakens them as Kenny Boy Mehlman warns? Or should they go down with the ship? Tough choices.

The problem, of course, is that they can run but they can't hide. They have gone along with every corrupt, inept, absurd and outrageous thing that the failed Bush administration has put out there. They have failed in their duty as a separate branch of government by pledging fealty to George W. Bush instead of the constitution. They are George W. Bush. There is no light between them.

This is the iconic image of the Republican Congress:

While New Orleans Drowned




Update: Tweety is down at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference (where they are selling those adorable bumper stickers that say "Happiness is Hillary's face on a milk carton") pretending like he's not running and asking all those who are tempted to write his name on the ballot to write in "George W. Bush" instead. He's tying Frist and the others up in knots.

The press loves the flyboy, never forget it. It's going to take a long determined effort to degrade his favorability if the Democrats hope to win.

Update II: Roger Birnbaum and Howie Fineman are both saying that all the candidates should back putting the name George W. Bush on the ballot because this thing doesn't really matter anyway and it's a nice gesture. Frist has been working feverishly to line up the votes. He wanted to win. McCain just got first blood, and he did it with a smooth slide of the shiv. He's good.



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digby 3/10/2006 12:20:00 PM |

 
Trash Talk Turkey

by digby

Atrios excerpts a few paragraphs from Paul Krugman's delectable "I told you so" column from today and I thought I'd excerpt a few more paragraphs for those of you who don't have Times select. I chose these in honor of tristero:

Never mind; better late than never. We should welcome the recent epiphanies by conservative commentators who have finally realized that the Bush administration isn't trustworthy. But we should guard against a conventional wisdom that seems to be taking hold in some quarters, which says there's something praiseworthy about having initially been taken in by Mr. Bush's deceptions, even though the administration's mendacity was obvious from the beginning.

According to this view, if you're a former Bush supporter who now says, as Mr. Bartlett did at the Cato event, that "the administration lies about budget numbers," you're a brave truth-teller. But if you've been saying that since the early days of the Bush administration, you were unpleasantly shrill.

Similarly, if you're a former worshipful admirer of George W. Bush who now says, as Mr. Sullivan did at Cato, that "the people in this administration have no principles," you're taking a courageous stand. If you said the same thing back when Mr. Bush had an 80 percent approval rating, you were blinded by Bush-hatred.

And if you're a former hawk who now concedes that the administration exaggerated the threat from Iraq, you're to be applauded for your open-mindedness. But if you warned three years ago that the administration was hyping the case for war, you were a conspiracy theorist.

The truth is that everything the new wave of Bush critics has to say was obvious long ago to any commentator who was willing to look at the facts

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No kidding.

It's a good column, but it's made shocking by the one that accompanies it on the page today by Thomas Friedman. Apparently, he didn't get the memo that he was long ago proved to be an ass.

I used to think Friedman was an astute observer of world affairs and had insight into globalization and mid-east politics --- until 9/11 when he showed himself to be an hysterical airhead. I've posted this column a couple of times, but it deserves another round as an illustration of how completely out of his mind he and the rest of the punditocrisy were in the days after the attacks:

... our enemies took us less and less seriously and became more and more emboldened. Indeed, they became so emboldened that a group of individuals - think about that for a second: not a state but a group of individuals - attacked America in its own backyard. Why not? The terrorists and the states that harbor them thought we were soft, and they were right. They thought that they could always "out-crazy" us, and they were right. They thought we would always listen to the Europeans and opt for "constructive engagement" with rogues, not a fist in the face, and they were right.

So our enemies took us less and less seriously and became more and more emboldened. Indeed, they became so emboldened that a group of individuals - think about that for a second: not a state but a group of individuals - attacked America in its own backyard. Why not? The terrorists and the states that harbor them thought we were soft, and they were right. They thought that they could always "out-crazy" us, and they were right. They thought we would always listen to the Europeans and opt for "constructive engagement" with rogues, not a fist in the face, and they were right.

America's enemies smelled weakness all over us, and we paid a huge price for that. There is an old bedouin legend that goes like this: An elderly Bedouin leader thought that by eating turkey he could restore his virility. So he bought a turkey, kept it by his tent and stuffed it with food every day. One day someone stole his turkey. The Bedouin elder called his sons together and told them: "Boys, we are in great danger. Someone has stolen my turkey." "Father," the sons answered, "what do you need a turkey for?"

"Never mind," he answered, "just get me back my turkey." But the sons ignored him and a month later someone stole the old man's camel. "What should we do?" the sons asked. "Find my turkey," said the father. But the sons did nothing, and a few weeks later the man's daughter was raped. The father said to his sons: "It is all because of the turkey. When they saw that they could take my turkey, we lost everything."

America is that Bedouin elder, and for 20 years people have been taking our turkey. The Europeans don't favor any military action against Iraq, Iran or North Korea. Neither do I. But what is their alternative? To wait until Saddam Hussein's son Uday, who's even a bigger psychopath than his father, has bio-weapons and missiles that can hit Paris?

No, the axis-of-evil idea isn't thought through - but that's what I like about it. It says to these countries and their terrorist pals: "We know what you're cooking in your bathtubs. We don't know exactly what we're going to do about it, but if you think we are going to just sit back and take another dose from you, you're wrong. Meet Don Rumsfeld - he's even crazier than you are."

There is a lot about the Bush team's foreign policy I don't like, but their willingness to restore our deterrence, and to be as crazy as some of our enemies, is one thing they have right. It is the only way we're going to get our turkey back.

This is the premiere, serious foreign policy op-ed columnist for the New York fucking Times. This is the level of sophistication we saw among the best and the brightest of famous public intellectuals, opinion makers and government officials as we raced to invade a country that hadn't attacked us. Trash talk foreign policy and sophomoric dick measuring.

Since then Friedman has come to criticize the Bush administration's execution of the Iraq war. But he certainly hasn't changed his puerile desire for the United States to "flex its muscles" and force those recalcitrant arabs into line with a mighty American roar. After everything we know about the efficacy of a superpower "acting crazy," Friedman comes out with this fatuous column today:

We need to bring together all the newly elected Iraqi leaders for a national reconciliation conference — outside Baghdad. We should lock them in a room and not let them out until they either produce a national unity government, so Americans will want to stay in Iraq, or fail to produce that government, which would signal that it's time to warm up the bus.

Those choices need to be put to the Iraqis in the most frank, tough-minded way by the most nasty, brutish and short-tempered senior official we've got — and that is Dick "Darth Vader" Cheney. Mr. Veep, this Bud's for you.

[...]

Mr. Cheney could open the meeting with his low growl by telling the Sunnis: "Look, you guys don't want to compromise, fine. Then we'll just leave you to the tender mercies of the Shiites, who vastly outnumber you."

To the Shiites: "You want to rule Iraq and control the oil without real regard to the Sunnis? Well, you're going to rule over nothing but a boiling pot, unless you compromise."

And to the Kurds he could say: "You've behaved most responsibly. Stick with it. If Iraq falls apart, we will make sure you're taken care of. We won't ignore the fact that you've built an impressively decent, democratizing society in your region."

After getting their attention, Mr. Cheney could start cracking heads on the key issues:

First, the Shiite alliance has to come up with a new candidate for prime minister, acceptable to all parties.

Second, the constitution has to be revised so the Sunnis do not feel that the Kurds and Shiites are breaking off their own chunks of Iraq, along with their oil resources.

Third, the Sunnis need to produce a credible plan for ending their insurgency.

Fourth, the parties have to agree on an inner cabinet, with ministers from each community, which will make all key decisions in coordination with the new prime minister.

Fifth, this inner cabinet has to draw up a plan for governing Iraq from the center — and not from any one faction.

Mr. Cheney could then conclude: "Read my lips — these are the minimum requirements for a decent government in Iraq. If Iraqis step up, Americans will want to stick it out. If Iraqis won't step up, Americans will want to step out. The American people are ready to midwife your democracy, but not to baby-sit your civil war."

Mr. Cheney, this is your Kodak moment. Iraqis are notoriously difficult and fractious. You've got the time and the mean streak to deal with them. They'll get serious if you're in the room. But just in case, bring along your shotgun. This is a good job for someone with bad aim.

Sixth: Go fuck youself, Dick.

I do not presume to understand the psychological disorder that leads so many highly placed gasbags to publicly yearn for a tough guy to step in and order everyone to do what he wants or else, but they need to deal with it rather than inflict their immature needs on the rest of the planet. I realize that Friedman thinks he was being funny by using Cheney as his villian, but apparently he truly believes the US can find a way to dictate these events around the world if we just show everyone that we have the biggest codpiece around. Please spare us any more of this juvenile trash talk. It's what got us into this mess in the first place.



Update: Via Atrios, I see that Andrew Sullivan's feelings are hurt that he's being held responsible for his earlier words.

I defer to tristero to make this argument explicitly, but it's important that people like Sullivan and Friedman don't get a free pass. This isn't going to be the last time the government makes devastating errors of judgment (although its going to be hard to beat the sheer scale of the Bush administration's failures.)People who endorsed this folly, over the objections of others with cooler analytical heads, have been discredited. It's that simple. They cannot be trusted the same way again, particularly if they fail to acknowledge that others were right and they refused to listen to them. It's very unpleasant to be wrong but mature people try to figure out where their reasoning failed and admit their mistakes. Simply "discovering" after all this time that Bush does not fit their fantasy image of him is not good enough.


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digby 3/10/2006 09:46:00 AM |

Thursday, March 09, 2006

 
Of Course

by digby

Avedon Carol snares a great quote that finally cleared something up for me: why does Bush always sound like he's talking to five year olds?

"He speaks to the audience as if they're idiots. I think the reason he does that is because that's the way these issues were explained to him." - Graydon Carter

The funny thing is that he sounds irritated too. It has always puzzled me why he seems so inappropriately impatient in his town meetings, as if his rapt audience needs some sort of time-wasting remedial education before he can get to the subject, which he never does. ("See --- social security is program for older people. Older people like ta retire. When you retire you don't work. When you don't work you don't earn money. That's the problem.")

Again, he's just parroting his own tutorial.



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digby 3/09/2006 07:04:00 PM |

 
They Mean It

by digby

It's pretty clear that the assault on women's reproductive rights is in full swing. I suspect that many Republicans know that their legislative majority days may be numbered and they are trying to deliver for their constituents before they lose their perch.

This one's a twofer.

Today the United States Senate is considering a bill that would have a serious and damaging impact on health coverage for women across the United States. The Health Insurance Marketplace Modernization and Affordability Act (HIMMAA), introduced by Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY) would allow insurance companies to ignore nearly all state laws that require insurance coverage for certain treatments or conditions, such as laws that require them to include contraceptives in their prescription plans.

[...]

For years, many insurance plans covered prescription drugs, but refused to cover birth control pills and other prescription contraceptives for women. In the past decade lawmakers in 23 states have remedied this inequity and enacted contraceptive coverage laws. Under HIMMAA women will lose contraceptive-equity protections currently guaranteed by state law.

They deliver for their primary masters, the insurance companies by "streamlining" the state laws that require the companies to cover certain health needs. This mandated coverage is often aimed at women's reproductive health. Insurance companies prefer not to be required to cover anything they can get away with not covering --- and the theocrats in the republican party want to make birth control more difficult to obtain if not against the law all together. This is one of those times when the interests of the big money boys and the bedroom police can work comfortably together.

This development is very interesting in light of the new emphasis on birth control among strategists in the Democratic party. The next battle is already being fought out on the edges of the abortion debate. If this goes the way of Democrats' previous brilliant strategies in the culture wars, within five years we'll have jettisoned our argument about Roe altogether and will be fighting with all our might to preserve Griswold, which the other side will be arguing is a matter of states' rights just like Roe. (No "streamlining" necessary.)

You'd think that common sense would preclude this, but it won't. Common sense says that regulating guns in a country of almost 300 million people is the smart thing to do. But we can't do it in the case of terrorism even now:

Historically, terrorist watch list checks were not part of the firearms background checkprocess implemented pursuant to the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act. Such watch lists were not checked, because being a known or suspected terrorist is not a disqualifying factor for firearm transfer/possession eligibility under current federal or state law.

[...]

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has directed the DOJ Office of Legal Policy to form a working group to review federal gun laws -- particularly in regard to Brady background checks -- to determine whether additional authority should be sought to prevent firearms transfers to known and suspected terrorists.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, you'll recall, John Ashcroft refused to extend the very short period that firearm backround checks were kept so that authorities could compare the lists with terrorist watch lists. (At the same time he and the rest of the administration ripped up the constitution because Dick Cheney believed the paperwork involved was too onerous.)

As of right now, it is perfectly legal for a terrorist suspect to buy guns. The right to bear arms is inviolate with these people. Not even a national security argument can be brought to bear --- even while habeas corpus is selectively suspended and the president has asserted a right to do anything it deems necessary to fight terrorism. Democrats can say nothing about this because we completely capitulated on the issue. It no longer even exists.

The Republicans and the NRA wore their opposition down over the course of many, many years and they are doing the same thing with abortion. So far, it's working pretty much the same way. And the icing on the cake from the perspective of the Republicans is that every time they wear the Democrats down on these contentious issues, it makes their "Democratic weakness" argument more believable. It's the gift that keeps on giving.

Michael Bérubé discusses this today by reflecting on the wide-spread belief among certain liberals that the anti-abortion people don't really mean it:

My point is that Nader, like all too many men on the left, doesn't believe that the right-wing culture warriors really mean it. They think it's all shadow-boxing, a distraction, a sop thrown to the radical fringe. That same attitude can be found, as I've noted before, in Tom Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas?, where Frank writes, "Values may 'matter most' to voters, but they always take a backseat to the needs of money once the elections are won. This is a basic earmark of the phenomenon, absolutely consistent in across its decades-long history. Abortion is never halted. Affirmative action is never abolished. The culture industry is never forced to clean up its act."

The idea is that an actual abortion ban would go too far: the first back alley death, and the Republican Party is in deep trouble. Well, maybe and maybe not, folks. You might think, along similar lines, "the first hideous death by torture in the War on Terror, and the Republican Party is in deep trouble," or "the first unconstitutional power grab by the executive branch, and the Republican Party is in deep trouble," or "the first data-mining program of domestic spying, and the Republican Party is in deep trouble," or "the first systemic corruption scandal involving Jack Abramoff and Duke Cunningham and Tom DeLay, and the Republican Party is in deep trouble," and you'd be, ah, wrong, you know. Besides, there's a nasty time lag between that first back-alley death and the repeal (if any) of a state's draconian abortion law, and in that time-lag, that state's Republican Party might or might not be in deep trouble. It's hard to unseat incumbents in this jerry-built and gerrymandered system, after all. So there's no guarantee that popular outrage against back-alley deaths would jeopardize a state's elected GOP officials en masse. But we can be pretty sure that women with unwanted pregnancies would be . . . how shall we say? in deep trouble.

They really mean it. This is no bullshit. There is no downside to overturning Roe for them --- and if there is, they don't care. If they want to overturn Griswald, they'll do that too. They fought the gun control fight when people were freaking out over crime in the streets and political assassinations. Conservative absolutists don't give up just because liberals get up-in-arms. They certainly don't care if we think they are shrill.

I believe that this fight is going to have to be fought on a number of fronts. We must make some decent people who have not fully explored the ramifications of their stand take a good hard look at it from a moral and logical standpoint. They need to be shown that their leaders (in the mode of Jack Abramoff and Ralph Reed) are very cynical and deceitful. What they say to their flock is very different from what they believe. From this review of the book "Absolute Convictions" in today's Salon magazine:

"Somebody's intimidating them, somebody's bullying them," Rev. Rob Shenck, a founder of the Christian lobbying group Faith and Action, says of women who seek abortions. Press counters: "None of the women interviewed claimed her decision was anyone's but her own." (He also cites this comment made to a reporter by antiabortion leader Joe Scheidler: "the gals usually know what they're doing and want to do it ... But if we started saying that women who have abortions should be sent to jail for life, we'd get into a real beehive."...)

A real beehive all right. An awful lot of people don't understand that this is where this argument inexorably leads. That means we have to engage at the dinner table and the water cooler as well as among ourselves. We must make some people look more closely at their own self-interest in this issue, particularly men.

But more than anything else we must accept the fact that these people are serious. They want to outlaw abortion and they want to curtail people's access to birth control. They aren't lying. And as they've shown with gun rights, they are in it for the long haul. We must be just a stubborn as they are and seek to wear them down rather than let them wear us down.

This is not an issue for tweaking. Let's tweak on the Ten Commandments or public funds for parochial schools or something else if it is necessary to adjust for this family values crap in order to win elections. State mandated forced childbirth and denial of access to birth control cannot be negotiated or finessed. This one's going to have to be fought out head to head, day to day to a final reckoning. That's what they are going to do and if we don't recognise that and act accordingly, we will lose.


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digby 3/09/2006 04:51:00 PM |

 
You And What Army?

by digby


I might be crazy but I think that Charles Krauthamer and Fred Barnes just implied that if we suffer another terrorist attack it will be because Bush was not allowed to reward our good friends the UAE with the port deal. Apparently if we don't play ball with our "allies" they'll be forced to do something nasty. It looks like the Bush Doctrine has undergone a little tweaking. The US is now paying off middle eastern countries so they won't help terrorists attack us. It's probably a better approach that "yer either with us or agin' us" thing. Paying off blackmailers directly is a lot cheaper than a war. In fact, it's a lot like the K Street project.

I wonder how the Republican base feels about that?

Meanwhile, Charles, Fred and Mort Kondrake agree that the UN is even more useless than it was before we went into Iraq and we won't be able to move into Iran for at least a year. We must once again unleash our mighty sword and remind some people of the military might of the United States (and Israel.) To hell with the Chinese and the Russians!

Looks like the Beltway Boys are getting ready to hitch up their codpieces and yippie yie yo kie yay, mothafuckahs. Just as soon as they remove their make-up.



Update:

Nice little country you've got there. Be a shame is something happened to it:

TODD (voice over): A warning of possible fallout from the port fight.

JOHN MCLAUGHLIN, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER: I think we've missed a opportunity.

TODD: CNN national security adviser John McLaughlin, a former deputy CIA director, says American politicians focused too much on the UAE's pre-9/11 terrorist ties and undervalued the Emirates' role since September 11 in catching terrorists, cracking down on weapons trafficking and money laundering.

Now...

MCLAUGHLIN: I think the UAE will continue to be a good intelligence partner, but there's a risk here, a chance that they will lose a lot of their enthusiasm for cooperating as closely with us as they have in the past.

TODD: Militarily, U.S. officials consistently hit home one point: the Emirates, specifically their port facilities in Dubai, are critical to U.S. operations in Iraq an Afghanistan. CAPT. THOMAS GOODWIN, U.S. NAVY: On a daily basis there is at least one U.S. ship in a port in the UAE, and oftentimes more than that.

GEN. PETER PACE, JOINT CHIEFS CHAIRMAN: And as you look to potential problems in the future in that region, the United Arab Emirates' location and capacity will be critical to our ability to succeed.

TODD: Now one former U.S. defense secretary tells CNN the ruling family may not kick American ships out of port, but may, in his words, "rethink their level of participation."

In business, the UAE is a huge American partner. Emirates Airline has placed a multibillion-dollar order for Boeing jets, but also buys planes from European-based Airbus.

Now...

RICHARD ABOULAFIA, TEAL GROUP: It's easy to see a scenario where this poisons commercial relations between the Emirates and the U.S., and that could directly impact Boeing's prospects to sell aircraft to the Emirates.

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digby 3/09/2006 03:48:00 PM |

 
Shell Game

by digby

John Warner says that DP World has agreed to transfer the operation of their US ports to a US "entity." They are guaranteed, apparently, not to suffer any financial loss in the deal. One must wonder exactly how that will be accomplished --- and who will be paying for it.

It appears on the surface that they are going to set up a shell company in the US in which the US taxpayer will guarantee DP World that it won't lose money. Nice deal. It will be interesting to see if that passes muster with the public.


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digby 3/09/2006 11:03:00 AM |

 
GUEST POST


Our Two Bobbies

By Lucian Truscott IV

The steno-pads in the Washington press corps have covered the Dubai Port deal the way they cover everything else, like a herd of hamsters scurrying for space on the airless, cramped exercise wheel that serves as our national capital. The conventional wisdom has focused exclusively on only one aspect of the story, national security, conveniently overlooking the fact that the Bush White House owns the goddamned national security issue. It's the one thing they can spin freely at Rovian whim, because they happen to have noticed that the inhabitants of Redneck Nation responded so warmly to Ronnie "working" at his "ranch" in his cowboy boots and western shirt and rolled up sleeves that Redneck Nation has collectively seized on the idea that anybody who spends lots of time "clearing brush" on his "ranch" in cowboy boots and western shirts with rolled up sleeves can be trusted not only with the Office of the President, but with our "security."

As a sergeant from Tennessee of my acquaintance in the Army used to say every time the Captain would pass down some wisdom from on-high about what was necessary to become a combat-ready rootin' tootin' blood-thirsty warrior: whhuuuut th' fuuuuuuk?

Here is a glimpse of what the Washington press corps steno-pads are failing to copy down:

Ask yourself why Bush suddenly found his Veto Stick and brandished it wildly at any legislation intended to stop the Dubai port deal. Ask yourself why he's out there on the plank facing growing opposition within his own party to the deal. Was it because he believes canceling the deal would send the wrong message to all of our "friends" in the world-- all three of them? Or maybe because he really believes it would be "unfair" to all those sheiks and emirs swathed in gold-embroidered robes having their toes sucked by Imported Blonde Virgins while they tap at their Blackberries, checking their stock portfolios for teeny little hundred-million dollar variances in their multi-billion dollar balances. I've got it! Bush is all upset with Republican Party congressional "leaders" because he's absolutely convinced that Dubai Ports World Inc. -- a national company wholly owned by the Emirate of Dubai -- has been thoroughly and expertly vetted by some "interagency committee" neither he, Rumsfeld, Snow, Chertoff or anyone else ever heard of before last week.

There are a few problems with this interagency committee vetting thing, beginning with the fact that the Deputy Secretary of the Treasury who chaired the interagency committee that vetted Dubai Ports World is the same guy who vetted Dan Quayle as well qualified to be Vice President for Bush's daddy when he was running for President in 1988. You read that right. His name is Robert M. Kimmitt, and believe-you-me, this man has a history of doing a hell of a job when it comes to being Bush Family Deputy-Expert Vetter. This is no doubt because he studied the fine art of vetting at the feet of Bush Family Master Fixer, Expert Vetter and Chief Water Carrier: James A. Baker III.

The Dubai Ports deal stinks to high heaven of tall Texan and master-fixer Baker. Robert M. Kimmitt, chair of the interagency committee that took something like 20 minutes to certify Dubai Ports as a worthy partner in running our ports -- without even taking a vote -- is a familiar name to me. He and I graduated in the same West Point class in June of 1969. Kimmitt, after serving in Vietnam, during which he was awarded three Bronze Stars, a Purple Heart, and an Air Medal, Kimmitt went to Georgetown Law School on the Army's dime and after graduating in 1977, plunged himself immediately into finding his way along Washington's corridors of power. As it happens, Kimmitt had some help reading the Power Map. His father was the man chosen by then Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson to replace Bobby Baker as the quietly powerful Secretary to Senate after Bobby Baker was discovered inflagrante in the bathroom of a gay porno theater. If anyone had the Power Map to the maze of corridors in our nation's capital, it was Kimmitt's daddy.

Kimmitt had also benefited from the careful guidance and ministrations of a powerful mentor with a big-time DC Power Job while he was still a cadet at West Point -- loooong story...WAY too long for this brief screed -- and now that he had in hand his Vietnam medals and Georgetown diploma and letters of recommendation from his DC Circuit Court of Appeals judge, whatdayaknow, but our boy Bobby immediately landed a job across town on the National Security Council at the White House. No stopping off to spend a couple of years rooting as an associate, around in a dusty law firm library for this boy! Nosiree! Robert M. Kimmitt knew there was one hell of a lot of vetting in his future, and where better to learn the fine art of vetting, but in the offices of the National Security Advisor to the President of the United States? There just wasn't any better place, that's what! So Kimmitt sets up shop on the staff of the NSC in 1978 and holds his breath and guts it out until that commie pinko peacenik Naval Academy grad and former nuclear submariner Jimmie Carter was ousted by cowboy boot and western shirt wearin', brush clearin' President Ronald Reagan, and he rolled up his sleeves and got busy. Busy doing what, you may ask? Easy! Bob Kimmitt got busy studying at the feet of his new mentor on the NSC -- James A. Baker III, who was installed on the NSC as the Bush Family Master Fixer, Expert Vetter and Chief Water Carrier!

Now you may be thinking, what a lucky guy, this Bob Kimmitt. It's 1978, he's not even 30 years old, and he's held only one real job in his life -- junior officer in the Army -- and there he is with his nose pressed not against the glass trying to get a glimpse of the Asshole of Power in Washington D.C., but on the other side of the glass, inside, really, really, really close to the Asshole of Power in Washington D.C., the one place where those words which ring in such dulcet political tones....national security...are not merely an aspect of policy, or a sideshow to the Real Deal, but the Real Deal Itself! Wow! National Security is right there in the title of the office where Bobby had his desk! And his phone! And his White House Pass! And his parking spot! Say it out loud! Listen!

National Security Council!

Double wow! Triple wow! No...whoopee! He's made it! Across town, mentors and daddies are celebrating! They're pouring tall tumblers of the Good Stuff out there on their patios! A Republican in the White House wearing cowboy boots and western shirts and clearin' brush during those loooooong weekends out there at the Western White House -- don't ya love the sound of it? Western White House! And our boy Bob right in there with him, watching out for our security! Whew! Isn't it great that we can relax out there on the back nine...swing that club a little looser...get that ball a little closer to the pin, maybe...now that Bob is in the White House making sure we're safe?

It was a great time for golfers, those years when Bob Kimmitt was looking out for the safety and security of their country clubs and the skies through which they passed in their Lears and Gulfstreams. Kimmitt spent the years 1978 to 1983 as an NSC staffer, and then he was promoted, and the golf courses turned greener and the Gulfstreams flew faster! Yep! Jim Baker promoted Bob to be his Executive Secretary, and then he made Bob the General Counsel to the NSC! Quadruple wow! But...wait. There was a problem. Some guys down there in the bowels of the NSC, guys flew so close to the Asshole of Power that their noses got singed, guys like North and Poindexter and McFarlane, guys who were messing around with arms for hostages and Contras and so forth. Not only did their noses get singed, some of 'em even got convicted of some crimes! But not our Bobby. No sir. That whole Iran-Contra thing...that was a Reagan deal all the way. Well...sort of. There was one little hiccup, something about Bob and a license that was needed to ship some missiles or rockets or something or another, and Bob was interviewed by the Tower Commission, but he sailed through safely, and in 1985, our Bobby followed the Bush Family Master Fixer, Expert Vetter and Chief Water Carrier over to the Department of Treasury, where he was installed as General Counsel to the Department under Secretary Baker. Now that the golf courses were safe and the Gulfstreams were up there flying through our secure skies, it was time to Watch the Money, and where better to watch it than the place where it was printed and distributed.

Kimmitt remained at Treasury under Secretary of Money Watching Baker until 1988 when he followed Baker into Bush Campaign I, where he distinguished himself by being deputized by Expert Vetter Baker to check out the qualifications of Dan Quayle. But hell. Anybody can make a mistake when it comes to one of those loons from Capitol Hill, and besides, Quayle didn't work out so badly. He turned into a kind of Agnew The Lesser, and baited the Dems and did what he was told, and down the road, he sure as hell wasn't a threat to any of the Bush Boys when one of them decided to run for President!

With Bush I elected in '88, Kimmitt followed the Master Fixer over to the Department of State, where he was made Under Secretary of State for Political and Military Affairs! Our boy Bob, who had toiled so long as a little-known player in the back rooms and basements of various government departments, was now up there on a High Floor at Foggy Bottom! And those golf courses and Gulfstreams and all that Republican money? Why, having Insured Security and Watched the Money for years, now Bob would move off-shore and do the same thing all over the world -- making the International Skies safe for the Gulfstreams and Watching the Money as it moved back and forth between friendly companies and banks in the States to foreign countries and friends who could be trusted, because if they stepped out of line, Bob was there to see to it that their Gulfstreams wouldn't be welcome in our skies, and their tacky golf shoes would not sully the groomed greens of our golf courses until they straightened-up and did the Right Thing with Our Money, which of course was to turn the Small Piles into Large Piles, and the Large Piles into Huge, Monciferous Piles of Crinkly-Smacking-Green Cash!

In 1991, Secretary of International Money Watching and Security Insuring Baker put in the fix so Bob was appointed Ambassador to Germany. He stayed in this post until Baker's boss lost in '92, and the Clinton people removed him in '93.

Sigh. Bob was on the street...in a Republican sort of way, you understand. He held a series of big-time, big-bucks corporate jobs during the politically Lean Years of the Clinton Administration, and took a long-awaited and well-deserved vacation in a top job at Time Warner AOL during Bush II's first administration. But recently jaws dropped on the E-ring of the Pentagon when word got around that Kimmitt was offered Secretary of the Navy, and to everyone's surprise, turned down that plum for Deputy Secretary of the Treasury. Now, why would a Power Guy like Kimmitt turn down a job where you could hop in your own personal Navy Lear Jet and take off to "visit the fleet" in Honolulu for the weekend, and instead take a slot as a deputy to a Bush lapdog who's still wandering the halls of the big building on 14th Street looking for his water bowl? There are probably some cynics who would call Kimmitt a footman riding the back bumper of the Bush Family Power Carriage, but I think of him simply as a wholly-owned subsidiary of James A. Baker III, Inc. Subsidiaries do what they're told to do, and when a former Treasury Secretary drops a hint that there are Things to Do and Money To Be Watched over in a Deputy Secretary's office at Treasury, why, what would you expect a good little Bobby to do, but listen to Duh Man.

When it comes to the Middle East -- specifically, to the Oil Business in the Middle East -- Baker is most assuredly Duh Man. Baker's powerful Houston law firm, Baker & Botts, represents the oil interests of the Saudi Royal family and has a big satellite office in Dubai which does business, among other things, in pipelines, energy and trade. You will recall that in 2003, Bush Family Master Fixer Baker was appointed by Bush as the Special Envoy who "negotiated" Iraq's huge debt, largely held by other Middle East oil-producing nations, including the UAE. Iraqi debt was reduced across the board. Does anyone think that the UAE just wrote off Iraq's debt? Not on your life. They are getting paid off in other ways...such as having the US approve a deal to have the UAE's Dubai company run six US ports, which will doubtlessly turn out to be hugely profitable to them, or else why would they be in the port business in a time when maritime trade is growing by leaps and bounds, and shipyards around the world can't turn out container ships and tankers fast enough. And that doesn't even get into Baker's connections to the Carlyle Group, or Bechtel, which built the port of Dubai, or any of that boring stuff.

Even leaving the Carlyle and Bechtel Boys aside, it gets better. Another "protege" of Baker's appears on the scene: Robert Zoellick, currently Deputy Secretary of State, but from 2001 to 2005, this country's Trade Representative in charge, largely, of setting up free trade agreements such as CAFTA around the world. I guess it was little noticed in 2004 when Zoellick signed a TIFA -- Trade and Investment Framework Agreement -- with the UAE, a first step in the negotiations with the Sheiks of Dubai toward a FTA, a Free Trade Agreement, negotiations for which are ongoing. In a speech in Jordan that year, Zoellick described the UAE as a "very positive partner for free trade in the region. The impending FTA with the UAE follows on the heels of FTA's already negotiated with Jordan, Egypt and Morocco. Trade ministers in the Middle East have described the free trade march of the US across the Middle East as picking off suckers one by one and an attempt to mollify Arab and Muslim nations with the carrot of trade while the stick of war is pounding Iraq. In fact, the several FTA's already signed are the beginnings of a plan for an overall MEFTA -- Middle East Free Trade Agreement -- intended to cover up to 20 nations in the region which is planned for completion by 2013.

And who is Zoellick to James A. Baker III? Why, he was the guy walking behind Baker carrying the briefcase containing Baker's Roman numerals, that's who! His technical job title was Counselor to Treasury Secretary Baker in 1985, and then Deputy Treasury Secretary under Baker until 1988. Then he took a cab down the Mall to Foggy Bottom where he was stood guard as Counselor to the State Department, and then moved into a tidy office down the hall where he went about the business of American Business as Undersecretary of State for Economic and Agricultural Affairs.

You think our two Bobbys ran into each other in the Corridors of Power when they were working for Duh Man? Does "duh" work for you as an answer? You think that the Deputy Secretary of the Treasury and the U.S. Trade Representative might have, uh, talked about stuff over a couple of lunches or sixteen or thirty-three? You think they might have played a round of golf or anything like that? You think that the interests of Bobby The Kimmitt and Bobby The Zoellick might not only coincide, but resemble each other so much they would appear as twins?

Consider their mutual interests in the UAE: The UAE is our 3rd largest trading partner in the Middle East, behind only Israel and Saudi Arabia. The Port of Dubai is the 3rd busiest in the world and is Home Away From Home for US warships, not to mention airfields in the UAE serving the same function for US Air Force warplanes. Consider that the Bush Administration's plans for a Free Trade Agreement with UAE are not just a foot but an entire leg in the door of an overall Middle East FTA slated for only 7 years down the road. You think there might be far more at stake with the Dubai Ports deal than our reputation with our "friends" in the world, or maybe even our "national security?" You think with two Money Watchers running things when it comes to Big Business and the UAE, that Bush might consider puttin' on his boots and western shirt and rollin' up his sleeves and brandishin' his Veto Stick if those goofballs on Capitol Hill mess around with his deal? Huh? Ya think?

As usual with the Bush Family -- with this Bush administration and the administration of Bush I -- if you turn over a rock, you won't find Weapons of Mass Destruction or Terrorist Connections or Osama bin Laden, but you will find a gigantic pile of Crinkly Greenbacks being overseen by our two Bobbies, dutifully carrying out their duties as Money Watchers, and buried in there amongst the grass-cuttings from the fresh-mown greens and a faint odor of kerosene dripped from topped-off wing tanks of the Gulfstreams...right down there next to the Veritable Bunghole of Power you will find evidence of fresh spittle from Bush Family Master Fixer, Expert Vetter and Chief Water Carrier James A. Baker III.



