Hullabaloo

Saturday, March 18, 2006

 
X-treme Politics

by digby

I'm not trying to get back into the religion debate tonight, but I do think that while we are talking about the Democratic wackos who the pundits believe are wildly out of the mainstream with their calls for censure, we shouldtake a little peek at some of the things that are happening on the other side. Right there in Washington.

How about this group, called the Justice House of Prayer in Washington SC:

The Justice House of Prayer (JHOP) exists to raise up a house of prayer to contend with every other house that challenges the Lordship and supremacy of Christ over all affairs.

Birthed out of theCall prayer assemblies and theCause prayer initiative, the Justice House of Prayer is a community of young and old who seek to lift a continuous (24/7) cry of worship and intercession for and out of our nation’s capitol.

The primary motivation of all that is done at JHOP is to pour out our extravagant love and devotion to Jesus Christ who is worthy of all praise and adoration.

At the same time, a unique and defining characteristic of JHOP is governmental intercession as delineated by the 1 Timothy 2 mandate. True reformation, revival, and revolution in our nation will only be born out of a spiritual shift and this can only occur when we have altered the spiritual atmosphere and power structure through sustained prayer and fasting. And to that end, JHOP was established.

Months before the recent shifts in the Supreme Court, the Lord made it clear through numerous prophetic voices that the composition of the Court was about to change and that if the Church would seize the window of opportunity that had been blown open, we could see "judges restored as at the first."

Ok fine. If people want to do this, it's their right. But check out this video from the ABC's 20/20 showing the kids who come to Washington to pray 24/7. I realize that these kids are just doing the common behaviors of the charismatic churches, with the rocking, the speaking in tongues and the rest. But, no matter how much people want to pretend that this is mainstream, it ain't. Particularly since these kids come from all over the country to do this praying in Washington with the express purpose of outlawing abortion.

These are the same kids who came up with this, during the Schiavo mess:



Again, they have a perfect right to do this. But all these pundits who insist that Democrats who want the president censured for abusing his office are "extremists," need to take a closer look at the state of the nation and recognize that when it comes to extremism, the right is where the action is.


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digby 3/18/2006 08:34:00 PM |

 
Don't Make Trouble

by digby

Eleanor Clift has penned a column that she clearly wrote while half in the bag after playing spin the Jameson's with Chris Matthews and John McLaughlin at Bob Shrum's St Paddy's Day bash. A bigger puddle of misguided conventional wisdom I have not seen in quite some time.

Democrats must have a death wish. Just when the momentum was going against the president, Feingold pops up to toss the GOP a life raft.

*sigh* How many more years are we going to hear this tired nonsense from establishment pundits before people wake up and realize that ever since the Democrats took on this appeasment strategy they have been losing. I have written before that I was an enthusiastic New Democrat at one time --- embracing all the stuff about modernizing politics and marginalizing the "crazies" and creating a new, technocratic party where our "competence" would so dazzle the population that we could set aside all that unpleasant passion and ideology and just simply run the government "the smart way." Man, did I like the sound of that.

There was only one little problem, after we were done patting ourselves on the back for being more brilliant than everyone else in the room, the Republicans beat the crap out of us over and over again. And over time that vision has been whittled down to a belief that if we just wait them out, the country will wake up and realize that we aren't really worse than the other guys so don't make waves.

The conventional wisdom in DC has now ossified into a reflexive notion that Democrats must do nothing. Ever. They must hold back and say nothing when the Republicans are on top and they must hold back and say nothing when they are on the ropes.

Naturally, Clift turns to ex-Republican and current DLCer, Marshall Wittman:

To win in '06, he says, "Democrats need to take the Hippocratic Oath: first, do no harm."

To the Republicans.

But the scruffy, louts out in the country disagree that taking on the Republicans while they are down is bad politics. With a president at 33%, they wonder why in the hell they can't do any harm? What kind of margin for error do we need, a president in the low 20's? A negative 10? How low does a Republican have to sink before we aren't afraid to take him on?

Clift assumes, without any kind of proof, that Feingold's motion is going to help Republicans in the polls. Why? The polling suggests that there is a very sizeable minority, in one poll a plurality of people who favor censuring the president.

But nobody in DC even entertained the possibility before dismissing it out of hand. Jim Lehrer was gobsmacked last night when Tom Olipghant suggested that this wasn't such a left field move after all:

JIM LEHRER: Before we go -- quickly -- what do you think of the Feingold -- speaking -- you mentioned Feingold -- what do you think of the Feingold resolution to censure President Bush on the NSA surveillance thing?

DAVID BROOKS: I think the conventional thing, that Republicans -- any time Democrats are in the news, Republicans feel good about it. When Republicans are in the news, they feel bad about it.

DAVID BROOKS: So, it was -- it was good for the Republicans. And I think most Democrats acknowledge that.

TOM OLIPHANT: Yes, but a little polling data to end.

JIM LEHRER: Oh, my goodness.

TOM OLIPHANT: For censure or against it, American Research Group last week: for, 48, against, 43 -- impeachment: against, 50, for, 43. There is...

JIM LEHRER: You mean this is a national poll?

TOM OLIPHANT: That's right, 1,100 cases last week.

JIM LEHRER: OK.

TOM OLIPHANT: This -- there are emotions out there in the country. Feingold did not make this up.

Brooks is right that most Washington Democrats "acknowledge" that this will hurt Democrats, but it is based on the fact that they have internalized GOP cant that says Democratic voters are extremists and the president is popular.

Just a couple of months ago Matthews was saying this:

"Everybody sort of likes the president, except for the real whack-jobs, maybe on the left."

Even now, with the numbers so clear, he can't process it:

"I always thought Bush was more popular than his policies. I keep saying it, and I keep being wrong on this. Bush is not popular. I'm amazed when 50 percent of the people don't like him -- just don't like this guy. Thirty-nine percent like him. Are you surprised? Does that fit with the world you walk in?"

Clearly it doesn't fit in in the world Chris Matthews and Eleanor Clift walk in, which is the Republican establishment.

Clift writes:

The Democrats' dilemma is how to satisfy a restive and angry base without losing the rest of the country. "If someone proposed stringing up Bush like they did Mussolini, that would have a lot of support in the base of the party, too," says a Democratic strategist. "But it's not smart." Democrats want the November election to be a plebiscite on Bush's job performance, not a personal vendetta. "Republicans will rally round him if they think it's a personal attack just like we did with Clinton," warns the strategist.

Clinton had an approval rating in the 50's. The country was in the midst of the greatest expansion in history. The entire world looked to us to lead them through the post cold war world. Yet Republicans insisted on impeaching him for lying about a sexual indiscretion That's a personal vendetta.

This president is in the low 30's. Most Americans hardly feel the good news in the economy because the benefits have been rigged to go to those who make more than $250,0000 a year. He's made a fetish out of abusing his power with a non-stop assault on the contitution, international law and civilized norms. He has asserted a principle of executive authority that says he does not have to abide by the law. And it's extreme to think this deserves a mild rebuke from the body that writes those laws in the first place?

And I shouldn't have to point out that since the Republicans impeached president Clinton, among other things, they have increased their majority in the congress, won two presidential elections, enacted every wet dream tax cut they ever had, rolled back every regulation they ever hated and installed two right wing ideologues on the court. And that doesn't even begin to cover it.

Yes, the Republicans have certainly paid a steep price for impeachment, haven't they?

Grover Norquist really understands Washington. When asked what he thought would create more social comity between the parties he wasn't just being cute:

Rock-ribbed Republican Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, proffered a solution, tell[s] us that Democrats must accept the finality of their powerlessness. "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."

He was showing a deep understanding of how today's political establishment works. The DC pundit-strategist class have "accepted the finality of Democratic powerlessness." People like Marshall Wittman and Eleanor Clift are telling the rest of us to do it too. Remember the GOP is the "daddy party" and you all know what he's like when he get's mad. Don't make trouble.

Clift wrote:

"there is a vacuum in the heart of the party's base that Feingold fills, but at what cost?"

Cost?

If the Democrats lose in November, I'm sure she'll find plenty of reasons to blame Democrats, but it won't occur to her that the reason people didn't vote for the D's was because the party listened to people like her and campaigned like a herd of neutered animals instead of listening to their hearts, their minds, their constituents and their leaders who were prepared to take a stand for what we believe in. No, they'll blame the "extremists" who want a safety net and a sane terrorism policy --- and leaders who defend the constitution. It couldn't possibly be that their tired, stale reflexive passivity is to blame when half the base fails to turn out because they just. have. no. hope.



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digby 3/18/2006 04:09:00 PM |

 
Is Your Blood Pressure Too Low?

by tristero

I can't go. I'd probably have a thrombo, as Austin Powers sez. But if you live in New York, and you're starting to feel much too calm and relaxed, you can get your blood racing on Monday night by going to a yak-fest at Miller Theater, Columbia U entitled Iraq: Three Years Later. The participants are Noah Feldman, Victor Davis Hanson, Joe Klein, Kenneth M. Pollack, and Andrew Sullivan.

It is bound to be a thoughtful, serious discussion. There will be no third-rate minds on hand - you know, the kind of childish, unimaginative mentalities that thought in 2002 that Bush's invasion of Iraq was the stupidest fucking idea they'd heard in their lifetimes.
tristero 3/18/2006 04:57:00 AM |

 
Less Is More

by tristero

In Bushland, the more inept you are, the more you can be trusted. For example, those crack Iraqi security forces:

[Condoleeza Rice] said she ``would call attention to the role that Iraqi Security Forces have played in this offensive,'' which ``demonstrates that Iraqi forces are indeed taking on more of the security side.''

...

The U.S. military last month said there were no Iraqi battalions capable of operating without support, a reduction from one battalion in September and three in June that were in the Pentagon's top category of readiness, Level 1.

tristero 3/18/2006 04:36:00 AM |

Friday, March 17, 2006

 
Iraqi Army Captures JFK's Killers

by tristero

Not really. And this probably ain't true, either:

An Iraqi-U.S. operation targeting insurgents in the vast hardpan desert northeast of Samarra has led to the capture of a possible ringleader of the bombing of the Gold Mosque, Iraqi officials said today.

Of course, I could just be getting cynical in old age. I mean, what's not to believe, right?
tristero 3/17/2006 09:17:00 PM |

 
PoMo Conservatism

by digby

Josh Marshall has written a nice riposte to Peggy Noonan's whiny lament about George W. Bush's liberal betrayal. He writes:

I'm not sure what to say to erstwhile Bush supporters other than, 'Nice try.'

In yesterday's online WSJ Peggy Noonan asks readers whether they understood George W. Bush "to be a liberal in terms of spending" when he first came on the political scene in 2000.

I've been mulling over the last few days just how to characterize this: but it is certainly a muddled and bad-faith form of ideological projection mixed with evasion.

There really isn't much point in trying to characterize it at all. As I've written before, it's a common pathology among conservatives when their policies fail. When Bruce Bartlett's book came out I wrote a post called Institutional Apostasy:

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.

Last fall as the rats were beginning to lurk around the deck of the sinking ship, I wrote:

Movement conservatives are getting ready to write the history of this era as liberalism once again failing the people. Typically, the conservatives were screwed, as they always are. They must regroup and fight for conservatism, real conservatism, once again. Viva la revolucion!

There is no such thing as a bad conservative. "Conservative" is a magic word that applies to those who are in other conservatives' good graces. Until they aren't. At which point they are liberals.

Get used to the hearing about how the Republicans failed because they weren't true conservatives. Conservatism can never fail. It can only be failed by weak-minded souls who refuse to properly follow its tenets. It's a lot like communism that way.

Appropriately, modern conservatism turns out to be the first post-modern political movement.


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digby 3/17/2006 05:10:00 PM |

 
Republican Self-Love

by digby

I just had the misfortune to see two swaggering, self-satisfied windbags named Rick and Bubba being interviewed by Neil Cavuto. For those of you who aren't familiar with them, which I wasn't, they are radio talk show hosts who have written a book called "Rick and Bubba's Expert Guide To God, Country and Family." Talk about arrogant know-it-alls. Rarely have I seen people more in love with themselves than these two.

They believe that they delivered the election to bush in 2000 by denying Gore his home state of Tennessee. One of them (Rick or Bubba I'm not sure which) looked into the camera, nodded his head and said,

"You're welcome America."

Oh no, thank you.



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digby 3/17/2006 04:36:00 PM |

 
Operation Overblown

by digby


Time magazine reports

On Scene: How Operation Swarmer Fizzled

Not a shot was fired, or a leader nabbed, in a major offensive that failed to live up to its advance billing

[...]

The press, flown in from Baghdad to this agricultural gridiron northeast of Samarra, huddled around the Iraqi officials and U.S. Army commanders who explained that the "largest air assault since 2003" in Iraq using over 50 helicopters to put 1500 Iraqi and U.S. troops on the ground had netted 48 suspected insurgents, 17 of which had already been cleared and released. The area, explained the officials, has long been suspected of being used as a base for insurgents operating in and around Samarra, the city north of Baghdad where the bombing of a sacred shrine recently sparked a wave of sectarian violence.

But contrary to what many many television networks erroneously reported, the operation was by no means the largest use of airpower since the start of the war. ("Air Assault" is a military term that refers specifically to transporting troops into an area.) In fact, there were no airstrikes and no leading insurgents were nabbed in an operation that some skeptical military analysts described as little more than a photo op. What's more, there were no shots fired at all and the units had met no resistance, said the U.S. and Iraqi commanders.

But contrary to what many many television networks erroneously reported, the operation was by no means the largest use of airpower since the start of the war. ("Air Assault" is a military term that refers specifically to transporting troops into an area.) In fact, there were no airstrikes and no leading insurgents were nabbed in an operation that some skeptical military analysts described as little more than a photo op. What's more, there were no shots fired at all and the units had met no resistance, said the U.S. and Iraqi commanders.

