Hullabaloo

Friday, March 31, 2006

 
Down The Hatch

by digby

In the Feingold hearings today, Orrin Hatch said that censure is unconstitutional. Like all the rest of the hypocritical weasels of the Eunuch Caucus, he has a very short memory:

Republicans believe their aggressive pursuit of impeachment is not only required by the Constitution but also satisfies their more conservative political base.

The growing debate about punishment for Clinton short of removal from office stems from a hard political count. Hatch said proponents of ousting the president will almost certainly be short of the required two-thirds vote in the Senate.

"It may be that if more hasn't come out or if people do not feel we can get 67 votes, it may be that that is the time when something else can be resolved," Hatch said.

Even though censure is not mentioned in the Constitution, Hatch said he believes it is within Congress' right.

"But it would have to be done very carefully" to avoid transgressing the Constitution's prohibition on "bills of attainder," or a legislatively enacted punishment, he said.

"This is a lot more difficult than people today realize," Hatch said.

Of course this impressive legal thinker is also the guy who says this:

"It would be unconstitutional for the Congress to say, 'You have to go through the FISA court.' We could pass a law that says, 'We want you to go through the FISA court,' and I think the president would probably try to live with that. The problem is, you cannot do what they've been doing to protect us through the current FISA statute."

Interesting new theory. The congress passes laws the country must abide by. Except for the president. For him laws are just polite requests.

God Save The King.


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digby 3/31/2006 04:14:00 PM |

 
Out of The Mouths Of Babes

by digby

Jim Angle, covering for Hume, just interviewed three wounded veterans who he probed for "good news" about Iraq that made their sacrifice worthwhile. One of them was a public affairs specialist who dutifully delivered the GOP boilerplate about schools and soccer games. But one of the guys, a very young kid grievously wounded, didn't know the script. He said:

Angle: You've seen some of the media coverage since you got back. Does it accurately reflect what you saw when you were there?

Cpl Diaz: Well, in my case I was out west in the Anbar province and the media kind of, kind of goes for major things that happen in Bagdad or Falluja during voting times and the media doesn't cover that IED's go off every day, numerous times.

I don't think that's exactly what Angle was looking for.



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digby 3/31/2006 03:43:00 PM |

 
Bubble Boy

by digby


One of the most curious things I've seen recently is George Bush's favorite Democrat going a little bit kooky for no apparent reason. What the hell is up with Joementum? Why so emotional and weird about this?

I have to think that he's suffering from the same bubble boy disease as his best buddy. In the beltway, Joe Lieberman is the most popular Democrat in town. The political establishment is totally dominated by Republicans and Republicans positively love him. As far as he can tell, he's the most popular guy in town.

Unfortunately, he didn't seem to realize until now, even after his experience in the 2004 primaries, that outside the beltway he has been the poster boy for GOP appeasement going all the way back to the impeachment. His acceptance on the ticket in 2000 was out of respect for Al Gore --- the grassroots could barely stand the sight of him.

His voting record is beside the point. Through his rhetoric he's given tremendous solace to the Republicans over and over again at the most critical times. He's advanced their most pernicious ideas, not through votes, but by continuously validating their premises. He's not the only member of the party to have done this, but he's the one who has gone the farthest to normalize the cheap, phony moralism the GOP sells as "character."

He just doesn't seem to understand the nature of the current political environment, probably because he is ensconced in the bosom of the establishment, sharing cocktail weenies with the cognoscenti and believing his own hype. The terrain looks far different from where the rest of us sit. "His way" looks a lot like treachery.

I did not think it was possible for him to lose the primary. But damn if it doesn't look like it is. Lamont is an impressive candidate, attractive and well-spoken. His run is not joke and it appears that Lieberman is actually worried. Joementum seems to leave the door open to running as an independent if that happened, a la his nemesis Lowell Weicker. I don't know why he wouldn't just make the leap and join the GOP. That's what his new idol, the very moral Frank Sinatra, did. Why play games?


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digby 3/31/2006 03:36:00 PM |

 
Iraq: More Deaths. Sistani Ignores Letter From Bush.

by tristero

In Baghdad, Three women were killed by a mortar and six handcuffed bodies were found. The article goes on:

Tensions arose over complaints of U.S. interference in Iraqi political affairs.

A letter from President Bush to Iraq's supreme Shiite spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, was hand-delivered earlier this week but sits unread and untranslated in his office, according to a key al-Sistani aide.