Most of you probably already know the name Lucian Truscott IV from the op-ed pages of the New York Times, stories in the Village Voice, novels like Dress Gray and Dress Blue or perhaps even the Sally Hemmings controversy in which Truscott, a Jefferson heir, insisted that Hemmings' family be included in the yearly family reunions. Now he has reached the pinnacle of his career by appearing on Hullabaloo.

By the way, even though he has been publishing op-eds in the New York Times since they started the page, for some reason they weren't interested in (the sedate NY Times version) of this essay. So he blogged it. Hah. ---- digby


Correction: Bobby Baker was discovered running a call girl ring, not in a gay porno theatre. That was Walter Jenkins.



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digby 3/09/2006 08:10:00 AM |

Wednesday, March 08, 2006

 
The political decadence of late-stage conservatism

by digby

"I was basically so busy winning that I didn't see what I was doing." Jack Abramoff

There you have it. Winning is the only thing they really care about and the only thing they know how to do. Governing, as we've just had graphically illustrated, was not part of the program.

Jack Abramoff is one of the anointed princes of the second wave of the conservative movement. He came of age politically during the go-go Reagan years, along with his good friends Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist. They were renowned for saying things like:

"I want to be invisible. I do guerrilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You don't know it's over until you're in a body bag." (Reed: Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, November 9, 1991)

Abramoff's personal credo was "If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing." As we know, Norquist just recently said: "Once the minority of House and Senate are comfortable in their minority status, they will have no problem socializing with the Republicans. Any farmer will tell you that certain animals run around and are unpleasant, but when they've been fixed, then they are happy and sedate. They are contented and cheerful. They don't go around peeing on the furniture and such." (All of us in the blogosphere have had to put up with the puerile troll taunt that begins, "Maybe when you start winning elections you can...." fill in the blank.)

This is the real modern Republican party in all its glory. It raised these guys from pups, nurturing their selfishness, their immaturity and their greed. They wanted to win by any means necessary and when you believe that you allow people like Reed and Abramoff to do what they need to do to make it happen. If you can skim some cream off the top, so much the better.

It's great that they are all being exposed, but let's not kid ourselves. They may be decadent and corrupt, but they do know how to win. I wouldn't count on them just folding up their tent and going home. Winning is, after all, the only thing they know how to do.

Still, there is good reason to hope that they are going to start turning part of their firepower on each other, which is the best way to beat people like this. The Dubai port deal shows a huge divide between the rank and file who believed that crap about "you're either with us or you're with the terrorists" and the big money boys who have already progressed past this old fashioned notion of the nation state to embrace the new borderless corporation paradigm. That crack in the coalition is becoming a fissure. There are a bunch of them.

But the crack that intrigues me the most is this one:

As the Jack Abramoff scandal unfolds, it is becoming increasingly clear how extensively he collaborated with the Christian right to advance his casino schemes. Ralph Reed was paid no less than $4 million by Abramoff and his Indian casino clients to serve as a liasion to the Christian right.

Reed managed to lasso Focus on the Family President James Dobson into a series of campaigns to stamp out competition to Abramoff's clients. Though Senate subpeonaed emails seem to confirm that Dobson was manipulated by Reed and Abramoff, he and his employees have repeatedly claimed that his activism against rivals to Abramoff's clients was a complete coincidence.

While I wrote about this for the Nation and Media Matters, there has been very little mainstream press interest on Dobson's role in Abramoff's schemes. So far, some of the best -- and most adversarial -- reporting on the Abramoff/Reed/Dobson saga is coming from the Christian media, namely from Marvin Olasky's World Magazine. As the former welfare guru to Gov. George W. Bush, Olasky coined the phrase, "compassionate conservatism." When Bush moved into the White House, he became the intellectual author of the Faith Based Initiative. Olasky's World Magazine is one of the largest evangelical publications in the country.

On February 4, World published a critical expose of Dobson's role in a 2002 Abramoff campaign to stop expansion of competition to his client, the Coushattas. A World reporter grilled Focus on the Family's Tom Minnery about Dobson's involvement. Minnery responded incredulously that Abramoff was "trying to take credit for" what Focus was supposedly already doing in Louisiana. He refused to criticize Reed, even though Reed clearly manipulated Dobson.

Two weeks later, Minnery and Dobson took to the airwaves in an attempt to defuse the conflict. Minnery claimed once again that "as it happens, we, Focus on the Family, we're fighting this new Indian casino in Louisiana at the very same time. Not because Ralph Reed asked us. Not because Jack Abramoff asked us." And he once again refused to criticize Reed. In fact, Minnery defended Reed, calling him "A wounded brother," who "regretted what he did, that he wouldn't do it again, and realizes that it was wrong."

I was criticized once before for writing that this rift could potentially push some of the evangelical voters back to the non-voting population. These worldly complications, it seemed to me, might make some of these folks ask themselves if they really wanted to devote all this time and energy to something so morally flawed as politics. Some readers felt that I was suggesting that we "suppress" the evangelical vote. Well... I would never try to stop somebody from voting. But I am certainly not going to go out and drag Republicans to the polls. These voters provide a huge, built-in GOP political machine through those churches and it is in our best interest to see that machine break down. As far as I'm concerned if a fight between Olasky and Dobson helps that happen, then I'm all for it. They are always welcome to vote for Democrats, of course.
digby 3/08/2006 06:00:00 PM |

Tuesday, March 07, 2006

 
Never Even Thought About It

by digby

This updates the post below about whether women should be held legally liable for having an illegal abortion. Apparently this video made the rounds some months ago (and I missed it) in which anti-abortion protesters are asked that very question. Turns out most of them haven't ever thought about it before. (Update: Apparently we crashed their server. Greg at the talent Show generously uploaded it on to his site here.)

That is as I suspected. It's time we make them think about it. Most anti-abortion legislation makes no sense morally and these people need to be led through the various steps that will show them this. The cognitive dissonence was apparent on these people's faces. It's a question that everyone from the family pro-choice supporter to professiohnal interviewers should always ask.

Picture if you will a poll in which Americans are asked if women should be jailed for murdering their unborn child with an illegal abortion. What do you think they would say? Considering the fact that even the anti-abortion picketers in that video don't know what to say, I think it's fair to assume that it would be rejected by more than 90 percent of the population.

That's because it's clear that there is almost nobody who believes that abortion is murder in the legal sense of the word. How can there be a law against "murder" where the main perpetrator is not punished? How can it be murder if these people don't believe that the person who planned it, hired someone to do and paid for it is not legally culpable?

The looks on these womens' faces in that video were amazing: confusion, frustration, pain. Their position is untenable and they know it.

I'm reminded of this profoundly dishonest anti-abortion activist from Kansas that I wrote about a while back. There's a reason why she obfuscates and dodges and lies:

BRANCACCIO: I don't understand how Kansas wouldn't-- ban abortion quit quickly after that. What do you know about the state of that debate in your state...

MARY KAY CULP: It isn't that. It's just that I know how the political system works. Then you can have real discussion. Then every-- both sides are gonna get aired, and if the media's fair about it, both sides are gonna get aired. That-- you know, that's a question. But at least democracy will have a chance to work on it. But, that doesn't necessarily mean anything either way.

She wants people to believe that this is going to be a very painless and simple debate in which the world will finally hear the pro-life side and be persuaded when the truth is that she and her fellow political operatives are working very hard to get these laws firmly in place before anyone has a chance to talk about it.

So I think we need to have this discussion. Let's debate it out in the open and "air both sides" because from where I sit it's the "pro-lifers" who haven't thought this thing through. Nobody says they can't agitate against abortion and stand out there with their sickening pictures and try to dissuade women from doing it. I will defend their right to argue against abortion forever. But when they use the law to enforce their moral worldview they need to recognize that they can't have it both ways. If fetuses are human and have the same rights as the women in whom they live, then a woman who has an abortion must logically be subject to the full force of the law. It would be a premeditated act of murder no different than if she hired a hit man to kill her five year old. The law will eventually be able to make no logical moral distinction. Is everybody ready for that?


Thanks to David in the comments for the clip.

Update: Here's an interesting exchange between Chris Matthews and Pat Toomey in 2004 on this very issue. Toomey was stumped.



Thanks to Mitch for the transcript.


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digby 3/07/2006 12:51:00 PM |

 
Trotting Out The Truth

by digby

The NY Times "trots out" a snotty piece today about how the Democrats are "trotting out" the fact that the Republicans have been lax on port security. That "record of failure" is apparently not convincing to the reporter since he/she puts it in "scare quotes."

Democrats in Congress almost daily blame their GOP counterparts for security holes in the U.S. maritime industry.

They trot out votes that show the Republican-controlled House and Senate turned back more than a dozen Democratic efforts to secure millions of dollars more for port security since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

''When it comes to protecting the ports, Republicans really do have a pre-9/11 mind-set,'' said Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind.

Among the votes:

--In 2003, House Republicans, on a procedural vote, agreed to kill a Democratic amendment that would have added $250 million for port security grants to a war spending package.

--Two years later, nearly all House Republicans voted against an alternative Homeland Security authorization bill offered by Democrats that called for an additional $400 million for port security.

--Senate Republicans stood together in 2003 to set aside a Democratic amendment that would have provided $120 million more for port cargo screening equipment.

--One year later, all but six Senate Republicans voted to reject a Democratic attempt to add $150 million for port security in a Homeland Security appropriations bill.

That "record of failure" presents "an important opportunity for Democrats to argue that they are the ones who have the right approach to protecting the country," maintains Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster.

House Republicans were put on record again last week on port security when Democrats tried to force a debate and vote on legislation that would require congressional approval of DP World's takeover. The effort failed. Only two Republicans voted with Democrats.

In defense, Republicans say Democrats always want to throw money at untested technology and that the GOP-led Congress has consistently given more money to port security than what the Bush administration has proposed.

Hahaha. Yeah. I hate when Democrats do that:

For the second time in two months, a test of the national missile defense system has failed, Pentagon officials said Monday.[February 15, 2005]

Military technicians say they believe the failure of the $85 million test was caused by a problem with ground support equipment, not with the interceptor missile itself. A preliminary assessment indicated that the fault had occurred in the concrete underground silo, where a variety of sensors perform safety and environmental monitoring.

[...].

The program, by some accounts, has cost $130 billion and is scheduled to require $50 billion more over the next five years. Bush's budget request for the 2006 fiscal year cut about 10 percent from this year's funding of almost $10 billion.

Do Republicans have any good arguments anymore? Aside from leaving themsleves wide open with a charge like that about untested technology, the Republicans in congress are reduced to saying that at least they gave more money for port security than their "tax cuts for millionaires" obsessive president. They are starting to make it look easy and that's never good for our side. I sincerely hope that Democrats are prepared and hungry enough to go for the jugular.


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digby 3/07/2006 10:23:00 AM |

 
First Degree Parenthood

by digby

I have a question for the innocent life crowd: how come none of the proposed laws anywhere, as far as I can tell, believe that a woman should be tried for the murder of her child if she gets an abortion? Indeed, there is no penalty in the South Dakota law for the woman at all. She isn't even charged as an accessory. Does that make sense? She could be tried for first degree murder for leaving a newborn baby to die on a church doorstep.

Doctors are targeted by all these laws; in South Draconian it's a felony punishable by up to five years in prison. We normally give people life in prison or the death penalty for premeditated murder for hire in our system.

I remember once seeing Larry King, of all people, ask this question of a "pro-life" advocate. (He wasn't laying a trap --- he really wanted to know, you could tell.) The "pro-life" advocate sputtered for five minutes. It's a question they need to answer. They've laid landmines everywhere with their hyperbolic nonsense about abortion being murder and "baby killing" and now they need to explain themselves.

If you ask most pro-lifers whether they think that women should be punished as murderers they say no. If you asked if they think women should be punished by the law at all, they say no. They don't want to punish the father either. The proposed laws target only the doctor who performed the surgery (or dispensed the drug) and for much less time than they would receive for killing a child. Now that we are moving beyond the demagoguery of the pulpit and the sidewalk and into the legal arena I think we all have a right to know how these people made these distinctions and why.

As with the arguments about rape and incest, the "pro-life" argument that abortion is murder is morally inconsistent. And if it isn't murder, then what is it?



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digby 3/07/2006 09:10:00 AM |

Monday, March 06, 2006

 
Democratic Sin Eaters

by digby

Speaking of Amy Sullivan's new article in the Washington Monthly about evangelicals leaving the Republican fold to join the Democrats, Kevin says:

Religion has been a big topic in liberal circles for a while now, and I have to admit that I always feel a bit like a bystander when the subject comes up. It's not like I can fake being religious, after all. Still, no one is really asking people like me to do much of anything except stay quiet, refrain from insulting religion qua religion in ways that would make people like Brinson unwilling to work with us, and let other people do the heavy lifting when it comes to persuading moderate Christians to support liberal causes and liberal candidates. That's not much to ask, and Amy makes a pretty good case that it would make a difference.

Sullivan's article is only partially persuasive to me. I'm with Atrios on this. If people are voting on the basis of abortion or gay rights, then they are unlikely to switch because of the other party's tax platform or approach to education. Those things are indicative of a certain view of personal autonomy in which compromise isn't very likely. I have very little hope that all this tweaking around the edges of the abortion issue with talk of abstinence or birth control will make any inroads into the GOP coalition. (There is better picking in the western libertarian camp in my view.)

However, Sullivan's article talks a lot about an educational program "presenting the Bible in a historical and cultural context—giving students a better understanding of biblical allusions in art, literature, and music," and (assuming the curriculum doesn't proselytise) I think it's a terrific idea and I'm as secular as they get. Back in the day, it was part of plain old Western Civ. and wasn"t particularly controversial. I think that teaching other religions in those terms would be useful and enlightening as well. I've mentioned before that I took a year of comparative world religions in high school that was just great. It's one of those subjects that can make a big impression on a young mind by showing that many religious beliefs are anchored in the same concepts. It promotes tolerance --- which may be one reason why the Christian Right is against this new Bible curriculum. (What fun is religion without coercion?)

But I doubt that it will change anything politically. If there is a religious divide, it's not about being religious per se. Almost the entire country considers itself religious to some degree or another. The parties are divided by religious intensity which is something else entirely. The big divide is between those who go to church more than once a week and those who don't.

Sullivan says, however, that there are a whole bunch of evangelicals who are willing to jump:

But a substantial minority of evangelical voters --- 41 percent, according to a 2004 survey by political scientist John Green at the University of Akron --- are more moderate on a host of issues ranging from the environment to public education to support for government spending on anti-poverty programs. Broadly speaking, these are the suburban, two-working-parents, kids-in-public-school, recycle-the-newspapers evangelicals. They may be pro-life, but it's in a Catholic, "seamless garment of life" kind of way. These moderates have largely remained in the Republican coalition because of its faith-friendly image.

I'd love to see some data to back that up. It's possible, but I think it's just as likely that they aren't voting for Democrats because of taxes or gay marriage or simple tribal identity rather than because the Dems are great except they aren't "friendly" to faith. After all, millions of religious Democrats don't have this problem. The numbers indicate that the party already gets 48% of the "abortion should be mostly/always illegal" and 29% of the "gays should have no legal recognition" crowds. I think that is probably the maximum social conservative vote that the Democrats can expect to get. (Well, unless it plans to completely sell out its principles, which is always possible.)

That is why this part of the article made me cringe when I read it:

The immediate post-election conventional wisdom was that Democrats lost because they couldn't appeal to so-called "moral values" voters. Democrats immediately embarked on a crash course in religious outreach and sought out people who could teach them about evangelicals. Brinson, who had caught the attention of the Democratic youth-vote industry, seemed like an obvious choice.

As for Brinson, when the Democratic chief of staff on the other end of the line asked whether the doctor would be willing to meet with some Democrats, he thought about his recent experiences with the other side and decided "maybe it wouldn't be so bad to talk to these Democratic people." In quick succession, the lifelong Republican found himself meeting with advisors to the incoming Democratic leaders—Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.)—field directors at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and aides to Howard Dean at the Democratic National Committee. What they found is that their interests overlapped: The Democrats wanted to reach out to evangelicals, and Brinson wanted to connect with politicians who could deliver on a broader array of evangelical concerns, like protecting programs to help the poor, supporting public education, and expanding health care. It had seemed natural for him to start by pressing his own party to take up those concerns, but Democrats appeared to be more willing partners. They even found common ground on abortion when Brinson, who is very pro-life, explained that he was more interested in lowering abortion rates by preventing unwanted pregnancies than in using the issue to score political points.

Those Democrats who had initially been wary about working with a conservative evangelical Republican from Alabama found Brinson convincing. They also realized that conservatives had done them an enormous favor. "Listening to him talk," one of them told me, "I thought, these guys bitch-slapped him, and he's willing to play ball."

Who's playing ball and who's getting bitch slapped, again?

Hey if I were a social conservative who was trying to leverage some clout against the Republican party for failing to deliver on its promises while in power, I'd run right over to the Democrats too. After all, everybody knows that they have no convictions and are willing to do anything to win. Why not co-opt them with visions of retaking the red states with the evangelical vote? It worked for Republicans on race.


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digby 3/06/2006 09:36:00 PM |

Sunday, March 05, 2006

 
Go Dolly

by digby


I guess we can all agree now that Dolly Parton isn't a real American. She wrote a song about God and a transgendered person that didn't condemn that person to hell.

Here's the effete, latte swilling, NT Times reading, out of the mainstream, left wing elitist making excuses for herself:

KING: And the lyrics are directly for the film. Example, "I'm out here on my journey trying to make the most of it. I'm a puzzle. I must figure out where all of my pieces fit." Did you like the movie?

PARTON: Well actually I thought it was very touching. It was very emotional to me to see someone, you know, that really frustrated with who they are and trying to become who they are and trying to become accepted and seen and loved for that.

And I really think Duncan, the director, handled it so well, all the parts of the movie. I was very, very touched with it. Even the son, little Kevin, I thought he was wonderful. I thought his part was great. And I think just all the ways that they all played together and how tastefully it was done for such a sensitive subject. I was real impressed with it all.

[...]

KING: Why have you been -- you've been interested for a long time in gay/lesbian, transgender stories, why?

PARTON: Well, I'm not interested in anything. I haven't made any efforts to do -- I just am totally accepting of people. I really believed that everybody should be allowed to be who they are.

KING: That's what I mean.

PARTON: Well yes, I'm very tolerant of just people in general. I believe we're all God's children. I think we all have a right to be who we are. I'm certainly -- I'm not a judge and I'm certainly not God, so I just try to love the God core in all people. And I know that is in the center of us all, so I just try to accept people for who they are, whatever that is.

Typical liberal moral relativist. Wasn't her most famous song called "In My San Francisco Russian Hill Home?" I think so.


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digby 3/05/2006 05:39:00 PM |

 
Three Years Later

by digby


Appropriately, Taylor Marsh has a nice post up today about movies. Tonight's the big night in this town and if you are anywhere near downtown Hollywood you'll see more limousines in one place than anywhere else on the planet. Until recently, the oscars were always on Monday, which was fun if you worked in the biz. There was a holiday feel to it and even if you weren't going to the show there were parties all over the place so everybody left work early. Now it's on Sunday and it's a whole different deal.

It occurred to me today as I was making my predictions (I think "Crash" is going to win Best Picture) that three years ago I was disappointed in Hollywood and the music industry for its cowardice in the face of the Iraq invasion. I wrote a long post about how odd and disjointed I felt watching this glamorous show in which the war was barely mentioned while the invasion was being presented as an epic patriotic pageant 24/7. There were pictures of GI's who had been captured all over the TV that day and I had been looking at the al Jazeera web-site pictures that were horrible:

... I'm disassociating from the reality. And, it occurred to me that maybe we are all doing that to some degree -- maybe because we are biologically programmed to do so just to keep ourselves from going crazy in times of war...

So, when I watched the Oscars last night, something I normally enjoy and go out of my way to see, I was just hoping for someone to say something heartfelt about peace. I was actually hoping that a lot of them would say something about peace --- not necessarily in the political sense, but in the universal value sense. Instead, sadly, most of them just pretended that nothing was happening.

But a few -- foreigners mostly -- did say some words about peace. Almodovar said, "I also want to dedicate this award to all the people that are raising their voices in favor of peace, respect of human rights, democracy and international legality. All of which are essential qualities to live." (Thanks, Pete. At least the Europeans love us, even if our own timid political brethren want us to tone down the rhetoric and let Rush Limbaugh dominate the discourse.)

But then Adrian Brody, the guy nobody expected to win, came up and let himself be human and emotional --- for his win, naturally, but also because of the the nature of the role he was being rewarded for playing. He said:

"My experiences of making this film made me very aware of the sadness and the dehumanization of people at times of war," he said. "Whatever you believe in, if it's God or Allah, may he watch over you and let's pray for a peaceful and swift resolution."

Dehumanization. That's what I'm feeling when I see the scared faces of those POW's and the horrors of decapitated children.

This is why civilization was supposed to be beyond the superficially logical rationalizations of "preventive war" and grand global ambitions of world domination through military force. While tallying up the 20th century's horrific body count we were supposed to have recognized that war must be a last resort in the face of NO OTHER OPTION. There can be no excuse but immediate self-defense to justify it. If Vietnam didn't teach us that, then it taught us nothing. Wars of aggression, by definition, cannot be glorious.

This war never met that test. And we have opened up Pandora's Box.

The historians will sort out the rightness and the wrongness of the policy. But as I was watching that glamorous telecast being held just a few miles from where I live, I could not help but be struck, once again, by the fact that we Americans are the luckiest people on the planet. I hope that we stay that way. We are good people, decent people, but we are being led astray by a leadership that is perpetrating a wrong. We simply cannot expect to remain safe and prosperous if we create a world in which it is the prerogative of one country, our country, to decide that a potential future threat is enough to justify a war. It is a dehumanizing undertaking that devalues every single one of us. It is not the America I know.

Three years ago. And I am now desensitized to the images I wrote about in the beginning of that post, the war images and the pictures of death. And new awful images have come and gone since then. I now argue with people about whether it is acceptable to torture -- a concept that would have been completely foreign to me three years ago. I would just as easily have believed we would be arguing about whether it is acceptable to molest children. I now accept that the president and his administration truly and deeply believe they are above the law, something I would have scoffed at not five years ago after the endless bellowing from the right during the Great Clinton Panty raid.

On the other hand, a lot has changed. Bush was a colossus, then. His approval rating was around 70%. The Dixie Chick boycott had just hit the news. It was a difficult time for dissent as I'm sure you all recall. The pressure on the media was perhaps exemplified most starkly by this:

A leaked in-house report said Phil Donahue's show would present a "difficult public face for NBC in a time of war." The problem: "He seems to delight in presenting guests who are antiwar, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration's motives." The danger --- quickly averted by NBC --- was that the show could become "a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity."

The good old days. How nice then to realize that this year's crop of socially conscious and politically themed movies must have been green-lighted right around that time. It usually takes between 18 months and forever to get a movie done. Therefore, while I was fretting about the movies losing their political voice because nobody spoke out at the Oscars, Hollywood was quietly setting about speaking out in a much more powerful way: through its art.

People can't stop talking about how "unsuccessful" all the movies were this year and that everybody wants to watch nothing but re-makes of "the Sound of Music." (See Wolcott for for a quick dispatch of that braindead trope.) But the truth is that all these movies succeeded as art, as politics and as popular works on their own terms. Hollywood made these films that are nominated this year because the artists involved had something to say, but they also made them for money. All of them were profitable, which is more than we can say for overpriced behemoths like that piece of shit "The Alamo" which lost 113 million or "Sahara" which lost 75 million and counting.

Perhaps it sounds silly to say that it took courage to make these movies, but I think it did. That night three years ago when I was watching the Oscars, I wondered if the new Republican reality would be with us forever. The shallow, fatcat, money grubbing studios made a bet that three years later this country would come to its senses and reject that awful craziness. Damned if they weren't right. Bush and the Republicans are in deep, deep shit today, Iraq is a mess, race is once again a hot topic and the cause of civil rights marches on. Maybe those guys and gals are worth the ridiculous sums of money they are paid to predict the zeitgeist after all.


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digby 3/05/2006 01:00:00 PM |

Saturday, March 04, 2006

 
Tears of A Klein Redux

by digby

As most of you undoubtedly already know, Jane has been holding a "Joe Klein, in his own words" contest these last few nights and they've come up with some doozies. It's down to the final round and I'm sorry to see that my favorite didn't make the cut:

The Great Society was an utter failure because it helped to contribute to social irresponsibility at the very bottom.

As with virtually everything else he has ever written, he was spouting bullshit GOP propaganda

If there is a prize for the political scam of the 20th century, it should go to the conservatives for propagating as conventional wisdom that the Great Society programs of the 1960s were a misguided and failed social experiment that wasted taxpayers' money.

Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, from 1963 when Lyndon Johnson took office until 1970 as the impact of his Great Society programs were felt, the portion of Americans living below the poverty line dropped from 22.2 percent to 12.6 percent, the most dramatic decline over such a brief period in this century.

Has there ever been a more useful Republican idiot than Joe Klein? I don't think so. If you don't believe me, check out the huge array of idiotic statements he's written over at firedoglake. Jane says, "No one man can claim credit for the minority status of Democrats today, but Joe Klein can certainly rest easily knowing that he has done more than his fair share." I think he and all his fake liberal pundit friends are the most responsible of all. They are killing us. People on both the left and the right confuse Joe Klein with a real Democrat and mistake his incomprehensible political philosophy for that of the Democratic Party. If there is nothing else that the liberal blogosphere can do, we must make it clear to the American people and the Democratic politicians that Joe Klein speaks only for his elite, insider cadre of cocktail weenie addicts. His opinions are irrelevant to serious Democratic politics.


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digby 3/04/2006 03:54:00 PM |

 
Don't Fuck

by digby

I got a track-back from the blog "Responding To the Left" to the post below, specifically the story of the woman who had an abortion because she already had two small children and couldn't afford another. I think it is an eloquent and honest representation of the way that many in the pro-life movement feel and it's great to see it out in the open so we can begin to debate this thing honestly:

I don't really get it. I am supposed to feel sorry for this woman? Does Digby expect me to sympathize with her? I hope not, because she's a selfish woman who was thinking only of herself.

That's right. You read that correctly. She couldn't afford to have another child so she terminated the pregancy. That is selfish. She wanted to have her fun and get laid, but she didn't want to have to deal with the possible consequences of her actions and guess what people? When a man and a woman have sex and the make is capable of producing sperm and the woman is capable of producing eggs, there is the possibility of the woman getting pregnant.

Digby makes the wisecrack about her not having sex. I can only take from his comment, that he is like so many other's of the same ilk who believe we're all like jungle animals and have to hump when the mood strikes. Of course, that isn't the case. People don't walk down the street and just bump into each other and start screwing (unless it's a Cinemax movie). We have the mental capacity to be able to take care of such business in private. We also have the ability to abstain. Nothing is going to happen to us if we don't have sex.

And if you're in a position like this woman, a low paying job and two kids already. Guess what? Don't fuck.

As human beings, we have the cognitive ability to think before we act. The choices we make carry consequences. And we have to accept responsibility for those choices. If we choose to smoke 2 packs of cigarettes a day, we have to accept it when we get lung cancer. If we drink and then drive, we have to accept it if we kill somebody in a car wreck. If we eat at McDonalds every day, then we have to accept it when we gain weight. It's about choices. Having sex is a choice. It's as simple as that. Saying, "I can't afford it" when a woman learns she is pregnant because of that choice is not accepting the results of that choice.
-
Personally, I believe abortion is a moral issue, not a legal one. Therefore, contrary to my personal feelings regarding abortion, I don't support South Dakota's law. As pro-life as I am, I find this law to be too draconian. That's not going to stop me from calling out this woman as a selfish person who is concerned more with making herself feel good then dealing with the consequences of the choice she made.

This person assumes that I believe humans are animals who can't control ourselves, but that is wrong. I don't believe that we are unable to control ourselves, but I do believe it is a fundamental part of life --- unstoppable, inexorable, relentless. It is not immoral (even for poor people) to do it. Nor is it even remotely realistic to think they won't. People have sex and lots of it, even when the "consequences" are severe. It's basic. And sometimes birth control fails or people lose their heads in the heat of the moment. Accidents happen. It is so banal and mundane and common that it's a bit bizarre to even have to make that explicit in the argument. Accidental, unwanted pregnancy happens every single day by the millions on this planet. Nature (or perhaps the "intelligent designer") expects women to get pregnant as often as possible and created the human sex drive to make that happen. Women, independent sentient beings that they are, want to control how many children they have. It's a constant battle and often times "nature" wins. It isn't a matter of morality. Sex between consenting people is simply human. And the right to abortion is simply a matter of human liberty --- a woman's right to decide her own fate and a woman's right to be a normal sexual being. Without both of those things, she can never truly be free.

No, people aren't mindless animals who can't control themselves. But, saying to women, "if you can't afford another child, don't fuck" is not entirely different than saying "if you can't afford food, don't eat." Of course, she won't literally die if she doesn't ever have sex again (or at least until she's past her fertile years.)But for many women it would be a death of another sort: the death of her humanity. Sex is elemental.

In any case, however much you exhort them not to, women will still have sex and without a right to abortion (and soon birth control) they'll end up in forced childbirth, bearing more offspring than they can afford and they'll end up having back alley abortions and they'll end up dying. I suspect the people who believe having sex if you are unprepared to procreate is irresponsible will find comfort in that.



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digby 3/04/2006 12:58:00 PM |

Friday, March 03, 2006

 
The Sodomized Virgin Exception

by digby

South Dakota:

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Napoli says most abortions are performed for what he calls "convenience." He insists that exceptions can be made for rape or incest under the provision that protects the mother's life. I asked him for a scenario in which an exception may be invoked.

BILL NAPOLI: A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.

Do you suppose all these elements have to be present for it to be sufficiently psychologically damaging for her to be forced to bear her rapists child, or just some of them? I wonder if it would be ok if the woman wasn't religious but she was a virgin who had been brutally, savagely raped and "sodomized as bad as you can make it?" Or if she were a virgin and religious but the brutal savage sodomy wasn't "as bad" as it could have been?

Certainly, we know that if she wasn't a virgin, she was asking for it, so she should be punished with forced childbirth. No lazy "convenient" abortion for her, the little whore. It goes without saying that the victim who was saving it for her marriage is a good girl who didn't ask to be brutally raped and sodomized like the sluts who didn't hold out. But even that wouldn't be quite enough by itself. The woman must be sufficiently destroyed psychologically by the savage brutality that the forced childbirth would drive her to suicide (the presumed scenario in which this pregnancy could conceivably "threaten her life.")

Someone should ask this man about this. He seems to have given it a good deal of thought. I suspect many hours have been spent luridly contemplating the brutal, savage rape and sodomy (as bad as it can be) of a religious virgin and how terrible it would be for her. It seems quite clear in his mind.

Meanwhile, outside the twisted imagination of Senator Psycho there, we have reality:

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: One patient she saw was this woman, probably in her early 20s. She would not reveal even her age. With a low-paying job and two children, she said she simply could not afford a third.

"MICHELLE," PATIENT WHO TERMINATED HER PREGNANCY: It was difficult when I found out I was pregnant. I was saddened, because I knew that I'd probably have to make this decision. Like I said, I have two children, so I look into their eyes and I love them. It's been difficult, you know; it's not easy. And I don't think it's, you know, ever easy on a woman, but we need that choice.

Too bad. She shouldn't have had sex. Three kids and no money are just what the bitch deserves. Her two little kids deserve it too for choosing a mother like her.


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digby 3/03/2006 10:27:00 PM |

 
You Talkin' To Me?

by digby

John Aravosis is following this delicious Katrina feud. He writes:

Ohhhh, this infighting is really getting interesting these days. "Heckuva job Brownie" is lashing out at his former boss Chertoff. All of that GOP discipline seems to be collapsing faster than Enron.

Hah. It does show you once again that Bush's vaunted loyalty is actually a necessity. Everytime he fires somebody the tales they tell are damning. It was particularly stupid to try to lay off the epic death and destruction of Katrina on poor little Brownie alone. They left him no choice but to try to publicly recover his reputation. He's destroyed. If they'd have played it smart they would have fired Chertoff and a couple of others too and just said it wasn't personal, it was a systemic failure and these people all fell on their swords because they are honorable men. They could have then been bought off with lucrative careers, no harm no foul. But they left poor little Brownie no choice. Now he is going to use every opportunity available to him to keep it in the headlines and convince a very receptive public that the fault was not his.

Rove must really be sweating this Plame thing because he has completely lost his touch.


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digby 3/03/2006 09:27:00 PM |

 
Wiping The Sleep From Their Tired Little Eyes

by digby

I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one who found this article by John Dickerson to be completely ridiculous. A former white house correspondent from TIME magazine apparently has no idea how stupid he sounds when he says he held the belief that Bush was some sort of behind the scenes mastermind until he saw the footage of the Katrina video conference. Weldon says:

So. Okay. What we have here is an experienced Washington hand who has presumably been conscious during at least some of the past five years, and is only now -- and only because he saw the frickin' video -- beginning to worry that Bush may not be quite as competent as those responsible for covering his ass say he is. Didn't it ever occur to Dickerson that executives who consistently ask good questions eventually get good answers that lead to at least an occasional good outcome? Have there been any good outcomes?

No.

I can understand why people may have intially thought that the guy just had to be smarter than he appeared in public because well.. nobody that dumb could possibly be president. It just defied reason. It wasn't long, however, before it became clear that the Republican Party had insulted our collective intelligence beyond our wildest imaginings by using sophisticated marketing techniques and every lever of institutional power at their disposal to install an idiot manchild in the oval office. (I came to believe they did it just to prove they could.)

After it was revealed that he had ignored the terrorism threat until 9/11 and then he continued to screw up everything that came after, any sentient being should have been able to see that what you saw in public was real: an arrogant, spoiled inarticulate man who didn't have a clue about how to run the most powerful country in the world. Regardless of how many "grown-ups" he had around him, he was the head of the organization and the organization was a reflection of him. They always are. His staff was just as inept as he was.

Bush's entire life had consisted of trading on his father's name and failing at everything he touched. That is the legacy of this failed presidency as well. That John Dickerson is only now beginning to realize that Bush is exactly what he appears to be is nothing short of mind boggling.