The only thing missing was the president parachuting in to the strains of "Danger Zone" from Top Gun, wearing a tight jumpsuit and carrying a plastic turkey

Chris Allbritton, reporting on the same story notes:

"Operation Swarmer" is really a media show. It was designed to show off the new Iraqi Army - although there was no enemy for them to fight. Every American official I've heard has emphasized the role of the Iraqi forces just days before the third anniversary of the start of the war. That said, one Iraqi role the military will start highlighting in the next few days, I imagine, is that of Iraqi intelligence. It was intel from the Iraqi military intelligence and interior ministry that the U.S. says prompted this Potemkin operation. And it will be the Iraqi intel that provides the cover for American military commanders to throw up their hands and say, "well, we thought bad guys were there."

It's hard to blame the military, however. Stations like Fox and CNN have really taken this and ran with it, with fancy graphics and theme music, thanks to a relatively slow news day. The generals here also are under tremendous pressure to show off some functioning Iraqi troops before the third anniversary, and I won't fault them for going into a region loaded for bear. After all, the Iraqi intelligence might have been right.

But Operation Overblown should raise serious questions about how good Iraqi intelligence is. I can't tell you how many times I've been told by earnest lieutenants that the Iraqis are valiant and necessary partners, "because they know the area, the people and the customs." But when I spoke to grunts and NCOs, however, they usually gave me blunter - and more colorful - reasons why the Iraqi intelligence was often, shall we say, useless. Tribal rivalries and personal feuds are still a major why Iraqis drop a dime on their neighbors.

I'm beginning to wonder if we haven't officially moved from tragedy to farce. And I'm not talking about the military. I'm talking about the pathological need on the part of the cable networks to go back to the glory days when Bush was commonly compared to Alexander the Great every chance they get. I think they see themselves as handsome windswept heroes, telling their epic stories under fire. But, those acts of shallow egotism are a big reason we got into this mess in the first place. It's time for the producers and news anchors to put away their designer safari vests and move on.


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digby 3/17/2006 03:13:00 PM |

 
Jaws Of Victory

by digby

Following up on my post below about Lemming Bayh's revolutionary strategy to stick as closely to the president on national security as he can so that people will trust him with their lives, here's some interesting news from a new NPR poll today:

A new poll of likely voters finds that President Bush and his party no longer have the advantage on issues of foreign policy and national security, which they used to dominate.

The poll, conducted for NPR by a Republican and a Democratic pollster, suggests that the ongoing instability in Iraq, the Dubai ports deal, job outsourcing and other global issues in the news lately appear to be weighing heavily on voters' minds in this midterm election year.

Republican pollster Glen Bolger says that, from his perspective, the results are a "bunch of ugly numbers."

[...]

It's not uncommon to see polls where Democrats beat Republicans on domestic issues, such as the economy and jobs, health care and Social Security. But in this poll, when asked which party they trust more on issues such as the Iraq war, foreign ownership of U.S. ports and attention to homeland security, majorities chose the Democrats. Only on the question of Iranian nuclear weapons do the president and his party come out ahead.

Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg says the numbers present Democrats with a real opportunity for electoral gains. "All of these issues are related to different kinds of foreign threats to the country," he notes. "On every single issue, voters favor the Democrats. This is a different landscape -- we were looking for 20-point advantages for Republicans on anything related to security. This ought to be the center of where you would trust the Republicans, and that's not happening here. There's clearly a new opening, new doubts about the Republicans and new openings for the Democrats."

[...]

... Glenn Bolger says the poll shows that Republicans in Congress helped themselves politically by abandoning the president.

"One clear piece of evidence in the data is that Republicans benefited by showing some independence from the president on the ports deal," Bolger says. "Democrats have a 16-point advantage over the president in terms of who [voters] trust, and only an 8-point advantage over the Republicans on the ports deal. So the Republican Congress' stand of independence cut the Democratic advantage on this issue in half."

Feingold seems to feel this zeitgeist and so do some others (like the Iraq veteran band of brothers who are running as Democrats.) The rest of the caucus is lagging behind, mired in 2002 thinking.

Separating themselves from the president --- and forcing the Republicans to rally around him --- is good politics. The NSA wiretapping issue in and of itself is not going to rally the greater public to Bush. It's the optics of Democrats issuing a rebuke that counts. The base, on the other hand, is hungering for leadership on these specific issues and wants desperately to rally around the party. Yet they are treated with terrible disrespect even though the polls show that two thirds of the country are unhappy and a majority is ready to throw the bums out.

Democrats do themselves no favors by following a cautious strategy in this climate. They are driving their voters crazy and convincing everyone else that they don't have the will to win. The Republicans have a very slick machine, based in churches and fueled by talk radio, that will work overtime to get their base out. Their survival depends on it. Democrats cannot depend on low GOP turnout to get them over the line.


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digby 3/17/2006 12:20:00 PM |

 
What Matters Most

by digby


Hughes For America makes an interesting observation about Republican priorities:

We learned Wednesday that the Federal Communications Commission has proposed a $3.6 million fine against numerous CBS stations and affiliates concerning a 2004 episode of "Without a Trace" that included "teenage boys and girls participating in a sexual orgy." The FCC also upheld its historic $550,000 fine against CBS for the Janet Jackson incident during the Super Bowl two years ago.

Meanwhile, the Sago mine - where 12 people died in January - was cited 208 times in 2005. The largest single fine, by comparison, was a mere $440. Not only that, but it was also reported that federal inspectors had repeatedly determined that the violations at Sago affected only one person, doing so to avoid the larger fines that come when more miners are involved.

Well, we know that they don't want to regulate business, even if lives are at stake. That would be wrong and bad for the economy. But regulating 10 PM cop shows (with no nudity) like "Without A Trace" or PBS documentaries about The Blues that use the word "shit" is much too important for such considerations. Little pitchers have ears and all. Too bad those little pitchers down in West Virginia no longer have fathers.

I find it quite interesting that they keep fining CBS so heavily when Fox has some of the most subversive, deviant (and creative) programming out there. In cartoon form. Perhaps the thought police are too busy obsessing over the F word to understand what their kids are watching. Or maybe it's something more sinister. It's important to remember that the vast majority of complaints are the result of organized wingnut campaigns. And organized wingnuts know the score.


Hughes for America is holding a fund raising drive. His stuff is better than Riverdance, I guarantee it.


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digby 3/17/2006 10:38:00 AM |

 
Words Speak Louder Than Actions?

by digby


So Firedoglake tells me that Lemming Bayh is in favor of the new rage in Washington --- if a Republican breaks the law, then just change the law! As the NY Times editorial board wrote earlier this week about president Bush's domestic advisor Claude Allen: "If the current Congress had been called on to intervene in the case of Mr. Allen, it would probably have tried to legalize shoplifting."

Bayh, in a torrent of process talk, explained that he doesn't support Feingold's measure because:

... the first thing Democrats need to do, Bayh said, is take Republicans on in an area they've dominated: national security.

"It's a threshold issue for us, and it's a threshold issue for America," Bayh said. "People aren't going to trust us with anything else if we first can't convince them to trust us with their lives."

All the great Democratic strategists know that the best way to do that is to blather incessantly about "what Democrats need to do," while simultaneously rubber stamping every crackpot GOP security program no matter how lawless or unnecessary. Yielding submissively to the Republican dominance you profess to be "taking on" is an excellent way to convince people that you can protect them. Great plan. Awesome.



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digby 3/17/2006 08:45:00 AM |

 
Attention Deficit

by digby

Matt Yglesias says deficits don't matter after all, at least not to the public:

Back in 1993, 17 percent of poll respondents said the deficit was the biggest problem facing the country, today that's way down to two percent.

Oh Ross Perot, where art thou now? We haven't heard a peep out of the crazy old coot since Bush took office ran through the surplus and then ran up the debt to unprecedented levels, have we? There was a time, when the deficit was much, much lower than it is now, that he felt the problem was so dire that he was compelled to start a third party to make sure that it was dealt with.

I had always thought he was the Bush's arch enemy and yet he has been strangely silenced throughout Junior's reign. You don't suppose that stuff about Republican operatives disrupting his dauighters wedding was true do you? ... nah. Karl Rove wouldn't do something like that.



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digby 3/17/2006 02:38:00 AM |

 
Girl Just Wants To Have Fun

by digby

John over at Crooks and Liars has Katherine Harris' brave interview with Sean Hannity in which she declares. "as God is mah witness I will nevah be hungry again ... oh sorry... "as God is mah witness I will spend every last million I have on mah Senate race."

"Let me tell you what the truth is. I'm staying... I'm going to put EVERYTHING on the line...I'm going to commit my legacy from my father, $10 million. This is everything that I have"

Not exactly everything. Her husband is reportedly worth somewhere around 20 million.

She says that he backs her decision one hundred percent. I wonder if he's seen this video of his wife canoodling with another man during the debate on WMD intelligence legislation.



Watch out Lindsey. This woman's a wildcat in the chamber.





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digby 3/17/2006 02:03:00 AM |

Thursday, March 16, 2006

 
From The This-Is-Way-Too-Weird-To-Be-A-Joke Department

by tristero

Looks like DARPA has a monopoly on all the good dope. And they've been having a high old time. They're seeking proposals for work on creating cyborg cockroaches, beetles, and moths:

DARPA seeks innovative proposals to develop technology to create insect-cyborgs, possibly enabled by intimately integrating microsystems within insects, during their early stages of metamorphoses. The healing processes from one metamorphic stage to the next stage are expected to yield more reliable bio-electromechanical interface to insects, as compared to adhesively bonded systems to adult insects. Once these platforms are integrated, various microsystem payloads can be mounted on the platforms with the goal of controlling insect locomotion, sense local environment, and scavenge power. Multidisciplinary teams of engineers, physicists, and biologists are expected to work together to develop new technologies utilizing insect biology, while developing foundations for the new field
of insect cyborg engineering.

via PZ Meyers, who explains in some detail why this is, shall we say, a bit unlikely to work. PZ writes, "This is like sending some guy who knows next to nothing about avionics into a 747 with a pickaxe, a voltmeter, and a 9V battery, and telling him to hack into the wiring and take control of the plane. It may not be impossible, but it is the next best thing."

Or like putting some guy who knows next to nothing about anything in charge of the world's most powerful country and giving him the opportunity to send troops to invade the Middle East without provocation. And expecting good to come out of it.

[UPDATE: Via comments comes this link to the world's smallest flying robot. Be sure to check out the groovy video of the gadget hovering and maneuvering with eerie precision in the air.]
tristero 3/16/2006 10:27:00 PM |

 
Manly

by digby


Why do you suppose that in the Pew poll, the second most popular word (after incompetent) to describe the president is "idiot?" Hmmmm.





Good thing he isn't one 'o them brie 'n cheese eatin' liberals or somebody might look at all that fancy expensive gear and call him an elitist rich guy. Can't he just shoot his friends in the face like real men do?


Via Pearlswine, who says this may be the most unpresidential picture ever taken, and that was before he noticed the little pink socks.

They are cute.


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digby 3/16/2006 03:24:00 PM |

 
Dear Amy Sullivan

by tristero

I see you've apologized for the knee-jerk left comment. I'm glad you have the guts to know when you're wrong and admit it.

But then you persist in getting it all wrong:

I do think there is a tendency on the part of some on the left to criticize conservative politicians on the basis of their religious views.

Jeebus, Amy, of course there is! That is a GOOD THING! They SHOULD be criticized! They HAVE to be criticized! And YOU should be among the first to let them have it! Why?

First of all, they're the ones that bring the subject of religion up in a political context, over and over and over, and - as with the fight over science in the classrooms - when it is wildly inappropriate. They're the ones making a political issue out of religion. Therefore, it can, and must be forcefully addressed.

Secondly, they're certifiably crazy. Case in point: This fanatical, bigoted bastard is a close friend of Bush. THAT is why sensible people like Moyers and Phillips are alarmed about an imminent theocracy. And Graham is only one of dozens, many of whom make this guy look as liberal as Jesse Jackson. Amy, do you know how close this country came recently to approving a Christian Reconstructionist agenda as science in public schools? These people are serious about a theocracy. And seriously insane.

Thirdly, they are trying to disguise their purely secular lust for power by hiding behind the skirts of priests. I'd think a religious person like yourself would be the first to be horrified and disgusted at their corruption of Christian belief for political gain. They are cowards and they are liars. They cannot be permitted to advance a secular agenda under the guise of faith.

And fourth, do you have any idea of the filth that spews from these pigs' mouth on a regular basis about the religious beliefs of liberals? Of Democrats? Of well-known public figures? Against Muslims? Against Jews? Against members of Christian denominations they disagree with? What makes their beliefs immune to criticism? Because they talk the Good Talk, and profess they are people of faith in the traditional cadences of evangelical American Christianity ? Anyone can do that, and has done that. But people of faith aren't cowards and sneaks who pretend that a religious agenda is a scientific theory that deserves equal time. But that's what these people do.

Bottom line, Amy: You want people to stop criticizing your religious beliefs, you don't deliberately make them a political issue. You don't make them the focus of serious discussions of government policy. Otherwise, your personal religious beliefs are fair game.

And this is said by someone who has demonstrated the utmost respect, tolerance, and interest in the beliefs of all faiths. It is because of their persistent intolerance of other people's religion and politics that conservative political operatives get no free pass from me. They blaspheme Christ by bringing the Gospels into a partisan political struggle. I am amazed that you, of all bloggers, think that's not proper to criticize. It most certainly is. The Republican exploitation and hijacking of religious belief is a dangerous travesty of public piety. And it's at these people - the Dobsons, the Falwells, the Grahams, the Frists, and yeah, the Brownbacks - your anger should be directed. Not at pious, intelligent patriots like Bill Moyers, for heavens sakes!

Love,

Tristero
tristero 3/16/2006 03:20:00 PM |

 
Depraved Government

by digby

Every once in a while I'm struck anew by the utter lawlessnes and barbarity of the United States government under Republican rule. I follow this stuff so closely that it all blurs for long periods of time until something, out of the blue, shocks me almost physically. Today, I have been catching up on some things and started reading in depth about the decision of Federal District Judge Trager's heinous decision to dismiss Maher Arar's case against the US for kidnapping him at Kennedy Airport and rendering him to Syria to be tortured for almost a year.