The aide who has never allowed use of his name in news reports, citing al-Sistani's refusal to make any public statements himself told The Associated Press Tuesday that the ayatollah laid the letter aside because of increasing "unhappiness" over what senior Shiite leaders see as American meddling in Iraqi attempts to form their first, permanent post-invasion government.

hat tip to Juan Cole who also links to a report of 8 workers shot dead at an oil refinery.

Funny how underplayed the reports of these 17 deaths have been in, say, the New York Times. One would almost get the impression - false - that there was a lull in the carnage.

By the way, it's not news that no one in Iraq bothers to listen to anything Bush says anymore. I think it was Steve Coll, or maybe Sy Hersh, who reported that in the New Yorker a while back.
tristero 3/31/2006 03:21:00 PM |

 
Oh Brother Where Art Thou

by digby

I have been joking for years that the Republicans would eventually try to bring back chain gangs to do the work of illegal immigrants. That way, they could appease their law and order, racist and corporate constituency all at once. (If they could add forced conversions to Christianity to it, it would be perfect.)

I should have realized the nothing is beyond the pale for the modern GOP:

Representative Dana Rohrabacher, Republican of California, dismissed arguments made by President Bush and business leaders who say the United States needs a pool of foreign workers. He said businesses should be more creative in their efforts to find help and suggested that employers turn to the prison population to fill jobs in agriculture and elsewhere.

"Let the prisoners pick the fruits," Mr. Rohrabacher said. "We can do it without bringing in millions of foreigners."

This is actually no joke. There is a lot of prison labor being used in the private sector these days. It's not even controversial, despite the fact that while the prison is paid minimum wage, the workers are paid sometimes less than a dollar an hour. (Room and board, you see.)

Considering the racial make-up of our prisoner population, we could see a day in the not too distant future in which the fields of the United states are picked by African Americans with guns trained on them. Interesting picture, isn't it?



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digby 3/31/2006 12:53:00 PM |

 
No Satisfaction

by digby


Pantload is "getting increasingly bugged" by Jill Carroll:

And maybe JPod’s right about Stockholm syndrome. And maybe the media’s selectively choosing what to show of her statements. But it would be nice to hear her say something remotely critical of her captors, particularly about the fact that they murdered her translator in cold blood. I’m very glad she’s alive, but I’m getting a very bad vibe. More, no doubt, to come.

He reminds of one of those guys who says a rape victim didn't act traumatized enough for him, so she's probably lying.

Pantload is not just an ordinary GOP dimwit; he apparently can't even read. She made the tape right after she had been released to the Iraqi Islamic Party offices and before she was in the hands of her friends and colleagues:

Carroll's captors dropped her off in a Baghdad neighborhood, outside an office of the Iraqi Islamic Party. The politicians inside gave her juice, candy, water and tissues.

Composed, Carroll negotiated her way through the first of many politically laden conversations she would have Thursday, trying to stick to what she wanted and didn't want to say.

The party officials asked her to write out and sign a statement saying she had not been harmed in her brief time at their offices. They had her record a question-and-answer session on camera that they said was for their records. It showed up on television shortly afterward.

Jill Carroll has more testosterone in her little finger than all these bedwetters put together. I'm sorry that she has not given the 101st one-handed keyboarders the picture of blood and horror they need to get satisfaction from their safe little offices, but I think it's highly unlikely these bedwetters would have handled themselves with such fortitude in those circumstances. They are after all, the same brave soldiers who believe the shoe bomber is a greater threat to the nation than having thousands of ICBM's pointed at every major American city.


Oh, and I'm glad to report that Jonah has also won today's Jeffie.


Update: I'd love to see how Don Imus and his pathetic little crew of flaccid, middle aged gasbags would hold up under her circumstances. I have a feeling that it wouldn't take much more than the kidnappers putting too much lemon in the bernaise sauce and Imus and these walking viagra commercials would break down and start calling themselves Tanya.


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digby 3/31/2006 09:46:00 AM |

 
Money

by tristero

Ah, money. John Aravosis brings the subject up again. A few comments on his post, which is well worth reading:

1. No one should be surprised that, one-on-one, politicians are really, really nice. It's their job to be nice. If you think about it for twenty seconds it becomes patently obvious that only someone with a nice personality could get anywhere in politics - which, after all, is all about working with other people 24/7. The Nazi-loving Schwarzenegger is really nice. By contrast, The Great KAT, who makes the young Bob Dylan look like a docile interview subject, is likely never to be elected... dogcatcher (couldn't resist). I'm told even Nixon was nice, even if I find that incredibly hard to believe.