Eric Boehlert, one of the few journalists around who was as gobsmacked by the gooey Bush adulation among the press corps as the rest of us were wrote back in February of 2002, after Bob Woodward's fellatory series called "10 Days in September: Inside the War Cabinet":

Conservative pundits cheered the series, suggesting it was a Pulitzer Prize must-win. Raves from the right were understandable: "10 Days in September: Inside the War Cabinet" erased any suggestion of Bush as a detached as well as inexperienced leader who relies on more seasoned aides to get things done.

To say the series presented the administration, and Bush in particular, in a favorable light would be an understatement. We see Bush utterly sure of himself, operating on gut instincts, leading round-table discussions, formulating complex strategies, asking pointed questions, building international coalitions, demanding results, poring over speeches and seeking last-minute phrase changes.

The portrait was so contrary to public perception that it was reminiscent of the timeless "Saturday Night Live" sketch that ran at the height of Iran-Contra scandal. It featured an outwardly jolly and oblivious Ronald Reagan, who in private Oval Office meetings revealed himself as a mastermind of the operation's arcane covert details, barking out orders to befuddled senior aides. In the same way, but without satire, the Post series suggested that a president often depicted as a genial delegator, who ducked the Vietnam War with a stateside post in the Texas Air National Guard, is in fact a hands-on commander in chief of the war on terror.

It was ridiculous, laughable, absurd and yet they actually succeeded in convincing am large number of Americans that they weren't seeing what they thought they were seeing:

You know, I'm asked all the time -- I'll ask myself a question. (Laughter.) How do I respond to -- it's an old trick -- (laughter) -- how do I respond when I see that in some Islamic countries there is vitriolic hatred for America? I'll tell you how I respond: I'm amazed. I'm amazed that there is such misunderstanding of what our country is about, that people would hate us. I am, I am -- like most Americans, I just can't believe it. Because I know how good we are, and we've go to do a better job of making our case. We've got to do a better job of explaining to the people in the Middle East, for example, that we don't fight a war against Islam or Muslims. We don't hold any religion accountable. We're fighting evil. And these murderers have hijacked a great religion in order to justify their evil deeds. And we cannot let it stand

Jesus H. Christ.


Now, like John Dickerson,Howard Fineman, (one of the gushiest Bush hagiographers) seems to have just discovered that the emperor has no clothes as well:

The man-of-few-words approach has its virtues, and they matched the moment in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and, for the most part, since. Bush's deep belief in his vision of global democratization, coupled with the eloquence of speeches crafted for state occasions by Michael Gerson, carried the day. Dazed and confused and searching for old verities after the terrorist attacks, I think most Americans found some comfort in Bush the Growling Cowboy.

I know it's a shock to Republicans but the president's primary job is not to provide comfort in an emergency, it's to deal effectively with the emergency. In that, he has always failed. There was, apparently, a massive need among the media (and perhaps the public) to believe that the puerile drivel that Bush spouted after 9/11 was an effective way to deal with Islamic terrorism. In fact, it was precisely the opposite.

Feinman has an epiphany:

That time has passed, though. The main reason of course, is that the simple, black-and-white solutions that the president sketched for us in the "war on terror" haven't materialized. Most Americans now consider the war in Iraq to have been a mistake, one that has made us less secure here in what is now called "the homeland." They see his Manichaean clarity not as a comfort, but as a danger --- because it underestimates the complexity of the real world. There are many more moving parts to consider in the world than the simple clockwork Bush had described.

No kidding. But then it was always bullshit and a good many of us knew it at the time. The "Manichean clarity" was fairy dust that any high school kid should have seen through. Yet Fineman was desperately in love with Cowboy Bush, as were so many of the elite press corps (for reasons that only their psychologists or spouses can understand) that he wrote:

So who are the Bushes, really? Well, they're the people who produced the fellow who sat with me and my Newsweek colleague, Martha Brant, for his first interview since 9/11. We saw, among other things, a leader who is utterly comfortable in his role. Bush envelops himself in the trappings of office. Maybe that's because he's seen it from the inside since his dad served as Reagan's vice president in the '80s. The presidency is a family business.

Dubyah loves to wear the uniform -- whatever the correct one happens to be for a particular moment. I counted no fewer than four changes of attire during the day trip we took to Fort Campbell in Kentucky and back. He arrived for our interview in a dark blue Air Force One flight jacket. When he greeted the members of Congress on board, he wore an open-necked shirt. When he had lunch with the troops, he wore a blue blazer. And when he addressed the troops, it was in the flight jacket of the 101st Airborne. He's a boomer product of the '60s -- but doesn't mind ermine robes.

And now he has the nerve to say that wearing costumes and talking like a cartoon character "underestimates the complexity of the real world. There are many more moving parts to consider in the world than the simple clockwork Bush had described." No shit.

I blame the press as much as I blame the Republicans for this nonsense. If they hadn't gotten a schoolkid crush on Bush after 9/11 and had maintained even a modicum of professionalism, we might not have had to endure this horrible failure for a second term. They built him up so high, and kept him there so long, that it was impossible for the public to fully comprehend what a miserable failure he was until it was too late. Now we are stuck with this bozo for another three years because these alleged journalists took five years to realize what was evident to anyone with eyes to see: George W. Bush was unqualified by brains, temperament or experience to be president, and the party he represents treated their country with tremendous disrespect by anointing such a man for such an important job. They have failed as much as he has and they have a lot to answer for.


Update:

There were some earlier reports about Bush's behavior in meetings, but nobody wanted to deal with the reality that we had a child in the oval office.


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digby 3/03/2006 08:04:00 PM |

 
Lazy, Good-For-Nothin N ... agin

by digby

I don't know if I heard this right, but I think Chris Matthews just said something like this:

This is probably going to bug some people, but the first time I saw Nagin I saw this slow acting, slow talking guy...or do all people talk that way down there? I didn't see any New Yorker type A get the job done ... is this lazy, "it's a hot day" kind of thinking?

Now why do you suppose he thought that would bug some people?

He agitated for his true love Rudy to take over the for weeks. I thought he was just yearning for another hot codpiece moment but apparently he also thought them slow actin' N'Olahns boys jess didn't know nothin' bout no hurricanes.

What in the hell is wrong with him? Is this unusual form of Tourette's Syndrome?



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digby 3/03/2006 02:15:00 PM |

Thursday, March 02, 2006

 
Lying Low

by digby


I've linked many times to this astonishing article by Michael Ledeen in which he agitates for an attack on France and Germany for their failure to support the Iraq invasion. Most recently, I used it as an example of right wingers assailing our traditional European allies while the administration cozies up to undependable allies like the UAE in this port deal. Alert reader Kurtis noticed something in the piece that I didn't:

Both countries have been totally deaf to suggestions that the West take stern measures against the tyrannical terrorist sponsors in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Saudi Arabia. Instead, they do everything in their power to undermine American-sponsored trade embargoes or more limited sanctions, and it is an open secret that they have been supplying Saddam with military technology through the corrupt ports of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid's little playground in Dubai, often through Iranian middlemen.

It turns out he's written a whole lot of things like this over the years. Here's another one:

Those who care to know such things have long been aware that the two most murderous leaders of the Islamic Republic, Rafsanjani and Rafiqdust, spend considerable time in Dubai, from which Iranians run weapons shipments throughout the region, smuggle Iraqi oil to market, and transfer billions of dollars to their overseas operatives (as well as to their private financial empires in Western Europe, North Africa, and elsewhere in the Middle East). There are more than 40 flights per day between Dubai and Iran, in addition to the countless voyages of ships of the sort captured by Israeli forces.

Strange then that the only thing I can find from Ledeen on the matter since the controversy arose is this entry on the Corner:

There is a clean way to handle things such as the port operations, and it still astonishes me that it wasn't done properly. It's been done thusly for many years, actually many decades:

1. Create an American company to handle the matter (if foreigners wish to buy in, or even buy it, that's ok);
2. Wall off the foreign investors/owners. They are silent partners. They have no say in the actual operation;
3. Create a "classified Board" composed of people with security clearances and experience in sensitive matters;
4. Appoint a CEO and other top executives with experience and clearances.

We do this all the time with, say, foreigners who want to buy companies that manufacture parts for weapons sytems, etc. It seems the obvious solution here. Dubai would get prestige and whatever profits are generated. Americans run the thing and guarantee, so far as is possible, security. Looks like a win/win solution. For that matter, we should have done the same sort of thing with the British owners, and we should do the same thing with the Chinese and others who now have access to all kinds of potentially dangerous information thanks to their buy-ins.

Funny, no fulminating about playboy sheiks from Dubai doing business with Iran or selling arms to the Palestinians or anything else. He just writes a very dry analysis about how Dubai can get out of this sticky wicket. This from the guy who has been the number one believer in the "real men go to Tehran" school of delusional neocon thinking.

How odd.



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digby 3/02/2006 06:50:00 PM |

 
Poll Tacks

by digby


All the polls are showing Bush and the Republicans in freefall, but there are a couple of things in this Quinnipiac poll that I found to be quite intriguing:

They separated results by blue, red and purple states, the latter of which are "13 purple states -- 12 in which there was a margin of five points or less in the 2004 popular vote between Bush and Kerry, plus Missouri, historically considered the nation's most accurate barometer of presidential voting. These states have 153 of the 270 electoral votes needed to capture the presidency." They are Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Oregon, Wisconsin.

Bush has a worse approval rating in those states than in the blue states. They also favor Democrats over Republicans in the 06 race by a a slightly larger margin than the blue states. In general, people in swing states have turned on Bush and the Republicans, big time.

But more startling than that is the huge gender gap. Across the board, women are much more critical of the Bush administration and the Republicans than men. The number on terrorism is particularly startling. Men still approve of Bush's handling of the war on terrorism by 51 to 45 percent. Women disapprove of his handling of terrorism by
59 to 35 percent.

It can't all be explained by Iraq. There is a substantial gender gap there also (men disapprove 57-41 while women disapprove 63-31) but it's not nearly as large.

I made a flippant observation the other day on this subject about women seeing Bush as a disgusting old boyfriend, but I'm now seriously curious about why this huge gender gap on terrorism exists. I suspect his performance on Katrina made an impression, but maybe I'm wrong. What do you think?


Update: Here's another interesting item, this time from the GW-Battleground Poll:

Of all the Washington leaders examined, only Senator John McCain (65% favorable/18% unfavorable) has chiseled out a positive “bi-partisan� image with the American electorate.

The Democrats need to start thinking about this right now. McCain is going to run against Bush's Iraq policy by saying he never committed enough troops and that's why we lost it.

Friday, April 16, 2004

The Pentagon should have known it needed more troops in Iraq and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld should have overruled his generals on the matter, Sen. John McCain said Thursday night.

"I was there last August. I came back after talking with many, many people, and I was convinced we didn't have enough boots on the ground," said the senator from Arizona and decorated Vietnam War veteran.

And he's king of the "reformers," too, at a time when corruption is the single most important domestic issue. They'd better be thinking about how to deal with this guy. Everybody assumes that the GOP base won't support him, but I have serious doubts about that. He is, after all, the guy that Bush was pretending to be.


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digby 3/02/2006 05:00:00 PM |

 
Cards On The Table

by digby

If more of these people would admit what they really believe we could have an honest debate in this country:

West Jordan Republican Sen. Chris Buttars scoffed at McCoy's suggestion that the legislation might force teens to other states for abortions or into their bathrooms to attempt the procedure on themselves.

"Abortion isn't about women's rights. The rights they had were when they made the decision to have sex," Buttars said. "This is the consequences. The consequence is they should have to talk to their parents."

Too bad if her father is the one who impregnated her:

Current Utah law - which was adopted in 1974 - requires doctors to notify a girl's parents before ending her pregnancy. HB85, sponsored by Ogden Republican Rep. Kerry Gibson and Peterson, would change state code to require doctors to get at least one parent's permission 24 hours before the procedure. Doctors could proceed without consent in medical emergencies or to protect the health of the mother.

The bill would allow girls to ask a judge to bypass the parental consent requirement if she fears abuse or is pregnant as a result of incest. At the same time, the legislation still would require a doctor to notify a girl's parents of the abortion, effectively nullifying the judicial bypass.

Salt Lake City Democratic Sen. Scott McCoy tried to amend the bill Monday to grant an exception to the notification requirement in "very narrow situations" where a girl's father also is the father of her baby.

Peterson argued that parental notification "hasn't been a problem" for 30 years. Why would notification after a judicial bypass be a problem? "What we're trying to do is allow a parent a say in what happens in this youth's life," he said.

But Sen. Patrice Arent said Peterson was closing his eyes to the "real world." The Murray Democrat said Utah lawmakers are setting up a situation where a girl who has been raped by her father would go to court to avoid telling her parents of her abortion. But the doctor still would notify one or both of those parents who could be complicit in the incest.

I find this refreshing. These Republicans admit that women give up their rights when they have sex. Good to know. And they believe a child molesting father's parental rights are more important than the daughter he impregnated. Also good to know.

Our equally religious Muslim fundamentalist friends take this argument to its logical conclusion:

A large number of women in Afghanistan continue to be imprisoned for committing so-called "zina" crimes. A female can be detained and prosecuted for adultery, running away from home or having consensual sex outside marriage, which are all referred to as zina crimes. The major factor preventing victims of rape complaining to the authorities is the fear that instead of being treated as a victim, they themselves will be prosecuted for unlawful sexual activity.

During its recent visit, AI found that a large number of female inmates in prisons across Afghanistan are incarcerated for the crime of "running away" and for adultery, as well as for engaging in unlawful sexual activity. Amongst many judges and judicial officials, there was a prevailing lack of knowledge about the application of zina law.

In many instances, there was a lack of basic legal skills among legal professionals interviewed. In addition, in relation to many offences, sentencing is left to judges’ unfettered discretion and they often had down arbitrary sentences to women. A majority of imprisoned women have been charged or are imprisoned for transgressing social norms and mores.

Utah girls should realize how lucky they are. They are just as guilty of having sex as their muslim sisters and yet their leaders are generous and only seek to punish them with the forced childbirth of their own siblings and the offspring of their rapists. That's because America is civilized.

One of these fine leaders puts it this way:

"There is a life inside of this life. And how that life is taken care of is very important to me," said Sen. Darin Peterson, R-Nephi.

How the life it's inside of is taken care of --- not so much. That life apparently gave up any claim to being cared for when she allowed her father to rape her.



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digby 3/02/2006 01:21:00 PM |

 
Wedgie A La Carte

by digby


I'm with Kevin on this. I've never thought that a la carte cable was all that because I know that I'll probably end up paying the same for fewer channels. It's just the way these things work. But if Pat Robertson and Jerry Fallwell are against it, I'm for it. These hucksters prey on lonely dupes in their homes, take their money and then use it to support corporate Republican politics.

Nothing would make me happier than to cancel all the religious programming from my cable line-up. And I would particularly like to tell ABC Family that I am cancelling their channel specifically because it carries the 700 Club.

I suspect that the religious programmers understand something that a lot of people in the media do not. What people say they want and what they will do are different things. Americans like to say they are religious, but many more want their MTV than want the 700 club.



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digby 3/02/2006 12:27:00 PM |

Wednesday, March 01, 2006

 
Curmudgeon Of The Moment

by digby


Can someone tell my why Jack Cafferty doesn't have his own show on CNN? They should put him up against O'Reilly. He's the guy who's riding the zeitgeist right now. Between him and Lou "I'm having an aneuryism" Dobbs, CNN could siphon off some of the FoxNews "Dad who is always mad" audience they've coveted for so long.

GOP and Bush worship is so 2004. Fox's ratings are falling...



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digby 3/01/2006 01:57:00 PM |

 
Take This Survey And Win A Million Bucks

Not really.

But, Blogads is doing a survey and the results are always interesting. If you'd like to take it and you want to put this blog on line #23, use the word Hullabaloo.



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digby 3/01/2006 01:31:00 PM |

 
Neocon Pipedreams

by digby

Robert Hutchings, the chairman of the National Intelligence Council from 2003 to 2005, said the October 2003 study was part of a "steady stream" of dozens of intelligence reports warning Bush and his top lieutenants that the insurgency was intensifying and expanding.

"Frankly, senior officials simply weren't ready to pay attention to analysis that didn't conform to their own optimistic scenarios," Hutchings said in a telephone interview.

[...]

In Congress on Tuesday, Army Lt. Gen. Michael Maples, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, testified that the insurgency "remains strong, and resilient."

Maples said that while Iraqi terrorists and foreign fighters conduct some of the most spectacular attacks, disaffected Iraqi Sunnis make up the insurgency's core. "So long as Sunni Arabs are denied access to resources and lack a meaningful presence in government, they will continue to resort to violence," he told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

That view contrasts with what the administration said as the insurgency began in the months following the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion and gained traction in the fall. Bush and his aides portrayed it as the work primarily of foreign terrorists crossing Iraq's borders, disenfranchised former officials of Saddam's deposed regime and criminals.

[...]

As recently as May 2005, Cheney told a television interviewer: "I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency."

White, who worked at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, said of the administration: "They've gone through various excuse phases."

Now, he said, "The levels of resistance are pretty much as high as they were a year ago."

Hutchings, now diplomat in residence at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, said intelligence specialists repeatedly ran up against policymakers' rosy predictions.

"The mindset downtown was that people were willing to accept that things were pretty bad, but not that they were going to get worse, so our analyses tended to get dismissed as `nay-saying and hand-wringing,' to quote the president's press spokesman," he said.

The result, he said, was that top political and military officials focused on ways of dealing with foreign jihadists and disaffected Saddam loyalists, rather than with other pressing problems, such as growing Iraqi anger at the U.S.-led occupation and the deteriorating economic and security situation.

This certainly put the lie to one of the (many) excuses as to why they screwed up on WMD: that they had underestimated Saddam's capabilities before the Gulf War and were being prudently skeptical of those who said he wasn't close to having nuclear weapons in 2002. It turns out, unsurprisingly, that they just don't believe anything they don't want to believe. In this case the intelligence was "too pessimistic." And here they've been saying that 9/11 changed everything and you can't be too careful.

I have long said that the neocons have always been wrong about everything, and this is but another example. They have always refused to accept things that don't fit their preconceived notions. This goes back to the 70's and Team B and the missile gap. Rummy was up to his neck in that too and was just as wrong then as he is now. They were still fighting the cold war as late as 1992.

This has gone on long enough. Any "liberal hawk" who goes along with these nuts in the future should be required to prove, on his own, with no data from them, that his position is correct. Never again should the political establishment take these people at their word for anything --- and their data should be independently checked more than once. The old birds in the GOP defense establishment used to know this and they kept these nutballs at a distance. After all, if they'd have had their way during the cold war they would have launched a pre-emptive nuclear war. They have shown themselves willing to do anything and believe anything that comports with their worldview even if it has no basis in fact. They think they can change reality by sheer will --- or politics. They can't.




Update: Clearly, their propaganda arm is still with the program.


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digby 3/01/2006 12:46:00 PM |

 
Best Friends

by digby

Yesterday:

Bush said there was intense discussion inside his campaign when the 15-minute videotape was released, which he described as "an interesting entry by our enemy."

"I thought it was going to help," Bush told the author. "I thought it would help remind people that if bin Laden doesn't want Bush to be the president, something must be right with Bush."

That would, of course, explain this from March 13, 2002

Q: But don't you believe that the threat that bin Laden posed won't truly be eliminated until he is found either dead or alive?

BUSH: Well, as I say, we haven't heard much from him. And I wouldn't necessarily say he's at the center of any command structure. And, again, I don't know where he is. I -- I'll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him. I know he is on the run. I was concerned about him, when he had taken over a country. I was concerned about the fact that he was basically running Afghanistan and calling the shots for the Taliban.

Hey heartland, I bet you didn't know that bin Laden worked for the Bush campaign did you? He stayed silent throughout the lead up to the Iraq invasion, never stepping on Junior's "Saddam is Satan" storyline. And then he stepped in just before a very close election and helped his pal Bush over the finish line. He owed him. Bush had let him go at Tora Bora, after all, and allowed his good friend Musharref to turn a blind eye for four years. And no enemy of the US could ever hope to have someone more dumb and ineffectual than the Codpiece in charge. He completes him.

Now, of course, Bush is focusing on his pal again because it ups the boogeyman meter to neon pink. He dropped in on Afghanistan today for the photo op:

"It's not a matter of if they're captured and brought to justice, it's when they're brought to justice," Bush said. "I am confident he will be brought to justice. What's happening is that we've got U.S. forces on the hunt. ... There are Afghan forces on the hunt, not only for bin Laden but also those who plot and plan with him. We've got Pakistan forces on the hunt."

I'm sure Osama will appropriately go "boo" at just the right moment. These guys could be "Dancing With The Stars" champions, they are so in sync.



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digby 3/01/2006 11:07:00 AM |

 
Bill Of Goods

by digby

John Kerry: What kind of message does it send to be sending money to open firehouses in Iraq, but we're shutting firehouses who are the first-responders here in America...

The president hasn't put one nickel, not one nickel into the effort to fix some of our tunnels and bridges and most exposed subway systems...

Ninety-five percent of the containers that come into the ports, right here in Florida, are not inspected.

This president thought it was more important to give the wealthiest people in America a tax cut rather than invest in homeland security...

George W Bush: I don't think we want to get to how he's going to pay for all these promises. It's like a huge tax gap...

My administration has tripled the amount of money we're spending on homeland security to $30bn a year.

John Kerry: The test is not whether you're spending more money. The test is, are you doing everything possible to make America safe?

We didn't need that tax cut. America needed to be safe.

George W Bush: Of course we're doing everything we can to protect America. I wake up every day thinking about how best to protect America.

Where are we supposed to find the money for this so-called "Homeland Security?"

The White House said Thursday that it plans to ask Congress for an additional $70 billion to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, driving the cost of military operations in the two countries to $120 billion this year, the highest ever.

Most of the new money would pay for the war in Iraq, which has cost an estimated $250 billion since the U.S. invasion in March 2003.

The additional spending, along with other war funding the Bush administration will seek separately in its regular budget next week, would push the price tag for combat and nation-building since Sept. 11, 2001, to nearly a half-trillion dollars, approaching the inflation-adjusted cost of the 13-year Vietnam War.

The cost of military operations in 2006 is $35 billion higher than what Congress had estimated a few months ago that the Defense Department would need this year. The higher costs are occurring even as the Pentagon is planning to reduce troop levels in Iraq in coming months, reflecting the continuing wear and damage to military equipment in desert combat, the need to upgrade protection for U.S. troops and the effort to train and equip Iraqi forces.

No large-scale reconstruction projects are included in the spending, officials said.

Currently, the Defense Department says it is spending about $4.5 billion a month on the conflict in Iraq, or about $100,000 per minute.

Oh, and then there's this:

THE SKEWED BENEFITS OF THE TAX CUTS, 2007-2016: If the Tax Cuts Are Extended, Millionaires Will Receive More than $600 Billion over the Next Decade

Life is full of choices. The American people chose to go into Iraq and give huge tax breaks to millionaires through the year 2016 and are willing to pay the price for those priorities.

Aren't they?



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digby 3/01/2006 08:22:00 AM |

 
Comforter

by digby

VARGAS: When you look back on those days immediately following when Katrina struck, what moment do you think was the moment that you realized that the government was failing, especially the people of New Orleans?

BUSH: When I saw TV reporters interviewing people who were screaming for help. It looked the scenes looked chaotic and desperate. And I realized that our government was could have done a better job of comforting people.

Bush has been using the "comfort" word since 9/11 and it gets more absurd the more time that passes. Karen Hughes came up with it during the 2000 campaign because she thinks it appeals to women and they trotted it out constantly after 9/11.

"The American people, obviously, if they see something that is suspicious, something out of the norm that looks suspicious, they ought to notify local law authorities. But in the meantime, they ought to take comfort in knowing our government is doing everything we possibly can."

"And America is comforted by the fact that we are united as we stand to fight terror."

"Americans should find comfort in knowing that millions of their fellow citizens are working every day to ensure our security at every level -- federal, state, county, municipal."

"We think differently about those who go to work every single day to protect us and save us and comfort us."

I've been hearing it a lot again lately and wondered why.

"the more people learn" about the deal and the government's scrutiny of it, "the more they'll be comforted."

Now I get it:

"The repetition of the news coming out of Iraq is wearing folks down," Reed said. "It started with women and it's spreading. It's just bad news after bad news after bad news, without any light at the end of the tunnel."

The women are the first out the door. I suspect it's because many of them see Bush now and are reminded of the embarrassing, dumbshit macho boyfriend (or husband) they once had. His little verbal gaffes aren't adorable any longer -- they set her teeth on edge. His arrogant swagger nauseates her. His childish habits are sexually repellant. The word "comfort" coming from him makes her want to scream. It's over.


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digby 3/01/2006 04:36:00 AM |

Tuesday, February 28, 2006

 
Limited Nativism

by digby


Tristero has already linked to this great interview with Mark Danner and I too recommend that you read it if you haven't already. It's interesting in dozens of different ways, but I wanted to highlight something specific:

TD: They're really extreme American nationalists, though you can't use that word in this country.

Danner: That's true, and they combine with this belief in great-power America an almost nativist distrust of international institutions. That's the difference between Truman America and this regime in its approach to foreign policy. They put international institutions in a similar class with terrorism –- that is, weapons of the weak.

Ah. Yes, they have very skillfully stoked this nativism with distrust of international institutions. This has long been an effective tool on the right from the Panama Canal to the UN black helicopter crowd. Recently, they have stoked this nativism with distrust of our allies too. I have been quite amused to see all of the rightwingers clutching their pearls about "alienating our friends" after their performance in 2003 in which some of them were actually agitating to attack France and Germany. Watching them stutter and dissemble about our great and valued ally the United Arab Emirates is just funny. Freedom falafels anyone?

But then this port deal doesn't really fit the storyline, does it? It's not about an international institution or a real ally. From what we've seen these last few years, they would never have gone to such lengths to defend it if it were. It's about an international corporation and that goes beyond borders, beyond alliances and beyond institutions. That's sacred ground to the big money boys of the Republican establishment.

I don't know if people are consciously aware of this distinction, but if they were I don't think they would be impressed by it. Basically, the Republicans are saying that we cannot trust long standing internatinal institutions, long standing international law or even long standing close allies --- but we should take it on faith that international corporations, even those owned by dodgy middle eastern monarchies, can be trusted not to harm our national security. Their all encompassing belief in the market has extended to national security.

This nativist impulse that has been so skillfully exploited by the Republican party is not allowed beyond the boardroom door. Is this ok with the white working class Republican base? I wonder.



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digby 2/28/2006 02:05:00 PM |

 
Programmed Cynicism

by digby

I had noticed the propensity of the gasbags to characterize Democratic criticism of the Dubai ports deal as a craven political move to Bush's right. Media Matters has gathered together quite a comepndium of quotes, many of them not coming from the openly right wing media. My favorite is this one, from Evan Thomas of Newsweak:

THOMAS: One thing that strikes me is -- it is hilarious to watch the Democrats, who are all against racial profiling except in this case, where they're racially profiling an entire country, and the Hillary Clintons -- there's a lot about Hillary Clinton in the other subtext here. Hillary and the Democrats need to get somehow to the right of President Reagan on something.

Nice of him to confuse Bush with St. Reagan. Those Republican talking points are potent, aren't they?

But let's examine the entire statement for perfectly layered GOP spin, shall we? First of all, the Democrats' response is "hilarious." It's absurd to think that they could be serious about national security. They are, as always, ridiculous. Especially compared to the suave, smoothtalking insiders like Thomas.

Second, the idea that this is racial profiling is right out of the wingnut playbook. It's called the "I know you are but what am I" strategy. They accuse Democrats of being racists/sexist/ageist, whatever, to put them on the defensive. Democrats still care about hypocrisy and second guess what they are doing when this happens. The GOP, on the other hand, has no problem apeing liberal talking points on their own behalf (often with a snide smirk on their face) and pretending to be offended by things they are not offended by. Picture Orrin Hatch going on and on about Democrats being racist for opposing Janice Rogers Brown, the sharecropper's daughter.

Dems could turn the tables if they would get all red in the face and start railing about political correctness and the right's being in the pocket of arab terrorists and racial minorities, but they don't play that game very well. It is, after all, fucked-up race baiting no matter how you slice it. I suspect that we are going to have to find a way to live with this nonsense and have faith that a majority of the American public can see through their little performance. Liberals have built up many, many years of credibility on this issue. We know who we are and so does everyone else. (And the idea of the Republicans defending Arabs from left wing prejudice is guffaw-inducing to anyone who isn't drunk on 151 --- or a member of the DC press corps. This alone clinches the argument.)

The most serious part of Thomas' smug criticism is the part about the Democrats, particularly Hillary, desperate to "get to the right of Bush" on national security. It is evidently incomprehensible to Thomas and the rest of the beltway courtiers that the Democrats might be legitimately concerned about the topic. They persist in this ridiculous assumption even though we are dependent on what even they must finally be realizing is the most incompetent administration in history. Doesn't that make these people, who live in New York and Washington, just a little bit nervous?

As the media themselves have told us ad nauseum, everything is narrative. If that's so then this port deal is emblematic of the larger story of Bush's incompetence in waging the war on terrorism --- the lack of awareness, the wasted money, the wrong strategy, the failed execution --- all of it. iraq showed the world that our intelligence is terrible and that our military is stretched by a simple war and occupation. Katrina showed the world that our response to an emergency is worse than it was before 9/11. For all the talk about loose lips sinking ships, I can't think of anything any whistleblower has done that gives al Qaeda more information about our vulnerabilities than the terrible performance of this administration.

The Democrats have long been complaining about Bush's laissez faire attitude toward homeland security, Hillary being at the forefront. That isn't running to Bush's "right" which makes very little sense when it comes to the war on terrorism. (To really run to his right a Democrat would have to endorse a pre-emptive nuclear strike on Finland.) It's criticizing a very real flaw in Bush's national security strategy. In Hillary's case, if it's politics, it the old adage "all politics is local." She represents New York and there are ample pragmatic reasons for her to take on Bush's lackadaisical approach to homeland security. In fact, I suspect that her constituents demand it, and for good reason. It already happened to them once. She has been talking quite sepcifically about port security for some time --- as was John Kerry, who the media also ridiculed as being a hilarious, flip-flopping opportunist.

Perhaps if they would take their eyes off their mirrors for a minute or two, the elite media could entertain the thought that these Democrats are not talking out of their asses. This is a legitimate issue. The worst terrorist attack in American history took place on the Republicans' watch and they've fucked up everything they've touched since then. Perhaps codpieces and trash talk aren't adequate to the task at hand.

Thomas is one of the biggest purveyors of the smug, cynical conventional wisdom that permeates the political media. Long after it was rasonable to defend this unpopular president's alleged prowess on national security they did it. And they refuse to let go of the notion that no matter how fucked up the Republicans are, the Democrats are worse. Winning elections may not even change this. I'm beginning to suspect that this is a generational identification with GOP political values, where good government or nuanced policy is always pooh-poohed by the these kewl kids who see governance through the lens of the puerile college Republican style of political combat. It may take a new generation of people who haven't mistaken dorky DC hipster cynicism for insight.

Like this guy, for instance.



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digby 2/28/2006 10:15:00 AM |

 
Mark Danner

by tristero

I'm gonna take about a week off for personal stuff and to collect my thoughts on a topic I've been meaning to post about. But I did want to share this truly superb interview with reporter Mark Danner, whose work is some of the best being done by an American. Read it all. Here are some excerpts:

It underlines [the Bush administration's] policies in all kinds of areas, their belief that the overwhelming or preponderant power of the United States can simply change fact, can change truth. It is quite indicative of their policy of public information inside the United States. They don't care about people who read the New York Times, for instance. I use that as a shorthand. They don't care about people concerned with facts. They care about the broader arc of the story. We sit here constantly citing facts -- that they've broken this or that law, that what they originally said turns out not to be true. None of this particularly interests them.

What interests them is the larger reality believed by the 50.1 percent that they need to govern. Kenneth Duberstein said this recently -- he was chief of staff to Ronald Reagan -- that this administration is unique in that they govern with 50.1 percent. He was referring not to elections but to popularity while governing. His notion was that Reagan would want to get 60 to 65 percent backing him, while the Bush people want a bare majority, which means they have a much more extremist policy because they're appealing to the base. It makes them very hard-knuckle when approaching politics, simply wanting the base plus one.

...

The icebergs are floating by. I've used the phrase to indicate that a process of scandal we've come to know, with an expected series of steps, has come to an end. Before, you had, as Step 1, revelation of wrongdoing by the press, usually with the help of leaks from within an administration. Step 2 would be an investigation which the courts, often allied with Congress, would conduct, usually in public, that would give you an official version of events. We saw this with Watergate, Iran-Contra and others. And finally, Step 3 would be expiation -- the courts, Congress, impose punishment which allows society to return to some kind of state of grace in which the notion is, Look, we've corrected the wrongdoing, we can now go on. With this administration, we've got revelation of torture, of illegal eavesdropping, of domestic spying, of all kinds of abuses when it comes to arrest of domestic aliens, of inflated and false weapons of mass destruction claims before the war; of cronyism and corruption in Iraq on a vast scale. You could go on. But no official investigation follows

...

[During the Reagan administration] At a time of real dominance by the Times and Post, and the administration came forward, denied the [El Mozote massacres in El Salvador] took place, and was able to make its views stick. And remember we knew [the Reagan administration was covering up about their knowledge of the death squads]...

That leads me to a conclusion I came to then: that in many stories it's not the information, it's the politics. It's not that we were lacking information. It's that, when that information came out, it was denied and those in power were able to impose their view of reality. Political power decided what reality was, despite clear information to the contrary. When I look at our time I see that phenomenon writ large.
...

I think it's widely known at the top of the administration that Iraq is a failure. It's also been recognized by many that, in strategic terms, the Iraq war could turn out to be a catastrophe because it's essentially created a Shia Islamist government sympathetic to Iran and, among other things, made it impossible for the U.S. to adequately pressure Iran on the nuclear issue.

...

[O]ne is perilously close to arriving at the conclusion that reality doesn't matter. When I look at the pieces on the inside pages of the papers about the stealing of funds in Iraq by American officials, when I realize that no one is likely to be punished for this, I think of the novels of [Milan] Kundera, of his vivid descriptions of what it was like to live in Eastern Europe in the 1950s and '60s -- in the Soviet system where everyone realized the corruption, the abuse of power, the mediocrity of the government, the yawning gap between what was said and what was really going on, but no one could do anything about it

...