This is a Kafkaesque tale that makes shivers go down my spine when I read about it. I simply can't wrap my arms around the idea that the American government is openly and proudly doing these things --- or that those who dissent are veritably dared to speak out against it lest they be branded terrorist sympathizers.

We have normalized torture, which I find akin to normalizing pedophilia for all its deviant --- if not uncommon --- malignity. To be clear: what shocks me is not that torture happens or that our government tortures. We have ample evidence that it has historically done so. What is unprecedented is this banal, rather dull acceptance that torture is perfectly natural and necessary.

Nat Hentoff has an article in this Week's Village Voice about this Arar case in which he cites a previous Apellate Court decision about torture from 1980:

In this landmark decision, Filártiga v. Peña-Irala, David Cole points out, the appeals court decided that "the prohibition on torture was so universally accepted that a U.S. Court could hold responsible a Paraguayan official charged with torturing a dissident in Paraguay . . . The [U.S.] court declared that when officials violate such a fundamental norm as torture, they can be held accountable anywhere they are found."

Notice the language in that decision, "enemy of all mankind." Here's the final paragraph in the opinion in its entirety:

In the twentieth century the international community has come to recognize the common danger posed by the flagrant disregard of basic human rights and particularly the right to be free of torture. Spurred first by the Great War, and then the Second, civilized nations have banded together to prescribe acceptable norms of international behavior. From the ashes of the Second World War arose the United Nations Organization, amid hopes that an era of peace and cooperation had at last begun. Though many of these aspirations have remained elusive goals, that circumstance cannot diminish the true progress that has been made. In the modern age, humanitarian and practical considerations have combined to lead the nations of the world to recognize that respect for fundamental human rights is in their individual and collective interest. Among the rights universally proclaimed by all nations, as we have noted, is the right to be free of physical torture. Indeed, for purposes of civil liability, the torturer has become like the pirate and slave trader before him hostis humani generis, an enemy of all mankind. Our holding today, giving effect to a jurisdictional provision enacted by our First Congress, is a small but important step in the fulfillment of the ageless dream to free all people from brutal violence.

So much for that. In our quest to deliver the almighty God's gift of freedom to each man and women in this world, we seem to have decided that the fundamental human right to be free of torture is no longer operative.

This was 1980. In 2006, just 26 years later we see this (from Hentoff again):

Now let us hear how Judge Trager justifies his dismissal of Maher Arar's suit for the atrocities he endured in Syria because of the CIA. In his decision, Trager said that if a judge decided, on his or her own, that the CIA's "extraordinary renditions" were always unconstitutional, "such a ruling can have the most serious consequences to our foreign relations or national security or both."

A judge must be silent, even if our own statutes and treaties are violated! What about the separation of powers? Ah, said Trager, "the coordinate branches of our government [executive and legislative] are those in whom the Constitution imposes responsibility for our foreign affairs and national security. Those branches have the responsibility to determine whether judicial oversight is appropriate."

Gee, I thought that the checks and balances of our constitutional system depend on the independence of the federal judiciary, which itself decides to exercise judicial review.

Judge Trager went further to protect the Bush administration's juggernaut conduct of foreign policy: "One need not have much imagination to contemplate the negative effect on our relations with Canada if discovery were to proceed in this case, and were it to turn out that certain high Canadian officials had, despite public denials, acquiesced in Arar's removal to Syria."

"More generally," Trager went on, "governments that do not wish to acknowledge publicly that they are assisting us would certainly hesitate to do so if our judicial discovery process could compromise them."

Right. He didn't even use a legal reason, just bought into the bedwetting cowardice that seems to have overtaken most of the government after 9/11 and hid under the covers. He left all the scary stuff to the preznit and his big strong armymen, rather than do his duty and follow the constitution or supreme court precedent. Nothing to see here.

When in American history have so many government officials in the other branches submitted themselves so willingly to executive authority? We are now three five years away from 9/11. The smoke has cleared and the rubble has been cleaned up. The "War on Terror" has been going on longer than WWII. If anyone thought that people would gather their wits about them and come to their senses about these things, the rubber stamp congress and deferential judiciary have shown that they have no intention of stopping the Bush administration's attack on the constitution or it's normalization of the depraved.

Democrats have got to win this next election. They are, for all their flaws, all we have standing between us a this continued abasement of American values. Taking the Republicans out of the majority is essential to the survival of what few ideals we have left.

If you find yourself wondering why you bother with politics, go read Arthur Silber's masterful series on torture. You'll be reminded why it's important.



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digby 3/16/2006 02:10:00 PM |

 
Constitutional Infirmity

by digby


I'm beginning to think they are actively trying to destroy the constitution just for the hell of it.

President May Have Known of Constitutional Defect Before Bill Signing

Wednesday, March 15, 2006 -- Rep. Waxman asks the White House to respond to information that the Speaker of the House called President Bush to alert him that the version of the Reconciliation Act he was about to sign differed from the version that passed the U.S. House of Representatives. Rep. Waxman writes: "If the President signed the Reconciliation Act knowing its constitutional infirmity, he would in effect be placing himself above the Constitution."

The nutshell version of this story is that the Senate passed the Omnibus Budget bill with a two billion dollar error regarding certain medicare payments in it. The vote was as close as possible -- Cheney had to break the tie. The clerk found the error, which happens from time to time apparently and requires a re-vote on the correct version of the bill. But the Republican leadership didn't fix it because they were afraid that when they brought it back up for the required re-vote in the Senate, it wouldn't pass. They kept it to themselves and the House passed the incorrect version of the bill on another close vote --- 216-214 and they sent it to the president who signed it --- error and all.

Waxman now has reason to believe that the president was informed by Hastert that he was signing an incorrect version of the bill and Bush unconstitutionally signed it anyway.

This is the kind of corrupt, partisan, iniquitous leadership these assholes have perpetrated since they took power. They commonly hold votes open for as long as it takes to bribe a member to vote for it. Democratic members are locked out of meetings and not allowed to see bills before they are required to vote on them. They design the votes to be as close as possible so they don't get any Democratic support -- the more they can take the Democrats out of the process, make them look impotent to their constituents, the more likely they are to demoralize Democratic voters and make them feel helpless to change things.

But, it's unconstitutional to do what they did. Just because you have to do a tough vote over again to make it legal, you don't get to just ignore the constitution to avoid having to do it. Or at least that's the way it used to be.

This is the kind of thing that would be ripe for hearings if the Democrats were to win the elections in the fall. It needs to be exposed, so that people can see the Republicans held accountable for their reign of political terror in the congress. The public does not understand, nor should they need to understand, the arcane rules governing the Senate. But anyone can understand that the Republican congress passed, and the president signed, a budget knowing that it was unconstitutional. And they did it because if they fixed it, as required by law, they knew it wouldn't pass.

Waxman will be the Chairman of the committee that will investigate these atrocities --- and he's been making a list and checking it twice since 2001. If the country would like to see some accountability, he's a guy who will do it. After all, he's the one who got the tobacco chiefs to say they didn't believe smoking was addictive --- under oath, I might add, something that's gone out of fashion since the Republican vassals were put in charge of overseeing their liege lord, the prince of the Codpiece.



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digby 3/16/2006 11:35:00 AM |

 
Bomb Iraq!

by digby

Gosh, I get a kind of warm feeling remembering those good old days back in 2002, when we were all hunkered down around Atrios' place, watching the metaphorical skies fill with fireworks. We even had our own campfire song:

If you've got no other reason, bomb Iraq (clap, clap)
If you've got no other reason, bomb Iraq (clap, clap)
If you've got no other reason, other than election season
If you've got no other reason, bomb Iraq (clap, clap)

Ah yes. Chalabi, we hardly knew ye.


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digby 3/16/2006 09:10:00 AM |

 
Air War

We got ourselves an air war.

Hersh told us why a few months ago:

In recent weeks, there has been widespread speculation that President George W. Bush, confronted by diminishing approval ratings and dissent within his own party, will begin pulling American troops out of Iraq next year. The Administration's best-case scenario is that the parliamentary election scheduled for December 15th will produce a coalition government that will join the Administration in calling for a withdrawal to begin in the spring. By then, the White House hopes, the new government will be capable of handling the insurgency...

A key element of the drawdown plans, not mentioned in the President's public statements, is that the departing American troops will be replaced by American airpower. Quick, deadly strikes by U.S. warplanes are seen as a way to improve dramatically the combat capability of even the weakest Iraqi combat units. The danger, military experts have told me, is that, while the number of American casualties would decrease as ground troops are withdrawn, the over-all level of violence and the number of Iraqi fatalities would increase unless there are stringent controls over who bombs what...

Within the military, the prospect of using airpower as a substitute for American troops on the ground has caused great unease. For one thing, Air Force commanders, in particular, have deep-seated objections to the possibility that Iraqis eventually will be responsible for target selection. "Will the Iraqis call in air strikes in order to snuff rivals, or other warlords, or to snuff members of your own sect and blame someone else?" another senior military planner now on assignment in the Pentagon asked. "Will some Iraqis be targeting on behalf of Al Qaeda, or the insurgency, or the Iranians?"

...

This military planner added that even today, with Americans doing the targeting, "there is no sense of an air campaign, or a strategic vision. We are just whacking targets - it's a reversion to the Stone Age. There's no operational art. That's what happens when you give targeting to the Army - they hit what the local commander wants to hit."
One senior Pentagon consultant I spoke to said he was optimistic that "American air will immediately make the Iraqi Army that much better." But he acknowledged that he, too, had concerns about Iraqi targeting. "We have the most expensive eyes in the sky right now," the consultant said. "But a lot of Iraqis want to settle old scores. Who is going to have authority to call in air strikes? There's got to be a behavior-based rule."

...

Robert Pape, a political-science professor at the University of Chicago, who has written widely on American airpower, and who taught for three years at the Air Force's School of Advanced Airpower Studies, in Alabama, predicted that the air war "will get very ugly" if targeting is turned over to the Iraqis. This would be especially true, he said, if the Iraqis continued to operate as the U.S. Army and Marines have done - plowing through Sunni strongholds on search - and - destroy missions. "If we encourage the Iraqis to clear and hold their own areas, and use airpower to stop the insurgents from penetrating the cleared areas, it could be useful," Pape said. "The risk is that we will encourage the Iraqis to do search-and-destroy, and they would be less judicious about using airpower - and the violence would go up. More civilians will be killed, which means more insurgents will be created."

Even American bombing on behalf of an improved, well-trained Iraqi Army would not necessarily be any more successful against the insurgency. "It's not going to work," said Andrew Brookes, the former director of airpower studies at the Royal Air Force’s advanced staff college, who is now at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, in London. "Can you put a lid on the insurgency with bombing?" Brookes said. "No. You can concentrate in one area, but the guys will spring up in another town." The inevitable reliance on Iraqi ground troops' targeting would also create conflicts. "I don’t see your guys dancing to the tune of someone else," Brookes said. He added that he and many other experts "don't believe that airpower is a solution to the problems inside Iraq at all. Replacing boots on the ground with airpower didn't work in Vietnam, did it?"

Nope, it didn't.

I've said over and over again that stay or withdraw is not the issue. Bush will screw it up either way. U.S. military airstrikes have significantly increased in Iraq. And it all makes poltical sense. What better way to boost poll approval ratings hovering at 33% (way, way, too high imo) than to bring the troops home? Airstrikes'll do that. Nevermind it will make the situation far worse than it already is (hard to believe, but true). It will be an Iraqi problem; a large American presence will be history. And Bush's poll numbers will rise.

Tragically, the beginning of a plan to find a real-world solution to the dangerous mess Bush created in Iraq will have to wait until January, 2009 when a hopefully sane president will take over. In the meantime, thousands will die for no reason at all except that an incompetent, bumbling, and frightened fool is president of the United States.

Makes you kind of angry, doesn't it?
tristero 3/16/2006 09:03:00 AM |

 
It's So Easy. Replace The "Q" With "N" And...

by tristero

Hooyah! Iran is now the new Iraq. Read all about it here. From the article:

The strategy document declares that American-led diplomacy to halt Iran's program to enrich nuclear fuel "must succeed if confrontation is to be avoided," a near final draft of the document says.

Fortunately, we've got the combined diplomatic genius of Condoleeza Rice and John Bolton spearheading the effort to avoid "confrontation."

China's leaders, it says, are "expanding trade, but acting as if they can somehow 'lock up' energy supplies around the world or seek to direct markets rather than opening them up — as if they can follow a mercantilism borrowed from a discredited era.

That sounds about right. Only America has the right to 'lock up' engergy supplies and follow a mercantilism from a discredited era. Where does China get off, anyhow?

Interestingly, the document includes the United States itself in its assessments:

"Recent trends regrettably point toward a diminishing commitment to democratic freedoms and institutions," the document reads.

Oops. They were talking about Russia. An understandable mistake on my part.

Moving right along, it's still the case that the worst ideas remain official American policy.

But chief among the sections that remain unchanged is the most controversial section of the 2002 strategy: the elevation of pre-emptive strikes to a central part of United States strategy.

"The world is better off if tyrants know that they pursue W.M.D. at their own peril," the strategy says.

Um, er...I think the lessons the world learned from Iraq is the critical importance of nuclear defense against the US - it's worked for NoKo, after all - and that the US is too overcommitted and unpopular to stop anyone else from acquiring them.

And the final sentence of the article notes a curious oversight in the National Security Strategy 2006:

It stays away from the subject of global warming.

But this is not the final draft. I'm sure the complete text will have a lot to say about global warming and what the Bush administration is doing to ameliorate its effects.
tristero 3/16/2006 07:05:00 AM |

 
Early Spring Reading List

by tristero

(Note: Links are to Powells Books, a fine independent bookseller.)

Mark Danner on the Downing Street Memos and then some. Danner is one of the greats of the American press. Not to be missed.

The Enemy of My Enemy: The Alarming Convergence of Militant Islam and the Extreme Right. And now you know why Horowitz has been so swift to insist that it's liberals who are in bed with Osama. But seriously, this could be a terrific book. The thing is that the author, George Michael, is going to have to define the "extreme right", because obviously many rightwing conservatives - eg Flemming Rose, Franklin Graham, the Dobson scum, etc. - clearly loathe islamism, if not Islam itself. But it sure is mighty curious how close islamist values mirror christianist ones.