Why is being nice essential to political success? Why is being nice as important for a political leader as being well-read and intelligent? My friends, if you have to ask those kinds of questions, then my advice is to pursue that degree in advanced statistics you've always wanted. I couldn't possibly begin to explain it to you. (Irate statisticians, please note: Musicians easily rival you for the title of professionals with the worst social skills.)

It also goes without saying that because nice-osity is such a critical skill, politicians are exceedingly adept at turning up the charm in order to disarm an opponent, or modulate the niceness in all sorts of subtle ways to suit their ends.

Therefore, John is absolutely right to report on the behavior of the politicians he meets. It is a crucial part of understanding who they are. So we can crush them at the polls.

But John is mistaken, when he writes about the charming Katherine Harris, "That doesn't mean I think she's a wonderful human being, it simply means that whatever she is, it's a lot more complicated than folks would like to present." It's not complicated at all, John. One-on-one Harris is professionally nice and she's so good at it, it looks sincere. It may even be sincere. That is her job. That's why she has supporters. What's so hard to understand?


2. The question readers of John's blog should ask is this: If John goes to these affairs - and why not, since he didn't have to pay for it, so, hey, the food's free - will being nice to Katherine Harris help advance the liberal causes John so passionately believes in? Well, it can't hurt. Being mean to her in that situation gets you nowhere.


3. Point 2 above notwithstanding, he should have kicked Katherine Harris in the shins. Hard.


4. Regarding money, it's painful to read John's justifications. That anyone as smart and savvy as John Aravosis would waste his time defending his desire and need to be paid for a job well done! That anyone could object to competent people being paid well to do their job! This just blows my mind.

Phil Glass put it succinctly - you pay me money. I give you music. There isn't a composer who ever existed (with the exception of Charles Ives) who would disagree. Don't like Phil's music? I assure you: Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven (to name just three) had exactly the same attitude.

5. To clarify point 4, please understand: I think John Aravosis is absolutely right about money. It is a crime that he should be wasting his valuable time defending his need to be paid. However, it clearly is necessary for him to educate his audience in reality. Hopefully, they'll get it. But if they don't, John will simply have to learn to ignore them. (For the little that it's worth, full disclosure: I've never been paid to do any political writing, or political work, of any kind, including blogging. Nor am I seeking payment. This makes me morally superior to nobody who does earn money - honestly, duh - from political work.)

6. John really should have kicked Katherine Harris in the shins when he had the chance.

7. John's last point is the most important. From the small involvement I've had with "real" politics, via blogging, attending conferences, interviewing and talking to politicians and diplomats, I am certain that politics has the potential to be enormously enjoyable.

Yes, indeed: Confronting the far-right - and destroying their ability to influence mainstream American politics is a moral obligation, I believe, for any American that cares about the well-being of his/her family, friends, and neighbors, not to mention the rest of the world. It's also potentially a lot of fun (and yeah, it can be dispiriting; no one said it was gonna be easy fun).

There simply is nothing wrong to be paid well for fighting effectively for liberal causes AND having fun. In fact, that's also part of the fun. Only crazy puritans think you should be miserable when you do good.

8. God-DAMMIT, John! Crutches! I want to see Katherine Harris on crutches! I want to sign the fucking cast on her leg! How could you pass up the chance?!??!
tristero 3/31/2006 06:29:00 AM |

 
Afghanistan

by tristero

Be sure to read through to the punchline:

U.S. officials are practically ignorant of this silent advance of fear. And their response to the exposed tip of the iceberg--open violence--has been misguided. Despite tough proclamations and battles against so-called insurgents in isolated valleys, U.S. military and civilian officials remain obsessed with 'Al Qaeda' and any possible manifestations of an Osama bin Laden-style, ideological confrontation. This concern acts as a set of blinkers, blinding Americans to the real problems in Afghanistan and vastly contributing to the Afghans' disillusionment.