Actually, to reach the point of being a TFN [a Totally Fucked-up Nation], I think we have a long way to go. We're at a very low point in the political evolution of this country. I've certainly not lived under an administration as radical in its techniques, its methods, and its beliefs as this one. I've seen nothing like it in my lifetime.

It's a difficult time for those of us who care about the truth and who don't believe, as I think this administration does, that the truth is actually determined by what those in power think. I take comfort from the fact that a lot of people don't believe that.

Like Mark Danner, I'm glad that the US is not yet Sierra Leone. The problem is that Bush just takes that as a challenge, rolls up his sleeves, smirks a few times, and then proceeds blithely about his God-given mission to wreck the United States in every way he can think of.
tristero 2/28/2006 08:46:00 AM |

Monday, February 27, 2006

 
Follies

by digby

Arthur Silber has written a very compelling series of posts featuring Barbara Tuchman's "The March of Folly" in several different contexts and it led me to go back and read it. It's an amazing analysis of a certain kind of willful governmental stupidity borne of hubris, mental laziness and bad judgment, and it's quite clear that we are seeing it being carried out right before our eyes. She defined "folly" this way:

To qualify as folly for this inquiry, the policy adopted must meet three criteria: it must have been perceived as counter-productive in its own time, not merely by hindsight. This is important, because all policy is determined by the mores of its age. "Nothing is more unfair," as an English historian has well said, "than to judge men of the past by the ideas of the present. Whatever may be said of morality, political wisdom is certainly ambulatory." To avoid judging by present-day values, we must take the opinion of the time and investigate only those episodes whose injury to self-interest was recognized even by contemporaries.

Secondly a feasible alternative course of action must have been available. To remove the problem from personality, a third criterion must be that the policy in question should be that of a group, not an individual ruler, and should persist beyond any one political lifetime. Misgovernment by a single sovereign or tyrant is too frequent and too individual to be worth a generalized inquiry. Collective government or a succession of rulers in the same office, as in the case of the Renaissance popes, raises a more significant problem.

Certainly, the first two criteria apply in spades. It's that last, that got my attention. In order for the current quagmire to be truly considered folly it must persist beyond any one political lifetime. In my view it already has.

Via Arthur again, here's Tuchman describing the thought processes of Lyndon Johnson during Vietnam:

Like Kennedy, Johnson believed that to lose South Vietnam would be to lose the White House. It would mean a destructive debate, he was later to say, that would "shatter my Presidency, kill my Administration, and damage our democracy." The loss of China, he said, which had led to the rise of Joe McCarthy, was "chickenshit compared with what might happen if we lost Vietnam." Robert Kennedy would be out in front telling everyone that "I was a coward, an unmanly man, a man without a spine." Worse, as soon as United States weakness was perceived by Moscow and Peking, they would move to "expand their control over the vacuum of power we would leave behind us ... and so would begin World War III." He was as sure of this "as nearly as anyone can be certain of anything." No one is so sure of his premises as the man who knows too little.

The purpose of the war was not gain or national defense. It would have been a simpler matter had it been either, for it is easier to finish a war by conquest of territory or by destruction of the enemy's forces and resources than it is to establish a principle by superior force and call it victory. America's purpose was to demonstrate her intent and her capacity to stop Communism in a framework of preserving an artificially created, inadequately motivated and not very viable state. The nature of the society we were upholding was an inherent flaw in the case, and despite all efforts at "nation-building," it did not essentially change.

In the illusion of omnipotence, American policy-makers took it for granted that on a given aim, especially in Asia, American will could be made to prevail. This assumption came from the can-do character of a self-created nation and from the sense of competence and superpower derived from World War II. If this was "arrogance of power," in Senator Fulbright's phrase, it was not so much the fatal hubris and over-extension that defeated Athens and Napoleon, and in the 20th century Germany and Japan, as it was failure to understand that problems and conflicts exist among other peoples that are not soluble by the application of American force or American techniques of even American goodwill. "Nation-building" was the most presumptuous of the illusions. Settlers of the North American continent had built a nation from Plymouth Rock to Valley Forge to the fulfilled frontier, yet failed to learn from their success that elsewhere, too, only the inhabitants can make the process work.

Wooden-headedness, the "Don't-confuse-me-with-the-facts" habit, is a universal folly never more conspicuous than at upper levels of Washington with respect to Vietnam. Its grossest fault was underestimation of North Vietnam's commitment to its goal. Enemy motivation was a missing element in American calculations, and Washington could therefore ignore all the evidence of nationalist fervor and of the passion for independence which as early as 1945 Hanoi had declared "no human force can any longer restrain." Washington could ignore General Leclerc's prediction that conquest would take half a million men and "Even then it could not be done." It could ignore the demonstration of elan and capacity that won victory over a French army with modern weapons at Dien Bien Phu, and all the continuing evidence thereafter.

American refusal to take the enemy's grim will and capacity into account has been explained by those responsible on the ground of ignorance of Vietnam's history, traditions and national character: there were "no experts available," in the words of one high-ranking official. But the longevity of Vietnamese resistance to foreign rule could have been learned from any history book on Indochina. Attentive consultation with French administrators whose official lives had been spent in Vietnam would have made up for the lack of American expertise. Even superficial American acquaintance with the area, when it began to supply reports, provided creditable information. Not ignorance, but refusal to credit the evidence and, more fundamentally, refusal to grant stature and fixed purpose to a "fourth-rate" Asiatic country were the determining factors, much as in the case of the British attitude toward the American colonies. The irony of history is inexorable.

Deja-vu-vu. I think it's pretty clear that history will judge Vietnam and Iraq as related wars, much as WWI and II were related, one growing out of the other. (The last election more or less dramatized it like a movie of the week.) The Republicans clung to their delusions for more than a quarter of a century believing that the Vietnam war was lost because it was sabotaged by the civilian leadership and the fecklessness of the American public. They nurtured their resentment through almost three decades, unappeased even by the fall of the Soviet Union. They, and many Democrats as well, never questioned their assumptions about the "illusion of American omnipotence" and they never understood that "problems and conflicts exist among other peoples that are not soluble by the application of American force or American techniques of even American goodwill." In fact, they carefully nurtured all those fancies and when they finally gained the power and opportunity, they immediately set about trying to prove their point --- again. The results are as predictable and as bad they were the first time.

I think that many of us over these last few years have felt as if we were living under water. Everything has seemed vaguely distorted. Communication and movement had an odd quality of density and resistance. We spoke out. We marched. We called our representatives. But it seemed as if our words sounded garbled and muffled in some way.

And there has also been a strong sense of inevitability. Certainly, since the impeachment the country has been steamrollered into a bizarre and aberrant political reality, never more than after 9/11 when the administration began agitating for this absurd, incomprehensible war. Despite its utter madness, I think most of us knew it was unstoppable. And it wasn't just us moonbats who knew it; it was the CIA and the state department. It was all of Europe and even Saddam himself. I suspect this is yet another feature of folly --- the sense among those who know better that there is no way to change the course of the event, that you are speaking a language nobody can understand.

Now, after we are dug in deeply with so much blood and money wasted, salvation requires repudiation of the Iraq war, the Bush doctrine and the cruel, undemocratic policies of the "war" on terrorism. I don't know if anyone has the strength to do that. It must be said that Lyndon Johnson was correct in that he would be mercilessly attacked for being weak if he withdrew from Vietnam. That's a political fact and it is what will happen if a Democratic administration tries to draw down the GWOT. (Not that we shouldn't do it, I'm just saying that the price will be high.) It's one of the main reasons why we should never start these things unless absolutely forced to. They are very difficult to end.

What or who will successfully put a coda to this ongoing folly? I don't see it in either party, to tell you the truth. But it's what I'm going to be looking for. This is the central challenge of millenial America: how can the most powerful nation on earth survive such monumental folly?




If you are interested in this topic, I urge you to read Arthur's long entire series on Iran and Tuchman's "March of Folly." Oh my.



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digby 2/27/2006 04:20:00 PM |

 
Extremes

by digby

Kos highlights an interesting story today about the fears among the political establishment of the of grassroots extremists:

While some view the evangelical church as above all a force for promoting conservative values, others see it as polarizing as well, fueling candidates who tap into the passions of activists and values voters but not the broader electorate.

"It's great, because it creates a lot of energy and helps broaden a movement, but the downside is you can also get pulled in a more extreme direction," said Erik Smith, who worked in the 2004 race for both Tom Coburn and a multimillion-dollar independent Republican ad campaign.

"There is real power there . . . but there are some real limits to it, and those limits have to be heeded," said Jonah Seiger, an evangelical strategist.

The Republicans are very concerned about how they appear to the mainstream and worry incessantly about how these activists will pull the party too far to the right.

Not.

That paragraph actually reads like this:

While some view the Internet as above all a democratizing force, others see it as polarizing as well, fueling candidates who tap into the passions of activists and ideological voters but not the broader electorate.

"It's great, because it creates a lot of energy and helps broaden a movement, but the downside is you can also get pulled in a more extreme direction," said Erik Smith, who worked in the 2004 race for both Dick Gephardt and a multimillion-dollar independent Democratic ad campaign.

"There is real power there . . . but there are some real limits to it, and those limits have to be heeded," said Jonah Seiger, an Internet strategist who also heads the board of advisers for the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet at George Washington University.

Unlike Democrats, Republicans do not question whether it is a good thing to have hard working, committed activists. They just say thank you.

Rather than worry about being "pulled in a more extreme direction" they confidently accept support wherever they can get it and openly court their base. They proudly run on the label "conservative" and would not dream of marginalizing their most energetic partisans. Democrats, not so much.

Note to the clueless DC insiders: the blogosphere is only "extreme" to the extent it is extremely impatient with people like you. We believe that your strategy of caution has failed and we are agitating for a more aggressive Democratic politics. After a partisan impeachment, a stolen election in 2000, an illegal war and an unprecedented executive power play we think this is a pretty serious situation. In fact, we see this as political civil war. You apparently think that is "extreme." We think it is common sense.

Perhaps it would be easier for these people to understand if we speak like Republicans and use stupid Civil War analogies to make a point, so here goes:

We believe that the DC establishment is running the war like George McClellan and we think his cautious strategy is losing us the war. It's not because we aren't all on the same side or don't have the same goals. It's that the McClellans of the establishment are temperamentally inhibited at a time when aggression is called for. We believe the party needs to fight like Grant.

If that civil war analogy is too complicated I'm sure I can find a cartoon or children's book to illustrate it. We are not ideologues. We are simply demanding that elected Democrats stand firm on our convictions and be willing to go toe to toe with Republicans. It isn't complicated. When Lincoln was asked to relieve Grant after Shiloh, he said, "I can't spare this man -- he fights." That's what we're talking about.


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digby 2/27/2006 01:28:00 PM |

 
No Retreat, No Surrender

by tristero

In comments to a previous post about South Dakota's imminent approval of coathangers for abortion, reader goodasgold wrote

I couldn't live in South Dakota. It would hurt too much. I wonder where all this will lead. I live in California. I feel safe.

The sentiment is understandable. Why live someplace that seems hellbent on trumpeting its ignorance of reality? Why go somewhere that all but brags of its cruelty to the poor?

Indeed, that's what pro-coathanger legislation is all about. The rich and the middle class will always have access to safe abortion. Making abortion illegal is quite simply class warfare, aimed at the poorest women and families.

That is all it is. It is one thing if your religious beliefs require you to bring a pregnancy to term. No one in the United States will, or should, stop you, It's a very, very different situation to use your religion as a shield to deflect sharp criticism of your political activism and demand that abortion be made dangerous and illegal. That is not religious belief. That is simply heartless, cruel, and immoral politcking. The cynical operatives who demand that the state approve coathanger abortions by banning legal ones in no way can claim the moral high ground, America's laws are very clear: no group has the right to inflict their religious proclivities on the rest of us.*

However, I think goodasgold is wrong, as the troll Par R, inadvertently, reminds us. Par R apparently lives in South Dakota and writes:

God bless and keep you safe in California, since we sure as Hell don't want your type living among us up here! Thanks.

To translate out of Troll-ish, Par R is saying, "Ignorance and tyranny will flourish wherever liberalism is absent." For that reason, it is vital that more liberals move to South Dakota, not less.

Liberals should move to South Dakota not to "impose" their values, of course. For as we all know, coercion is what religious nuts do, not liberals. Liberals have a long, consistent history of strong opposition to laws that force people to conform to a specific "politically correct" or "religiously correct" moral code. Nope, more liberals should move to South Dakota for one reason only: To become proud, loyal, and productive South Dakotans. The state simply needs more liberals if it is to become a better South Dakota and it needs less unprincipled politicians advancing an anti-American theocratic agenda.

Contrary to christianism, with its unhealthy obsession on deadly punishment and diseased sex, liberalism is a world view that is life affirming. It posits that human beings have the ability and the will to construct a moral life, and a happy, prosperous one in a civil community regardless of our differences. That is what is meant, in a political context, by "all men are created equal." And liberalism has succeeded. It is in states where liberalism is in short supply that poverty reigns, and ignorance, and a great deal of crime.

The answer to South Dakota's real problems is not tyranny, either religious or secular (and make no mistake: oppressing the poor, by denying them access to a safe medical procedure, certainly is tyrannical). Both are the desperate solutions of the ignorant and the fearful. No, the answer begins with informed, careful, and reasoned thought. In a word, the answer begins with liberalism. By contrast, nothing could be further removed from reality, nothing could be more irrelevant to the problems South Dakota faces than the thoughtless and clueless theocracy the pro-coathanger crowd desire. And that is why more liberals are needed in South Dakota.

Liberal South Dakotans surely hold different values than California liberals. Speaking for the moment as a New York liberal, I certainly hope so! (grin)

Therefore, more liberals in South Dakota will bring to the state a personal and civil philosophy that will make South Dakotans of all political stripes even prouder of their state than they already are. They will give all South Dakotans more genuine reasons to sneer at how awful and foolish life is in California (and New York), not less. More liberals in South Dakota will focus the state's resources on genuine issues, not well-marketed faith-based cure-alls that cure nothing. Issues, like passing laws to ban abortion, are not only immoral because of their viciousness to the poor. They are immoral because they waste valuable time and resources better spent addressing real problems.

Liberalism - a philosophy of reason, compassion, tolerance, and hard-headed realism unemcumbered by utopianism - is the only civic philosophy that is flexible enough to encompass the wildly different needs of a wildly disparate America. The notion of a "godless" liberal is one more rightwing myth. The vast majority of American liberals agree that, on a personal level, the "good life" is lived with God's help. They are also aware that what is meant by God or God's will is no business of the state to define; one group's position on God's will can in no way be privileged in the business of an American polis. The sooner South Dakota's legislature stops trying to to do so and gets down to the real business of running the state, the better. And that requires more liberals in South Dakota, not more theocrats thumping Bibles and obsessing about other people's sex lives.

And so, goodasgold, start packing.



An apology: I haven't addressed the right to safe and legal medical care very much in the past. The reason is that it is self-evident that all citizens have a right to such care, even if they are poor. Therefore, what's there to argue over? The fury over the use of coat hangers has always puzzled me. Yes, honest people can come to radically different conclusions as to whether their pregnancy should or should not be terminated. But an American government clearly has no right to impose a conclusion. Therefore the politicization of the abortion issue has always struck me as a thinly disguised war against providing safe health care to the poor, especially women, rather than anything that engages a genuine moral issue which, in abortion's case, is a private one.

I still think this is true. But it is becoming clear to me that, not only because the issue of safe medical care for all Americans is an important issue in itself but because the right to such care impacts many other important issues, all of us must once again speak out, loud, clear, and often in favor of Roe v. Wade.

True, I've done so several times before, and just as unequivocally as I've done so here. But I feel a need to speak out even more. I recognize that others have sensed this need long before I have. They were right, I was wrong and I apologize. To say that there were (and are) issues that were just as serious is no excuse, of course. But that was, and is, the case for me.

As I've said before, it has become very hard to be an American. The assault from the extreme right on American values has been relentless and highly organized since (at least) the second Clinton term. Nearly as bad, the Democrats have, as a party, failed miserably to stand behind its finest members - people like Kerry, Murtha, and Dean - or its modern principles, which are based in liberalism. The fact that being an American is very hard work these days also is no excuse. Please accept the apology and I'll try to make up for it with more posts on the right of all Americans to safe, legal medical care. That care is dangerously undermined whenever the access to abortion on demand is challenged. The dangers of illegal abortion primarily fall on poor women (and honest, competent doctors who provide abortions despite the potential for imprisonment), but the dangers of making access to medical procedures contingent on religious correctness are dangers for everyone, including those who, for personal/religious reasons, will carry all viable pregnancies to term.

*Note to rightwing religious nuts: Disagree with me all you want, but don't try to claim I am "prejudiced against religion," yadda yadda because I would truly hate to embarass you. There is abundant public proof of my longstanding admiration and deep respect for religious observance and devout practice.

My contempt and disgust is focused entirely on political activists like bin Laden, Antonin Scalia, Randall Terry, or the late Meir Kahane, who hide behind the skirts of priests to advocate theocracy. (And yes, that is precisely Scalia's agenda which is why he's mentioned here in the company of his peers: his remarks here fall barely one or two commas short of advocating a full overhaul of American jurisprudence and the establishment of a christianist theocracy)

Now if you're an extra crunchy and sleazy rightwing nut you might sneer, "What about Martin Luther King? You object to him speaking out when he saw injustice?" To which there is only one response:

Your comparison is deeply insulting. King's peers are Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, so if you want to discuss him by comparing him to those other great human beings, I am only too happy to join you. But I will not demean KIng's achievements by dignifying, with a response, any mention of him in the rhetorical company of cheap slimeballs like Pat Robertson or Rick Santorum. What next, shall we "discuss" whether FDR is the moral equivalent of Hitler? Or whether the Bible authorizes slavery? It's still a free blogosphere so go somewhere else and spew.
tristero 2/27/2006 06:33:00 AM |

Sunday, February 26, 2006

 
Creating A Better Circumstance

by digby

This William Kristol quote from this morning is another step in the eventual disavowal of Bushism. You see, just as it was in Vietnam, the know-nothings in Washington won't let the military leaders take the gloves off which is why we are having so many problems.

This will, of course, be folded into the standard one size fits all conservative whine that alleges conservatism cannot fail on its own terms. Not even neo-conservatism, which isn't conservatism at all except to the extent it prefers war over other means of change.

Indeed, the neos have the civil war in Iraq already built into their utopian vision. Much as David Ignatius said that if in 30 years Iraq is doing as well as Lebanon is today then the invasion can be seen as a success, for years some neocons have held that in order to make a nice US dominated Iraq, the massive death and destruction of a war and then civil war might be just what the doctor ordered. From a very depressing article by Robert Dreyfuss:

In a paper for an Israeli think tank, the same think tank for which Wurmser, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith prepared the famous "Clean Break" paper in 1996, Wurmser wrote in 1997 : "The residual unity of the nation is an illusion projected by the extreme repression of the state." After Saddam, Iraq would "be ripped apart by the politics of warlords, tribes, clans, sects, and key families," he wrote. "Underneath facades of unity enforced by state repression, [Iraq’s] politics is defined primarily by tribalism, sectarianism, and gang/clan-like competition." Yet Wurmser explicitly urged the United States and Israel to "expedite" such a collapse. "The issue here is whether the West and Israel can construct a strategy for limiting and expediting the chaotic collapse that will ensue in order to move on to the task of creating a better circumstance."

Such black neoconservative fantasies—which view the Middle East as a chessboard on which they can move the pieces at will—have now come home to roost. For the many hundreds of thousands who might die in an Iraqi civil war, the consequences are all too real.

This is where the Straussian beast of neoconservatism rears its ugly head.[and says hello its mate, perverted trotskyism. ed] Their vaunted starry-eyed idealism about spreading democracy is a pile of crap. They, like all imperialists, seek domination. They went along with the cockamamie idea to give the Iraqi people the opportunity to surrender peacefully and do it our way. Those purple fingers should have made them feel really good about themselves. But they aren't cooperating. Which means, sadly, that it's time to accept reality. We tore the country apart, now we'll let the crazy wogs have it out.

The big challenge now is to "limit and expedite the chaotic collapse in order to move on to the task of creating a better circumstance." When you look at it that way, everything's going according to plan. Too bad about all the dead people.

Meanwhile neocon shills like Kristol will soothe the rubes with tales of how the Bush administration tied the military's hands. If they'd have let them go they could have gotten the job done in a couple of weeks. We could have bombed em back into the stone age if necessary. After all, everything turned out just great with Japan and Germany. But, no. They wouldn't let our brave men and women get the job done. (Of course you can't blame them too much. It was the dominant Democrat hippies who made them do it.)

It gives the Republicans a good excuse to run on "restoring honor" to the country. The rubes eat it up and get all excited about proving ourselves in the next war. A war we must fight for freedom and democracy, of course. Because we're so good.


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digby 2/26/2006 01:14:00 PM |

 
Vinaigrette

by digby

Kevin at Catch is calling it a day and now I have one less funny blogger from whom to steal great material. Damn. I hate when that happens. He is one of those guys who likes to go into the belly of the rightwing blogospheric beast and examine the entrails with insight and humor. It is a valuable service and I will miss him.

We met (virtually, of course) during the Wes Clark campaign when both of us were asked to do an online interview with the general. Back in those golden, olden days, that was quite an unusual thing. We were asked to submit five questions. Kevin and I both asked four probing, deeply complicated queries about long term foreign policy strategy and one fun "personal" question. They picked the personal questions, of course. Kevin's was "what's your favorite salad dressing" and mine was "of all your postings overseas, what country did you enjoy the most?" (answers: vinaigrette and Panama.) I was lucky enough to get one "real" question in the mix as well so I didn't suffer the overwhelming disapprobation of the Clarkies who accused Kevin of wasting the general's and the community's time with this silliness. (Clarkies are a serious bunch.) We bonded.

Kevin may be leaving the blogosphere but he will be long remembered around these parts. His memorial is the term "bedwetters." That's what I call a contribution.

I assume that Kevin knows his great eye and superior snark are always welcome on this blog should he feel the overhwelming urge to post. And you know he will feel the urge eventually. It's hard to go cold turkey. Yelling at the TV just doesn't have the same kick. Plus it annoys people. Your loved ones quickly realize they didn't miss you that much after all and are relieved to hear the sounds of your angry typing. I'm guessing. Not that I would know, of course. I'm very even keeled.

In case you missed it, here's Kevin's interview with TBOGG. A classic.


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digby 2/26/2006 09:12:00 AM |

Saturday, February 25, 2006

 
They Are NOT Eliminating Abortions In South Dakota



by tristero

They are approving coathangers for use as medical instruments.

tristero 2/25/2006 02:55:00 PM |

 
Who Says Dems Don't Ask The Tough Questions?



by tristero


Now, I'm not saying that I completely agree with this, but I do think it is worthy of a full, thoughtful discussion.

Note to wingnuts: In case it is lost on you, the sentence above is one I have found on right wing discussion boards regarding whether gays are moral lepers, abortion doctors deserve the death penalty, or whether torture may be a good thing on occasion. In other words, this is satire.

tristero 2/25/2006 12:20:00 PM |

 
Civil War

by tristero

Ever optimistic, the Times surveys opinions on what Civil War would be like in Iraq if civil war comes. While there is much that is interesting here, I am also struck by the amount of naivete on display* and the poor organization of the article. For example, this would appear to be perhaps the most striking and important "news" to impart to Americans:

[Kenneth] Pollack cautions that a civil war could prove especially painful for the Shiites. There is no reason, he says, to assume that they won't fight among themselves. The three major Shiite movements each have militias. Sometimes they have clashed... "There are a thousand Shiite militias that could do battle against each other, splintering even the southern part of Iraq."

The way the story's usually been played in the US press is that it's Shia vs. Sunni. Not so. The situation is far more complex. So where does the Times put this important information? Near the end of the article.

While Pollack is right to point out the dangers of infra-Shia strife, he is wrong elsewhere in the piece to claim that such strife is the first thing one would see in an Iraqi civil war - Sunnis may be a minority, but they were, and still are, a powerful minority. The first thing you'd see, obviously would be something close to what we are, indeed, seeing: increasingly violent actions between Shia and Sunnis. Nor is Pollack accurate in opining that "a civil war could prove especially painful for the Shiites." If nearly any Shia faction wins a violent civil war, Sunnis will experience major league political repression. As in state sponsored torture and murder. If anything, it's the Sunnis who will find a civil war "especially painful," assuming they lose. And, among many other factors, it is their desperation - rightly, they don't trust a "legit" Shia government to treat them well - that is behind their present attacks.

Pollack's emphasis on Shia-Shia conflict seems an academic distortion, going for the unusual angle. But that's nothing compared to this unattributed whopper:

Some experts, however, say Iran may understand the dangers of a war. Even President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's denunciation of the bombing of the Shiite shrine in Samarra last week, in which he blamed Zionists rather than Sunnis, could be seen as an act of restraint, these experts say — an effort to play to Shiite anger without fanning flames between Iraq's Islamic communities.

Now this is such an unspeakably stupid analysis of what Iran is up to that it could only come from a high Bush administration official. I'm quite serious. Another clue it's from a Bushite is its sense of loony "accentuate the positive" thinking. And indeed, the context gives a pretty clear clue where this idiocy probably came from. Backing up one paragraph we read:

While Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has proclaimed that the world has isolated Iran more than ever because of its nuclear ambitions, Iran has in fact tightened relationships with it local allies as events in Iraq have played out. In recent months, Iran has been deepening its alliance with Syria and the Shiite movement Hezbollah in Lebanon, and now it appears ready to strike up a friendship, backed by financing, with a Hamas-led Palestinian Authority.

Some experts, however, say Iran may understand the dangers of a war. Even President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's denunciation ...

Am I saying Condoleeza Rice is the moron who sees hope in Iran's anti-Zionism/semitism? No, not exactly. But anyone who is making the fundamental error Rice is making - focusing on Iran's "world" isolation while downplaying its strengthening of regional ties, including to Hamas - is quite capable of misconstruing Ahmadinejad's remarks to mean Iran is not doing whatever it can to grasp as much purchase within Iraq as possible. And if it came to a war that led to Iraq's total disintegration, it is unclear what Iran stands to lose.

The article also floats the idea of a negotiated breakup of Iraq into three states. Good luck. Who gets the oil regions, boys and girls? Who gets the desert? And who moves? And who sez Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Iran are just gonna twiddle their fingers and not interfere?

There is much more interesting speculation and detail about how truly incredibly complex the mess in Iraq is, and how few alternatives exist that won't quickly lead to disaster for the people of the region, and the people of the United States. Will Turkey invade to defend the Turkomen against oppression if Iraq's Kurds officially set up on their own? Will the Arab League step in to intervene? And looming above it all are nukes. Iranian nukes coming soon. Potential Sunni Arab nukes depending on how the situation worsens (calling Dr. A. Q. Khan!).

So, Mr. Tom Friedman, are you enjoying the real live political experiment now? So, Mr. George Packer, still think that those of us who absolutely knew Bush/Iraq would open the gates of hell have "second-rate minds?"

Hey, y'never know! Maybe Ahmadinejad really was sending a signal that Iran wasn't interested in an Iraq civil war when he blamed Zionists - Israel -for the attack. True, that could be because he wants to attack Israel first, but at least it's not supporting civil war in Iraq!

Yes, it's possible. And maybe there really is a Bigfoot. And maybe tomorrow, cold fusion will work and, as Woody Allen predicted in Sleeper, cigarette smoking will turn out to improve your health and longevity. You never know...






*I am no expert on the Middle East. Why am I so confident many of the "expert opinions" in this article are naive? Here goes:

To be deemed an expert on the Middle East, one would assume that the prerequisite would be fluency in several dialects of Arabic, fluency in Persian, fluency in Hebrew, and considerable time spent living and working in the Middle East. But one would be wrong. Most American "experts" in the public domain -there are real experts in universities, I assume - know one of those languages. At best, two. Many can't read or speak any of them, and rely on assistants and clipping services for information on Middle Eastern press and mass media. Incredibly, language fluency is still considered not a requirement for marketing yourself as a pundit whose specialty is the Middle East. And many people defend this.

In my book, there's a word to describe anyone who claims expertise in Middle Eastern affairs who can't read Iranian or Iraqi newspapers, or needs a translator to understand al Jazeera, or whose experience of the region is limited to a guided tour of the pyramids or an overnight stay at the King David Hotel: phony.

Simple commonsense tells me that Iran stands to gain quite a bit from Iraq's disintegration and stands to lose little even if there is furious intra-Shia civil war in Iraq. Simple commonsense tells me that when Iran sends a message to the world that Zionists destroyed the Shiite shrine, they are clearly trying to unify Muslims against a common enemy - Israel - and they are not saying anything, one way or the other, about the desirability of Iraqi civil war. Commonsense also tells me that when Iran's president sends a message to the world, that message is intended primarily for Muslims and that US analysts make a fundamental error when it assumes "the world" means us.

I'll gladly defer to genuine expert opinion on any of this, but I doubt that any seriously real scholar would make assertions like the silly ones cited above. Pollack's sense that Shias would endure "special pain" in a civil war is vacuous and dishonest, used only to hype his superior knowledge of the complexities, but shows not a trace of any superior understanding. For one thing, "speical pain" is empirically unverifiable. Furthermore, his argument is naive in its assumption that a Shia/Sunni strife can never get bloody enough to meet most standards for what is meant by the term "civil war."I'm afraid we are seeing Pollack proved wrong on a daily basis right now.

As for the anonymous misconstrual of Iran's remarks, that is less naive than it is delusional.


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tristero 2/25/2006 08:15:00 AM |

Friday, February 24, 2006

 
Update: Pardon our dust. Yes, I know it's a bit of a mess. Please bear with me. People much smarter than I are working on bringing this site in to the second half of the ot years. Thanks you for your patience.

And, no. The new design will look nothing like the one some of you saw earlier. That was merely a placeholder.






Never mind


This is not a permanent template. Please don't waste your time commenting on its terrible/wonderful look.

I'll tell you when the real transition happens. And then you can complain all you want. Comments will return I promise.

Nothing to see here folks. Move along.




digby 2/24/2006 04:19:00 PM |

 
The Ship That Sailed



by digby




If you haven't had any fun today, click on Lou Dobbs arguing with Joe Klein about port security. Klein, the pretend liberal in a balanced group consisting of Republican David Gergen, Republican Ed Rollins and Republican Dobbs, insists that if we don't let this Dubai deal go forward, we will be causing ourselves some real trouble in the arab world. They are very sensitive to this kind of disrespect, you see. Changing the rules midstream is going to cause more terrorists.

He's so right. America should do everything it can not to foment terrorism.


Meanwhile, violence and fear sweep through Iraq:

The waves of vengeance have left the majority Shiite and the minority Sunni communities feeling victimized and deeply angry with each other. Both are also resentful of the United States, which has been working to ease the animosity and coax Iraq's various ethnic and religious groups into a cooperative government.

"The Americans also abandoned us extremely. They could have put some of their vehicles to protect the mosques — they have the forces to do that," Khalaf Ulayyan, general secretary of the Sunni Iraqi National Dialogue Council, said at a news conference. "How does a civil war start? It starts like this."

What a shame.

But let's keep our priorities straight here. What we need to do is make sure that Dubai's feelings aren't hurt or things might just hurtle out of control in the mideast. We wouldn't want that.





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digby 2/24/2006 03:43:00 PM |

 
Braindead Hotshot



by digby



Rita Cosby said that it's wrong that the Republicans in South Carolina are asking for church rolls to target the evangelical vote but it's just as wrong that Democrats are targeting the "hoodlum vote."

Yes, the hoodlum vote. When a plainly confused Chris Matthews asked what she meant, she explained that Democrats were going through voter rolls to find felons to vote for them.



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digby 2/24/2006 02:50:00 PM |

 
Rude Lefty Bloggers

by digby

A mainstream Republican gives a speech:

Coulter even made comments about the physical appearances of those who were removed.

"Another attractive Democrat," she said as junior Sean Hall, a man wearing a blonde wig, white sheet and a sign that said "Coultergeist" was removed.

"I think we should have saved the ushers some time and just removed all the ugly people," she said.

During her question-and-answer session, Coulter responded to both fans and protesters. One comment that drew strong audience reactions came from a young man who asked her if she didn't like Democrats, wouldn't it just be better to have a dictatorship? Coulter responded with a jab at the way the student talked.

"You don't want the Republicans in power, does that mean you want a dictatorship, gay boy?" she said.

The well trained young Republican borg had a ready defense:

IU College Republicans President Shane Kennedy defended Coulter's comments by stressing that the speech was for entertainment and attendees should have expected Coulter to say controversial comments.

"I think the guy could have been more respectful to her," he said. "I mean, we already know that she was going to be controversial and she was just saying what people were thinking. If you are going to talk like you are gay, then Ann Coulter is going to call you gay. Of course, she said it in a spiteful tone, but it was expected."

On the other hand, she was quite upset that she had to deal with dissent:

"You are paying me to give a speech," she said. "I mean, if you don't want me to keep talking, that's fine, but I think I'll just do the speech. Hopefully, the idiot liberals will be out of here by the second half of the speech.

"You guys are doing a great job." she said sarcastically later to auditorium ushers. "I guess they did hire Democrats as ushers."

In other news, the mainstream media continues to wring their lace handkerchiefs about rude liberal readers.



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digby 2/24/2006 02:32:00 PM |

 
Jingo Blowback

the digby

Last night Kevin approvingly linked to the same William Greider piece that I did and said:

On a related note, it makes me feel almost nostalgic to watch the toxic stew of cherry picking, half truths, and outright misrepresentations currently being used to demonize the UAE as a virtual arm of al-Qaeda. You know what it reminds me of? The way Bush & Co. tried to sell Saddam Hussein as Osama's best buddy in the Middle East. It's poetic watching the Bushies squirm when they're on the receiving end of this stuff.

I think this comparison is off base. To the extent it is demagogic, this UAE outcry falls into the category of political ox-goring, the likes of which are seen every day in our system. Comparing it to the lies, distortion and institutional manipulation that led the nation into a war is vastly overstating it.