Since both these books won't be out until April, that gives me plenty of time to finish off Jonathan Israel's masterpiece, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750, all 834 pages of it. And it's wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. In related reading, I'll also have time to complete my first serious pass through Spinoza's writings since college. Folks, you ain't read nuttin' 'til you've read his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. The word on the street (grin) is that Spinoza is dry, cold, and difficult. Not true. I find him deeply moving and, well, not exactly easy on occasion, but clear as a bell most of the time and worth every second. I've been gobbling up excerpts from this set of selections from Spinoza's work. It includes the complete Ethics, which I've just started and don't expect to grok for many, many years. There are the usual disputes in academe about translations, but the ones here, by Curley, seem more than adequate.

If you need some hand-holding getting into Spinoza - as I did - Israel's book has some superb, concise chapters on Spinoza's works that can help as a guide. I would skip The Courtier and the Heretic by Matthew Stewart, about Spinoza and Leibniz, which got some good reviews recently. I read it, and yes, it's a very fast read, but that's because most of the book is taken up with biographical stuff and very little detail of their philosophies. But I suppose if all of this is brand new to you, Stewart's book is a good way to get a toe wet. But definitely go on over to Spinoza himself. Beautiful. And if you already know him, you might want to read him again, just to remind yourself that there once was a time when people thought a reality-based government was a pretty good idea.
tristero 3/16/2006 06:24:00 AM |

 
Planning Ahead

by tristero

To add one more observation to Digby's post about how Republicans are using the censure effort to rally the Republican base:

The GOP has been anticipating a serious effort to hold Bush accountable for his incompetence for years. For example, here is Jed Babbin from National Review Online in 2003. He's worrying what might happen to poor George Bush if there's another serious terrorist attack in the US:

If such an attack succeeds, the Democrats have been positioning themselves to benefit from it. All the talk of inadequate funding for homeland security — as if pouring money on Rainbow Tom Ridge will solve anything — is a predicate to their strategy. Bush will be blamed for protecting us inadequately. If the damage is sufficiently severe, and the economy tanks, they may even try to impeach him. If you think they can't do that, think again.

But even 2003 seems a little late to start planning the pushback strategy we're seeing against Feingold. My rough guess is that they started to develop it within days of the Supreme Court decision in 2000 that put Bush in the White House. That's why this effort to "rally the base" is so organized and the message is so meticulously tailored: this isn't an attack on Bush, but on the Republican Party which, as we all know, is the true party of America. It's also why it's an easy sell to a compliant, lazy press; they've been told to anticipate it for years, and "what it really means" when it finally happens.

Dig: Republicans started planning Clinton's impeachment in November, 1992. Y'wanna bet when they'll start working to impeach the next we-should-be-so-lucky Democratic president? Y'think they haven't started? Wanna bet?
tristero 3/16/2006 03:57:00 AM |

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

 
Our Best Interests

by digby

What an interesting article. Apparently, David Kirkpatrick is on the "conservative beat" this week for the NY Times and has the big scoop that the Republicans are all atwitter with scary tales of Democrats impeaching the president if they take the House and Senate. "Conservative beat" sources like Limbaugh and Weyrich and the Wall Street Journal editorial page are quoted saying that they are gleeful and excited that the Democrats have handed them this present and it's onward to victory!

How generous of them to give this warning so that Dems have a chance to dodge that bullet. That's why the "conservative beat" of the New York Times is such a godsend for liberals. When concerned Republicans need a platform from which to warn the Democrats about where they are going wrong they know they can go there and get their message out. In this case they feel it is only fair to give Democratic politicians a heads up that if they pursue things like Feingold's motion the Republican base will go wild.

They humbly remind them that the Republicans paid big time for impeaching president Clinton. (Why, if they hadn't done that they might have an even bigger majority in the House, Senate and Supreme Court than they have today!) I'm sure that the Democrats will take heed and not make the mistake of giving the Republicans any issue with which to motivate their base.

The question is, what are Democrats going to do to motivate theirs?



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digby 3/15/2006 09:09:00 PM |

 
Bad Instincts

by digby

There is still a lot of angst, it appears, both in Washington and the blogosphere over Feingold's censure motion. It seems that substantively, the party agrees that Bush broke the law and deserves to be censured, but there is a division among most of the blogosphere and virtually the entire establishment about whether this is a canny move politically. (See these two post by Kevin Drum and Glenn Greenwald respectively for the essence of the argument within the blogosphere.)

Steve Benen contacted some insiders who told him this:

First, a lot of Dems were bothered by the fact that Feingold took the party off-message. The DP World controversy was still reverberating, and congressional Dems had hoped to keep the momentum going this week with a vote on the "Sail Only if Scanned (S.O.S.) Act," which requires more effective scanning techniques be implemented at our ports, and a bill that would expanding government scrutiny of foreign investments. Instead, both of these are getting less attention because of interest in Feingold's resolution.

Second, there's a sense that Feingold helped bring Republicans together. As of last week, the GOP's fissures were showing and all the talk was about Republicans on the Hill exerting independence from the White House. Now, Feingold's resolution has pushed the GOP back together again and Republicans are back on the offensive. Some Dems think the censure resolution basically helped the GOP get off the ropes.

Third, there was not even a hint of party strategy on this. The past couple of years, there's been an effort to try and have Dems coordinate more on major political and policy initiatives. Coordinating Dems is like herding cats, but there's been some progress of late. Feingold, however, decided to go his own way; he announced his resolution without even letting his colleagues know it was coming and with no real regard for what it would do for the party's short-term agenda. Some see this as a slap in the face — if Feingold wanted party support, they said, he should have worked within the party. Instead, Feingold took the lead, and no one followed.

Fourth, Dems saw that Bush was starting another series of Iraq speeches, and the party was ready to pivot from ports to the war. Roll Call noted today that Dems want to "play offense on Iraq." Yesterday, however, whenever a Dem senator tried to talk about the war, reporters just asked about Feingold.

And fifth, one Senate staffer in particular said if Feingold wanted to push warrantless searches again, there were (and are) effective alternatives to a censure resolution. The staffer told me:

"Rather than just rush to a vote, which would be stupid, we want to get Specter to hold a hearing on it in Judiciary where it has been referred. Imagine a hearing with a panel of experts discussing whether Bush's behavior deserves censure. Wouldn't that be much better as a first step then a rushed vote in which we lose and R's declare victory and say we were silly?"

None of these reasons hold up for me. They do not denote timidity, so much as a kind of political blindness. Let's take them one by one:

One: The port legislation is being reported right now on CNN. And it is being reported with as much fanfare as it ever would have been. But it is as dry as tinder. The mojo of the port deal is past. It did its job. It helped to further drive the president's approval ratings into the dirt and split the Republicans. Any thought that the controversy could be effectively extended by legislation announced in a press conference by Nancy Pelosi is wishful thinking. There's no reason not to do it, of course. But it isn't an excuse to be angry at Feingold.

Two: Please tell me that the Democrats are not going to withhold criticim of Bush because it might make Republicans rally around him. Karl Rove and Tom DeLay have run the GOP with an iron fist for almost eight years. The Republicans have lost the ability to function without them. They are confused and rudderless and they will run back and forth toward Bush and against him dozens of times over the next few months. They literally don't know where to turn.

Yes, Feingold probably did bring Republicans together. For five full minutes until the latest polls came in which have George W. Bush at 33% today. Do Democrats really think that Republicans can turn that around if they vote for this censure motion? (If they do then Rove and Delay have already done their jobs well. They have convinced the Democrats that the GOP is omnipotent.)

Three: It's apparently true that Feingold didn't consult with the party. But considering the response I can sort of see his point. They are so unimaginative and so sluggish that he didn't see the use in playing the party game. If party coodination means being forced to wait for them to hold plodding press conferences about x-raying cargo boxes, then it's hard to see why anyone who wants to take the fight to the Republicans would bother.

I can see why they are angry about it. They were caught short. But they need to move more quickly on this stuff. Planning is great, but you can't always control events. How you deal with things coming from left field is important --- they failed on this one, making it worse for themselves by ducking the press and dithering about their response. I think Democrats have lost touch with their political instincts. This is one of those things that a smart old fashioned pol would have been able to either finesse or respond to properly off the cuff. (They should have called Bill Clinton --- he was good at that sort of thing.)

Four: Iraq is what's killing the Republicans in the polls. Democrats will be talking about Iraq every day in one way or another far into the future. And other things are going to come up to interrupt their plans to "pivot" on the war at any particular time. They need to learn to deal with this.

Five: Well yes, by all means a strategy whereby we count on Specter to hold "real" hearings is spot on. What could possibly go wrong? Why, if we wait until after the 2008 election, he might even do it.

I said this yesterday and I'll repeat it. This image of "powerlessness" at a time when the Republicans are on the ropes is the biggest problem we face for the fall elections. If Democratic pols don't understand that they are flirting with terrible grassroots defeatism, then they are going to lose. They must take action (and I don't mean boring press conferences and 10 point plans) or it won't matter a damn if the Republicans are on the ropes --- demoralized Democrats are not going to bother with them. Come on. Speak for us. If not now, when?

Defeatism: acceptance and content with defeat without struggle. The term is commonly used in the context of war: a soldier can be a defeatist if he or she refuses to fight because he or she thinks that the fight will be lost for sure or that it is not worth fighting for some other reason.

I might just point out that in the few primaries so far, the Democrats have not had an exceptional turn-out. Maybe it means nothing. But it might also be a canary in the coal mine.

Jane and ReddHedd have all the numbers for your Senators. Make a call. These people need to hear from us.


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digby 3/15/2006 01:08:00 PM |

 
Establishment Claws

by digby


Here's a new group that it seems to me is worth supporting. Contrary to popular myth, Democrats have always supported the military and are very religious. But we do believe that everyone, especially those in the military, have a right to be free of religious or political coercion. Here's yet another former Republican and Reagan official who has come over to our way of thinking:

Former Reagan White House counsel, Air Force veteran, U.S. Air Force Academy graduate and activist, Mikey Weinstein, today announced the launch of a new nonprofit organization, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), which is dedicated to ensuring that all members of the United States Armed Forces fully receive the Constitutional guarantees of religious freedom. Weinstein, who filed a federal lawsuit last October to halt illegal proselytizing and evangelizing throughout the Air Force, will serve as president of the charitable organization.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation will serve as a watchdog organization - educating the public and the media on issues related to the separation of church and state within the Armed Forces, and litigating when necessary. Weinstein is joined by some of the nation’s leading military and civic leaders who have united together as founding members of the board. The MRFF will also work with local leaders throughout the country to coordinate grassroots efforts.

"I created the Military Religious Freedom Foundation so that others could join in the fight to assure that our Armed Forces preserve the Constitutional guarantee of the separation of church and state and ensure that junior officers and enlisted personnel are protected from coercive proselytizing and evangelizing by their superiors," said Weinstein.

[...]

Weinstein began his efforts to combat the disregard of the Constitutional guarantee of the separation of church and state within the Armed Forces when he learned that his sons, cadets at the Air Force Academy, were subjected to taunts and derision because of their Jewish faith and that each had faced proselytizing both from their peers and superiors. He led a nearly two-year struggle to end evangelical religious bias at the United States Air Force Academy, reaching out to government officials and Air Force academy leadership. When these efforts failed, Weinstein, a practicing attorney, took the next step and filed a lawsuit against the Air Force.

A founding tenet of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation is that it adheres "strongly to the principle that religious faith is a deeply personal matter, and that no American has the right to question another American's beliefs as long as these beliefs do not unwontedly intrude on the public space or the privacy or safety of another individual," according to the foundation's mission statement.

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digby 3/15/2006 12:29:00 PM |

 
Heaven Or Hell, It Don't Matter To Me...

by tristero

...as long as I end up where Jerry Falwell ain't.
tristero 3/15/2006 06:23:00 AM |

 
Abu Ghraib: More Details

by tristero

Go read it. Look and watch. And remember:

Although the photos are a disturbing visual account of particular incidents inside Abu Ghraib prison, they should not be viewed as representing the sum total of what occurred.

Your tax dollars at work, boys and girls. Truly an education in how Bush is bringing democracy to Iraq.

(BTW, I would imagine that at least a few folks will download all this stuff before the Feds try to get Salon to pull it, so it will be available somewhere. Nevertheless, you should get over there soon.)
tristero 3/15/2006 06:12:00 AM |

Tuesday, March 14, 2006

 
Nice

by digby

John at Crooks and Liars has the video of Bush congratulating Jason McElwaine the basketball player who has autism. I know that it was a cheap stunt on many levels, but I'm with John --- it was a nice thing for Bush to do on its own merits. And I have to say that Bush actually seemed like a real human when he was talking about it. For the first time in, well ... ever.

If you haven't seen Jason's amazing feat, go over to C&L and check it out.


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digby 3/14/2006 09:44:00 PM |

 
Hah

by digby

From Wednesday's NY Times Editorial:

If the current Congress had been called on to intervene in the case of Mr. Allen, it would probably have tried to legalize shoplifting.

Law and order is for the little people.


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digby 3/14/2006 09:05:00 PM |

 
Rank and File Partisanship

by digby

So the Republicans are finally coming right out and saying that Russ Feingold is helping the terrorists by calling for censure. I'm just surprised it didn't happen sooner. Bill Frist pretty much said it himself on Sunday:

George, what was interesting in listening to my good friend, Russ, is that he mentioned protecting the American people only one time, and although you went to politics a little bit later, I think it's a crazy political move and I think it in part is a political move because here we are, the Republican Party, the leadership in the Congress, supporting the President of the United States as Commander in Chief, who is out there fighting al Qaeda and the Taliban and Osama bin Laden and the people who have sworn, have sworn to destroy Western civilization and all the families listening to us. And they're out now attacking, at least today, through this proposed censure vote, out attacking our Commander in Chief. Doesn't make sense.

(Don't you just love the idea that "our" Commander in Chief is "out there" fighting al Qaeda and the Taliban and Osama bin Laden?" Maybe the Delta Force has rendered them to Crawford where Rambo Bush and Dirty Cheney hunt them like plucked turkeys.)

This stuff is actually a veiled threat. As Robert Parry pointed out the other day:

Bush's latest success came as part of a supposed "concession" to Congress that would grant two new Republican-controlled seven-member subcommittees narrow oversight of Bush's warrantless wiretapping of Americans.

While "moderate" Republican senators -- Mike DeWine of Ohio, Olympia Snowe of Maine, and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska -- hailed the plan as a retreat by the White House, the deal actually blesses Bush's authority to bypass the courts in spying on Americans and imposes on him only a toothless congressional review process.

Indeed, the congressional plan may make matters worse, broadening the permissible scope of Bush's wiretaps to include Americans deemed to be "working in support of a terrorist group or organization."

Given Bush's record of stretching words to his advantage -- and his claim that anyone who isn’t "with us" is with the terrorists -- the vague concept of "working in support" could open almost any political critic of the Bush administration to surveillance.

Now we have Republican senators saying explicitly that Russ Feingold is helping the terrorists. You do the math. Everyone is supposed to simply "trust" a president and his rubber stamp bedwetters to not use such sweeping laws against political opponents.

Very recent history shows that we are very wise to be suspicious of such things. It is not only not unimaginable, it was definitely done, within my adult lifetime, by a former GOP president and many of that president's staff and acolytes who are now in the Bush administration. Congressional oversight was what nailed them before and they are determined not to be tripped up by that pesky constitutional requirement again.

For a full primer on this issue, read this fascinating article about conservative southern Democrat, Senator Sam Ervin, whose devotion to civil liberties led him to pursue inquiries that led all the way to the White House:

"For the past four years, the U.S. Army has been closely watching civilian political activity within the United States." So charged Christopher H. Pyle, a former intelligence officer, in the January 1970 edition of Washington Monthly. Pyle's account of military spies snooping on law-abiding citizens and recording their actions in secret government computers sent a shudder through the nation's press. Images from George Orwell's novel 1984 of Big Brother and the thought police filled the newspapers. Public alarm prompted the Senate Subcommittee on Consti­tutional Rights, chaired by Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina, to investigate. For more than a year, Ervin struggled against a cover-up to get to the bottom of the surveillance system. Frustrated by the Nixon Administration's misleading statements, claims of inherent executive powers, and refusals to disclose information on the basis of national security, the Senator called for public hearings in 1971 to examine "the dangers the Army's program presents to the principles of the Constitution."

[...]

Although he did not know it at the time, Senator Ervin had started down the road to Watergate. It was during the subcommittee's investigation of Army surveillance in 1970 and 1971 that Ervin stumbled onto the secretive programs and questions of executive power that would lead him to chair the famous Watergate Hearings in 1973. Ironically, it was at the same time that Ervin began his investigation into military spying that Richard Nixon and his men began their own political espionage that put them, too, on the road to Watergate.

[...]

Attorney General John N. Mitchell provided the legal basis for the increased domestic surveillance soon afterward. According to the Attorney General's spokesman, the Administration had the right to collect and store information on civilian political activity because of "the inherent powers of the federal government to protect the internal security of the nation. We feel that's our job." Thus, the Administration claimed a virtually unchecked power -- not subject to Congressional oversight -- to carry out unlimited domestic surveillance on anyone it wished.

The Church Commission, formed after the Nixon administration, recommended the creation of the FISA court as a direct result of the abuses of the previous few decades on the part of both Democratic and Republican administrations. Republicans were upset by this:

An intense debate erupted during former U.S. president Gerald Ford's administration over the president's powers to eavesdrop without warrants to gather foreign intelligence, newly disclosed government documents revealed.

Former president George Bush, current Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice-President Dick Cheney are cited in the documents. The roughly 200 pages of historic records reflect a remarkably similar dispute between the White House and Congress fully three decades before President George W. Bush's acknowledgment he authorized wiretaps without warrants of some Americans in terrorism investigations.

"Yogi Berra was right: it's deja vu all over again," said Tom Blanton, executive director for the U.S. National Security Archives, a private research group that compiles collections of sensitive government documents.

"It's the same debate."

You have to give these guys credit for having patience. They lost a debate 30 years ago but the minute they were able to get an airheaded puppet in the white house and a bunch of blind eunuchs in the congress it was as if it never happened. They never liked the law so they just didn't follow it.

Donna Brazile broke from the establishment today and wrote this in Roll Call:

Don't Ignore the Feingold Resolution. Embrace It

The progressive blogosphere is on fire right now. Web loggers are pumped up about the effort by Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) to censure President Bush for breaking the law on domestic surveillance and taking matters into his own hands. Feingold, a potential 2008 presidential contender, announced the controversial resolution Sunday on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos." (Full disclosure: I was a participant in the show's roundtable conversation.) Since then, this topic has activated the party's base online and generated an onslaught of babble on talk radio stations across America. Feingold hadn't even left the studio when Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) condemned the proposal as "a crazy political move." I disagree. It's a desperate political move to save our democracy.

[...]

Many bloggers say they want Democrats to be bold and decisive when it comes to protecting the Constitution of the United States and the rule of law. For those who worry that this issue will create more tension between the progressive "net-roots" types and the party's base, I say fear not. Let's use this resolution to talk about what's really troubling so many Democrats and other astute Americans: the lack of Congressional oversight and accountability. No sooner had Feingold made his announcement than Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) was on CNN's "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer" urging caution. In other words, hold your powder -- wait until the investigation, if any occurs, is completed before urging action.

As a Beltway insider, I am convinced that we cannot continue to tell those who have loyally supported our Democratic leaders to wait. Wait for what? Wait until our pollsters give us the green light to speak up? Should we continue to wait, hoping that the Republicans will finally invite Democrats into the room when important decisions affecting our national security are made? All I know is that people outside the Beltway have grown deeply impatient with our focus-group style of politics. They want to see some bold changes and some new leadership.

It's time to break with the same-old, same-old and use the Feingold resolution to force the Republican-controlled Congress to commit to serious oversight of the controversial, but increasingly popular, surveillance program. The message from the left-leaning blogosphere is clear: Democrats should understand the real issue. The point is not censure or impeachment; it is Congress' lack of oversight and its failure to hold anyone accountable for major mistakes or missteps. And especially, it's about clearly misleading the American public...While the Feingold resolution is not going anywhere given the full Republican control of Washington, D.C., a change in leadership in the fall would make this a ripe item for conversation and action in 2007 and beyond.

Yes, it looks as though we have to clean up the same messes we cleaned up the first time these miscreants were in power and we'd better start preparing the public for it. Saying "trust us" isn't going to cut it:

Civil liberties watchdogs worry that, in the reaction to 9/11, security agencies are going overboard, much as they did during the 1960s and early '70s, when huge programs of illegal spying and dirty tricks led to reforms (box)."These agencies haven't remembered what happened to them in the '70s," says University of Georgia scholar Loch Johnson, who as a staff member on the House and Senate intelligence committees helped draft those reforms. "You heard the same arguments back in the Johnson and Nixon administrations: 'Why do you want to shackle our hands?'"

Why indeed. Given their history, we'd be fools to accept their assurances that they are not using their extraordinary police, military and intelligence power to spy on their political opponents. That's what they always do. There are many, many examples of this administration's "grown-ups" lying in wait for a quarter century to roll the clock back to a time of Richard Nixon and the Imperial presidency.


Call your Senators. Get Feingold's back. Brazile is right on this. The establishment Dems and the weak-kneed courtiers in the pundit and strategist class who whisper in their ears are on the wrong side of history and they'd better get right with it. Here's an email I got today from a reader:

At times like this I feel that the U.S.A. has been lost and will never again be found. Here we have a president who failed to protect us from foreseeable threats, lied us into an imprudent and unnecessary war (with tremendous loss of national treasure), presided over the destruction of one of the great American cities, spies on the American people and lies about it, and is currently seen as unfavorable by 2/3 of the American people. Yet our Democratic leaders are too timid to even criticize him for fear of being considered against the war on terrorism or being partisan.

With all due respect, Democrats should be kicking Bush in the teeth every chance they get. Every word from their mouths should remind people of what Bush has brought to this country.

I am embarrassed to be a Democrat after seeing the reaction to Feingold censure resolution. I am mortified for our country. I don't think there is any hope. Our party is the party of Neville Chamberlain. The way we are acting as a party we don't even deserve to be compared to Americans.

These are your people, Democrats. You'd better listen to this or they are going to be hard pressed to leave the house this November and vote for you. As Rove says, "politics is TV with the sound turned off" to millions of people in this country. All they see is another Democratic retreat. They may not like the Republicans but they also don't see how a party like ours can beat them.

Democrats' biggest enemy right now is rank and file Democratic defeatism. They ignore it at their peril. The Republicans aren't and they will spend every minute of every day working to make Democratic voters feel powerless and weak, no matter how low the GOP falls in the polls. This kind of thing helps them make their case.



Update: Brazile was on Blitzer this afternoon and said this:

BLITZER: Because you know a lot of Democrats are nervous about this resolution.

BRAZILE: Well, they're nervous -- when Jack Murtha spoke out about a timetable, they were nervous. Now the president is almost embracing it.

So just hold your horses, get behind Russ Feingold. Things will be OK in the morning.

Torie Clarke went on to say "bring it on" to try to intimidate the Dems into continuing to believe that they cannot criticize the president on national security. They really need to stop saying that. It hasn't been working out for them.

Update II: Here's an interesting analysis of the polling on the issue by Mystery Pollster.

I would suggest that the more Democrats say they approve of the program, the more people will believe there isn't anything wrong with it. Funny how that happens.


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digby 3/14/2006 01:54:00 PM |

 
Praying For Understanding

by digby


I got an e-mail from the writer of this post called "I'm Not Sick of Atrios or Digby: Building a Team Means Religious and Secular Liberals Hearing Each Other Out" in which Atrios and I are taken to task for our hostility to religion.

I love Atrios, but he's not exactly politically savvy when it comes to the concerns of religious moderates and liberals--the fastest growing part of the Democratic Party base. One would think that just as a matter of real politic that the fastest growing part of your coalition would be entitled to some basic respect if not props. But, alas, not from Atrios.

[...]


Digby also weighs in: Perhaps some of these religious politicans (sic)could speak to the flock about giving some respect to the non-faithful. It's the Christian thing to do.

We're not politicians here, but that's exactly what groups largely led by the religious community do: the Interfaith Alliance, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, etc etc Come on, guys. No one is trying to convert you--we're just asking for the most basic respect.

Unfortunately, he excerpted the only paragraph in my piece in which I say that secular Dems should be treated with more respect, which was actually sort of a wry joke. The rest of my long post was spent pointing out that the vast majority of Democrats are religious and that those of us who aren't, contribute to, work and vote enthusiatically for those who are. My main beef with Amy Sullivan and others like her was that she seems to have internalized facile GOP talking points and unthinkingly uses them against Democrats. (That is also, I believe, what Atrios was claiming he was "sick of.") To portray the left as being "knee jerk" anti-faith is unfair and plays into the negative image that Republicans have spent years cultivating. Let he who casts the first GOP meme be chastized.

I take the point about building coalitions. But, those moderates whom Sullivan claims would vote for Democrats if only they didn't believe the Republican campaign to protray us as hostile to faith, will undoubtedly be moved to do so if religious Democrats make clear that the vast majority of our policies and our politics stem from faith as well, which everyone acknowledges. Many of our values about equality and community and fairness and tending to those less fortunate come from the religious tradition. The civil rights movement grew directly out of the church and there are no liberals who repudiate or belittle it. When Bill Clinton, Jesse Jackson or Jimmy Carter or John Kerry or any number of the Democratic politicians I mentioned in my post speak in the language of faith we non-believers vote for them without a second thought.

All of us Democrats share a common set of political values and principles, regardless of religion. As a member of the small minority of non-believers in the party I have no problem with our leaders using religious language and emphasising the religious nature of those commonly held principles and values.

But unsurprisingly, I'm not crazy about being the scapegoat for Democratic losses, particularly since the data does not bear that out. Nor do I think most Democrats agree with the proposition that the party needs to adopt conservative social positions in order to win. If there is hostility to religion, it's hostility to conservative religion --- and not because it's religion but because its conservative. We are liberals after all. If Sullivan and others want to move the party to the right on social issues let's put religion aside and talk about that. Using religion to bludgeon Democrats into believing that they are offending the faithful unless they change their attitudes about personal liberty is cheap.

It's also important to point out, in the interest of keeping the facts squarely on the table, that numbers of religious liberals and Democratic moderates may be growing, but they are not the fastest growing part of the Democratic base. Indeed, they are not the fastest growing part of the nation:

The most comprehensive recent survey of religous affiliation found:

-- Catholic adults increased from 46.0 million to nearly 50.8 million, but their proportion in the population fell by nearly two percentage points.

-- Although Protestant and other non-Catholic denominations remain the majority, with more than 105.4 million adult adherents, their proportion slid sharply from 60% to 52%.

-- 2.8 million adults give their religion as Jewish, down from about 3.1 million in 1990. Another 2.5 million, who say they have no religion or identify with another religion, are of Jewish parentage, were raised Jewish or consider themselves Jewish.

-- The number of adults who identify with a non-Christian religion rose sharply, from about 5.8 million to 7.7 million. However, their proportion remains small, 3.7% up from 3.3% in 1990.

-- Muslim/Islamic adults total 1.1 million -- nearly double the number in 1990. Those identifying their race as black are 23% of the group; the others overwhelmingly identify as white or Asian.

One of the most striking 1990-2001 comparisons is the more than doubling of the adult population identifying with no religion, from 14.3 million (8%) in 1990 to the current 29.4 million (14.1%). The 1990 figure may be downwardly biased due to a slight change in the wording of the key survey question in 2001. In seeking a more accurate measure of identification, the clause "if any" was added this year to the question, "What religion do you identify with?" The prior wording may have subtly prompted respondents to name some religion.