This would be better compared to the white house having a fake case of the vapors over Newsweak reporting that Korans had been defaced at Guantanamo and "causing" the riots in the mid-east. The head of the joint chiefs of staff said the whole thing was used as an excuse by the heavies in Afghan politics, but that didn't stop the administration from lecturing the press about revealing these accusations. Many people accepted the idea that Newsweak erred, particularly when it was shown that the report was unreliable. Bush and his boys had been saying that revealing information about torture and abuse was playing into the enemies' hands for months, so this fit perfectly with their "loose lips sink ship" rhetoric. In this case, Bush has been saying "we're fighting 'them' over there so we don't have to fight 'them' over here" for years. Saying now that it's ok to bring "them" into our ports creates cognitive dissonence. They have only themselves to blame for the outcry.

In both the UAE port outcry or the Newsweak outcry, the demagogic argument coming from the administration is that these things will harm our image in the middle east and make it more difficult for us to prosecute the war on terror. It works fine as long as it doesn't conflict with one of their other demagogic arguments. But neither of these flaps come close to the invasion of Iraq for sheer bad faith and demagogic overkill.

Besides, there is a legitimate reason to be wary of the UAE being involved with US port management and calling it racism, in particular, is puerile nonsense. Like Pakistan, another close ally in the war on terror, the UAE have been playing both ends against the middle for a long time. We all understand that and accept it. They have to deal with the vicissitudes of their own political situation which doesn't always accrue to our benefit. Welcome to the real world where the black and white formulation of "you're either with us or you're with the terrorists" is shown as the bullshit it always was. As Yglesias says here:

... the UAE isn't a strategic partner of the United States in the way that the UK is. The number of countries who have British-style security relationships with the United States can be counted on one hand, if not one finger. We share intelligence with the British that we wouldn't share with Portugal, much less Dubai. An ally as close as Israel has been known to screw us over in defense and intelligence matters because, hey, countries have different interests. A private British firm operates in the context of the rule of law; a state-owned enterprise in Dubai . . . not so much. These are different countries in a thousand ways that have nothing to do with skin color. Pretending not to see the difference is childish and absurd. That a country hosts American military bases proves almost nothing -- we have bases in all kinds of places.

I would suggest that if the UAE is holding access to their ports over our heads as a way to ensure this deal goes through, then we may have to evaluate whether they are even the nominal ally in the war on terror we think they are. That's called blackmail. They can't interfere with our domestic policies any more thaan we can interfere with theirs.



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digby 2/24/2006 01:40:00 PM |

 
Back To Normal

by digby

Ok, you are not going crazy. You did see a different template on this site earlier today. This blog's oging to be changing a bit over the next little while. There may be some glitches for a while. That was a glitch.



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digby 2/24/2006 01:18:00 PM |

 
Remedial Journalism

by digby


Gosh, the Republicans must be so pleased with CNN's new reporter Brian Todd. Discussing Libby's motion that contends Fitzgerald lacks authority to bring charges because proper procedure were not followed, Todd asserted:

"Here's the procedure: He or she has to be appointed by the president. He or she has to be confirmed by the senate. He or she has to answer to top justice officials whenever they want to bring and indictment of grant immunity. None of these things have occurred in the case of Mr Fitzgerald. He was appointed by an acting Attorney general. He was never confirmed by the Senate. He has had sweeping power in this case to do as he chooses."

I guess he didn't have time to check the Department of Justice Web site:

Patrick J. Fitzgerald began serving as the United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois on September 1, 2001. The United States Senate confirmed his nomination by unanimous consent and President Bush signed his commission on October 29, 2001.

He was named special counsel by an acting attorney general because the attorney general recused himself from the case.

Here's what the GAO had to say about Fitzgerald's mandate:

"The parameters of his authority and independence are defined in the appointment letters which delegate to Special Counsel Fitzgerald all (plenary) the authority of the Attorney General with respect to the Department's investigation into the alleged unauthorized disclosure of a CIA employee's identity with the direction that he exercise such authority independent of the supervision or control of any officer of the Department. [13]. In addition, Department officials informed us that the express exclusion of Special Counsel Fitzgerald from the application of 28 C.F.R. Part 600, which contains provisions that might conflict with the notion that the Special Counsel in this investigation possesses all the power of the Attorney General, contributes to the Special Counsel's independence. [14] Thus, Special Counsel Fitzgerald need not follow the Department's practices and procedures if they would subject him to the approval of an officer or employee of the Department. For example, 28 C.F.R. 600.7 requires that a Special Counsel consult with the Attorney General before taking particular actions."

That took me five minutes with Google. I would imagine that Brian Todd could have had some flunky do the same thing before he proclaimed that Fitzgerald's appointment hadn't followed this procedure. It doesn't prove anything, of course, but it does show that there might just be some legitimate differences of opinion as to whether or not their claim has merit. You don't have to be a lawyer to know that the law requiring that the special counsel be appointed by the president and confirmed by the senate meant that he or she must be a US Attorney, not that he or she must be a special appointment by the president to investigate his own administration. That wouldn't exactly make sense, now would it?


It's theoretically possible that a judge will rule in Libby's favor on this, but it is highly unlikely. You'd think that Todd would have at least picked up a phone this morning and called a legal analyst who might clue him in on the other side's arguments. When he said/she said makes sense --- as in a legal case --- they don't do it. When it comes to global warming or intelligent design they fall all overthemselves giving equal time to hucksters and fools.


Why do journalists have such a hard time understanding these distinctions?



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digby 2/24/2006 10:58:00 AM |

 
Civil War

Khalizad is worried

"What we've seen in the past two days, the attack has had a major impact here, getting everyone's attention that Iraq is in danger," Mr. Khalilzad said in a conference call with reporters.

The country's leaders, he added, "must come together, they must compromise with each other to bring the people of Iraq together and save this country."

Mr. Khalilzad's comments are the most explicit acknowledgment so far by an American official of the instability of the situation, and the fragility of the entire American enterprise here. The killings and assaults across Iraq that began Wednesday have amounted to the worst sectarian violence since the American invasion.

...In the deadliest assault, 47 people returning from a protest were pulled off buses south of Baghdad on Wednesday and shot in the head, an Interior Ministry official said Thursday. Three journalists from Al Arabiya, the Arab satellite network, were abducted and killed Wednesday in Samarra, near the ruined shrine. Seven American soldiers were also killed Wednesday in unrelated attacks involving roadside bombs.

Political and religious leaders, including President Jalal Talabani and Moktada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric whose followers are believed to be involved in much of the anti-Sunni violence, called for restraint.

Bring it on, indeed. A terrible situation, and a confused one, in which al-Sadr, of all people, feels compelled to urge restraint.

For the purpose of discussion, if Khalizad is this blunt, we should probably assume that reality is far, far worse. Iraq is gone, or at the very least, rapidly moving that way.

Now what? Three states, Shia, Sunni, and Kurd? A violent, anarchic "state of nature"? How will humanitarian aid reach the sufferers if there is no Iraq left? What are the short term/long term implications for terrorism both within the Middle East and against the US and US citizens? What can be done, in any event, to counter the development of a disintegrated Iraq becoming a breeding ground for terrorism. Are efforts to "save" Iraq a priori doomed to failure?

And aside from the questions of humanitarian aid, the most crucial question: in a post-Bush world, what is the United States' - our - moral obligation to the people of the former Iraq?

Thomas Friedman once said that it's not every day you get to see a political experiment in action. Well Tom, here it is. Happy?



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tristero 2/24/2006 05:37:00 AM |

 
Extra! Extra! Neoconservatism Discovered To Be Screaming Yellow Bonkers!

by tristero

Why are the so-called "conservative intellectuals" in the United States so hellbent on reinventing a square wheel? Anyone with half a brain and half an education knows better than to bother. But there they are, with their T-squares marking off 89 degree angles - can't even get that straight - and sawing away for years on one patently idiotic idea or another before finally announcing what liberals have known all along: It was a patently idiotic idea.

For the latest, here's Francis Fukuyama's epiphany. Turns out neoconservatism is... a really bad idea. Who knew? Well I knew, and I didn't need tens of thousands of deaths in Iraq to know it. And so I think a prayer is called for:

Dear God,

Please deliver us from the hideous locust plague of conservative pseudo-intellectuals. Sinners we may be in Thine eyes, and unworthy of thy Divine Love, but Jesus Kee-rist! Cut us some friggin' slack, already! Fire and brimstone, eternal damnation, I ain't gonna argue with you. But, seriously, God, we really don't deserve any more Fukuyamas, y'know? So ease up.

Please.

Love,

Tristero



tristero 2/24/2006 03:59:00 AM |

Thursday, February 23, 2006

 
Hobgoblins

by digby


I'm quite impressed by the Washington Post editorial board's intellectual consistency

Friday, February 24, 2006; Page A14


If members of Congress really want to burnish their "tough on terrorism" credentials, they should start by focusing on real presidential lapses, which are sufficient, and forget about the phony ones. As Mr. England said yesterday, the war on terrorism demands that the United States "strengthen the bonds of friendship and security . . . especially with our friends and allies in the Arab world." That means allies should be treated "equally and fairly around the world and without discrimination," he said. And he suggested that it is the terrorists who want the United States to "become distrustful, they want us to become paranoid and isolationist."

If so, they must be feeling pretty content right now.

Yes, that's right. If we become distrustful of our allies, the terrorists will have won:

Wednesday, January 25, 2006; Page A18

SHORTLY AFTER Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush famously declared that other countries must choose between supporting the United States and supporting terrorism, and that those that harbored al Qaeda would be treated as the enemy. In the years since, he has refrained from applying that tough principle in practice -- which is lucky for Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf. Ever since the war on terrorism began, this meretricious military ruler has tried to be counted as a U.S. ally while avoiding an all-out campaign against the Islamic extremists in his country, who almost surely include Osama bin Laden and his top deputies. Despite mounting costs in American lives and resources, he has gotten away with it.

digby 2/23/2006 09:11:00 PM |

 
Rockefeller Sticks In The Shiv

by digby

Glenn has been writing a lot about the administration pursuing journalists in the NSA illegal spying scandal and he sounds a very important alarm. But I think they should think long and hard about how far to take that considering their history. It's a can of worms they will regret opening. Here's a good example of what kind of ugly little fish-bait might come slithering out.

From Murray Waas:

The vice-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) made exactly that charge tonight in a letter to John Negroponte, the Director of National Intelligence. What prompted Rockefeller to write Negroponte was a recent op-ed in the New York Times by CIA director Porter Goss complaining that leaks of classified information were the fault of “misguided whistleblowers.”

Rockefeller charged in his letter that the most “damaging revelations of intelligence sources and methods are generated primarily by Executive Branch officials pushing a particular policy, and not by the rank-and-file employees of intelligence agencies.”

Later in the same letter, Rockefeller said: “Given the Administration’s continuing abuse of intelligence information for political purposes, its criticism of leaks is extraordinarily hypocritical. Preventing damage to intelligence sources and methods from media leaks will not be possible until the highest level of the Administration cease to disclose classified information on a selective basis for political purposes.”

Exhibit A for Rockefeller: Woodward’s book “Bush at War”.

Read the whole thing. I was unaware that the CIA had been instructed to cooperate with Woodward. I thought he was simply allowed to listen in on classified White House meetings:

One former senior administration official explained to me: “This was something that the White House wanted done because they considered it good public relations. If there was real damage to national security—if there were leaks that possibly exposed sources and methods, it was not done in this instance for the public good or to expose Watergate type wrongdoing. This was done for presidential image-making and a commercial enterprise—Woodward’s book.”

The Bush adminstration suffers from terminal hubris, so I am not sure they completely understand the implications of this. They seem to think they can get away with "leaking" classified information for political purposes with impunity while screaming to high heaven about real whistelblowers leaking classified information to expose wrongdoing by them. There was a time they could do that sort of thing and get away with it. I suspect that time is past. There is too much blood in the water.

This does explain why Woodward was so nervous about the Plame matter, though. He was leaked a ton of selective classified information by powerful people to help make a bogus case for war. He makes Novak look like an amateur.



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digby 2/23/2006 07:34:00 PM |

 
The Gay Governor

by digby


This guy is so uncool Republicans will assume he's one of them and vote for him by mistake. Blagojevich for president!

Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich wasn't in on the joke.

Blagojevich says he didn't realize "The Daily Show" was a comedy spoof of the news when he sat down for an interview that ended up poking fun at the sometimes-puzzled governor.

"It was going to be an interview on contraceptives ... that's all I knew about it," Blagojevich laughingly told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in a story for Thursday's editions. "I had no idea I was going to be asked if I was 'the gay governor.' "

The interview focused on his executive order requiring pharmacies to fill prescriptions for emergency birth control.

Interviewer Jason Jones pretended to stumble over Blagojevich's name before calling him "Governor Smith." He urged Blagojevich to explain the contraception issue by playing the role of "a hot 17-year-old" and later asked if he was "the gay governor."

At one point in the interview, a startled Blagojevich looked to someone off camera and said, "Is he teasing me or is that legit?"

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digby 2/23/2006 07:04:00 PM |

 
Live By Demagoguery, Die By Demagoguery


William Greider is right on the money.

The Boy Who Cried Wolf:

David Brooks, the high-minded conservative pundit, dismissed the Dubai Ports controversy as an instance of political hysteria that will soon pass. He was commenting on PBS, and I thought I heard a little quaver in his voice when he said this was no big deal. Brooks consulted "the experts," and they assured him there's no national security risk in a foreign company owned by Middle East Muslims--actually, by an Arab government--managing six major American ports. Cool down, people. This is how the world works in the age of globalization.

Of course, he is correct. But what a killjoy. This is a fun flap, the kind that brings us together. Republicans and Democrats are frothing in unison, instead of polarizing incivilities. Together, they are all thumping righteously on the poor President. I expect he will fold or at least retreat tactically by ordering further investigation. The issue is indeed trivial. But Bush cannot escape the basic contradiction, because this dilemma is fundamental to his presidency.

A conservative blaming hysteria is hysterical, when you think about it, and a bit late. Hysteria launched Bush's invasion of Iraq. It created that monstrosity called Homeland Security and pumped up defense spending by more than 40 percent. Hysteria has been used to realign US foreign policy for permanent imperial war-making, whenever and wherever we find something frightening afoot in the world. Hysteria will justify the "long war" now fondly embraced by Field Marshal Rumsfeld. It has also slaughtered a number of Democrats who were not sufficiently hysterical. It saved George Bush's butt in 2004.

Bush was the principal author, along with his straight-shooting Vice President, and now he is hoisted by his own fear-mongering propaganda. The basic hysteria was invented from risks of terrorism, enlarged ridiculously by the President's open-ended claim that we are endangered everywhere and anywhere (he decides where). Anyone who resists that proposition is a coward or, worse, a subversive. We are enticed to believe we are fighting a new cold war. But are we? People are entitled to ask. Bush picked at their emotional wounds after 9/11 and encouraged them to imagine endless versions of even-larger danger. What if someone shipped a nuke into New York Harbor? Or poured anthrax in the drinking water? OK, a lot of Americans got scared, even people who ought to know better.

So why is the fearmonger-in-chief being so casual about this Dubai business?

Because at some level of consciousness even George Bush knows the inflated fears are bogus. So do a lot of the politicians merrily throwing spears at him. He taught them how to play this game, invented the tactics and reorganized political competition as a demagogic dance of hysterical absurdities, endless opportunities to waste public money. Very few dare to challenge the mindset. Thousands have died for it.

Bush's terrorism war has from the start been in collision with the precepts of corporate-led globalization. One practices hyper-nationalism--Washington gets to decide where it goes to war, never mind the Geneva Convention and other "obsolete" international restraints. Yet Bush's diplomats travel the world banging on governments for trade rules that defenestrate a nation's sovereign power to run its own affairs. The US government regards itself as comfortable with this arrangement since it assumes the superpower can always get its way. Most citizens are never consulted. They are perhaps unaware that their rights have been given away, too.

It would be nice to imagine this ridiculous episode will prompt reconsideration, cool down exploitative jingoism and provoke a more rational discussion of the multiplying absurdities. I doubt it. At least it will be satisfying to see Bush toasted irrationally, since he lit the match.

Indeed.

A commentator on CNN just said that if the US becomes isolationist and refuses to engage our neighbors the terrorists will have won. (I'm looking forward to hearing John Bolton sing "Blowing in The Wind" at the next meeting of the UN security council.)

The New York Times reports:

"If the furor over the port deal should go on, Mr. England said, it would give enemies of the United States aid and comfort: 'They want us to become distrustful, they want us to become paranoid and isolationist.'"

Republican voters, if you question the port deal, the administration
thinks you're a traitor.


Update: John Aravosis doesn't think much of Gordon England.



Update II: For unknown reasons the NY Times has scrubbed the England quote from its story. It's still in this story in the SF Chronicle.
digby 2/23/2006 04:28:00 PM |

 
Castrati Chat

by digby


Rush has been on a strange tangent the last couple of days. Aside from his strange sensitivity to the feelings of terrorist supporting middle eastern potentates (which actually makes sense when you stop and think about it) he also appears to be somewhat obsessive on other subjects:

Ladies and gentlemen, I'm tempted to say that we are on "Summers's eve." We are at Summers's eve. I know Summer's Eve is also -- I think; I used to be an expert in these things -- a feminine deodorant spray, but it's also -- it also designates, ladies and gentlemen, that we are in the last days of the administration of Larry Summers as president of Harvard. And, by the way, this happened -- I think we need to change the name from Harvard to Hervard, because a bunch of angry feminazis took him out simply because he spoke the truth about diversity on campus and the differences in men and women.

The feminist movement is still alive and well, and it contains the central belief there's really no difference between men and women, we're all the same, we're all just conditioned differently, but we can all do what everybody else does, we're all equal, there is no inherent difference. Now, you think I'm laughing when I -- joking when I suggest they change the name from Harvard to Hervard; they changed the word "history" to "herstory" at one point, remember, in the militant feminist movement. In fact, maybe we can have two schools, Hisvard and Hervard, and just sequester the students. Hervard: Übersexuals need not apply, metrosexuals would be welcome, but the few slots are very competitive. Transsexuals, your scholarship's in the mail before you even apply.

And this, from the same day, is just strange:

OK, so there's that. Lemme put that aside. Next little story, and this -- this actually is from Sunday. It's an Associated Press story: "Ginsburg bears burden without O'Connor. It'll be a one-woman show in the Supreme Court starting Tuesday. Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the only female among the nine justices, and she's not so happy about it." So, resign. If you don't like it, resign. If you don't like being the only woman on the court, then go somewhere else. Besides, David Souter's a girl. Everybody knows that. What's the big deal? I'm talking about attitudinally, here, folks. You gotta -- you just -- Dawn [studio transcriber] agrees. She's nodding her head in agreement.

The day before that:

Speaking of Jimmy Carter, did you see what his son, Jack, said? ..."I am pro-choice as far as a woman choosing. But I am against abortion." Well, there is a totally worthless view. This is just his version of, "I support the troops, but I don't support the war." Or "I'm against slavery, but I oppose freeing the slaves. I'm for jobs, but I'm not for Wal-Mart. I'm for open government, except when a Democrat's in office, and I want to have the power to do what I want to do without anybody seeing me."

I mean these people are just -- they are so -- just total wimps. Come on, Jack, tell us what you really believe, and stand for something, and come out and lead on that basis, Jack. This is -- "No, I wanna make sure I don't offend the women." This -- this is -- here you go. Classic example of the castrati, the new castrati. Jack Carter is -- has been castrated by the feminization of this culture since he grew up. He's -- he's three years older than I am. He was subject to the same pressures I was, plus probably even more, what with his dad being in there in the White House and so forth.

You heard, of course, that he and Daryn Kagan broke up recently. (I know, I know)

It sounds like Rush has even more issues with women than he did before. It also sounds like he's heavily trolling his favorite porn sites. He's got transexuals and castrati on the brain again.



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digby 2/23/2006 12:49:00 PM |

 
Shipping News

by digby


CNN just reported that Condoleeza Rice called for Syria to cooperate in the investigation of the assassination of the Lebanese prime minister. She really ought to keep that issue quiet for the moment.

Check out this report from Robert Parry:

The Bush administration is letting the United Arab Emirates take control of six key U.S. ports despite its own port’s reputation as a smuggling center used by arms traffickers, drug dealers and terrorists, apparently including the assassins of Lebanon’s ex-Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

Press accounts have noted that the UAE’s port of Dubai served as the main transshipment point for Pakistani nuclear engineer Abdul Q. Khan’s illicit transfers of materiel for building atomic bombs as well as the location of the money-laundering operations used by the Sept. 11 hijackers, two of whom came from the UAE.

But the year-old mystery of the truck-bomb assassination of Hariri also has wound its way through the UAE’s port facilities. United Nations investigators tracked the assassins’ white Mitsubishi Canter Van from Japan, where it had been stolen, to the UAE, according to a Dec. 10, 2005, U.N. report.

At that time, UAE officials had been unable to track what happened to the van after its arrival in Dubai. Presumably the van was loaded onto another freighter and shipped by sea through the Suez Canal to Lebanon, but the trail had gone cold in the UAE.

While not spelling out the precise status of the investigation in the UAE, the Dec. 10 report said U.N. investigators had sought help from “UAE authorities to trace the movements of this vehicle, including reviewing shipping documents from the UAE and, with the assistance of the UAE authorities, attempting to locate and interview the consignees of the container in which the vehicle or its parts is believed to have been shipped.”

The UAE’s competence – or lack of it – in identifying the “consignees” or the freighter used to transport the van to Lebanon could be the key to solving the Hariri murder. This tracking ability also might demonstrate whether UAE port supervisors have the requisite skills for protecting U.S. ports from terrorist penetration.

The Bush administration anticipated this and made sure this was addressed in the secret agreement:

Under the deal, the government asked Dubai Ports to operate American seaports with existing U.S. managers "to the extent possible." It promised to take "all reasonable steps" to assist the Homeland Security Department, and it pledged to continue participating in security programs to stop smuggling and detect illegal shipments of nuclear materials.

That "reviewing shipping documents" thing might be a little problem though. There is this:

The administration did not require Dubai Ports to keep copies of business records on U.S. soil, where they would be subject to court orders. It also did not require the company to designate an American citizen to accommodate U.S. government requests. Outside legal experts said such obligations are routinely attached to U.S. approvals of foreign sales in other industries.

Let's just hope that DHS doesn't need to look at any "business records" in order to trace terrorist activity in the US. I'm sure it's nothing to worry about.


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digby 2/23/2006 12:47:00 PM |

 
Civil War

by tristero

Is there now a civil war in Iraq, as the lunatic right is so eager to have its opponents claim? And would calling the horrors going on now within Iraq a "civil war" help or even further obscure any understanding of what's going on?


Depends on the meaning of civil war which, I gather, is not at all a set definition among legitimate scholars. This, of course, lets the wingnuts play their grotestque sophistical games - Who sez it's civil war? Only by liberals' definition! - games made more perverse as the blood flows ever more freely. But there's something more important at stake than arguing over when a civil war is "officially" a civil war or just "significant civic untidiness." And that is trying to get some sort of conceptual handle with which to comprehend what is indisputably a violent, chaotic catastrophe.

How do I see the events of the last few days, the mosque bombing and the subsequent violence? I see them as making the issue of a disintegrative civil war in Iraq - and the scope of its tragic potential - an issue that is long overdue for serious focus. And make no mistake: The United States will be blamed for it. Not only Bush, but you and me. Although many of us fought as hard as we could to prevent Bush from doing anything as stupid as invading and conquering Iraq, we - and our kids- will be blamed; we will have to endure the consequences of the incompetence and stupidity of the Bush administration.

As a preliminary to a serious discussion, here are some remarks from September 16, 2005 from the Council on Foreign Relations. There is much more to be said, of course. And there are things I disagree with here. But they are interesting and thougthful comments:

Lionel Beehner,staff writer for cfr.org, asked several experts their opinions of what constitutes a civil war, and whether the situation in Iraq qualifies or not.
...

[Michael O'Hanlon] "The kind of civil war I’m worried about is of the ethnic-cleansing kind, where people form militias and clear out neighborhoods...If you saw the militia-style combats—clearing out neighborhoods, people fighting each other and getting killed in pitched gun battles versus car bombs, or leaders calling for more organized conflict—then that would constitute a civil war."
...

[Kenneth Katzman] "Civil war is organized violence designed to change the political structure or governance within a country, or internal conflict within a state...

This week [September 16, 2005] it’s definitely become clearer that we’ve entered civil war, but whether it’s a sustained or permanent feature, we don’t know. Also, I wouldn’t say it’s full-blown, that is, where it’s neighborhood against neighborhood...just because you don’t have one side fighting back doesn’t mean you’re not in a civil war. "

...

[Marina Ottaway] "To go from acts of terrorism to civil war you need two population groups deliberately targeting each other. As long as it is insurgents trying to kill people to dissemminate terror, and the population is angry at the terrorists, that does not constitute civil war. In the case of Iraq, we would talk of civil war if the insurgents, who are overwhelmingly Sunni, started to deliberately target Shiites (or Kurds) and the targeted group reacted by holding every Sunni responsible, and thus would seek revenge against all Sunnis. I’m very hesitant to say you have a civil war in Iraq now. [Again, as of September 16, 2005].

I think Iraq is sliding very closely in that direction. It’s not quite there yet, but there is no longer a viable political process underway to halt the slide into civil war."
...

[David Phillips] "It’s already civil war. Civil war is sectarian-based conflict that’s systematic and coordinated. This has been going on for some time [in Iraq]...Next, what happens is the political process breaks down and sectarian strife worsens, Iraqi Kurds withdraw their cooperation from the government, ethnic conflict ensues, and Iraq starts to fragment. This will force the United States to manage the deconstruction of Iraq, meaning the country is not viable, and the United States can’t have 140,000 troops in the middle of a civil war. We’ll have to withdraw troops to the north, draw a line in the thirty-sixth parallel [which formerly demarcated the largely Kurdish no-fly zone from the rest of Iraq], and secure U.S. national interests, in the form of Kirkuk’s oil fields and protecting democracy in northern Iraq."
...

[Thomas X. Hammes]: "I think you know it when you see it, but we’re not there yet. In a true civil war, the mass of society on both sides is involved. Civil war would require family-on-family violence. That’s not the case yet...Obviously, all sides are preparing for the possibility [of civil war], but I think as long as [Shiites and Sunnis] are talking and trying to work through the constitution, we’re OK. "

...

[Steven Metz] "It’s really a whole spectrum because when we hear the phrase “civil war,” we think of the equivilance of total war. But I think there are lots of things at lower levels that constitute civil war. In terms of its definition, it’s obviously just war primarily internal to a country, even though it could have some external involvement. I’ve said all along the chances are perhaps fifty-fifty that the ultimate outcome [in Iraq] will be some sort of major civil war. I haven’t seen anything politically or militarily that would lead me to change that position.

The bottom line is Iraqis don’t have a strong sense of national identity but rather a sense of tribal and local identities. Countries like that are only able to avoid internal conflict if they have a powerful, central government, like Iraq had under Saddam Hussein. Unfortunately, a democracy is not the type of government equipped to hold together such a fractured society."

tristero 2/23/2006 11:53:00 AM |

 
Insider Outsiders

by digby

When did the mainstream DC press come to believe that they represent outside the beltway thinking?

Today, Josh Marshall notes:

...there's just nothing more precious than seeing the faux-populist poseur Post editorial writers standing tough against an entrenched "establishment" of thirty-something, tenure-desperate semioticians and lit geeks in defense of "mainstream American values", a well of mores and beliefs with which the Post is no doubt deeply in touch. (Peel away the Fred Hiatt mask and underneath it's Bruce Springsteen; cut a little deeper and he's an Iowa farmer.)

Precious indeed. I caught the same thing coming from the Wall Street Journal(!) editor "Paul Gigot, GOP good ole boy who apparently lives somewhere in rural Nebraska:"

...I didn’t speak to anybody from the White House or the vice president’s office all week on this. It was looking at it from outside the Beltway and saying where did this story stand on the relative scale of importance?

Gigot, too, evidently believes he has his finger on the heartland pulse.

This is why we are having such a disconnect with the mainstream press. They are laboring under some ridiculous belief that they are the voice of the people when they are actually the voice of the establishment --- which is, by the way, Republican.

Democrats have a very bad habit of paying too much attention to the beltway punditocrisy. Online media isn't going to change the world as we know it, but it might just be able to break up this abusive relationship and get them looking outside the beltway more. The establishment does not favor Democrats but thars gold in them thar hills if they care to look.


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digby 2/23/2006 09:38:00 AM |

 
Issues And Competence

by digby


TAPPED approvingly quotes this from a new Union blog called Laying it On The Line

We keep losing elections because the parties are fighting on two different levels. We talk about competence and issues. They talk about character and values.

We appeal to narrow self-interest and a laundry list of issues. We are down in the weeds. They appeal to a higher plane, as pollster Cornell Belcher puts it, getting a substantial number of low income whites to vote not ‘against their economic interests’ as some would have it, but for what they see as higher interests.

Democrats will continue to win on the issues but lose elections until we learn to cast our issues in terms of values and characater.

Or until people finally see that the Republican committment to values and character is nothing but a scam --- which is happening --- and they see that such things are not very well measured by someone spouting a few religious code words and being against abortion.

I'm all for inspirational and aspirational rhetoric. They are essential components of successful politics and I don't think Democrats do enough of it. But the Republicans have bastardized these concepts of "character" to mean you don't have sex and "values" to mean you are against gay marriage and abortion and they have become code words in themselves. Once people begin to separate this phony Elmer Gantry hucksterism from the actual performance of the Republican majority in office, perhaps some universal values like "honesty" and "responsibility" and "respect" might even come back into fashion. I suspect when that happens, many voters are going to be looking for teacher instead of a preacher. Issues and competence tend to become more highly valued when the shit comes down.

Update:


To clarify. Ever since Dukakis I have railed against using the "competence" argument. It's flat and technocratic and doesn't work when compared to the soaring "we are the greatest" or "we are the free-est" rhetoric coming from the right.

But right now we are seeing an epic meltdown in basic governance layered underneath years of values rhetoric, inspirational cant about freedom and democracy and fear mongering about "smokin' em out o their caves." I have a suspicion that we are going to have a couple of elections in which competence is going to be a substantial part of the discussion. The debacle in Iraq and the corruption scandals have turned the tables on the soaring rhetoric about freedom and the values arguments about personal character. They won't play the way they used to --- indeed, they are probably going to be most useful as criticism.

As I wrote, I'm a big believer in inspirational and aspirational rhetoric. I think we should get some. And I think we should talk about values like "honesty" "responsibility" and "respect." I've been relentlessly hectoring the Democrats about showing conviction and fighting for fundamental principles. I believe this is essential.

But let's not make the mistake of fighting the last war. We may just naturally be bringing something to the party that people want right now. Good government. Issues and competence are arrows we have in our quiver and we should not be afraid to shoot them when the time is right.



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digby 2/23/2006 07:53:00 AM |

 
Aw, That's Too Bad, David Irving. We Got ACLU. Austria Doesn't.

by tristero

I'm still trying to dig out from under the chaos that usually accompanies major concerts (oddly, before the performances, life stays pretty organized, why I don't know) but thought I'd briefly weigh in with some thoughts on the Austrian conviction of scumbag David Irving for the crime of...being a scumbag.

Now, the Jerusalem Post appears to approve of Irving's sentence to imprisonment for three years for denying the Holocaust. Yet their editorial takes note that Deborah Lipstadt, who famously was sued for libel by Irving - a case Irving lost and then some - believes that Irving has the right to lie through his teeth about Hitler, Jews, and the Holocaust without thereby becoming an involuntary guest of the Austrian penal system.

Of course, I agree with Lipstadt. Free speech means the freedom to offend. And that's that.

Well... Not quite. It's not that simple. Sure there's free speech. And then there's the indisputable fact that Irving is a lying, unprincipled, Nazi-loving, right wing sociopath who repeatedly has bent over backwards to exonerate Hitler for 6 million plus murders while, at the same time, ridiculing and sliming the lucky few who escaped the gas chambers and lived to tell the tale.

And so, to be perfectly blunt and honest about it, I really don't give a good goddamm what happens to David Irving. Let the bastard rot in hell. Y'think I'd lift a finger to help him? Y'kidding?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've heard it a million times. Free speech, free speech! But when it comes to Nazi lovers, it ain't me, babe. Sure, intellectually, I get it. But if you think I'm gonna take the time truly to defend Irving's right to lie and rewrite some of the most tragic history - if not, the most tragic history - humans have endured, think again.

Ditto, if only slightly less ugly, the Danish newspaper editor behind the racist cartoons. Yup, yup, yup. He indeed had the right to publish them. But did you just say you want me to sign a petition in support of HIS free speech rights? Well, geez... you know, I have a serious case of writer's cramp right now and my doctor forbids me holding a pen for at least the next 6 months, so, no I ain't signin' nuttin.' Can't.

And that's why there's the ACLU.

Well, to be precise, that's why there would be the ACLU if these things happened here in the US. So let's now leave David Irving in Austria, and Flemming Rose in Copenhagen, and return to America and free speech here. After all, why go all the way to Austria, or Denmark, to sniff out someone rotten? There are a lot of inflammatory stinkers in this country. I don't mean only Pat Robertson and Antonin Scalia, of course. I'm thinking about that always useful nobody the right likes to smear lefties with, what's his name - Ward Cleaver? Winston something? Anyway, that guy.

Life is far too short for me to waste a moment of it worrying in detail about the civil rights of a malicious ignoramus who called my friends and neighbors "little Eichmanns." And I really don't care at all about some jerks at U of Illinois, especially when there are people whose rights I DO care proactively to defend like say, parents who want their kids to learn science and not fundamentalist propaganda in science class. For this reason, if it appears that Ward Cleaver's rights may be violated, then - because the principle of free speech and civil liberties simply must be respected regardless of my personal beliefs and feelings - it is essential to the operation of a modern democracy to support an organization like ACLU.

Strangely, many on the right and some others don't quite get ACLU's beat. Defending Oliver North or the Ku Klux Klan in no way implies endorsement of North's loopy Cro-Magnon militarism or the Klan's racism. The problem is this. Once you start infringing on Ollie's constitutional right to be a flaming asshole,fundamentalist churches any NAMBLA are next. No great loss, you say? You're right, I agree. But the problem with infringing those civil rights is that rapidly you reach the point where just about any kind of speech can be banned for any reason. And therein lies the problem.

First and foremost, the banning of speech and the curtailment of civil rights, is a political act, exercised by the powerful upon the weak. It is an immensely slippery and dangerous slope. Speech suddenly gets criminalized at the whim of the government or corporations in cahoots with the government. That is why those of us who don't have any interest in speaking up in defense of major league jerks nevertheless refuse to give up our ACLU cards when they offer their services to defend someone we utterly detest. We know that, if they get away with shutting up Ollie or a Nazi, we're next. Just as we don't like Iran/Contra criminals, we don't like NAMBLA either. But they all got rights. Or none of us really do.