ARIS 2001 goes further than its predecessor in investigating such new territory as membership in a place of worship, change of religious identification over one's lifetime, and religion of the spouse or partner of respondents. Findings reveal, among other things, a huge gap between religious identification and affiliation with a place of worship. Although 81% of America's adults identify with a religion, only 54% reside in a household where anyone belongs to a church, temple, synagogue, mosque or other place of worship. About 20% of those who say they have no religion (including many atheists and agnostics) nevertheless report that they or someone else in their household is a member of a religious congregation. About 40% of adults who describe themselves as "religious" report no membership in any religious congregation.

The religious pollster The Barna Group writes:

Since 1991, the adult population in the United States has grown by 15%. During that same period the number of adults who do not attend church has nearly doubled, rising from 39 million to 75 million – a 92% increase.

I'm not suggesting that because you don't go to church, you aren't religious. But it does suggest that the coveted evangelical vote, which is very church based, may not be where the religious action is.

And I don't point any of this out to say that the party should cater to non-believers. The total number of admitted non-believers may be growing, but they are just 14 pecent of the country --- a small minority. The Democrats know this very well. No politican in the country can win if he is not sufficently religious and they wouldn't dare to even try.

But these numbers do back up the fact that this isn't about religion. It's about social conservatism. That's a different argument.

When you dig into American religiosity you find some very interesting data and many contradictions. It is not a monolith by any means, not even within the various factions of the "born-again." What people say and what they do and what they really believe are often different. As opposed to the 7% of people who believe in Evangelical Christianity, which has a very cohesive set of beliefs, faith in America in general is incredibly complicated.

Here's what religion pollster Barna says:

The outcomes suggest that faith does have an impact on how people live, according to George Barna, who directed the research. "It seems that areas of life most clearly related to religious beliefs, such as moral behavior and serving the needs of disadvantaged people, are somewhat affected by involvement in church or through a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. The data also show, however, that areas of life that are less overtly associated with people's religious beliefs - dimensions such as economics, political influence or entertainment choices - may not be impacted by their faith. People need more help in determining how their faith speaks to life issues beyond the obvious connections.

If the religious left would like to engage their fellow religionists on these issues, I'd be very happy. Build that coalition. But trying to slice off the one small faction of organized religous conservatives who currently vote for Republicans based on their (allegedly) shared beliefs on sexual morality is a stupid strategy. There appear to be many millions of Christians, Jews, Muslims, New Agers, and unchurched who could be persuaded by faith based liberal appeals. Democrats do not need to change their values of tolerance and equality and liberty to accomodate them. We already share them.



For those of you who are interested in the breakdown of believers to non-believers and how it impacts politics, check out this fascinating state by state breakdown of religious belief.


Update: I see that Atrios responded as well. I agree.

Update: Gilliard weighs in with a very provocative post tying the GOP's religious outreach to racism.


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digby 3/14/2006 11:26:00 AM |

 
A Rare Long Atrios Rant

by tristero

And it's terrific, of course. Obviously, I care a lot more about religion than Atrios does (all religious expression, not just one), and there are a few "secularists" that have a public face - but no major politicians who are out and proud of their secularism.

But these are quibbles and besides the point because his conclusions are right on:

We also have some left-leaning Christians who seem to think this perception problem is due to hostility to religion by secular liberals... I don't understand this. People who perpetuate right wing talking points about Democrats always piss me off especially when they have no basis...

Advocates for the separation of church and state are not advocating secularism, aside from government secularism, they're simply trying to defend freedom of religion.

Exactly.
tristero 3/14/2006 11:13:00 AM |

 
The End Of History Is History

by tristero

[Update: In comments, some excellent distinctions between Wilsonianism and Bushism were drawn by anand. I'm not sure they profoundly change the essential point I was trying to make, vis a vis idealism, but they are extremely helpful in more precisely defining what Wilson meant by Wisonianism. Whether Fukuyama sees Wilsonianism in that way is an open question. It seems pretty clear that he was mashing together two foreign policy extremes, and the invocation of Wilson was rhetorical, to avoid using the term "realistic idealism," which is almost as hilariously Pynchonian as Catatonic Expressionism.]


Michiko Kakutani reviews Fukuyama's latest typing in the NY Times, which she calls "an astute and shrewdly reasoned book." Uh huh. Here's one of his astute, original observations:

... the tremendous margin of power exercised by the United States in the security realm brings with it special responsibilities to use that power prudently.

Now where did I hear that before? Wait a minute, Yes! Now I remember:

With great power comes great responsibility...

Now in all seriousness, I don't see any harm in a man considered to be one of the most important brains in international affairs cribbing his ideas from comic book characters. Because when you think about it, it makes a helluva lot more sense than having less than five qualified Arabic translators in the entire FBI pre-9/11 (if that). And it is true, after all, that, well, with great power does come great responsibility - Peter Parker had a smart uncle or whatever he was. And he sure was an astute, shrewd reasoner.

But what is unconscionable is this summary Kakutani provides of one of Fukuyama's least defensible astute observations:

These errors were worsened in the walk-up to the war in Iraq, Mr. Fukuyama adds, by an us-versus-them mentality on the part of many neoconservatives, who felt they were looked down upon by the foreign policy establishment.

The hell they were! They weren't looked down upon enough.

They should have laughed Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Kristol, and you, too, Fukuyama out of public influence for the rest of their lives. But nooo...They took them seriously enough to "engage" them. But how do you engage an insane idea except by colluding with the insanity?

And now a chastened Fukuyama admits the errors of his ways - and boy, was that mofo wrong, twice signing PNAC letters urging US presidents to pre-emptively invade Iraq. And what does he advocate now? Dig: Fukuyama calls for a "realistic Wilsonianism."

Now, there's a shrewdly astute idea. Make the world safe for democracy; and be realistic about it, utlitizing "soft" power.

Get it, people? Can you believe that this blithering, incoherent fool is considered a serious intellectual about anything, even comic book philosophy? Okay, let me take a deep breath, lower my blood pressure, and briefly explain what's wrong with "realistic Wilsonianism."

First, the US has no mission to make the world safe for democracy. Wilsonianism is just America's ugliest expansionist desires topped off with a smiley face. Second, realism in foreign policy sense is a disaster for US foreign policy. It has encouraged a dangerous ignorance of a foreign country's culture and politcs (see above re: dearth of Arab translators).

Clearer now? "Realistic Wilsonianism" is a perfect description of the spectacular combination of lies, good intentions, imperial ambitions, cluelessness, and just plain stupidity that eventually led to the proposal and execution of the Bush/Iraq war.

That's right: what Fukuyama has proposed as a solution to the problem of Bushism is more of the same bullshit that led to Bushism in the first place. Sure, sure, we'll make war with economic policy instead of guns. As if that isn't just as stupid and deadly. As if it won't escalate rapidly right back into Bushism.

So what's the alternative, you might ask, if not Fukuyama's hooey? The answer is patently obvious: a liberalism in international affairs - or if you prefer jargon, a liberal pragmatism - that navigates between the Scylla of idealism and the Charybdis of realism, using prudence and caution.

What is so difficult to understand or accept in that? Does it sound too timid? As if it's somehow cowardly to use the brains God gave us to avoid forseeable disasters. Besides, look where "bold" and "audacious" has got us. Too vague? Not half as vague as the neo-conservative call for The End of Evil - what are they talking about? On the other hand, a pragmatically liberal foreign policy would have recognized the necessity of removing Saddam from power* and balanced that with an equally crucial recognition that the removal of Saddam by US-led invasion would cause Iraq to rapidly reach the Hobbes threshold.

If Fukuyama is considered a serious American intellectual, we are in deep trouble. Guess what? He is. We are.

(Edited and slightly expanded after orignial posting.)

[UPDATE: In case the above sounded like a distinction without a difference, I"d like to point out that Fukuyama's formulation, as described in the review, focuses on combining two extreme views of foreign policy, neither of which is an intelligent way to behave in the world. My point is that framing a foreign policy by trying to mash together two bad ideas is a terrible idea; it will rapidly lead to extremism. My suggested alternative assiduously steers clear of either extreme and is never idealistic or realistic, but simply pragmatic, prudent, cautious and sensible. ]

[*This is a sloppy overstatement and I apologize for that. What I actually believe is that it was necessary to intensively pressure Saddam, to insist upon inspections and to demand that human rights norms be upheld. Prior to the Bush invasion, Saddam was indeed under considerable pressure, and it was working. No wmd have been found. Regarding human rights, the record was more mixed, but I'm certain that an international effort that eliminated sanctions and effectively compelled adherence to human rights standards was possible.

In other words, there was no necessity to remove Saddam and certainly not by invasion! I clearly misspoke by writing in haste, as I've been consistent from day 1 about this.]
tristero 3/14/2006 06:57:00 AM |

 
The Hobbes Threshold

by tristero

There are many people who refuse to go to horror or action films because they find screen violence so upsetting. I've always been puzzled by that because, no matter how gory it looks, it is, after all, nothing but ketchup or Karo syrup and dye. We all know that afterwards, the actors simply open their eyes, get up off the stage set, take a shower, and go off to have dinner with their friends and families.

Scenes of real violence never look like a Terminator movie, or even much like Spielberg's "Munich." Real violence comes in blurred, random images poorly framed, without slo-mo, without artfully symmetrical splatter patterns and goosed soundtracks with shrieking bird-like fiddles. A movie of real violence isn't a Peckinpah or Hitchcock movie, but a cheap, fourth-generation video with bad sound, showing a reporter getting his head sliced off. Or it shows those insignificant little things falling off the burning skyscraper, things which happen to be real people, with real children, real friends, real enemies, real thoughts, real fears, and real lives that are about to end. For real.

And when real violence gets reported in words, it's with one or two inadequate adjectives standing in for the ghastly, reeking smells and the unspeakable textures and sounds of mass murder. And since I have a very active imagination, reports of real violence never fail to revolt me. I know how many countless tragedies - many still to come - are created by each death, and then compounded:

Police found at least 65 bodies in Baghdad in the past 24 hours, including 15 men bound and shot in an abandoned minibus, in a gruesome wave of apparent sectarian reprisal attacks, officials said Tuesday.

The timing of the killings appeared related to the car bomb and mortar attacks in the Shiite slum of Sadr City in east Baghdad on Sunday in which 58 people died and more than 200 were wounded.

The sectarian violence marked the second wave of mass killings in Iraq since Feb. 22, when bombers destroyed an important Shiite Muslim shrine in Samarra, north of the capital.

The minibus was found on the main road between two mostly Sunni neighborhoods in west Baghdad, not far from where another minibus containing 18 bodies was discovered last week.

The bodies of at least 50 more men were found discarded in various parts of the capital, police said. All had been shot and many also had their hands and feet tied.

It is only moral - since after all our tax dollars helped create the State of Nature in which these murders happened - to ask each of us to sit quietly and imagine the last 2 or 3 minutes of these people's lives. And what their mothers, and their children, and their husbands and wives were thinking about, perhaps wondering where they were, if they were just late, or playing with friends... Not that any of these dead are innocent heroes. They are just people -good, bad, and indifferent - who were killed as the result of the dreadful violence unleashed in Iraq on America's watch. And for which all of America will be blamed.

And with the images of their deaths, and the images of their living loved ones and friends in our mind, it's time to ask a few questions:

Anyone care to defend anymore the ridiculous proposition that the Bush/Iraq war was a good idea? Or the corollary absurdity that this level of horror could have been avoided simply by 25,000 or 50,000 troops, or "better planning"?

This catastrophe was predictable. The people who refused to listen have blood, not ketchup, on their hands.
tristero 3/14/2006 02:45:00 AM |

Monday, March 13, 2006

 
Fortunate Flyboy

by digby

Atrios calls this a Rovian ratfuck and says that McCain should be thrilled about this and he's right:

Is John McCain a lesbian? Maybe we'll learn the answer from Edward Klein, who insinuated as much about Hillary Clinton in his 2005 biography -- largely a clip-job of hit pieces, reviewers said -- and is apparently hard at work on a poison-pen book about the Arizona senator. According to Crain's New York Business, Klein claims he'll chronicle the Republican presidential front-runner's "sexual infidelity, chronic gambling and anger management." I can hardly wait.

Atrios rightly claims that this is innoculation. To me it says Rove is working to get McCain elected. It's right out of the "Fortunate Son" playbook:

In 1999, St. Martin's Press published a critical biography of Bush titled "Fortunate Son". The book quoted an unnamed "high-ranking advisor to Bush," who revealed Bush's 1972 drug bust. The source told author J.H. Hatfield, Bush "was ordered by a Texas judge to perform community service in exchange for expunging his record showing illicit drug use."

Hatfield later revealed that his source was none other than Karl Rove. That might seem ridiculous, considering Rove's lifelong loyalty to the Bushes and the fact that he now has an office adjacent to Bush's in the White House. But leaking the story to Hatfield essentially discredited the story and sent it into the annals of conspiracy theory. Soon after the book was published and just as St. Martin's was preparing a high profile launching of the book, the "Dallas Morning News" ran a story revealing that Hatfield was a felon who had served time in jail. In response, St. Martin's pulled the book.

"When the media stumbled upon a story regarding George W. Bush's 1972 cocaine possession arrest, Rove had to find a way to kill the story. He did so by destroying the messenger," says Sander Hicks, the former publisher of Soft Skull, which re-published "Fortunate Son."

Howie Fineman writes:

Private though it was, the McCain call was emblematic of the '08 strategy that he and his circle have decided to pursue. They want to build out their campaign with members of the Bush circle, and base McCain's pitch on the notion that he is the only sensible, electable and competent commander who can take control of the war on terror.

"Competence and electability," that's what we're going to talk about," said a key advisor. "If you support the president's vision, John can carry it forward."

Known as an outsider and maverick, McCain in 2008 has chosen a different route and probably had no choice, given his prominence and experience. He and his aides are making the best they can of it, and one aspect of doing so involves trying to reel in Bush's top operatives and supporters.

Here in Memphis, McCainanites worked closely on straw poll strategy with Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi, a Bush loyalist widely regarded as one of the sharpest strategic and organizational minds in the party. They are wooing him to come aboard officially, which would be a major coup for McCain.

Word around the Peabody lobby is that another former GOP chairman, Richard Bond, is part of an unofficial circle of counselors, too.

Barbour is the tip-off. He's the establishment guy's establishment guy, former RNC chairman, southern good ole boy, K Street lobbyist extraordinaire. The party pooh bahs are beginning a soft push for McCain. And by having him run as the man who can complete Bush's vision, he redeems Bush.

This has Rove's blessing, I'd bet money on it. They may not know how to govern, but they are masters at campaigning. We'll see if it works.

Fineman concludes:

...they exposed the risks of their embrace-the-president strategy. If they are such good buddies, and if McCain is the natural follow-on to George Bush, shouldn’t the senator have been the toast of more folks in the Peabody lobby?

It's a tough hand to play. "Is there a playbook for how to run as an insider and outsider, establishment and anti-establishment?" asked a weary McCain strategist. "If you find it, let me know."

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digby 3/13/2006 07:45:00 PM |

 
Chutzpah!

by digby

Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., said he had not read it either and wasn't inclined simply to scold the president.

"I'd prefer to see us solve the problem," Lieberman told reporters.

Yes. Joe doesn't believe in scolding presidents does he?

The implications for our country are so serious that I feel a responsibility to my constituents in Connecticut, as well as to my conscience, to voice my concerns forthrightly and publicly. And I can think of no more appropriate place to do that than on this great Senate floor.

[...]

To begin with, I must respectfully disagree with the president's contention that his relationship with Monica Lewinsky and the way in which he misled us about it is nobody's business but his family's and that even presidents have private lives, as he said.

[...]

But there is more to this than modern media intrusiveness. The president is not just the elected leader of our country. He is as presidential scholar Clinton Rossiter (ph) observed, and I quote, "the one man distillation of the American people." And as President Taft said at another time, "the personal embodiment and representative of their dignity and majesty."

[...]


In this case, the president apparently had extramarital relations with an employee half his age and did so in the workplace in the vicinity of the Oval Office. Such behavior is not just inappropriate. It is immoral...

[...]

The president's intentional and consistent statements, more deeply,may also undercut the trust that the American people have in his word. Under the Constitution, as presidential scholar Newsted (ph) has noted, the president's ultimate source of authority, particularly his moral authority, is the power to persuade, to mobilize public opinion, to build consensus behind a common agenda. And at this, the president has been extraordinarily effective.

But that power hinges on the president's support among the American people and their faith and confidence in his motivations and agenda, yes; but also in his word.

As Teddy Roosevelt once explained, "My power vanishes into thin air the instant that my fellow citizens, who are straight and honest, cease to believe that I represent them and fight for what is straight and honest. That is all the strength that I have," Roosevelt said.

Sadly, with his deception, President Clinton may have weakened the great power and strength that he possesses, of which President Roosevelt spoke.

[...]

Mr. President, I said at the outset that this was a very difficult statement to write and deliver. That is true, very true. And it is true in large part because it is so personal and yet needs to be public, but also because of my fear that it will appear unnecessarily judgmental. I truly regret this.

[...]

But the president, by virtue of the office he sought and was elected to, has traditionally been held to a higher standard. This is as it should be because the American president, as I quoted earlier, is not just the one man distillation of the American people, but today the most powerful person in the world. And as such, the consequences of his misbehavior, even private misbehavior, are much greater than that of an average citizen, a CEO or even a Senator.

That's what I believe presidential scholar James David Barber (ph) in his book "The Presidential Character" was getting at when he wrote that the public demands quote, "a sense of legitimacy from and in the presidency. There is more to this than dignity -- more than propriety. The president is expected to personify our betterness in an inspiring way; to express in what he does and is, not just what he says, a moral idealism which in much of the public mind is the very opposite of politics."

[...]

... the transgressions the president has admitted to are too consequential for us to walk away and leave the impression for our children today and for our posterity tomorrow that what he acknowledges he did within the White House is acceptable behavior for our nation's leader. On the contrary, as I have said, it is wrong and unacceptable and should be followed by some measure of public rebuke and accountability.


[...]

Let us as a nation honestly confront the damage that the president's actions over the last seven months have caused, but not to the exclusion of the good that his leadership has done over the past six years, nor at the expense of our common interest as Americans. And let us be guided by the conscience of the Constitution, which calls on us to place the common good above any partisan or personal interest, as we now in our time work together to resolve this serious challenge to our democracy.

I thank the chair. I thank my colleagues. And I yield the floor.

Man, to hear him talk you would have thought the president had blatantly defied the law and illegally spied on American citizens without a warrant or something.

Lieberman, with his usual political tin ear, thought that he was being Barry Goldwater or Howard Baker by stepping across party lines to condemn a president of his own party. Unfortunately for him the citizens of this country don't find blow jobs to be quite the threat to the Republic that he does.

The day Al Gore picked that insufferable, sanctimonious gasbag as the Democratic nominee for Vice president was one of the lowest of my life. That speech was the single most disloyal public political act of my lifetime. The Republicans were shrill, shrieking hyenas, foaming at the mouth, circling in for the kill --- and that preening showboater stepped into the well of the senate and used his image as a moral exemplar to try to validate their bullshit partisan witch hunt. It was unforgivable. But he got lots of fawning press coverage from the Republicans and the beltway establishment and it evidently got into his blood. He can't stop doing it.

Needless to say, after that loathsome performance, I have never expected Liebermann to do the right thing and he's never disappointed me. Today is par for the course. (Jane reports that even his pro choice cred in in tatters since he supports the right of catholic hospitals to deny emergency birth control to rape victims. How ... unsurprising.)

But regardless of the high-stepping strategists fluttering around cautioning the Democrats not to "make trouble," the meme of Republican perfidy and ineptitude is starting to hum below the surface and I believe it will rise in volume over the next two years to a deafening howl. How do I know this? Their talking points sound lamer every day:

Cheney said Monday, "The outrageous proposition that we ought to protect our enemies' ability to communicate as it plots against America poses a key test of our Democratic leaders."

"The American people already made their decision," Cheney added. "They agree with the president."

If that's their best argument, it's probably best to say "Americans think it's a good idea." Associating policies with the president is a sure loser. Americans don't trust him, respect him or like him. At 60% disapproval, saying that Americans agree with the president on anything is the kiss of death.




Ned Lamont is giving Joementum heartburn. Turn up the heat.


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digby 3/13/2006 05:49:00 PM |

 
Fair Assumption

by digby

Drudge is reporting that Ben Bradlee has confirmed that Richard Armitage was Woodward's souce on Plame:

THE WASHINGTON POST's famous Watergate editor Ben Bradlee claims that it was former State Department Deputy Secretary Richard Armitage who was the individual who leaked the identity of CIA official Valerie Plame.

In the latest issue of VANITY FAIR: "Woodward was in a tricky position. People close to him believe that he had learned about Plame from his friend Richard Armitage, Colin Powell's former deputy, who has been known to be critical of the administration and who has a blunt way of speaking. 'That Armitage is the likely source is a fair assumption,' former WASHINGTON POST editor Ben Bradlee said."

'I had heard about an e-mail that was sent that had a lot of unprintable language in it.'"

For why this is meaningless, here's a post I did last year on the subject.



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digby 3/13/2006 05:25:00 PM |

 
Tweety

by digby

If you feel like punishing yourself, tune into Tweety today if only to see Tony Blankley's vomitous shirt and tie combo.

Tweety said that Frist had called Feingold's (alleged) bluff and that Harry reid looks nervous about this censure motion. Blankley replied smugly that Reid looks nervous about a lot of things these days. Tweety nodded sagely. He's still high from the wingnut kool-aid he spent the weekend swilling down in Memphis.

Meanwhile, back on planet earth 2006, Bush is down to 36% in the latest Gallup Poll and Democrats are ahead by 16% in the generic poll.



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digby 3/13/2006 02:05:00 PM |

 
Start The Hum

by digby


I wrote a post a while back that made a lot of people mad, called "learning to lose well." It is a difficult argument to make and I failed at making it. I'm going to try again.

We are a minority party with almost no institutional power and a majority that sees no margin in bipartisanship, even as their president is failing quite dramatically. The port deal controversy was pretty much solely a Republican deal (although Shumer and some others were fairly high profile.) The intelligence commmittee, which was formed out of the atrocities uncovered by the Church investigation as a rare bi-partisan entity, has been taken over by an irresponsible partisan shill (who should be remembered by his fellow Kansans as the man who sold his balls and the constitution to that callow little man, George W. Bush.) This modern Republican party consciously governs by scant 51% majority by design, in order to ensure that no compromises with the opposition are required. (See Off Center by Hacker and Pierson.) Bipartisanship has been dead for almost a decade. Democrats failed to accept this and that failure left them floundering for a strategy.

It's not impossible for an opposition party to function in that environment; it means that their only choice is accept that they are irrelevant to actual governance. That's the simple reality in this quasi-parliamentary system the Republicans have rigged up. What that means is that you have to take every opportunity to make your argument clearly and concisely over and over again. You use whatever institutional levers you have at your disposal to put the other side off balance, expose their real agenda and get them on the record doing unpopular things. Everything is about setting up sharp distinctions and preparing the ground for the next election.

I'll lay a little Sun Tzu on you for emphasis:

On hemmed-in ground, resort to stratagem. On desperate ground, fight.
-Sun Tzu

The Dems have been hemmed in since 2002. And at times they have been desperate. But since they failed to understand that they were in a partisan political war instead of a deliberative democratic body, they did not take advantage of their opportunities. The good news is that this system also made it impossible for the Democrats to impede Republican hubris (not that Joe Lieberman isn't trying.)

To be fair, 9/11 was a traumatic experience and many people lost their heads. The Democrats, afraid of being tarred once again as soft on national security --- and perhaps just afraid --- failed to raise the kind of arguments early on that might have ripened before the 2004 election. In fact, they didn't make them in time for them to have ripened even now, which was a mistake. We have seen such terrible foolishness as the Gang of 14 and the lackluster political skills of the intelligence committee. But it isn't too late. The Republicans are in free fall, but the Democrats need to step into the breach. Russ Feingold is doing that today.

Now, I think we all know that the Republican Senate is not going to censure their president. In fact, they are probably going to rise up like wounded animals and roar like mad. Here's Bill Frist from yesterday:

George, what was interesting in listening to my good friend, Russ, is that he mentioned protecting the American people only one time, and although you went to politics a little bit later, I think it's a crazy political move and I think it in part is a political move because here we are, the Republican Party, the leadership in the Congress, supporting the President of the United States as Commander in Chief, who is out there fighting al Qaeda and the Taliban and Osama bin Laden and the people who have sworn, have sworn to destroy Western civilization and all the families listening to us. And they're out now attacking, at least today, through this proposed censure vote, out attacking our Commander in Chief. Doesn't make sense.

Expect more of this hysteria. It might even bring their base back into the fold. (Which is an inevitability in any case.) But take a look at the poll numbers. Revitalizing the GOP base will only stop the bleeding from the jugular vein. From the Democracy Corps memo (pdf) called "Cracks In The Two Americas"

The most important shifts are taking place among the world of Republican loyalists, which will have big strategic consequences. It is reflected in the most recent Democracy Corps poll where defection of 2004 Bush voters to the Democrats is twice the level of defection of Kerry voters to the Republicans. Only 31 percent of voters in blue counties (those carried by Kerry) are voting Republican for Congress, but 41 percent of red county voters are supporting the Democratic candidate. The combined data set shows major shifts in the Deep South and rural areas (even before the most recent controversies), blue-collar white men, and the best educated married men with high incomes....

But this problem is where the action is:

The other big shifts are taking place across the contested groups that form the swing blocs in the electorate. That is bringing big Democratic gains among older (over 50) non-college voters, the vulnerable women, practicing Catholics and the best-educated men. It is as if the entire center of the electorate shifted. This is why independents are breaking so heavily for the Democrats in each of our polls.

This is an election about throwing the bums out and Democrats need to make a clear statement of fundamental values, not policy differences. Some strategists insist that Democrats must adopt the religious code words that Republicans use to signal character and values to evangelical voters. I would suggest that all Americans, religious and secular alike, share a language that is full of words that describe character and values. How about we start using some plain English words like unethical, dishonest, unfair, untrustworthy, dishonorable and lies. I think everybody can understand what those mean.

E. J Dionne wrote the other day:

The stories about the Democrats are by no means flatly false -- Democrats don't yet have a fully worked-out alternative program -- but they are based on a false premise, and they underestimate what I'll call the positive power of negative thinking.

The false premise is that oppositions win midterm elections by offering a clear program, such as the Republicans' 1994 Contract With America. I've been testing this idea with such architects of the 1994 "Republican revolution" as former representative Vin Weber and Tony Blankley, who was Newt Gingrich's top communications adviser and now edits the Washington Times editorial page.

Both said the main contribution of the contract was to give inexperienced Republican candidates something to say once the political tide started moving the GOP's way. But both insisted that it was disaffection with Bill Clinton, not the contract, that created the Republicans' opportunity -- something Bob Dole said at the time.

The Republicans worked very, very hard to stoke that disaffection with Bill Clinton. The consequence was that, except for a brief demoralizing period between 2001 and 2002, the Republicans have controlled both houses of congress for 12 years. They won because the tide was with them, Clinton had only won by a plurality, and the economy had not yet picked up steam. And they won mostly because from the moment he came into the White House the Republicans had relentlessly and mercilessly attacked his character.

It is past time for elected Democrats to begin laying out the case that the leader of the Republican party, the man to whom the congress has blindly followed at every turn for the past five years, is dishonorable. They must begin to create a low hum that reverberates throughout the body politic that says "the Republican party is unethical, untrustworthy, inept and dishonorable." Make people hear it in their heads before they go to sleep each night.

Russ Feingold has just taken the first step to doing this. His censure motion will not pass, of course. But he's started the hum. The press is listening. They are shocked, it can't be, how can he say that? But Feingold is saying outloud, for the whole nation to hear, that the president defied the law and broke his oath to defend the constition.