It goes without saying that ACLU also defends a lot of right-on causes. Recently, ACLU was doing God's work in the Dover "intelligent design" creationism trial (no irony intended; "God's work" is an appropriate way to describe ACLU's efforts on behalf of science, religion, and American education). And that's just for starters.

But what makes ACLU so admirable is that that is not all that they do. They go beyond where my emotions can permit. Whereas I truly couldn't care less whether a Nazi lover has free speech, they care long after my anger at Irving's lies has forgotten the free speech principle that lets Irving off the hook, legally (but not morally). So by being an ACLU member, I unequivocally support free speech without ever having to speak up in defense of the Klan. So whatever flaws the organization might have, as long as ACLU cleaves to its mission to defend free speech, I will continue to support them no matter who they choose to defend. (Even, dammit, David Irving, if he ever gets in trouble over free speech issues in the US.)

I realize this appears not to be a rousing defense of freedom of speech. In fact it is. It simply takes into account that one of the best ways to uphold the principle without being exploited by cynical manipulators is to support an institution whose sole mission is to defend specific liberties like free speech without endorsing any specific ideology. Free speech - real free speech - is a complex issue, and an emotional one. Rightly so. There are ways to be pro-free speech without holding hands with the American counterparts of sleazy gits like David Irving or Flemming Rose. ACLU is one way.

[Not to rightwingers: You might object to what seems an unfair pairing of the likes of David Irving - a known liar and anti-Semite - with the Danish editor Flemming Rose (who is not known publicly to be either and who I assume in neither in private). It would appear to be obvious that I implied they are alike only in their appeal to free speech for their disgraceful behavior, but rightwing nuts have managed in the past to assume much more.

Therefore, always sensitive to the special needs of my readers on the right and their numerous cognitive challenges, let me be clear. I do not wish to enter into specious arguments as to which is a more cowardly scumbag, Irving or Rose. So, let's all agree that "sleazy" refers only to Irving in the last sentence and "gits" to both.]
tristero 2/23/2006 07:48:00 AM |

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

 
Innocent Life

by digby

As the country careens toward a supreme court showdown on Roe vs Wade, I just have to point out that columnists like EJ Dionne are full of shit when they say that most members of the right to life movement care more about a the taking of an innocent life rather than wanting to control a woman’s reproductive systems. They may think that’s what they care about but if that were true 81% of Americans, including many who call themselves "pro-life," wouldn't believe that abortion should be legal in case of rape or incest.

I hate to point out the obvious but children who are conceived in rape or incest are just as innocent as those who are conceived because birth control failed. The difference is not in the relative innocence of the children --- it’s the "innocence" of the woman. Most people believe that she should not be forced to bear the child of her molester, her relative or her rapist. And I think it’s fair to assume that they think this because they believe that the pregnancy wasn’t her “fault."

Some people would probably make the argument that having to bear a child in the case of rape or incest is too traumatic for the mother and that is why they shouldn’t have to bear the child. But people talk about giving up children for adoption as if that is somehow easier than the trauma of bearing her child concieved in rape and having to give it up for adoption. For some that might be true. But for others it most definitely is not. Indeed, it can be terribly traumatic to go through a full term pregnancy and then be unable to raise her child for any reason --- a child who would be the brother or sister of her other children.

Neither do these people allow that it would be terribly traumatic to have a child while still in high school or after already having had three children in five years or many of the other circumstances that could make a pregnancy unwanted. I don’t buy the trauma argument. I think it’s pretty clear that most “pro-life” people who hold that abortion is ok in the case of rape or incest (all but the 19% who are opposed in all cases) believe this is so because the woman did not consent to sex, which makes her “innocent” too --- and therefore she should not be punished as other women are by being forced to go through pregnancy and childbirth and all that goes with that.

They seem to think that sex isn't a primary biological imperative --- meaning that succumbing to the most primitive urge we have is an act which should be punished if it results in what nature intends --- pregnancy. It is not a function of bad character. It’s a function of nature. There seem to be few people who are willing to admit that the sex drive is stronger than most people’s willpower from time to time --- and therefore unwanted pregnancy will also happen from time to time.

We could take a fair amount of chance out of this equation by simply promoting the use and availability of birth control. The more available and easy it is to obtain the less likely unwanted pregnancy will happen. We could at least educate young people and make it easy for them to get reliable birth control. If pro-lifers really cared about not killing “innocent life” they would have condom machines in school alongside the cokes and candy bars. There is no group of people on earth who are more horny, more impulsive and more likely to think there is no tomorrow than teen-agers. Yet this is the group that the pro-life people most want to punish with early pregnancy if they fail to beat back their natural urges.

But let’s face it. Even if everyone had birth control, unwanted pregnancies would still happen. Nothing is foolproof. As the Republicans remind us incessantly, the only foolproof way to ensure there is no unwanted preganancy is abstinence. That's the real message of the "pro-life" movement. If women don't want to endure forced childbirth they shouldn't have sex. Period.



Jane is asking people to contact Naral and Planned Parenthood to ask them to support Ned Lamont in the Connecticut senate race against Lieberman, whose loyalty to the Gang of 14 Milquetoasts was stronger than his loyalty to women. This is getting very serious now and it's long past time for the anti-forced childbirth groups to play hardball.


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digby 2/22/2006 02:20:00 PM |

 
The Deal

by digby


From what I just heard from Senator Warner on CNN, it's about maintaining access to the ports, as I guessed earlier. (Airfields too.) Ed Henry just said the UAE hosts more of the US Navy in the gulf than any other country. If we diss them and refuse to scratch their backs, they'll get upset and pull back permission to dock our ships in their country. It's nothing personal. It's strictly business.



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digby 2/22/2006 02:04:00 PM |

 
His Petard

by digby


From Dave at Seeing the Forest, here's Rush from yesterday:

This is the first time in four years that I can recall a Democrat seriously being concerned about this group of people, and this is racism. This is racism. We are concluding that all Arabs are terrorists. We are concluding that every damn one of them -- be they a sheik, an emir -- they are all terrorists. They all have ties to terrorists and they all seek our utter, total destruction, and we can't risk an exception to that. They're all that way -- and welcome to racism Democrats, because the Democrats are leading the show on this just as well as a lot of conservatives are. So when Democrats are illustrating their racism, their xenophobia, they're also demonstrating that they fully acknowledge we have an enemy. Well, this is a tenuous position for them to take because their kook base doesn't believe any of this.

Uhm...

All right, well, I'm watching this during the break -- the Senate hearings. I'm just watching Sen. "Dick Turban," ah, Dick Turban is doing his -- from Illinois -- he of Club G'itmo fame. Ha! I wish Roberts would have shown up in the Club G'itmo T-shirt today. Maybe, maybe a Club G'itmo java coffee cup, just for Dick Turban. Ah, but anyway, Dick Turban is up there saying, "Ah, you're going to judged here, Judge. You're going to be judged on one question, just one question. You going to expand the personal freedoms of the Americans, or are you going to restrict them? You going to expand personal freedom, or you going to restrict personal freedom?"

Illustration from the August 2005 issue of The Limbaugh Letter

[Reading from AP report] "One detainee wrapped in an Israeli flag, some were shackled hand and foot in fetal positions for 18 to 24 hours, forcing them to soil themselves." Ugh! I thought they did that anyway over there.

It's awfully tempting to simply answer Rush's maidenly concern about the UAE's royal family's delicate feelings with this:

If it were up to you people, we wouldn't exist as a country today. You would have given in to the Soviets long ago, you would have appeased the Soviet communists. You would appease Iran right now. You probably wouldn't have cared about the war on terror or the bombing on 9-11. You would have sought out bin Laden and tried to make a deal with him, and this country exists today only because we have been able to prevent you from gaining power to do that kind of thing. We've had our run-ins with Neville Chamberlain types, and you're the modern incarnation

.


Traitors.

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digby 2/22/2006 11:05:00 AM |

 
You Can Never Be Too Careful

by digby


Following up my post below, I'd like to recommend this diary over at Kos by hekebolos. I think this is an excellent insight into why this port issue is having so much resonance:

Time and time again, this president has said that his highest goal, superceding all others, and even superceding any previous precedent of executive authority--is to defend the American people. He has shown time and time again that neither international law, nor federal law, nor the constitution, nor the Legislative or Judicial Branches of the Government of the United States, will prevent him from executing that duty as he and he alone sees fit.

The Bush presidency has not really been the "fuck-you" presidency. Really, it has been the "I can act like a king because I do national security and after 9/11 you can never be too careful" presidency.

And right here, it all comes crashing down. Because for many Bush supporters, it doesn't really matter whether Iraq helped or harmed national security. It doesn't really matter whether the domestic spying program assisted or hindered surveillance of suspected terrorists. It doesn't really matter whether the Patriot Act helps get new leads against terror suspects--because he's trying his best to do what he thinks is right, in their view, and if they agree with him on other issues, they'll be willing to forgive whatever mistakes have been made in his quest to protect the country, because he seems to care that much.

The Portgate scandal is crucial because Bush has violated his own doctrine. When Bush said that we need to justify holding a Middle Eastern company to a higher standard, he showed that he in fact does not agree with the key point of his own doctrine: namely, that in a post-9/11 world, you can never be too careful.

He needs to be secretly spy on American citizens without a warrant and he needs to be able to hold them indefinitely in jail without a trial and he needs to be able to torture innocent people with impunity because we just can't be too careful after 9/11.

But there's no reason to go overboard by saying that we shouldn't outsource our port management to a company owned by a state whose leaders have been known to hang out with bin Laden.

Perhaps the best way to put this is that the administration seems to trust the leaders of the United Arab Emirates more than the US congress or the secret FISA Court.


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digby 2/22/2006 09:30:00 AM |

 
Blackmail

by digby

Every converstation I've had with people about this port deal, on both the right and the left, has been one of complete befuddlement. Why on earth would Bush do something this politically obtuse? After all the fearmongering and the talk about "oceans don't protect us" for the last four years it's just inexplicable that they would go to the wall for a deal that looks so terrible.

Just now I sleepily clicked over to Atrios and read this, which just makes it even more unbelievable:

The Central Intelligence Agency did not target Al Qaeda chief Osama bin laden once as he had the royal family of the United Arab Emirates with him in Afghanistan, the agency's director, George Tenet, told the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United States on Thursday.

Had the CIA targeted bin Laden, half the royal family would have been wiped out as well, he said.

Here's the bit from the 9/11 report which doesn't explicitly name the royal family:

The Desert Camp, February 1999

Early in 1999, the CIA received reporting that Bin Ladin was spending much of his time at one of several camps in the Afghan desert south of Kandahar. At the beginning of February, Bin Ladin was reportedly located in the vicinity of the Sheikh Ali camp, a desert hunting camp being used by visitors from a Gulf state. Public sources have stated that these visitors were from the United Arab Emirates.

Reporting from the CIA's assets provided a detailed description of the hunting camp, including its size, location, resources, and security, as well as of Bin Ladin's smaller, adjacent camp. Because this was not in an urban area, missiles launched against it would have less risk of causing collateral damage. On February 8, the military began to ready itself for a possible strike. The next day, national technical intelligence confirmed the location and description of the larger camp and showed the nearby presence of an official aircraft of the United Arab Emirates. But the location of Bin Ladin's quarters could not be pinned down so precisely.The CIA did its best to answer a host of questions about the larger camp and its residents and about Bin Ladin's daily schedule and routines to support military contingency planning. According to reporting from the tribals, Bin Ladin regularly went from his adjacent camp to the larger camp where he visited the Emiratis; the tribals expected him to be at the hunting camp for such a visit at least until midmorning on February 11. Clarke wrote to Berger's deputy on February 10 that the military was then doing targeting work to hit the main camp with cruise missiles and should be in position to strike the following morning. Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert appears to have been briefed on the situation.

No strike was launched. By February 12 Bin Ladin had apparently moved on, and the immediate strike plans became moot. According to CIA and Defense officials, policymakers were concerned about the danger that a strike would kill an Emirati prince or other senior officials who might be with Bin Ladin or close by. Clarke told us the strike was called off after consultations with Director Tenet because the intelligence was dubious, and it seemed to Clarke as if the CIA was presenting an option to attack America's best counterterrorism ally in the Gulf. The lead CIA official in the field, Gary Schroen, felt that the intelligence reporting in this case was very reliable; the Bin Ladin unit chief, "Mike," agreed. Schroen believes today that this was a lost opportunity to kill Bin Ladin before 9/11.

Even after Bin Ladin's departure from the area, CIA officers hoped he might return, seeing the camp as a magnet that could draw him for as long as it was still set up. The military maintained readiness for another strike opportunity. On March 7, 1999, Clarke called a UAE official to express his concerns about possible associations between Emirati officials and Bin Ladin. Clarke later wrote in a memorandum of this conversation that the call had been approved at an interagency meeting and cleared with the CIA. When the former Bin Ladin unit chief found out about Clarke's call, he questioned CIA officials, who denied having given such a clearance. Imagery confirmed that less than a week after Clarke's phone call the camp was hurriedly dismantled, and the site was deserted. CIA officers, including Deputy Director for Operations Pavitt, were irate. "Mike" thought the dismantling of the camp erased a possible site for targeting Bin Ladin.

The United Arab Emirates was becoming both a valued counterterrorism ally of the United States and a persistent counterterrorism problem. From 1999 through early 2001, the United States, and President Clinton personally, pressed the UAE, one of the Taliban's only travel and financial outlets to the outside world, to break off its ties and enforce sanctions, especially those relating to flights to and from Afghanistan. These efforts achieved little before 9/11.

In July 1999, UAE Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Hamdan bin Zayid threatened to break relations with the Taliban over Bin Ladin.166 The Taliban did not take him seriously, however. Bin Zayid later told an American diplomat that the UAE valued its relations with the Taliban because the Afghan radicals offered a counterbalance to "Iranian dangers" in the region, but he also noted that the UAE did not want to upset the United States.

What a tangled web. It certainly appears that the UAE has us wrapped around their little fingers, doesn't it? And it's not just that they are "both a valued counterterrorism ally of the United States and a persistent counterterrorism problem." They are holding something else over our heads as well (again via Atrios):

But he said he would withhold judgment on the deal's national security implications until after today's briefing. The United Arab Emirates provides docking rights for more U.S. Navy ships than any other nation in the region, Warner noted. He added: "If they say they have not been treated fairly in this, we run the risk of them pulling back some of that support at a critical time of the war."

This is obviously a very complicated relationship, which explains why Bush was singing kumbaaya around the drum circle yesterday asking everyone to give peace a chance.

But here's the thing. Bush has been playing politics with this complicated situation for years now, saying things like "you're either with us or you're with the terrorists." He spent the entire presidential campaign taunting John Kerry for allegedly requiring a "global test" and using his applause lines like a bludgeon:

I will never hand over America's security decisions to foreign leaders and international bodies that do not have America's interests at heart.

... the senator would have America bend over backwards to satisfy a handful of governments with agendas different from our own.

This is my opponent's alliance-building strategy: brush off your best friends, fawn over your critics. And that is no way to gain the respect of the world.

Here's some vintage Bush cowboy bullshit trash talk, from just last week:

First, when we see threats, we've got to deal with them. When I was growing up in West Texas, oceans protected us. You might remember some of those days. Old Mayor Martinez, I know he remembers those days when we felt pretty comfortable here in America. We could see a threat overseas, but oceans made it pretty clear that -- to a lot of folks -- that nothing would happen, you know. September 11th came along and made it clear that we are vulnerable, that the enemy can hit us if they -- if they want to.

And therefore, when you see a threat, you've got to deal with it. You can't take things for granted anymore. The best way to deal with this enemy is to defeat them overseas so we don't have to face them here at home, and to stay on the hunt. (Applause.) And that's what we're doing.

And we've got a coalition of countries. I spent a lot of time reminding people about the nature of the war. Listen, the tendency for folks is to say, well, this really isn't a war. I can understand that. Who wants to walk around thinking there's a war about to hit us. I mean, that's -- that's my job to worry about it, not yours. How can you have an economy recover from a recession if people are afraid to risk capital because they're worried about thinking something is going to happen? And the same thing happens overseas. People kind of want to slip to the comfortable. They don't believe it's a war, some of them, and I understand that. And so we spend a lot of time reminding people that we've got to work together because the enemy can't stand what we stand for, and that's freedom. They just hate freedom. And so we've got a good coalition, and -- and we're on the hunt. We're keeping the pressure on them. It's hard to plot and plan and execute attacks when you're on the run.

And so the first step of our strategy is defeat them there so we don't to have to face them here. And we've got some great special forces -- I met the special forces command guy here -- and there's great intelligence officers and wonderful coalition folks. We're cutting off their money. It makes it kind of hard to operate when you can't get your bank accounts full of money in order to -- we're just doing a lot of stuff. And it's important for citizens to know that there's a constant, constant pressure. I think about it every day.

And we're making progress -- Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, September the 11th plotter-planner, is incarcerated; his successor brought to justice. Slowly but surely, we're finding them where they hide, and they know we're on their trail.

Secondly, we got to deny them safe haven. These people can't operate without safe haven. It's an interesting war we're in. It's totally different from what we're used to because we're not -- we're not facing nation-states; we're dealing with an enemy that is international in nature, that hides in states.

When the President says something like, if you harbor a terrorist, you're equally as guilty as the terrorist, those words mean nothing unless you act upon them. And I said that to the people of Afghanistan -- the Taliban. They didn't listen. And so we acted. And removing the Taliban -- (applause) -- is a clear signal that we won't tolerate safe haven. In other words, if you harbor the terrorist, you're just as guilty as the murderers. And that's a clear signal that the United States must continue to send in order to win the war on terror.

But, it was never quite that simple was it? We aren't in a "war" as it is commonly understood, are we? Our "enemies" are sometimes our "allies" and things change from one day to the next. It's complicated and --- dare I say it --- nuanced . Our security can't be assured by simply flexing our muscles and roaring like beasts.

But, after years of that puerile chest beating he can't expect everybody to do a big 180 and accept this crap:

I want those who are questioning it to step up and explain why all of a sudden a Middle Eastern company is held to a different standard than a Great British (sic) company. I'm trying to conduct foreign policy now by saying to people of the world, we'll treat you fairly. And after careful scrutiny, we believe this deal is a legitimate deal that will not jeopardize the security of the country, and at the same time, send that signal that we're willing to treat people fairly."

Is it any wonder that this whole thing has brought about extreme cognitive dissonance?

It may be that we have gotten ourselves into a terrible position in which we cannot "offend" the UAE by blocking this deal because they may reciprocate by blocking access to their deep water ports. If that's the case, then we are being blackmailed by the UAE for big money and potentially putting our own ports in danger in the process. According to the 9/11 report they have been playing both ends against the middle for years. And we have Yosemite Sam and Quickdraw McGraw in charge of dealing with them. It's not a big surprise that the whole thing is blowing up in their faces.



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digby 2/22/2006 07:32:00 AM |

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

 
Cutthroats

by digby


Both Kos and Atrios linked to this post about how Rove smeared John Kerry fior allegedly being in cahoots with Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohammed. It was bullshit, of course, and now we find out that Rove's buddy Abramoff was selling Bush face time and cut a deal for a meeting with Mahathir for 1.2 mil. (And to think the Republicans had coronaries about those silly "white house coffees.")

This post also notes some other dirty tricks from the last electionthat I was unaware of. From a Miami Herald article dated november 1, 2004:

The visits came as the ground war escalated. The National Jewish Democratic Council reported Sunday that Kerry campaign signs were defaced with stickers reading, ''Arafat Endorses,'' suggesting Kerry has the backing of the ailing Palestinian leader.

Bush's campaign has looked to siphon off traditionally Democratic-leaning Jewish voters, and the stickers echo a Republican Party of Florida mailer that also suggests Kerry is being supported by Arafat.

Kerry supporters have pointed to the senator's 100 percent pro-Israel voting record to rebuff the Republican claims that Bush is a stronger supporter of the Jewish state.

Republican voters received a torrent of negative anti-Kerry campaign mailings Saturday, some from an organization with strong Republican ties, the Florida Leadership Council.

The group is headed by Cory Tilley, a former aide to Gov. Bush, and David Johnson, former executive director of the Republican Party of Florida.

The mailings range from images of the party's stalwart leaders -- like Ronald Reagan -- to more ominous pieces that equate a vote for Kerry as the first step in leading to a terrorist attack on South Florida.

FAKE ARTICLE

The most negative mailing from the Florida Leadership Council has a fake newspaper story from the year 2007 underneath a photo of children in a classroom wearing gas masks.

The dateline is ''Florida Red Zone,'' and the fake story reads: 'President John Kerry warned parents and children in South Florida that mandatory radiation and chemical gear would be required to be worn `for the foreseeable future' since the Suitcase Dirty Bomb terrorist attack on South Florida in the spring.''

On the reverse side of the mailing, it says ``The last line of defense must be stronger than John Kerry.

These are the people who run and win on "moral values."


Sometimes I get criticism from my readers for suggesting that the Democrats must play on the same playing field as the Republicans. They say, "we shouldn't become them." But I never suggest that the Democrats should lie, cheat or play dirty as the Republicans do. I suggest that they wise up and stop pretending that Republicans are anything but ruthless adversaries and adjust accordingly. They can be beaten with smart strategies, but not unless the Democrats internalize the connection between the nice men and women they are working with on capitol hill every day with the thugs they hire to get elected. They are all cogs in the same cutthroat political machine.



Update: When I went to put up the links, I realized that Atrios had written "Always project. Always." it reminded me of a post I did before the election called "Projection Politics" in which I noted that Rove doesn't actually attack the strengths of his opponents, as he like to say he does:

Rove has developed a campaign of projection in which he tars his opponents with his own candidates' weaknesses and then attacks them.

He attacks Kerry for phony heroism thirty years ago when just last year his own candidate had himself filmed in a little costume prancing around on an aircraft carrier pretending he'd won a war that had only begun. But, by tarring Kerry with using war as a PR stunt for his own personal gain, people can process the uncomfortable feelings they are experiencing about Iraq as not really being caused by Junior, but by his rival who is the real shallow opportunist who only pretends to be a man of proven leadership and experience.

[...]

What is interesting about Rove is that his way of dealing with his own candidates' even more glaring deficiencies is to build a Kerry straw man in Bush's exact image and then set it afire. I don't know if it will work, or even if he's aware that he's doing it, projection being epidemic in GOP circles. But, it's disarming and confusing and it makes it difficult to effectively counter attack. You end up with some defensive version of "I know you are but what am I" which doesn't really advance your position.

It's projection/innoculation. And they are very good at it. Of course, you always run the risk that it will circle right back on you, which it seems to have done.



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digby 2/21/2006 01:51:00 PM |

 
Empty Veto

by digby


So Bush says he'll veto any legislation to block the port deal. He says that his government knows what it's doing and wouldn't have ok'd the deal if it would harm the nation's security. This is the same government that did such a great job with Hurricane Katrina and the aftermath of the Iraq invasion.

Assuming that we aren't seeing some sort of kabuki here, it appears that the Eunuch Caucus is getting an earful from their constituents and see no margin in working with the lame albatross right now. He's threatened vetoes before and the invertebrate Republicans have always fallen into line. This time appears to be different.

If this is true, the Bush administration may be effectively over.

Update: Dan Bartlett is going on and on about the "rigorousness" of the process the administration undertook with this port deal. He keeps saying that they have a lot of experience with this company and that the department of Homeland Security will be in charge of security. Apparently, they have no idea that they have lost the trust of the people on exactly these kinds of things. The rigor of their planning, the "experience" with private companies and the ineptitude of Homeland Security.

They have fear mongered their way to victory for four long years, going on and on about how "the oceans don't protect us" anymore and now they act as if port security is just another contract and claim it's important for "our image" to give security contracts to state owned middle eastern companies with ties to terrorism. Wow.

They are left with nothing but the president's "resolve" to govern. They believe that if he digs in his heels everyone will capitulate out of sheer admiration for his machismo. At 39%, the power of his machismo has shrunk to a fraction of what it once was. He's in very icy water now.



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digby 2/21/2006 01:02:00 PM |

 
Mixed Signals

by digby


On CNN earlier today:

NGUYEN: Well, it wasn't quite an apology, but it was an admission. Three weeks after his State of the Union address calling for energy independence, President Bush acknowledged today that his administration has been sending some mixed signals.

Mr. Bush visited one of the nation's top renewable energy labs in Colorado. He praised the work that's being done there and acknowledged that just two weeks ago the government laid off 32 workers there. Those jobs have now been restored, just in time for the president's visit.

I'm sure those 32 workers are grateful, but really. This is becoming embarrasing. I don't know if you saw him, but he was draped so far forward on the podium he looked like he was trying to crawl over it. Maybe there was a copy of "My Pet Goat" lying open on the floor.

Update: Here's the full story from the WaPo:

President Bush, on a three-state trip to promote his energy policy, said Tuesday that a budgeting mix-up was the reason 32 workers at one of the nation's premier renewable energy labs were laid off and then reinstated just before his visit.

Bush addressed the funding problem as soon as he began speaking here at the Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which is developing the sort of renewable energy technologies the president is promoting.

"Sometimes, decisions made as the result of the appropriations process, the money may not end up where it was supposed to have gone," Bush said.

Right. He never meant to cut those jobs. The money just ended up where it wasn't supposed to go.




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digby 2/21/2006 12:45:00 PM |

 
Born Again Con Man

by digby


The Book Of Ralph

It'll make you you hurl.



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digby 2/21/2006 11:29:00 AM |

 
The Trifecta

by digby

If there are three hallmarks of this failed Bush administration, it is hubris, incompetence and cronyism. This port deal features all three.

The hubris is illustrated by the fact that they actually thought after years of fear mongering and beating of Islamic terrorist war drums, they wouldn't be questioned about a United Arab Emirates contract for port security. The king shall not be questioned. The incompetence feature is that they believe it is smart to outsource security, of all things, to another country. If there is one thing all sides can agree upon, it's that the US should control its own borders and ports. It's common sense.

And finally, as we should have known, via FDL, it turns out this is also another crony cock-up:

The Dubai firm that won Bush administration backing to run six U.S. ports has at least two ties to the White House.

One is Treasury Secretary John Snow, whose agency heads the federal panel that signed off on the $6.8 billion sale of an English company to government-owned Dubai Ports World - giving it control of Manhattan's cruise ship terminal and Newark's container port.

Snow was chairman of the CSX rail firm that sold its own international port operations to DP World for $1.15 billion in 2004, the year after Snow left for President Bush's cabinet.

The other connection is David Sanborn, who runs DP World's European and Latin American operations and was tapped by Bush last month to head the U.S. Maritime Administration.

Bush Buddies: Doing a heckuva job, as usual.



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digby 2/21/2006 09:22:00 AM |

 
The Anti-Sentimental American

by digby

Knowing I have a penchant for Chayefsky, Arthur sent me a link to his discussion of "The Americanization of Emily" a film I'm embarrassed to say I've never seen. I'm going to get it today:

Many of the propagandists for war, 40 years ago and ever since -- and up to and most definitely including today -- consider Emily to be "anti-American" and "anti-war." It certainly is all that and more -- if your view of war is the mythic one. But Chayefsky rejects the myth and all its various aspects totally and across the board. It is unjustified to conclude that Chayefsky is "anti-war" in the sense of advocating pacifism: such a view finds no support in the film. But what Chayefsky does convey is just as threatening to the war lovers: while he may view some wars as absolutely necessary and required, that still does not make any war a "good" one, in the affirmative sense. Any war, even one dictated by the demands of self-defense, is immensely destructive and causes untold suffering. Much of that suffering is endured by people who are entirely innocent.

Chayefsky's target is the one identified by Charlie: it is the glorification of war, and the countless ways in which all of us "honor the institution." We build statues of our war heroes and name streets after them; we erect shrines to the dead. We insist on the "ideals" for which we fought, and the "goodness" of our intentions. Many of us do this in the misdirected and destructive search for "meaning" in our lives: our own stunted souls prevent us from finding fulfillment and happiness in our individual lives, so we look for "glory" by climbing over endless piles of corpses.

And what is lost in all of this is the unbearable horror and pain inflicted on individual human beings, and the particularized, specific costs of our quest for glory, or meaning, or "national greatness," or honor.

Read the whole thought provoking essay.



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digby 2/21/2006 08:52:00 AM |

 
On The Internet No One Knows You're A (Singing) Dog

by tristero

Thanks, folks, for all the nice comments about my music - including the ones that that truly were LOL. Just a few things before once again scooting back, more or less, into the closet.

I sent Digby the Times review and he asked if he could mention it. I said it was fine with me. The main reason I don't write more about what I do is that I'm really not trying to promote my musical career in my blogging.* It's not that I'm above promotion; no one is. Even Stravinsky was shameless when it came to hyping his work. It's rather that it seems like a blog is the wrong place to flack external reputations.

For me, the most interesting aspect of blogging has nothing to do with anyone's accomplishments but rather the present quality of their thought and the extent of their knowledge. While it is much less true now than it was in the olden days five years ago, it is still the case that prior reputation counts for much less in the blogosphere than it does Out There. You are read, or not read, based entirely on your ability to persuade from post to post. And in order to be persuasive, not only must you be a decent writer, but you damn well better know how to back up your assertions with convincing, relevant, links. Whether you've got a doctorate in political science from Stanford or are an 11 year old afraid to come out of your bedroom really is besides the point.

That is how it should be. If it does anything, blogging can make hash of the rhetorical fallacy of appealing to authority. One's authority as a blogger, to the extent anyone has any, comes entirely from the merit of the posts. And that is wonderful. You don't read Josh Marshall's blog because he's got a reputation as an ace reporter. You read his blog because with every post, he reports. He is actively making a reputation in a way that, say, a NY Times reporter doesn't have to. The mere act of being hired by the Times confers (even now, of course) an authoritative reputation, whether or not it is deserved. To put it into big words: At its best, blogging transmutes reified power - authority - back into something contingent. Authority is no longer a noun, but a verb. You earn your reputation with every word. It's never assumed.

And brother, do we need to stop listening to unearned authority.

In 2002, the experts in the press gave the experts in the Bush administration a free pass to market an insane, unnecessary war. It was so obviously a mistake that even a musician immediately could understand it was doomed to catastrophe. During 2002 and early '03, I went all over the world for concerts of my music. It was an exciting time, and I loved every minute of it. But there was one thing that was quite striking, wherever I went. Everyone, and I mean I everyone from cab drivers to diplomats, thought the United States had gone insane in its advocacy for an Iraq invasion. And yet, back home the experts assured us it would be a cakewalk.

A few weeks after returning from Sydney, Australia where, John Howard aside, everyone was as alarmed as I was at the impending war, I began blogging in February, 2003. I figured that, artist or no, I knew an imminent foreign policy disaster when I saw one. And to my horror, I was right. I have never wanted to be more wrong than I was about the Bush/Iraq war, but I never doubted that it would end up, more or less, where it has.

And so here I am, still blogging and hoping against hope that this country I love will no longer heed the advice of people who understand the world a lot less well than a fellow who's spent most of us life composing. It's not that I know so much, although I'm not stupid or uneducated. It's that the Bushites know so very, very little.

What the present crisis teaches us, a crisis in which the country is being led by clowns posing as experts, is that the opinions of ordinary citizens are vital to the running of a major democratic power. It's not that expertise isn't essential. Of course it is. But political expertise in a democracy must always confront the full range of public opinion in a meaningful manner. Otherwise, there lie monsters.

Today, the public discourse is so clotted and constrained, so limited to the right and far right, that it really is imperative for those of us who object to the direction the country is going to speak out, strongly and often. Not because we all deserve a prominent media role but rather in the hopes that eventually the media will be forced to broaden its coverage of political opinion to acknowledge voices like ours. Voices expert and persuasive enough to articulate alternatives to Bushism. Heaven knows we need them, and fast.

****

*When I first started to blog, I was a bit concerned about how my politics would affect my career, but didn't care that much. If anything, I care more now. By which I mean that I think it is extremely important to stand up and be counted in opposition to Bush. But I like being Tristero, it's part of who I am, and I don't see any reason to bump the guy off, any more than there's a reason to promote my music.
tristero 2/21/2006 02:33:00 AM |

Monday, February 20, 2006

 
Democrat Libre

by digby


Matt Stoller has a fiery exchange going with Hotline Blogometer and Washington Examiner opinion writer, William Buetler, about the normally navel gazing subject of the blogosphere's influence on politics. I don't have a lot to add, except to take issue with one little bit that Buetler writes in his piece:

The phrase [Vichy Democrats]was timely, punchy, and summed up the anger I saw directed against moderate and conservative Democrats.

No, no, no and no. The anger was not and is not against moderate and conservative Democrats. Paul Hackett is a conservative Democrat. It is against those who seek to either make deals with or capitulate to Republicans, particularly on issues of fundamental principle. "Vichy" is a term I don't use because I think the Republicans do such a fine job of demeaning Dems that I don't need to help them. However, it is a particular term of art that means something quite specific: to sell out your own people to the enemy.

The grassroots of the Democratic Party see something that all the establishment politicians have not yet realized: bipartisanship is dead for the moment and there is no margin in making deals. The rules have changed. When you capitulate to the Republicans for promises of something down the road you are being a fool. When you make a deal with them for personal reasons, you are selling out your party. When you use Republican talking points to make your argument you are helping the other side. When you kiss the president on the lips at the state of the union you are telling the Democratic base that we are of no interest or concern to you. This hyper-partisanship is ugly and it's brutal, but it is the way it is.

It's not "left" and "right" or "liberal," "moderate," or "conservative" that animates the grassroots. We argue some amongst ourselves on policy, of course, but that's not the rap on the establishment. It's the desire that our representatives wake up and recognise that we are in a new political era in which these designations take second place to "Democrat." That's the environment we are in whether we like it or not --- a country sharply divided by party, not ideology.

The Democratic party did everything it could to alleviate the culture war and the partisanship in the 90's by electing southern moderates to the white house and helping the Republicans pass a lot of legislation born of major compromise of Democratic principles. Nothing was good enough. The culture war raged, not on the basis of policy --- there was much in Bill Clinton's policies for a Republican to love. It was based purely on the tribal instincts of the culture warriors who insisted that liberals not only be marginalized (fair enough in politics) but that they be annihilated. They gave no quarter unless public opinion absolutely forced them to.