As the magnificent helmeted Cokie Roberts once said, "it doesn't matter if it's true or not, it's out there." In this case, it's true. And now it's out there. Take a moment and hum this tune in your senators ears today. It's time they get used to hearing it.

Go over to Firedoglake, where Jane and ReddHedd and the whole Firedog Brigade have all the information you need to make a couple of calls. Remember, we will lose it ---- but we will "lose it well." All that means is that sometimes losing a skirmish is in service to winning the longer war.




Update: CNN just reported that Bush's numbers are down to 36% in the Gallup poll. Dems now have a 16 point lead in the generic ballot.

Update II: Ed Henry just reported that Frist is trying to move this vote up to tonight because he thinks he has around 85 Senators to vote against it. They still don't get it. Bush just hit a new low in the Gallup Poll, they are 16 points ahead in the generic --- it's time to take a fucking risk. Voting for this motion will not hurt them in the fall but it changes the stakes. 15 Democrats is not good enough.



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digby 3/13/2006 12:38:00 PM |

 
Call Yer Senators

by tristero

Feingold's censure resolution. As Atrios says, if you don't know how, just Google their names. Call today. Now. Urge them to support it. Now.
tristero 3/13/2006 08:39:00 AM |

 
The Ineluctable Consistency Of George W. Bush

by tristero

There will be some who surely will accuse Lonsesome Cowboy Bush of flip-flopping now that he has apparently been converted to the joys of multi-lateralism. But they are quite wrong. There is no flip flop, and there will be no change in the behavior of the Bush administration.

Early indicators make it clear that Bush will be as thoroughly incompetent at multi-lateralism as he has been at everything else.
tristero 3/13/2006 08:20:00 AM |

 
Interview With Barbara Forrest

by tristero

Recently, I had a chance to meet Barbara Forrest, one of the most important witnesses in the so-called Scopes 2 trial. (Ultimately, I think history may judge the Dover trial far more important a defense of scientific inquiry. For one thing, the good guys won this time). Her book, co-authored with Paul Gross, called Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design is a compellingly written history of the "intelligent design" creationism movement and I cannot reccommend it more highly. I wrote a detailed review of it here which led to a correspondence with Dr. Forrest and our delightful discussions about Darwin and music over a fine Italian meal. She is interviewed here about the Dover trial and it is well worth reading. Barbara is a Louisiana native, through and through, born and raised there. She is also a card-carrying member of ACLU, a member of American United for Separation of Church and State and most importantly, as one would expect from someone with such credits, she is wickedly smart and articulate. If you have a chance to hear her speak, go.

After Judge Jones's decision in the Dover trial, it is hard to imagine that "intelligent design" creationism will ever legally recover. True, they can change the name again, but Jones's decision made it pretty clear that the courts were not going to tolerate such underhanded tactics to sneak a cheap, cult theology into science classes (or any other kind of theology). But as Barbara makes clear in the interview, these people are not going away. The fight to undermine science will continue as it is part of even a larger war. As hard as it may be to believe, "intelligent design" creationism is, in fact, the wedge - the opening tactic - of an elaborate strategy to establish an American theocracy. It is well-funded by some of the wealthiest names on the extreme right.

The overarching objectives behind ID and its influences are still little-understood by the larger public, or even by those of us who are involved in mainstream politics. Hopefully, in the next few days I'll be able to post some of the results of some recent research I've been doing.
tristero 3/13/2006 04:16:00 AM |

 
A Bit More On Knee Jerking

by tristero

[UPDATE: pastordan in comments supplied the following links to those interested in a progressive religious response to the religious right. I've only glanced at them, but they look like they might have something of interest:

United Church of Christ

Talk To Action

Street Prophets ]

Digby's spot on here to object to Amy Sullivan's aside about the "knee jerk left's" utterly mythical objection to devoutly religious candidates. For a long time, Sullivan has been a strong advocate of increasing the amount of God Talk among candidates for high political office. This is a terrible idea, primarily because it is irrelevant and will solve nothing. The real issue is quite clear and it's not a religious one at all, but simply a strategic one.

God is not a card-carrying Republican.

Republicans have been claiming a God monopoly for well over 30 years, and national Democrats as well as liberals have let them get away with it. That is very, very stupid. If a cheap scumbag like Santorum keeps saying, as he has, that John Kennedy wasn't really a Catholic president, then Catholic Democrats should wrap that canard around Santorum's slimy little neck. But that's not all. And then they should chase Santorum back into his church and refuse to concede that his perverted political philosophy has anything to do with the real practice, let alone the pressing concerns, of true American Catholics.

And then you let Santorum hang himself explaining why his "Catholic faith" comes before his Americanism.

It might seem that by calling for Democrats to confront Republicans on religion, I'm somehow agreeing with Amy Sullivan. Not so. I'm not suggesting Democrats out-God Republicans. They already have, people! Since when did Christ call for tax cuts on the rich or abandoning the poor to the flood waters? No, what I'm suggesting is that Democrats and liberals make it impossible for Republicans to cynically work the God angle without a serious fight.

Politicians that advocate the legal murder or mutilation of poor women should be ashamed, not proud, to tout such immoral "beliefs" in public. It is outrageous to claim that death by coathanger is God's Will. Making this point (or a similar one in more politically attuned rhetoric) doesn't mean shilling for a particular religious practice. But it does mean that you have to be quite comfortable with politcal arguments over religion, and quite confident that Bible thumpers can be confronted on their multiple hypocrisies, and lose.
tristero 3/13/2006 02:19:00 AM |

Sunday, March 12, 2006

 
They're Killing Me

by digby


I just watched Press The Meat on Tivo. Oh my god.

George Allen is like one of those frighteningly stupid right wing callers on C-Span. Is the Republican Party really going to insult our intelligence once again and foist another dimwitted blockhead on this country?

SEN. ALLEN: It's going tough. Some progress, but obviously when they used the burning-of-the-Reichstag tactic of hitting that mosque in Samarra and trying to create this religious violence back and forth, that was, that was a setback. But things seem to be calming down.

Is he accusing the Shiite political leaders of engineering this bombing to disable democracy and give themselves the power to issue laws by decree? If so, it's quite a bombshell, particularly since he then goes on to say approximately 178 times that the Iraqis need to form a unity government.

Or, like those idiot C-Span callers did he just hear something like this in passing from an equally stupid person at a cocktail party and parrot it on the air?

The point of the matter is, is we need to pressure and try to get others in that region, as well as other countries outside of the region, to really tell them what the stakes are. And I think they recognize what the stakes are, but, but action needs to be taken. There's going to need to be concessions from various points. And then ultimately, this government - they can get a unity government, but there's going to need to be some credibility, particularly in the security forces, the secretary, so to speak, of the interior, to make sure that law enforcement and military actions are, are fair and just and not based upon any sort of religion or, or ethnic biases.

Huh?

And then there's this:

MR. RUSSERT: Something else happened this week, Senator Allen, in South Dakota. And this is how The New York Times reported it: "Governor Michael Rounds, the Republican Governor of South Dakota, signed into law the nation's most sweeping state abortion ban. ... The law makes it a felony to perform any abortion except in a case of a pregnant woman's life being in jeopardy." No exceptions for rape, incest, health of the mother. Would you like to see that law, the law of the United States of America?

SEN. ALLEN: Well, first of all I respect and support the right of the people in the states to pass laws that reflect their values and their desires. For the country, I think each state ought to make those decisions. Personally, I think that there should be exceptions for rape and incest because I look at the person. There is a victim of a crime, and if they so choose they ought to have that option.

MR. RUSSERT: But you would outlaw all abortion except in cases of rape, incest?

SEN. ALLEN: Oh, I don't think the federal government ought to be making such laws. I think the laws ought to be determined by the people in the states. If South Dakota wants a law like that, they can have that. If South Carolina wants a different law, that's up to South Carolina or Virginia or California.

MR. RUSSERT: And if a state said unlimited abortion on demand, you would abide by that?

SEN. ALLEN: Well, I don't agree with that approach.

MR. RUSSERT: But you said states should determine...

SEN. ALLEN: But the, but the -- if a state did that -- I can't imagine too many states or any state having one that allows abortion for all nine months for any reason or no reason at all. But that would be the right of the people of the states. And for those -- but if a state like South Dakota wants a law like that, even though it's not exactly what I would think is appropriate, that does reflect the will of the people. This is a representative democracy and I think that's appropriate approach.

MR. RUSSERT: It would means that Roe vs. Wade would have to be overturned, which you would support?

SEN. ALLEN: I think Roe vs. Wade has been interpreted in such a way that it precludes the rights of the people to decide their laws. When I was governor, we passed the law on parental notification. I think parents ought to be involved if a girl who's 16, 17 years old...

MR. RUSSERT: So you say overturn Roe. You hope Roe is overturned.

SEN. ALLEN: Well, Roe -- if you need parental notification for ear piercing or a tattoo, they certainly ought to be involved with it. And so I think Roe vs. Wade has been interpreted in such a way as to restrict the will of people. Moreover, that decision was from the early 1970s and medical science has advanced a great deal. We know a lot more and of course, unborn children have an earlier stage of development.[???]

MR. RUSSERT: So overturn?

SEN. ALLEN: The point is, rather than arguing on a legal term, the point of the matter is the people in the states ought to be making these decisions. And if that's contrary to the dictates of Roe vs. Wade, so be it. Because the way that Roe vs. Wade has been interpreted is taking away the rights of the people in the states to make these decisions.

We haven't heard that argument put quite that way since around 1860.

He clearly doesn't know what he is saying because this is a killer with the neanderthals: "I can't imagine too many states or any state having one that allows abortion for all nine months for any reason or no reason at all. But that would be the right of the people of the states"

Ooops. Wrong answer George. Mistress Dobson has some remedial work ahead of him. And so does the anti-forced childbirth movement --- we need to get the press to start asking the right questions. This bozo is incoherent getting soft balls about "overturning Roe." He got visibly uncomfortable when confronted with the idea that a state might legislate "abortion on demand" and he blew his dismount. Imagine his eyes rolling back in his head when someone asks if he thinks the states ought to have the right to institute the death penalty for teenage girls who get illegal abortions. Or why he thinks it's wrong to kill innocent babies unless they were conceived in the course of a crime. (I have a feeling he'll be fine with it as long as the parents are notified, which seems to be a thing with him.)

He's so stupid that he even brought this up:

... Again, let's recognize how difficult that is. In this country, if we had to get two thirds of the Congress to agree who our president would be, for example, we, we'd still be fussing through the 2000 election.

Don't go there...

The really scary thing about Allen is that while he was talking he looked and sounded like he thought he was making sense. He is quite fluently dumb. But it's like a little girl making mud pies. She's imitating all the moves of a baker --- her mother or dad or Emeril or whomever. From a certain angle she looks just like them. But her "pies" aren't really pies at all. They are piles --- of mud. Much like George Allen's answers.

I'm begging you, Republicans. Beg-ging you. Give the world a break. Whatever you do, don't nominate another fuckwit meathead just because your base likes a leader who is just as thick as they are. I realize that you probably want to elect him just because it will drive me insane. But please, think of the children.



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digby 3/12/2006 08:02:00 PM |

 
Vote!

by digby

I just realized that the Koufax awards are closing tomorrow. Go over and vote for your favorite blogs (click on the logo in the left column to go to the whole list) but also use the opportunity to check out all the blogs that you've been missing. There is gold in every category. The contest is fun, of course, and it's great to be nominated, but the real benefit is that it keeps the community vital by making sure people get a chance at least once a year to check out new sites and celebrating superior blogging.

Also, send a couple of bucks Wampum's way if you can spare it. It costs them a lot of money and time to do this for the liberal blogosphere every year.



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digby 3/12/2006 06:15:00 PM |

 
Knee Jerk God Baiting

by digby


Amy Sullivan writes:

...Brownback is about as extreme as they come in the Christian Right world. Finally, a religious candidate who actually deserves the scorn of the knee-jerk left.

I wonder who all the religious candidates we've unfairly scorned in the past would be? Jimmy Carter? Bill Clinton? (and no, having affairs does not mean you are not religious, just a sinner.) Al Gore? John Kerry? They all go to church and profess to be believers. Are they just not religious enough? Now, it's true that the knee-jerk left doesn't much care for Joe Lieberman but that's not because he's a religious man. It's because he is disloyal and enables the right wing. (We knee-jerk left wingers do tend to be dismissive of right wingers, that's true.)

I recall scorning both Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon and neither one of them were particularly religious. Bobby Kennedy was a youthful hero and he was as catholic as they come. In fact, I'm having a hard time coming up with any consistent views on either side toward religious politicians at all. It would seem to me that this entire argument is nothing but a political football used to shut down criticism and advance a particular agenda without having to debate the issues on their own merits.

I hesitate to call this kind of lazy observation "religious correctness" because that gives the impression of an objection to rude derisive language about religion. This is something else. It's "God-baiting" designed to put any critic on the defensive if the person they are criticizing is religious. (The right, interestingly enough, is using this and its close cousin, race-baiting, very effectively these days. Nice to see people on "our side" helping them out --- again.)

Every secular "knee jerk liberal" has voted for religious candidates their whole lives. Indeed, it is impossible not to. You cannot get elected in this country if you do not profess religious belief. We have enthusiastically backed candidates who are from every religious tradition and from every region. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were both born again, southern evangelicals. We do not scorn religious candidates, period.

Many of us knee-jerk leftists are hostile to those who want to use the state to dictate the proper social attitudes of its citizens and interfere in their most personal, private decisions, that's true. I would scorn Pat Robertson and Sam Brownback's ideas no less if they were secular. It's the lack of respect for the division of influence between the private and public sphere's that is causing the problem.

And as for hostility, let's not forget that it was back in 1988 that a future president of the United States said this:

President George H. W. Bush: I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.

Who scorns who again? Perhaps some of these religious politicans could speak to the flock about giving some respect to the non-faithful. It's the Christian thing to do.



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digby 3/12/2006 10:44:00 AM |

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

.

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.
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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