The grassroots believe that after all that, after moving to the right, after offering to compromise, after allowing our "red state Democrats" to run with the other side who then treated them with nothing but bad faith, now is the time for politicans to make a choice. Submit to them or stand with the resistance.


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digby 2/20/2006 04:19:00 PM |

 
What You See Is What You Get

by digby

I was just watching Bush give a speech and he said "it makes sense for the government to incent people."

I've never really subscribed to the great man theory, but I have to say that in my experience organizations do take their cues from the person at the top. When you have a president who says things this ridiculous every single day, for more than five years, I think it's safe to say that he is a boob. And his government is a perfect reflection of him: incompetent, arrogant, short-sighted, impulsive, secretive. A failure. That is the story of Bush's life. let no one ever say again that it doesn't matter who the president is becuase he'll have great people around him. Bush's government is as bad as anyone could have predicted when we saw him flub that answer about foreigh leaders back in 1999 --- he was clearly unprepared and unqualified. And he's proven it.



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digby 2/20/2006 03:18:00 PM |

 
Filling In The Blank Check

by digby


Be sure to read Glenn Greenwald's piece today about the undercurrent in DC that suggests that the Republicans aren't so sanguine about the NSA scandal accruing to their benefit after all. This is clearly becauase of the pressure coming from within, but I think that mostly has to do with Bush's unpopularity generally (as I write below.) The bottom line is that the Eunuch Caucus needs some viagra, and quick.

Glenn links to this very revealing editorial in Pat Roberts' home paper:

Many Kansans, including members of The Eagle editorial board, have long admired Sen. Pat Roberts for his plainspokenness and reputation for fair brokering of issues.

So it's troubling that Roberts, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is fast gaining the reputation in Washington, D.C., as a reliable partisan apologist for the Bush administration on intelligence and security controversies.

We hope that's not true. But Roberts' credibility is on the line. . . .

What's bothering many, though, is that Roberts seems prepared to write the Bush team a series of blank checks to conduct the war on terror, even to the point of ignoring policy mistakes and possible violations of law.

That's not oversight -- it's looking the other way.

This is Kansas we're talking about.

It's also a sign that Rovism may have run its course. His MO, after all, is to entirely dominate the party from the top down, something that only works if the "top" can wield the whip. The Cheney episode was a window into the inner workings of the white house in this respect and it's quite clear that Rove does not have the clout he once did. He couldn't control Cheney. It's going to be harder and harder for him to control this nervous congress. All lame ducks have a hard time retaining control -- a lame duck at 39% is an albatross around his party's neck.

Of course, Rove is probably a little bit distracted by certain personal matters too. And that's one very good reason to keep the pressure on. Even if we can't advance our own agenda, we can certainly help make it difficult for them to advance theirs. That's just as important to successful politics as anything else.



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digby 2/20/2006 01:21:00 PM |

 
Ombusdman On The Runway

by digby

This is rich. Julia catches Daniel Okrent, erstwhile "public editor" of the NY Times, being critical of the war coverage after he vociferously defended it in his column a while back:

He said poor press coverage lead to the Iraq war, because “in a time of war, editors being [sic] to wear epaulettes on their shoulder” and The Times' were not exceptional in jumping on the bandwagon.

I think Julia's being much to hard on poor Mr Okrent. When he was defending the media's coverage of the war, the Iraq invasion was the all the rage. Epaulettes were the new little black dress of imperialism. Sadly, it's now as out of date as stone washed jeans. He's just keeping himself on all the best invitation lists for fashion week.



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digby 2/20/2006 12:21:00 PM |

 
Institutional Apostasy

by digby

Kevin Drum has written a review of Bruce Bartlett's "Imposter" (the heretical consrevative anti-Bush tract for the Washington Monthly.

Here's an excerpt:

Put in plain terms, Bartlett's charge is simple. George W. Bush, he says on page one, is a “pretend conservative.” Philosophically, Bush actually has more in common with liberals than he does with true conservatives.

Now, there's not much question that this is overstated. Bush won't be getting an invitation to join The New York Times editorial board any time soon. Among other things, he's appointed hundreds of conservative judges, cut taxes repeatedly and dramatically, signed into law a ban on partial-birth abortions, and committed America to its biggest and costliest war of choice since Vietnam.

And yet, in a narrower but still provocative way, Bartlett makes a persuasive case. I'm a pretty conventional FDR liberal myself, but several years ago, I came to the same conclusion Bartlett did: Bush may be a Republican—boy howdy, is he a Republican—but he's not the fire-breathing ideologue of liberal legend.

Kevin may be right that Bush has not governed like a doctrinaire conservative. But what's important here is that it's not the lack of conservatism that makes a guy like Bartlett jump ship. It's the failure. As long as Bush was riding high you heard almost nothing from these people. Oh sure there was a column or two from iconoclasts like Paul Craig Roberts or the occasional jab from Pat Buchanan. But there was no real outcry over the prescription drug benefit or the steel tariffs or the deficit during the entire time Bush has been in office. Certainly the anti-conservative notion of nation building, which Bush ran on, was totally jettisoned from conservative discussion. (We are all Wilsonians now.) Conservatives supported him so enthusiastically that they frequently compared his oratory(!) to Winston Churchill's:

To a greater extent than any politician since Churchill, President Bush has set forth and defended his policies in a series of speeches that combine intellectual brilliance and philosophical gravity. Today's speech in Latvia was the latest in this series, and, like the others, it will be studied by historians for centuries to come.

This was the cult of Bush. But, as with all modern Republican presidents who become unpopular, he will be ignominiously removed from the pantheon. They did it to Nixon, they did it to Bush Sr and they are now doing it to Churchill the second. It's always the same complaint. They failed not because of their conservatism, but because they were not conservative enough. It's nonsense, of course. Even St. Reagan was no more "conservative" than the others --- highest tax increase in history, remember?

Kevin discusses this and has a great insight about why liberals loathe Bush so much:

Although the popular perception of Nixon is still that of an archconservative who infuriated liberals, Bartlett reminds us that on domestic policy Nixon routinely caved in to public opinion and betrayed his conservative principles—for example, by creating the EPA, supporting enormous increases in Social Security, and proposing a guaranteed-incomes policy. Likewise, Bush spent nearly his entire first term talking tough but then caving in with barely a whimper to any interest group that might help him win a few more precious votes in 2004. Tariffs were enacted in order to appeal to steelworkers; the Medicare bill was designed to buy the votes of the elderly; and McCain-Feingold was signed in the hope that it would provide a temporary fundraising advantage for the Republican Party. If all of these actions were precisely the opposite of what a real conservative would do, so what? As Nixon might have said, don't you know there's an election coming up?

As far as all this goes, Bartlett's argument is a good one, and the Nixon comparison even provides a neat and underappreciated explanation for why liberals hate Bush so much. After all, it's possible to respect someone with whom you have a principled disagreement, but not so easy to respect someone whose only real principle is to crush anybody who gets in his way. (Bush's alter-ego, Karl Rove, summed up this philosophy within earshot of journalist Ron Suskind when he yelled to an aide about someone who had displeased him, “We will fuck him. Do you hear me? We will fuck him. We will ruin him. Like no one has ever fucked him!”) As with Nixon, it's not really Bush's conservatism that gets liberals seething. In fact, it's just the opposite. It's precisely his lack of political principle, combined with a vengeful ruthlessness so dark it's scary, that makes liberals break out in hives.

Exactly. He's the perfect president for Limbaugh Nation (the successor to Nixonland.) But then, that's really what the modern Republican party is all about --- the big money boys and the ruthless operatives. Everybody else in the party are just dupes:

"The wackos get their information through the Christian right, Christian radio, mail, the internet and telephone trees...Simply put, we want to bring out the wackos to vote against something and make sure the rest of the public lets the whole thing slip past them." Michael Scanlon, former communications director to Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff's first lieutenant

(And by the way, so-called principled conservatives are just another brand of "wackos" to these guys.)

Rick Perlstein knows this terrain very, very well. In the course of interviewing various ideological leaders of the movement over the years he came to see that the activists and intellectuals have an amazing capacity for compartmentalization in which they quite willingly adopt the "ends justify the means" strategy of the ruthless operatives. But they are, unsurprisingly, incredibly dishonest about it. Perlstein writes:

This past year, I interviewed Richard Viguerie about conservatives and the presidential campaign. I showed him an infamous flier the Republican National Committee had willingly taken credit for, featuring a crossed-out Bible and the legend, "This will be Arkansas if you don't vote." "To do this," Viguerie told me, "it reminds me of Bush the 41st, and not just him, but other non-conservative Republicans."

Republicans are different from conservatives: that was one of the first lessons I learned when I started interviewing YAFers. I learned it making small talk with conservative publisher Jameson Campaigne, in Ottawa, Illinois, when I asked him if he golfed. He said something like: "Are you kidding? I'm a conservative, not a Republican."

But back to Viguerie's expression of same. With a couple of hours' research I was able to find a mailer from an organization that was then one of his direct-mail clients that said "babies are being harvested and sold on the black market by Planned Parenthood."

Why not cut corners like this, if you believe you are defending the unchanging ground of our changing experience? This is what many Americans of good faith seem to be hearing conservatives telling them.

It is what they are telling us. But, ofcourse, the modern Republican party is not conservative by any definition of conservatism. I'm not even sure it's ideological at all, but to the extent it is, it's radical. Yet the allegedly conservative party has enthusiastically supported a president who believes that you can wage wars, lower taxes and expand government all at the same time. That's not just radical, it's magical. And they can hardly raise their heads even today to oppose an administration that is radically expanding the police powers of the federal government. But it's starting to happen. They can adjust their principles to anything except failure. A president at 40% simply cannot be a conservative. Conservatism is, after all, supposed to be tremendously popular in this country.

Here's a little preview from the ultimate Bush worshippers, Powerline:

For reasons I don't fully understand, there is something about "leaders," especially self-appointed leaders, and most especially those who are drawn to intensive participation in organizations, that tends toward liberalism. We see this in politics all the time, of course: it is one thing to vote for conservatism, something else entirely to get it from our elected leaders.

All of which makes me especially thankful, this year, for democracy, limited government and free enterprise: the best measures yet devised to protect us from our leaders.

By the time it's all over Bush is going to be seen as a coke-sniffing, frat boy hippy by the movement conservatives. This is how they do it. And then they'll go back to doing the same things they always do --- whatever it takes to win.

"Go after 'em like a son of a bitch" Richard Nixon

"I think one of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don't encourage you to be nasty. We encourage you to be neat, obedient, loyal and faithful and all those Boy Scout words, which would be great around a campfire but are lousy in politics." Newt Gingrich

"This whole thing about not kicking someone when they are down is BS - Not only do you kick him - You kick him until he passes out - then beat him over the head with a baseball bat - then roll him up in an old rug - and throw him off a cliff into the pounding surf below!!!!!"Michael Scanlon, former communications director to Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff's first lieutenant

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digby 2/20/2006 08:35:00 AM |

Sunday, February 19, 2006

 
Conduits

by digby


Jane is admirably doing battle with the WaPo again. Deborah Howell's column today is the usual bizarre mixture of harsh theatre critic and sycophancy. I don't get it.

I remember fondly the work of Geneva Overholser who actually worked as the readers representative and honestly attempted to analyse and assess the paper's performance. Here was her take on the Lewinsky scandal (after she left the job):

“We allowed ourselves to be used by leakers, and we gave people cover — and encouraged their underhanded methods — by constantly quoting people anonymously.”

Here was Downie's take:

In the deposition story, Downie said, the Post was asking readers to trust the paper, “which is why it is very important not to make mistakes. At the moment, I’m pleased to say to readers, look at our track record. Everything has been shown to be accurate and fair.”

That, of course, was utter crap. Read this study conducted by the Committee of Concerned Journalists, about the behavior of the press during the Lewinsky scandal:

"The findings of the study, conducted by the Committee of Concerned Journalists, raise questions about whether the press always maintained adequate skepticism about its sources. There were occasions, moreover, when the press got ahead of the facts in its basic reporting. Others then used that work to engage in sometimes reckless speculation and propaganda. ... Overall, the research paints a picture of a news media culture that in breaking stories usually relied on legitimate sources and often was careful about the facts in the initial account. But even in these careful stories, the press at times tended to accept interpretations from those sources uncritically and may have had a penchant to emphasize the perspective of investigators over those being investigated. ... At other times, reporting was based on sources whose knowledge was second hand, and this occasionally got journalists into trouble. ... On occasion, the press also ferried speculation, some of which could have been construed as threats, from investigators into news accounts, raising questions about whether the press was sufficiently wary of being used by sources, especially law enforcement sources."

Now we are supposed to take the reporting by people like Susan Schmidt, a primary Republican leak recipient, at face value on the Abramoff story. Sorry, fool me once ... won't get fooled again. There is no more "trusting the paper." (Not to mention that she appears to have simply worked off the report of a dead man.)

Jane links to one terrific point that Paul Lukasiak made in her comments (which was inexplicably purged from the new WaPo comments section):

Paul said (among other things):

... I mean, personally, I stopped asking for the documents that Harris, Howell, Willis, Schmidt, and the rest of the Post claims provides proof that Jack Abramoff "directed" contributions to Democrats. When I looked into what little Howell and her cohorts did provide, I discovered that their "evidence" actually disproved their assertions. So I did further research.....and there is literally nothing which in the public record that suggests that Jack Abramoff was personally and directly involved in getting any of his clients to contribute to a single Democratic candidate. Zero. NADA. NOTHING.

Now, Howell, and Brady, and Schmidt, and Willis know this as well as I do. But the more we keep asking this question, the more likely it is that they will come up with a new "spin" on the meager facts that they do have that can indirectly tie Jack Abramoff to contributions made to Democratic politicians. Of course, those "ties" are no more solid than the "ties" that connect Jack Abramoff to the 9-11 attacks because some of the terrorists visited a casino owned by Abramoff.

If Susan Schmitt and the Post wanted to build a circumstantial case implicating Abramoff with the 9-11 attacks, she could do so. If Schmitt and the Post wanted to tie Jack Abramoff to Mafia hit men involved in the murder of the former owner of his casino, she could do so. But Schmitt and the Post have decided to tie Abramoff to the Democratic Party --- with the same level of circumstantial and indirect evidence the Post could use to tie Abramoff to the 9-11 attacks and a mafia hit.

After everything they did during Lewinsky, they are back at it again without missing a beat. To make such assumptions about Abramoff's "ties" to Democrats truly is not much different than tying Abramoff to the 9-11 attacks. And in this case there is evidence of the opposite being true. The tribes had long been Democratic constituents yet gave less to Democrats than Republicans once Abramoff began representing them. Abramoff was a long time Republican operative. There is documentary evidence that Abramoff was frustrated with his clients for failing to do everything he told them to do.

As Paul points out, the only documentary evidence ever used to back up the claims of the Post and elsewhere that Abramoff "directed" funds is the fact that funds went to Democrats. That is meaningless circumstantial nonsense.

Until there is something more substantial on which to base this claim of Abramoff "directing" funds, it is nothing but rank speculation. Susan Schmidt (who actually got an award for this nearly plagiarized coverage!) is particularly not credible on any speculative reporting. I simply do not trust her unless all the facts and all the sources are on the record. Her history requires it.

Pounding the Washington Post on this issue is a good idea. We may find that Abramoff did personally direct some money to Democrats. But it is outrageous that they continue to assert this as fact when they have none. If bloggers "look bad" somewhere down the road that's a chance we'll have to take. The Post "looks bad" right now and they should have to explain why they are continuing to assert something for which they can offer no proof.


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digby 2/19/2006 04:04:00 PM |

 
Teaching Them A Lesson

by digby


I got a very interesting trackback from "Right Thinking From The Left Coast" to my post "haters vs haters" that was unfortunately zapped when blogger deleted posts and comments.

Here's an excerpt:

Sully’s got an interesting post up about how the left is more hateful than the right. First read this post, then this one. In the second post Sully links to this leftie blogger who disagrees, saying the right is more hateful.

[...]

In support of his assertion of Limbaugh’s “hatred” he offers this quote.

I said at the conclusion of previous hours—part of me that likes this. And some of you might say, “Rush, that’s horrible. Peace activists taken hostage.” Well, here’s why I like it. I like any time a bunch of leftist feel-good hand-wringers are shown reality.

[...]

Okay, a few comments here, if I may. I’ll preface my remarks by stating that I’m not a regular Limbaugh listener, though since Howard Stern has gone off the air I have found that I’ve tuned in to him a lot more during my ten minute morning drive. I’ll also stipulate that you could very reasonably make the argument that Michael Savage and Ann Coulter speak hatred. But Limbaugh? He’s always struck me as being provocative and opinionated, but I’ve never heard anything from him that I would consider “hatred.”

Take the quote above, which the leftie blogger has taken totally out of context. He’s not cheering the fact that people have been kidnapped. What he’s saying is that he likes the fact that, because of their own actions, these “peace” activists are being forced to deal with the consequences of their own stupid beliefs. It’s like when you have a guy who makes a living sticking his head into the mouths of alligators, and the alligator chomps down on his head. Can anyone really look at the guy with sympathy? He voluntarily stuck his head into the mouth of an alligator. Would it be “hateful” for someone like me to come along and say, “See? This is why you shouldn’t stick your head into an alligator’s mouth.” So when some raving moonbat “peace” activist assumes a haughty air of moral superiority and goes to where the Islamists are, and then the Islamists capture them and hold them for ransom, it’s not hateful at all to then say, “See? This is what your lofty ideals of peace get you.”

There is nothing hateful about enjoying the suffering of other people when that suffering is due to their own stupidity. We do this all the time. Some dumbass climbs an electricity tower and gets electrocuted. He had to climb over fifty signs warning him of the danger, telling him to keep out, yet he did it anyway. Most pragmatic people would say, “Let this be a lesson to everyone else.” I remember a story a few years back about a protest over a ban on BASE jumping off Half Dome here in California. The park service banned it because it was unsafe. To demonstrate how safe it was a bunch of jumpers climbed up there and began jumping off. One of the jumpers leaped off the edge, her chute failed to open, and she plunged to hear death. The less on to be learned here is that BASE jumping is indeed unsafe, and those who engage in it run the very real risk of dying from it. Such is the case with the peace activists.

I had a friend once a few years ago, a die hard leftie, an admitted capital-S socialist. We were discussing the situation in the Middle East, and I referred to the Islamists as our enemies.

[...]

He simply refused to recognize the fact that the Islamists would hate him simply by virtue of being who and what he was. He honestly believed that, if he had the chance, he could convince the Islamists that he was not their enemy, that they could peacefully coexist with his kind. He steadfastly refused to believe in the concept of enemies. The peace activists suffer from the same delusion. So, when people on the right say “These people hate you and will kill you,” and the lefties subsequently get kidnapped, how is this substantively different from a guy who voluntarily sticks his head into an alligator’s mouth and expects nothing bad to happen to him?

I'll leave it up to you to decide whether it's hateful to enjoy the suffering of others regardless of how "stupid" they are. (Psychologists would call it sociopathic.) Let's just say that I think it's cold and inhuman and leave it at that.

But there is a leap of logic here that's worth exploring. If it is true that this suffering and death serves as a sort of teachable moment, we should also "kind of like" the beheadings of the other civilians captured in Iraq and Pakistan. They are dead at the hands of the same people who are teaching those peace activists a lesson. And they too were told that it is dangerous to do what they did and they did it anyway.They jumped off the same cliff as the peace activists. Of course they did it for different reasons. One did it purely for money. Another lived there for years working for Lockheed. One did it to tell "a story." Another was there for decades doing humanitarian work. Should the lesson we take from their deaths be that they deserved what they got because they were too stupid to know that they might be killed?

Do soldiers deserve to die forbeing soft and doing good deeds in a violent war zone?

"When he got to Iraq, one captain was telling us that you were trained not to get out of your vehicle," said his father, James McGaugh of Springdale. "He said he looked over and Dustin was out giving candy to a bunch of kids."

Their commander in chief's stated motivation is to "help the Iraqi people" because "freedom is the Almighty's gift to each person in this world." How earnest and naive is that? Perhaps he needs to be taught a lesson about war and killing and violence too.

These enjoyable teachable moments get complicated, don't they? You really have to delve into people's minds to be able to figure out whether it's ok to enjoy their suffering or become enraged. Peace activists are easy. The right knows that they are putting their hands into the fire and deserve to get burned so they'll understand that being a peace activist in a war zone is stupid. They can't help but "kind of like it." The kidnapping and beheading of the kid who went over to build satellite towers, on the other hand, made everyone crazy with anger. But it certainly appears that he quite stupidly put his head into the alligator's mouth for no good reason at all. And the soldier who gets killed because he gives candy to children --- well, he's a hero, isn't he?

It's a good thing the right doesn't believe in moral relativism or they might really get confused.


BTW: They are still threatening to kill the four Christian peace activists.


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digby 2/19/2006 03:42:00 PM |

 
"The Beltway's Madwoman of Chaillot*

by digby


You really have to wonder who is ever going to be dumb enough to ever hire Mary Matalin again? This shooting mess was clearly her deal and she couldn't have fucked it up worse than she did. She couldn't handle her client and she's still out there spinning like a top --- and badly --- when she should just shut the hell up. What a fun, fun day it was on Press the Meat.

Crooks and Liars has the full catastrophe on his web-site. Wolcott documents the strange facial expressions of the Madwoman of Chaillot.

But I haven't heard anyone comment on Paul Gigot, GOP good ole boy who apparently lives somewhere in rural Nebraska:

Not looking at this, by the way, David, from—you know, I didn’t speak to anybody from the White House or the vice president’s office all week on this. It was looking at it from outside the Beltway and saying where did this story stand on the relative scale of importance? Looked to me to be a human tragedy, the vice president made a mistake, it was probably in not disclosing it himself, letting someone else do it. But that’s a relatively minor mistake. I think scandal standards are declining in Washington if this becomes another big, huge scandal which this is supposed to be a metaphor for for governing, a bunker of secrecy which is, I think, what some of the Democrats in the Senate were saying. This is a metaphor for the way this administration operates. I just don’t think that’s true. And so I think mockery was appropriate.

[...]

Well, I think—well, let’s make some distinctions between stories that really matter ...

Yes, let's do. For instance, let's remember what it was like back when standards for scandals were much higher:

"Mr. Blumenthal’s [grand jury] testimony reveals a president doing much more than hiding an affair. He was using the powers of his office to create a false story that would destroy Ms. Lewinsky... Mr. Clinton was telling his most fervent supporter that his president was the victim of lies and a gross injustice. Wouldn’t Mr. Blumenthal want to tell everyone in the White House and around the world why his hero was innocent? If Mr. Clinton didn’t want his chief political communicator to broadcast this phony tale, he could have said so. There’s no record he did... In her interview with House managers on Sunday, Ms. Lewinsky seemed surprised when they asked her about Mr. Blumenthal’s testimony and the ‘stalker’ line. Maybe this explains the furious Democratic opposition even to videotaping her testimony."

Now that's a scandal with standards. About issues that really matter.

Gigot, I recall, was, at one time, none too pleased with those "outside the beltway" who didn't seem to be too interested in impeaching the "evil" Bill Clinton. He didn't think the American people's standards were high enough:

The good news is that Mr. Hyde can finally step back and laugh about such nonsense, which he did in an interview yesterday. With impeachment ending, the 74-year-old chairman reflected on the duty he never wanted, his errors along the way and the meaning of Senate acquittal. He's more cheerful than he has a right to be.

"I had a naive, utopian hope that as we documented the record, people who paid only passing attention would come to the conclusion that this was serious," he says. "That just never happened."

Like many others, he isn't sure why. "I'm a little bewildered by the American people," says the World War II Navy man. "I just don't know if our standards have got so low that this behavior is tolerated." He acknowledges that "this was a culture war," and maybe the 1960s' generation "revels in this guy's success. I don't know."

One culprit Mr. Hyde is certain of is modern polling, which he now believes can be politically self-fulfilling. Snapshot polls are taken and then echoed by politicians and the media until their biases harden into concrete, if not wisdom. "Nobody wants to be the oddball," he says.

Mr. Hyde won't say so, but he also wasn't helped by Ken Starr or his fellow GOP leaders. Mr. Starr waited too long to cut a deal with Monica Lewinsky, declined to indict anyone in the case, then dumped a referral on Congress that was only about Monica's case and two months before an election at that.

"You're right, we got sex, and that was the least viable topic for us to run on," he concedes, after praising Mr. Starr for his perseverence.

Gigot won the Pulitzer prize for that. And it wasn't for fiction.

Everybody let Gigot and Hyde down. The people, Ken Starr, Newt Gingrich and the Republicans in the senate --- they all failed to remove the evil Clinton from office. Now Gigot is on television complaining that our standards for scandals have been lowered.

How do these people manage to live normal lives with this lack of self awareness?



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digby 2/19/2006 12:42:00 PM |

 
Genius Over Genius

by digby

The New York Times

Should the composer Richard Einhorn's "Voices of Light" be heard as an oratorio that accompanies the 1928 silent film classic "The Passion of Joan of Arc"? Or is it the film, by the Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer, that accompanies Mr. Einhorn's 80-minute musical work?

That is the question raised by Mr. Einhorn's ambitious score. In any event, the audience that packed the Winter Garden in Lower Manhattan on Thursday night for a free performance seemed too swept away by "Voices of Light" to care about its category.

Presented as part of the World Financial Center's Arts + Events series, "Voices of Light" brought together the Ensemble Sospeso, a contemporary-music group beefed up here to an orchestra of 37, the New Amsterdam Singers, four fine vocal soloists, and Anonymous 4, the officially disbanded early-music vocal quartet, which reunited for this performance. As intended, Mr. Einhorn's work was performed while the film that inspired it was screened.

"Voices of Light" has been performed more than 100 times around the world over the last 10 years, providing a nice income source for Mr. Einhorn, who has also been a record producer. If nothing else, the composer deserves thanks for introducing new audiences to Dreyer's masterpiece, which was nearly lost.

Shortly after its premiere, the film was destroyed in a fire. Though shattered, Dreyer reconstructed an acceptable version using negatives from outtakes. Incredibly, the replacement film was lost in a second fire. For decades the work was known only through various bastardized versions. Then, in 1981, as Mr. Einhorn explained to the audience, an intact copy of the original film was discovered in a janitor's closet in a mental hospital in Oslo. When Mr. Einhorn saw this wonderfully restored print, he was moved to compose his score.

"Voices of Light" has a libretto of Latin and French texts assembled by Mr. Einhorn. Anonymous 4 sing quotations of Joan's words from the transcript of her trial for blasphemy in 1431. The chorus and soloists sing a patchwork of writings from medieval mystics, mostly women. Mr. Einhorn's sensitive score deftly shifts styles from evocations of neomedieval counterpoint to wistful modal murmurings over droning pedal tones, from bursts of Minimalistic repetitions to moments of piercing modern harmony.

While never getting in the way, the music heightens the impact of this pathbreaking film, which tells the story of Joan's trial at the hands of French clerics who supported the occupying English forces in 15th-century France. Most of the characters are shot in discomfiting close-ups. You see the faces of officious and accusing priests, with warts, creviced skin, bad teeth and bulbous noses. You are riveted by the face of Joan (Renée Maria Falconetti), which conveys an eerie mix of wide-eyed fear and delirious elation.

David Hattner conducted a calmly authoritative performance that featured Susan Narucki (soprano), Janice Meyerson (mezzo-soprano), Mark Bleeke (tenor) and Kevin Deas (bass) as the vocal soloists. The score can be heard on a Sony Classical CD. But ideally this music should be experienced as a live complement to Dreyer's stunning film.

The performance was taped for broadcast on the WNYC-FM (93.9) show "New Sounds" on March 2.

I thought you all should see this because I imagine most of you don't know that the brilliant "tristero" is also the brilliant Richard Einhorn.

If you haven't had the opportunity to see this film on DVD, accompanied by Richard's amazing score, then I urge you to get it. It's not like any silent film you've ever seen --- and of course it's not actually silent. The score speaks more eloquently than any dialog short of Shakespeare could match.

The film and score are great artistic achievements, but they are also extremely interesting for their sociological insight. Based as it is on the transcripts of Joan's trial for heresy, I never thought this film would have such resonance to events in my own lifetime --- but it does. Same as it ever was.



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digby 2/19/2006 10:50:00 AM |

 
"Insane"

by digby


Blogger ate the comments below, so I'm going to post this in response to those who felt I had gone "insane" and they would never read this blog again because I said "Bill Clinton was the best Republican president in my lifetime."

First of all, it was not meant as a slur. Perhaps I should have added that he was also the best Democratic president in my lifetime, which he was, but that was not my point. I'm a great fan of Clinton's and voted for him happily both times.

"Republicanism" is not inherently evil. Before we became ridiculously polarized by the right wing ideologues, it was common to split tickets in this country. I've done it myself a time or two and I consider myself to be a hard core liberal. And there were times that if forced to vote for certain Democrats back in the day there's no way I could have done it. A whole bunch of racist assholes used to be Democrats. The lablels are only useful up to a point.

The fact is that Bill Clinton governed in the only way he could with an out of control GOP congress and a hostile press: as a moderate centrist. All successful presidents pragmatically survey the political terrain and move forward the best way they can and Clinton was admirably successful at getting things done through a centrist triangulation strategy. I'm not criticizing him for it. I'm amazed that the man was able to pass any legislation at all. It's a testament to his gifts that his presidency wasn't a total failure considering what he had to work with.

I'm a Democrat and always have been. To call me a Naderite is absurd. But in my lifetime Republicanism wasn't always a dirty word, which is why I always couch my extreme criticism with the words "modern Republicans." Looking back, Dwight Eisenhower was a good president who moved this country forward in ways that would make any modern progressive proud. That tradition of Republicanism is good for this country. I only wish we had some today. It is in that sense that I called Bill Clinton the best Republican president in my lifetime.



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digby 2/19/2006 09:38:00 AM |

 
Blogger ate comments again. Sorry.

Political Religion

by digby

Following up on my earlier post, I just realized that Andrew Sullivan entitled his piece "Religious Left" which is very interesting. This latest dialog began with Glenn Greenwald's great post earlier this week in which he proclaimed modern Republicanism a Bush cult. It was widely read and discussed on the right as well as the left blogopshere. I disagreed a little bit with Glenn's analysis and called it a Republican Authoritarian Cult because I can already see beginning to detach from Bush and prepare the ground for whoever the next object of their authoritarian passion turns out to be.

The other day Elizabeth Bumiller did an article on Bruce Bartlett, who was portrayed as being "out in the cold;"

What happens if you're a Republican commentator and you write a book critical of President George W. Bush that gets you fired from your job at a conservative think tank?

For starters, no other conservative institution rushes in with an offer for your superb analytical skills.

"Nobody will touch me," said Bruce Bartlett, the author of the forthcoming "Impostor: Why George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy." He added, "I think I'm just kind of radioactive at the moment."

Bartlett, a domestic policy aide at the White House in the Reagan administration and a deputy assistant Treasury secretary under the first President Bush, talked last week at his suburban Washington home about his dismissal, his book and a growing disquiet among conservatives about Bush.

Although "Impostor" is flamboyant in its anti-Bush sentiments - on the first page Bartlett calls Bush a "pretend conservative" and compares him to Richard M. Nixon, "a man who used the right to pursue his agenda" - its basic message reflects the frustration of many conservatives who say that Bush has been on a five-year government spending binge. Like them, Bartlett is particularly upset about Bush's Medicare prescription drug plan, which is expected to cost more than $700 billion over the next decade.

He is unhappy, too, with the president's education and campaign finance bills and his proposal to overhaul the nation's immigration laws, which many Republicans call a dressed-up amnesty plan. The book, to be published by Doubleday on Feb. 28, also criticizes the White House for "an anti-intellectual distrust of facts and analysis" and an obsession with secrecy.

"The Clinton people were vastly more open and easier to deal with and, quite frankly, a lot better on the issues," Bartlett said in the interview, in the kitchen of his pared-down modern house on a street of big new homes in Great Falls. Bartlett hastened to add that although he admired Clinton's economic policies, that did not mean he had changed sides.

"I haven't switched to the Democratic Party," he said. "I wrote this for Republicans."

Bartlet's true apostasy is in saying that Clinton was better on the issues. (I certainly would agree that Clinton was the best Republican president of my lifetime.) As for the rest of his criticsm, he's just laying the groundwork for the eventual purge of Bushism --- a purge that is already gaining steam.


Bill Schneider had this report today on CNN:

SCHNEIDER (voice-over): Cracks are beginning to appear in President Bush's conservative base. One leading conservative characterizes the view of Bush this way.

DAVID KEENE, AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE UNION: We love the guy, but...

SCHNEIDER: But what? Well, consider this. Nearly half of self- described conservatives say President Bush has done something to make them angry. Like what? Many conservatives have problems with the Bush administration's expansive view of government. They're outraged by the deficit.

REP. MIKE PENCE (R), INDIANA: It's simply morally wrong for us to allow the expansion of government and pass that bill along to our children and grandchildren.

SCHNEIDER: This week, an all-Republican congressional committee examining the government's response to Hurricane Katrina issued a scathingly critical report. REP. TOM DAVIS (R), VIRGINIA: The president or the secretary or Andy Card or someone who'd say, "Do you have everything you need?" And he'd say yes. But there was no supervision. And they were just not engaged.

SCHNEIDER: President Bush's immigration policies have angered many conservatives.

REP. TOM TANCREDO (R), COLORADO: And if the president of the United States really wanted to, he could secure the border tomorrow.

SCHNEIDER: Some conservatives are asking, should the U.S. be engaged in nation building in Iraq?

KEENE: Part of the base belief of conservatives is that the people in Washington have neither the confidence nor the ability to tell the people of Peoria, Illinois, how to order their lives. It therefore sort of seems inconsistent to say that, "Well, we may not be able to do that, but we do know how to organize societies halfway across the globe."

George W Bush has won two elections with the unquestioning support of conservatives. In his first term he made it quite obvious that he was not a conservative in any sense that I understood conservative. From out of control spending to federalizing education to nation building and messianic foreign policy, he has simply not been conservative by any common definition of the term. None of that stopped conservatives from virtually worshipping the man. It is only now that he has become unpopular and his policies are failing that his brand of conservatism is being criticized on the right. And he's being criticized for being

George W. Bush will not achieve a place in the Republican pantheon. Conservatism cannot fail, it can only be failed. (And a conservative can only fail because he is too liberal.)

Dave Neiwert chimed in on this discussion yesterday and wrote a very intriguing post in which he posits that the modern Republican party might more aptly be called a political religion, which, as it happens, is an acknowledged sociological designation. He writes:

I wonder if there isn't another way of framing this that can help progressives get a handle on what we're dealing with. Particularly, I wonder if it wouldn't help to think of the discrete conservative movement as a political religion.

Here's the Wikepedia entry, which is actually rather accurate on the subject:

In the terminology of some scholars working in sociology, a political religion is a political ideology with cultural and political power equivalent to those of a religion, and often having many sociological and ideological similarities with religion. Quintessential examples are Marxism and Nazism, but totalitarianism is not a requirement (for example neo-liberalism can be analysed as a political religion).

... The term political religion is a sociological one, drawing on the sociological aspects of religion which can be often be found in certain secular ideologies. A political religion occupies much the same psychological and sociological space as a theistic religion, and as a result it often displaces or coopts existing religious organisations and beliefs; this is described as a "sacralisation" of politics. However, although a political religion may coopt existing religious structures or symbolism, it does not itself have any independent spiritual or theocratic elements - it is essentially secular, using religion only for political purposes, if it does not reject religious faith outright.

Obviously, this movement embraces religious faith outright, which may give it certain advantages over more secular political religions, since it so readily taps into ordinary people's deeply held beliefs and exploits them.

Nonetheless, when we begin to run down the various aspects of political religions, the resemblance becomes even sharper:

Key memetic qualities often (not all are always strongly present) shared by religion (particularly cults) and political religion include:

Structural

-- differentiation between self and other, and demonisation of other (in theistic religion, the differentiation usually depends on adherence to certain dogmas and social behaviours; in political religion, differentiation may be on grounds such as race, class, or nationality instead)

-- a charismatic figurehead, with messianic tendencies; if figurehead is deceased, powerful successors;

-- strong, hierarchical organisational structures

-- a desire to control education, in order to ensure the security of the system

Belief

-- a coherent belief system for imposing symbolic meaning on the external world, with an emphasis on security through purity;

-- an intolerance of other ideologies of the same type

-- a degree of utopianism and the aim of radically transforming society into an end-state (an end of history)

-- the belief that the ideology is in some way natural or obvious, so that (at least for certain groups of people) those who reject it are in some way "blind"

-- a genuine desire on the part of individuals to convert others to the cause

-- a willingness to place ends over means -- in particular, a willingness to use violence

-- fatalism -- a belief that the ideology will inevitably triumph in the end

David Brooks says that the left is Stalinist. I assume that's what Sullivan's title refers to as well. Communism is often considered a secular religion, although that clearly underestimates the huge power of state coercion. If the American left is Stalinist, it certainly has been extremely ineffective. After all, conservatism now dominates all three branches of government. And I can't help but find this argument amusing considering that the primary critique of Democrats is that we have no convictions and are constantly fighting amongst ourselves. We are remarkably undisciplined totalitarians.

In one way both parties share the same religion: an all-American obsession with winning. In this I actually envy the right. When they fail, as everyone inevitably does at times, they don't lose their faith. Indeed, failure actually reinforces it.
Liberals, on the other hand, have nothing like that. We hate our leaders for failing us. It's a personal thing --- as if we are in a bad marriage and we have lost all respect for our partners. But then that's how most Americans are these days. You are a winner or a loser and nobody wants to be associated with a loser. The Republicans are smart enough to rid themselves of failure by always being able to convince themselves that the failure had nothing to do with their belief system. It must be very nice to live in a world in which you can never, ever be wrong.


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digby 2/19/2006 09:23:00 AM |

 
Haters vs Haters

by digby


This week, the issue of which side of the political spectrum is more hateful is back and it's all I can do to stop myself from crawling back under the covers and staying there. Alleged apostates Andrew Sullivan and Marshall Wittman both tut-tut the barbaric behavior of the left today, saying that it is actually much worse than the unpleasantness they sometimes hear from the right.

I don't know how many ways you can say this but I'll try again: hatefulness is not confined to any particular political persuasion --- but there is only one side that makes a fucking profit at it.

How many hateful liberal books accusing Republicans of treason, slander, being unhinged or ruining the world are there out there? A couple? Probably. But let's just say that the market for accusing political opposition of capital crimes, indulging in fantasies about their extinction and musing about how someone should be killed as a way of sending a message to others has leaned heavily on the right wing side of the equation for decades.

Which liberal radio stars are given 250 million dollar contracts to talk every day about how liberals are in cahoots with al Qaeda or indulge in hate-filled rants about hurricane victims and gays? None? Right.

Which liberal TV News nework features an exclusive line-up of outwardly liberal pundits who publicly accuse conservatives of giving aid and comfort to the enemy? None? Check.

Sullivan says this:

Yes, I get homophobic hate mail from the right all the time; and many conservative blogs have blackballed or slimed or smeared me in various ways. But that's, sadly, what you get for being provocative and opinionated on the web. Bottom line: Hugh Hewitt is not as hateful as Eric Alterman, as any reader can see for themselves.

Now, I'm not going to even bother arguing the relative hatefulness of Eric Alterman and Hugh Hewitt because that's a false equivalence. Let's stipulate for the sake of argument that Eric Alterman is hateful. As hateful as a lefty can get. And let's for the sake of argument assume that he's more hateful than Hugh Hewitt. I'll even say, for the sake of argument, that he's more hateful than all the writers of the Weekly Standard put together. He's a real son of a bitch.

But can anyone claim with a straight face that he's more hateful than Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter? Is he more hateful than Michael Savage, Glen Beck, Bill o'Reilly and Sean Hannity? And, more importantly, can anyone claim that he has even a modicum of the influence these people have?

Ann Coulter was just cheered deliriously by the young conservatives assembled at the CPAC convention, where the vice president, the majority leader of the senate and many other powerful leaders of the Republican party were assembled. The same convention features bumper stickers that says things like:

"Happiness is Hillary's face on a milk carton"

The right wing has developed an entire industry of hate, where people like Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh are extremely well compensated and feted with adulation and esteem by the most powerful people in the political establishment. When Rush said something so bizarre and outrageous (about the revolting treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib) that even the mainstream media woke up for a moment or two to comment, the National Review raced to defend him:

Rush is one of those rare acquaintances who can be defended against an assault challenging his character without ever knowing the "facts." We trust his good judgment, his unerring decency, and his fierce loyalty to the country he loves and to the courageous young Americans who defend her.

This is the same man who said:

I said at the conclusion of previous hours -- part of me that likes this. And some of you might say, "Rush, that's horrible. Peace activists taken hostage." Well, here's why I like it. I like any time a bunch of leftist feel-good hand-wringers are shown reality.

For the record, notorious leftist hatemonger Eric Alterman has never celebrated the deaths of political rivals. Nor does any leftist hatemonger have a 250 million dollar media contract to celebrate the deaths of his political rivals. I can only assume that this is because there just isn't enough of a market to support such a thing. Before getting themselves in a tizzy about the hateful left, perhaps Wittman and Sullivan should ask why that might be so.



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digby 2/19/2006 09:22:00 AM |

Thursday, February 16, 2006

 
Scary Visions

by digby


I'm a little bit under the weather today. I think I'm hallucinating. I just tuned in to MSNBC and thought I saw a segment about ski-jumping called "Tucker In Training" featuring Tucker Carlson in a skin tight purple and yellow ski suit with a pin striped shirt under it.

I must be feverish. That can't be true, can it?



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digby 2/16/2006 02:23:00 PM |

 
H v. H

by tristero

Via Peter Daou's excellent blog of blogs , which of course includes brilliant original posting of his own, I learned that a rightwing blog posted a link to Hugh Hewitt's interview with Helen Thomas. I suggest clicking on the mp3 link and taking a listen. The wingers obviously think that Hewitt got the better of Thomas. I truly don't hear it that way and to my mind, the transcript gives a skewed notion of the way the conversation flowed. But go and judge for yourself.

In any event, I'd like to ask you about one thing, out of many that occur to me, and "who won" is not that central a question to my immediate interest here.

I'd like to suggest that it would be very instructive for liberals and Dems to look at the rhetorical strategies used by Hewitt. I'd like us to trace how a discussion that began with a simple, easy question about what Thomas thought about the vice president shooting a 78 year old man morphed into Hewitt trying to set up a faux confrontation which - while looking obviously contrived to us - was designed to make Hewitt's dittoheads think that Thomas had been reluctantly forced to concede that Saddam was an evil man.

I think we can all agree that there seems little direct causal connection between the two subjects - unless one gets snarky, and that won't accomplish much. So really, how did Hewitt move the conversation to that point? What were the strategies he used? What did Thomas do in response? Where did Hewitt mess up? Where did Thomas? How did they recover? What do you think Hewitt's point was? Did he make that point - not to you, but to his dittoheads?

Most importantly, what can the next person who's not a card-carrying Bushite learn from this in order to make it next to impossible for Hewitt to find any red meat from using these kinds of cheap tactics? I am certain this is how Hewitt interviews all those he suspects of card-carrying liberalism no matter what the topic. Knowing exactly what he does should suggest numerous ways to make it all but impossible for him to get away with it.

Not that Thomas did poorly; as I said, I think she did quite well. But I'm curious: how can the next person do even better? What would they need to do? Also, please note that I'm NOT suggesting that a single position be changed to accommodate a clown like Hewitt (or any other conservative). I am asking, "How can the next potential victim best turn Hewitt's cynical game against him?"

I think it is more than possible to do so. This guy is a piker and I think a little bit of careful thought could make him look like a buffoon even to his own followers. Yes, folks: Even if those bias studies are right and people tend to excuse hypocrisy in those they believe in, I think it is more than possible to turn Hugh Hewitt into a joke in the eyes of the people who think he's right.

And I think it would be a very good idea to do so.
tristero 2/16/2006 08:41:00 AM |

 
Herbert's Right. Dammit.

by tristero

I didn't post my suspicions, but My Smart Spouse will confirm that within minutes of first hearing the news that Cheney had shot a 78 year old man in the face, I suspected there was drinking involved. And unfortunately, I was right. This is a genuine catastrophe, because it means that Bob Herbert's call for Cheney's resignation is, as I see it, exactly right. Damn, damn, damn!

If it happens - and I suspect the odds are about 60/40 that it won't, which are lousy odds - then one of two things will happen. Either Bush will play the GOP loyalty card and we'll have Vice-President Rice, which will be extremely bad for Democrats for, oh, about the next geologically significant aeon or two. Or if he's feeling personally insecure, Bush will appoint a far right lunatic in the Santorum mold, confident that no one would dare to impeach Bush even if, somehow, Democrats manage to win majorities in the House and Senate.

Either way, it's bad news. Not only for Democrats but for the entire country. True, Cheney is bad news already. But never underestimate Bush's ability to make an awful situation far worse.

On the other hand...I've got a thought! Let's see where this leads:

Maybe Bush could really show he has the country's best interests at heart and just go for it! I'm saying, if he knows Cheney's resignation is inevitable, why not go for extra credit and resign along with him? And take the rest of the administration along as well?

Hmm... Well, to be honest, I do see maybe a few practical problems with that - like how to avoid a President Hastert, for one. And the worldwide collapse of confidence in the US, which would probably trigger a worldwide economic panic of mega-tsunami proportions.

Big deal. As George Packer might say, Hey, y'never know, it just might work. Let's give it a shot. So I say:

Resign, Mr. Cheney, and take the whole damn administration along with you.

(Note to rightwingers and other humor-impaired readers: Everything from "On the other hand" is satire. Anyone caught taking it seriously will be peppered with pixels as soon as I put down my brewski. However, I am quite serious about this: Cheney must resign.)
tristero 2/16/2006 05:59:00 AM |

Wednesday, February 15, 2006

 
Hiding From The Breathalyzer

by digby


He was drinking all day:

Cheney said he drank a beer with lunch the day of the shooting, according to his interview. The shooting took place about 5:50 p.m.

Armstrong had previously told CNN that she never saw Cheney or Whittington "drink at all on the day of the shooting until after the accident occurred, when the vice president fixed himself a cocktail back at the house."

Lee Anne McBride of Cheney's office referred CNN to a statement from the Kenedy County Sheriff's Office Monday, which said that the investigation "reveals that there was no alcohol or misconduct involved in the incident."

That's not exactly convincing when the secret service "made an appointment" with the sheriff's office for the next day and ran off the deputy who showed up to interview Cheney at the ranch.


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digby 2/15/2006 02:34:00 PM |

 
She's So Relieved

by digby


It's just so awful when the kewl kidz have to report icky things about Republicans. It makes everybody feel so darned uncomfortable!

Candy Crowley just said:

"Assuming that nothing else comes up, I suspect this fades."

Now if Cheney had received fellatio and hidden it from his wife instead of drinking beer while on medication, shooting a man at close range and hiding it from the public, the story might not fade. Not because they would be concerned about his personal sex life, of course. It would be because of what it said about the his character.


On the other hand Jack Cafferty just slammed Cheney for running to his little friends at Fox News for his softball interview. "Talk about seeking a safe haven..."

Of course as one of my readers reminded me, Cheney has officially endorsed FoxNews:

Vice President Cheney endorsed the Fox News Channel during a conference call last night with tens of thousands of Republicans who were gathered across the country to celebrate a National Party for the President Day organized by the Bush-Cheney campaign.

Fox News styles its coverage as "fair and balanced," but it has a heavy stable of conservative commentators that makes it a favorite around the White House. It is unusual for a president or vice president to single out a commercial enterprise for public praise.

The comment came as Cheney took questions from supporters at 5,245 parties that were held in 50 states to energize grass-roots volunteers building a precinct-by-precinct army for President Bush's campaign.

"It's easy to complain about the press -- I've been doing it for a good part of my career," Cheney said. "It's part of what goes with a free society. What I do is try to focus upon those elements of the press that I think do an effective job and try to be accurate in their portrayal of events. For example, I end up spending a lot of time watching Fox News, because they're more accurate in my experience, in those events that I'm personally involved in, than many of the other outlets."

Good girl Candy. Bow down to the administration AND your competition.



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digby 2/15/2006 01:08:00 PM |

 
"I'm The Guy Who Pulled The Trigger"

by digby


ReddHedd's doing the play by play of the Fox interview with Cheney. He keeps saying it was the worst day of his life. He'll never foreget it, blah, blah, blah. Very touching, I'm sure.

In fact he was so upset that he went back to the ranch and sat down for dinner.

But he was very worried while he ate so that's ok. In fact, he was so busy worrying and eating that he couldn't even make some calls to DC to have his press office inform the public.


And then there's this. Jesus, these people are unbelievable.

Krauthamer (from yesterday):

Cheney knew he would get a lot of heat for withholding this, and I think he did the manly thing. He decided, "I'll take the heat, but I'm going to give my host and my friend, who just got shot, a half a day of reprieve." Anyway, it's a minor issue, and to make it into this -- I mean, it was a zoo at the White House yesterday. I think the public had the right reaction. It was disproportionate and unseemly.

Well yes. Blow job and semen stains are one thing --- the country has a right to know all the details of the president's sex life. But when the vice president shoots an old man in the face and then covers it up for 24 hours, it's nobody's business but his own. All this attention is disproportionate and unseemly.

Update: ReddHedd says:

Hume says Cheney said he had a beer at lunch -- that had been hours earlier -- no one was drinking. Went back to ranch, took a break for a few hours, and then went back out hunting at 3 pm. Says it was out of his system by the time they went back out. Cheney told Hume he had BBQ and a beer a lunch. (That should be an interesting point of discussion.)

OH mygoodness. I've always heard that alcoholand guns do not mix. But certianly a man who had two DUI's and had his driver's license suspended --- back in the days when you had to be really, really drunk to get popped --- now admits to drinking on the day he shot an old man in the face. And he didn't let law enforcement talk to him until the next day.

I know it's unseemly to bring this up but shouldn't there be at least a teeny-tiny little investigation about this now? People are mouldering in jail for decades for drinking and injuring people with guns.



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digby 2/15/2006 12:13:00 PM |

 
Leaders Lead

by digby


So it looks like the Judiciary Committee is going to do the big el-foldo on the NSA spying scandal and some Democrats in the congress are going to simply vote with the Republicans make the president's illegal program legal and call it a day. Once again their losing strategists have misunderstood why Americans believe that they are weak on national security. Indeed, if they capitulate on this they will have reinforced that image much more than if they oppose it outright.

This article by Walter Shapiro on Salon discusses what is driving some Dems to play down the NSA spying issue:

Typical was my lunch discussion earlier this week with a ranking Democratic Party official. Midway through the meal, I innocently asked how the "Big Brother is listening" issue would play in November. Judging from his pained reaction, I might as well have announced that Barack Obama was resigning from the Senate to sell vacuum cleaners door-to-door. With exasperation dripping from his voice, my companion said, "The whole thing plays to the Republican caricature of Democrats -- that we're weak on defense and weak on security." To underscore his concerns about shrill attacks on Bush, the Democratic operative forwarded to me later that afternoon an e-mail petition from MoveOn.org, which had been inspired by Al Gore's fire-breathing Martin Luther King Day speech excoriating the president's contempt for legal procedures.

A series of conversations with Democratic pollsters and image makers found them obsessed with similar fears that left-wing overreaction to the wiretapping issue would allow George W. Bush and the congressional Republicans to wiggle off the hook on other vulnerabilities. The collective refrain from these party insiders sounded something like this: Why are we so obsessed with the privacy of people who are phoning al-Qaida when Democrats should be screaming about corruption, Iraq, gas prices and the prescription-drug mess?

Again, aside from the ridiculous fantasy that they will be able to "neutralize" the terrorism issue and move on to prescription drugs (again!), they have made a huge error in their analysis of why the Republicans have the edge on national security and every time they genuflect to the administration's wacky plans they drive the image home. The problem for Democrats isn't that they are seen as soft on national security. It's that they are seen as not believing in anything and therefore are not strong on national security.

Every time the Democrats first speak out strongly and then fall in behind Republicans on national security like this, selling out their principles and the deep concerns of their constituents, they reinforce the image that there is nothing the Democrats are willing to fight for and the national security vote goes to the Republicans who have shown they are willing to fight for everything.

Via Rick Perlstein's book "The Stock Ticker and The Super Jumbo" here are some typical focus group answers about what people think of Democrats:

"I think they lost their focus"
"I think they are a little disorganized right now"
"They need leadership"
"On the sidelines"
"fumbling"
"confused"
"losing"
"scared"



Republicans openly defied the polls when they impeached a president who had a 60 percent approval rating. (They had the help of the press, of course, but it never made any difference in public opinion.) They used the language of principle and "the rule of law" and paid no price for what they did beyond the loss of a few seats in 98. People do not hold it against politicians for standing up for principle even if they know there is political intent. They do hold it against politicans if they are seen as having no principles at all.

Capitulating on issues of such huge importance is even more damaging when it's clear that it's the Eunuch Caucus who are truly soft on this issue, not the Democrats. The Republicans hold both houses and have the power to defy this presumptuous administration on a matter of fundamental principle to the conservative cause: unfettered government power. The few who managed to squeak out a tiny protest just caved in response to arm twisting from president Dick Cheney. Apparently when he wasn't drunkenly shooting old men in the face, he found time to put the metaphorical shotgun to the heads of his own party who promptly fell to their knees and kissed his ring. They are invertebrate, cowardly eunuchs who cannot even muster enough courage to defy this lame duck jerk when he openly regards the US Senate as his personal pack of spayed retreivers.

The polls today show that more than half of the country believes the president broke the law with this program and that it was wrong for him to have done it. And the press is in the most danger they've been in since since the Pentagon Papers, which was the last time whistleblowers came forward with such important revelations about government secrecy and lawlessness. So Democrats do not have to fear the press on this --- particularly if they remind them who their friends are on this issue. The Republicans are split on it, with the libertarian wing and the doctrinaire conservatives finding themselves having to swallow their disgust or break with the party. Democrats are in a much better position than they think to turn this into a positive and drive a wedge through the Republican coalition while they do it.

If the Democrats in congress simply stood together on principle instead of listening to overfed, out of touch strategists who have misdiagnosed the problem for years, they would begin to crawl out of this hole on national security. In order for the nation to trust them to defend the country the first thing they must do is stop believing that going along with the Republican Eunuch Caucus will ever improve their lot. People trust leaders who lead not followers who fall in line.


Glenn has more on this, here.


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digby 2/15/2006 11:40:00 AM |

 
Sending A Message

by digby


Bush is at the Wendy's Headquarters giving a speech about how many great jobs he's created since he took office. I'm not kidding.



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digby 2/15/2006 09:21:00 AM |

 
Abu Ghraib: More Pictures

by tristero

60 more photos, including six corpses, and what appear to be wounds from shotgun pellets (and no, I don't find any humor or irony in comparison. Torture takes away my ability to laugh or smirk.) The Bush administration has been trying to prevent Americans from seeing these new pics but 15 of the 60 are published in a slide show with the article. They are sickening.

The rest are to be shown on an Australian tv show. Note the very different way the incident is described by a press that is not American, which seems to my mind not only to imply culpability but also a cover-up of the involvement of superiors:

Seven US guards were jailed following publication of the first batch of Abu Ghraib photographs in April 2004.

Hit, tip, Kevin.

No doubt there are many more pictures, and videos, that have fallen beyond the legal control of the US.

[Update: One sentence removed, one revised, one added after original post. ]
tristero 2/15/2006 02:16:00 AM |

Tuesday, February 14, 2006

 
Journalistic Venereal Disease

by digby


Glenn has another great post up today in which he throws down the gauntlet to the right wing bloggers like the Old Perfesser who are all quick to require that Democrat purge the party of radicals while they cheer and applaud the eliminationist fascists in their own midst.

Republicans have been playing this game for years. They wildly inflate the importance of fringe, extremist figures and then -- every time one of those individuals makes an intemperate remark or comment that can be wrenched out-of-context and depicted as some sort of demented evil -- they demand that Democrats ritualistically parade before the cameras and either condemn those individuals or be branded as someone who is insufficiently willing to stand up to the extremists "in their party."

I've written dozens of posts on this topic myself and it never fails to amaze me how deeply the right believes in its own righteousness. We on the left are not perfect, but by God, when leftist radicals start talking wistfully about killing Republicans we don't make them into best selling authors and cheer them like rock stars.

But I think there is another dimension to Glenn's observation and one that lets the right wing bloggers off the hook just a little. You can't really hold them responsible for Ann Coulter when the woman is profiled on the cover of TIME magazine and characterized as some sort of kicky, ascerbic comic. The writer of that article said:

"the officialdom of punditry, so full of phonies and dullards, would suffer without her humor and fire."

Here are a few more choice quotes from that article, (gathered by the incomparable Howler:)

CLOUD: Coulter's speech was part right-wing stand-up routine—she called Senator Edward Kennedy "the human dirigible"—and part bloodcurdling agitprop. "Liberals like to scream and howl about McCarthyism," she concluded. "I say, let's give them some. They've had intellectual terror on the campus for years ... It's time for a new McCarthyism." Curtain.

CLOUD: [S]he told me several times that, as she put it in an e-mail, "most of what I say, I say to amuse myself and amuse my friends. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about anything beyond that."

CLOUD: So which is it? Is she a brave warrior or a shallow hack? Or is Ann Coulter that most unlikely of conservative subspecies: a hard-right ironist?

CLOUD: [A]s Coulter herself points out in Is It True What They Say About Ann?, "I think the way to convert people is to make them laugh or to make them enraged ... Even if I could be convinced that if I had gone through 17 on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hands, I might convince one more liberal out there, I think I'd still write the way I write, because it gives me laughs." Coulter told me that when her editor suggests cutting a line from a column to save space, "I'll ask him, 'But is it funny?' And if he says it's funny, I'll cut an actual fact [instead]."

CLOUD: People say that Jon Stewart has blurred the line between news and humor, but his Daily Show airs on a comedy channel. Coulter goes on actual news programs and deploys so much sarcasm and hyperbole that she sounds more like Dennis Miller than Limbaugh.

CLOUD: One theory about Coulter is that she is less Joe McCarthy and more a right-wing Ali G, acting out a character who utters what the rest of us won't.

Why Coulter is just a female Ali G! Hilarious!

When Eric Alterman had the temerity to call Cloud on this utter swill, the author fell back on journalism's tedious false equivalency crutch:

Eric Alterman calls my piece on Ann Coulter a "moral, professional, and intellectual abomination" as well as, redundantly, a "moral and intellectual scandal." He says Time has "a journalistic venereal disease." This is the left-wing equivalent of an Ann Coulter attack: callous and intended to create as much friction as possible (words I use to describe Coulter in my alleged puff piece). But that's really what my story was about--the kind of take-no-prisoners dialogue that Coulter has helped create and popularize. Now Alterman, it would seem, is trying to out-Coulter Coulter.


[...]

What Alterman wants is for people to ignore Coulter, to pretend as though she doesn't exist and isn't one of the most loved--and hated--figures on the public scene. I would rather engage her, examine her ideas and her popularity, and challenge her. My story does all of those things. It's true that I don't list every single mistake Ann Coulter has ever made, although I do print some new ones. My job was not to fact-check all of Coulter's 1,000 columns, the 1,300-odd pages of her books and the hundreds of TV appearances; it was to profile her. Nonetheless, I do list several Coulter errors and also correct the record on some mistakes by others who have written about her--including Alterman. In his book on the media, Alterman asserts that Coulter said to a Vietnam vet, "People like you caused us to lose that war." She did not. In fact, the vet had just gotten his facts wrong, and Coulter responded sarcastically, "No wonder you guys lost." Harsh words, yes--sort of like saying Time has a venereal disease--but Alterman got the quote wrong.

Yes the phrase "TIME has journalistic venereal disease" (meaning that this rhetoric is passed along through intimate contact) is equivalent to "my only regret is that he [McVeigh]didn't blow up the NY Times building. Right. Exactly the same.

I wrote about this nonsense last spring when the Coulter profile was published:

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

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

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

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

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

Ann Coulter and her violent, racist eliminationist rhetoric is considered funny and mainstream by the Washington post and TIME magazine. Considering that, why should the right wing bloggers believe they have any responsibility to hold themseloves to the standard to which they hold liberals with an outlying provocateur like Ward Churchill? In thier view, and most of the poltiical establishment, Ann Coulter is perfectly respectable.

I ended this post on the same subject with this comment from the racist website RedState:

Ann Coulter doesn't go on television ranting and raving like the liberals do. Remember Lawrence O'Donnell? Paul Begala? James Carville? Try Maureen Dowd. Ann is nothing like these losers but she does have a sharp wit and biting tongue and knows how to dish it out. These conspiracy theory wingnuts deserve nothing less.

That is the problem with Republicans. They don't know how to go for the throat while the Democrats are pros at aiming for the head.

I hope Ann keeps it up and never gives an inch. She is a strength for us conservatives, not something to be ashamed of.

Here's a cute little quote from that fun little minx's biting tongue:

"Liberals hate America, they hate flagwavers, they hate abortion opponents. They hate all religions except Islam post 9/11. Even Islamic terrorists don't hate America like liberals do; they don't have the energy; if they had that much energy they'd have indoor plumbing by now."

Adorable.


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digby 2/14/2006 03:26:00 PM |

 
He Stands Ready To Assist

by digby


Yesterday McClellan kept saying that the vice president and his staff couldn't get all the facts together because they were concentrating so hard on making sure Whittington was ok. The implication was that Cheney must have been intimately involved, pressing down on an artery or administering CPR for hours since he didn't bother to even call Bush until much later.

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, I think that the first priority was making sure that Harry Whittington, Mr. Whittington was getting the medical care that he needed, and I think that's where everybody's attention should have been focused and was focused when the hunting accident took place. And in terms of here in Washington, there was information that we were continuing to learn about throughout the course of that evening and into early Sunday morning. The initial report that we received was that there had been a hunting accident. We didn't know who all was involved, but a member of his party was involved in that hunting accident. And then additional details continued to come in overnight.

And it's important always to work to make sure you get information out like this as quickly as possible, but it's also important to make sure that the first priority is focused where it should be, and that is making sure that Mr. Whittington has the care that he needs. And the Vice President went to the hospital yesterday to visit him. The Vice President was pleased to see that he was doing well and in good spirits. And the President is, as well.

Today,post heart attack, they are again saying the the Veep is standing by (waiting to be called into the operating room to monitor his vital signs orsomething.)

A statement from Cheney's office said, "The vice president said that he stood ready to assist. Mr. Whittington's spirits were good, but obviously his situation deserves the careful monitoring that his doctors are providing."

The funny thing about all this is that during the long night that Cheney was supposed to have been rolling bandages and mopping Whittington's fevered brow, he was actually "focused" on having his dinner:

She said Cheney stayed “close but cool” while the agents and medical personnel treated Whittington, then took him by ambulance to the hospital. Later, the hunting group sat down for dinner while Whittington was being treated, receiving updates from a family member at the hospital. Armstrong described Cheney's demeanor during dinner as “very worried” about Whittington.

"Man I hope that old bastard doesn't kick. Can you pass the butter?"


I have to say that judging from the cable gasbags today, this is the first scandal I've seen handled by the press like the Lewinsky scandal --- with everyone sitting around breathlessly speculating about what really happened and "what it all means." I suspect it's because it fits a larger narrative, as this diary on Kos, only partly tongue in cheek, shows. In fact, I just heard Bob Shrum say on Hardball that this story is a metaphor for the entire Bush administration: the gang that couldn't shoot straight.


But, seriously. What in the hell are they hiding? What?



Update: Ok. I think something very serious is happening behind the scenes. There is simply no way that a normally functioning white house would let their most powerful propaganda voice say this:

"Would you rather go hunting with Dick Cheney or riding in a car over a bridge with Ted Kennedy?” Limbaugh asked. "At least Cheney takes you to the hospital.”

Is that really where they want to go with this? Yow.



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digby 2/14/2006 01:23:00 PM |

 
Laziness Doesn't Begin To Explain It.

by tristero


Dear Kevin, You're wrong. I was there. I remember.

Laziness doesn't explain why George Stephanopoulos failed to mention on the proceeding Sunday show in February that millions of people in the United States marched the day before to oppose Bush's insane plans for war. Oh he mentioned Europe but not a word about the US marches. That's right, Kevin: Stephanopoulus failed to mention what was almost certainly the largest US demonstration in history the day after it happened. That wasn't laziness. And it's not laziness that the February and March '03 marches been all but eliminated from the official memories of 2002/2003. (Except to bring up ANSWER's involvement in organizing them and dismiss all those millions of mothers, fathers, and kids as green-haired goofballs.)

Kevin, I read somewhere that at least one of the networks began planning a year before the invasion to cover it (I'll try to look it up if you don't believe me). Meanwhile the voices opposed to war - and there were millions - were systematically excluded. Think about it. "Fuck, Saddam. We're taking him out," Bush joked (haha) a year before. It was in no one's interest in the media to include serious dissent to rush to war. Not only on Sunday bloviations, but throughout the week, the token representatives of opposition to Bush that were permitted on the major shows were ridiculed and smeared. Hey remember Scott Ritter, that shrill, hysterical, obnoxious guy who seemed slightly crazed? Laziness doesn't explain why Ritter's personal problems suddenly followed him whenever he confidently asserted that Saddam couldn't possibly have wmd - problems that, while no doubt truly ugly, didn't in any way disqualify his expertise. Remember when a liberal meant Michael Moore and only Michael Moore, a comic filmmaker who voted for Nader? The genuine major voices opposed to war weren't permitted anywhere near an effective microphone, but they were known. When Jessica Mathews of Carnegie Endowment - as sober an American as one could ask for and certainly known within the media - started to make a convincing case on NPR that democracy by invasion was a crazy pipe dream, even that relatively unimportant network was too big. William Kristol personally called up and horned in on her time with ludicrous assertions designed to prevent the conversation from touching upon the substantive issues at stake.

Hey, do you remember the Turkey angle, Kevin? Boy, I do. By that time, I was trying full time to understand why my country had gone insane. In the months before invasion, the press in the US was reporting a "coalition" attack - i.e. US - from Turkey was a done deal. But I smelled a rat. I asked friends for translations of articles overseas, including from Turkey. My, my what a different picture one got of that done deal! We were lied to and laziness doesn't explain that. It couldn't possibly happen given some 95% of the country was opposed to the US invading from Turkey. We were lied to. The press lied to the American people.

That is the truth. Oh yes, the press was, and is lazy. In booking guests on Sunday or reporting the news from Turkey. But that was hardly what uniquely characterized 2002/2003. What happened was that the press became an active collaborator in the single worst decision ever made by a United States president. Ever. A decision my 9 year old daughter will have to endure the consequences of, in ways large and small, every day for the rest of her life.

Laziness excluded anti-war voices on Sunday shows? After what we've all seen of the Bush/Cheney obsession with information control? Laziness? Please, Kevin. You're smarter than that. And you know you're smarter than that, as your half-hearted attempt to make nice all-but-concedes.

Before Bush/Iraq, it may have seemed cleverly political - cute - to take your tack, to not blame the press but ever so gently suggest they are getting bored with the same tired faces. It lets them save face after all and accomplishes the same thing. But after Bush/Iraq, it's gonna take a lot more than kind gentle suggestion to make sure that the US press never, ever deliberately abandons its gadfly role out of fear of retaliation from any presidency whose lust for power and control is well-nigh psychotic. As the current presidency is. And was particularly successful at enforcing in the prelude to disaster... sorry, I meant the war.

It's going to take an angry, assertive polis fully prepared to take on the establishment press and hold both its lazy foot AND its sycophantic foot to the fire. And do whatever it takes - even if it leads to resignations and reorganizations - to ensure the American people get the information it must have to govern itself.

Laziness. Yeah, right.

Love,

tristero

{Update: Kevin examines whether ratings tipped the balance in the run up to war}. Why does the name Howard Beale come to mind when I hear this argument? And why do phrases like, "we're talking about war, goddammit not a popularity contest" keep going throught my head? As for blaming Democrats for being boring, that is NOT what happened. That is NOT what makes the run up to war one of American journalism's most shameful period. What happened, what is still happening, is that voices that were right about Iraq in 2002 are still systematically excluded. They were/are not excluded because they are boring, but because they are unwanted. There's a difference.]
tristero 2/14/2006 12:02:00 PM |

 
Cheney's Victim Has He