The fact is, except in a training capacity, Al Qaeda hardly has any presence here. This is logical: Why would Al Qaeda send Arab or Chechen operatives to notoriously chauvinistic southern Afghanistan, which hated the domineering Arabs when they were guests of the Taliban, and where foreigners stick out like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer? For ideological combat against the West, Iraq is a far more convenient and penetrable battleground, which is one reason why countless more Americans die there than in Afghanistan.

Even the 'suicide bombings' in Afghanistan that have garnered mentions in the Western press of late are often something else. In one case I investigated carefully--the target, an Afghan official, was a friend of mine--much evidence contradicted the notion that the attack was a suicide bombing, as it was immediately labeled: the condition of my friend's body, the type and location of the survivors' wounds, and eyewitness descriptions. Everything pointed to a remote-controlled mine planted ahead of time. But no Afghan or U.S. official bothered to collect this evidence or to examine it seriously when it was presented to them.

Why such sloppiness? Because the terrorist suicide bombing explanation suits everyone. Americans are comfortable spending their resources searching for the Al Qaeda bogeyman; the real perpetrators take cover behind the Al Qaeda label; and Afghan officials are absolved of complicity or incompetence and the responsibility to properly investigate.

The steadily worsening situation in southern Afghanistan is not the work of some ineffable Al Qaeda nebula. It is the result of the real depredations of the corrupt and predatory government officials whom the United States ushered into power in 2001, supposedly to help fight Al Qaeda, and has assiduously maintained in power since, along with an 'insurgency' manufactured whole cloth across the border in Pakistan--a U.S. ally. The evidence of this connection is abundant: Taliban leaders strut openly around Quetta, Pakistan, where they are provided with offices and government-issued weapons authorization cards; Pakistani army officers are detailed to Taliban training camps; and Pakistani border guards constantly wave self-proclaimed Taliban through checkpoints into Afghanistan.

But beleaguered Afghans have a hard time getting U.S. political and military officials to focus on these two factors, which feed on each other. U.S. personnel cling to the fictions that Afghans are responsible for the local officials who rule over them--despite the overwhelming moral and material support the United States has provided these officials--and that the Pakistani government is cooperating in the war on terror. And so the Afghan villagers, frightened, vulnerable, and disillusioned, are obliged to come to terms with the 'fairies who come at night.'

This state of affairs is so bewildering that Kandaharis have reached an astonishing conclusion: The United States must be in league with the Taliban.

hat tip to Avedon Carol
tristero 3/31/2006 04:02:00 AM |

Thursday, March 30, 2006

 
Fashion Week

by digby

This season's little black dress:



Order your T-Shirts courtesy of Tennessee Guerilla Women


Via Avedon Carol, who I'm sure knows the perfect bra to wear under it.


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digby 3/30/2006 08:41:00 PM |

 
Big Brother Is Freezing

by digby


Another Homeland Security success story:

From Anchorage it takes 90 minutes on a propeller plane to reach this fishing village on the state's southwestern edge, a place where some people still make raincoats out of walrus intestine.

This is the Alaskan bush at its most remote. Here, tundra meets sea, and sea turns to ice for half the year. Scattered, almost hidden, in the terrain are some of the most isolated communities on American soil. People choose to live in outposts like Dillingham (pop. 2,400) for that reason: to be left alone.

So eyebrows were raised in January when the first surveillance cameras went up on Main Street. Each camera is a shiny white metallic box with two lenses like eyes. The camera's shape and design resemble a robot's head.

Workers on motorized lifts installed seven cameras in a 360-degree cluster on top of City Hall. They put up groups of six atop two light poles at the loading dock, and more at the fire hall and boat harbor.

By mid-February, more than 60 cameras watched over the town, and the Dillingham Police Department plans to install 20 more — all purchased through a $202,000 Homeland Security grant meant primarily to defend against a terrorist attack.

Your federal tax dollars at work, folks. Bridges to nowhere and terrorist surveillance in remote arctic villages. This is how the Republican party keeps the nation safe, promotes small government and shows fiscal responsibility.


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digby 3/30/2006 05:46:00 PM |

 
Is America A First World Nation?

by tristero

Not when it comes to science it ain't. Check this out from Discovery Institute's so-called Center for Science and Culture, the clowns who brought you "intelligent design" creationism, the clowns with ties to Christian Reconstruction and the Moonies. Now don't peek, but can you spot, as PZ Myers says, the "serious problem in the logic" of "intelligent design" creationist Jonathan Witt's argument?:

In Dover, they [mainstream scientists] insisted that physical evidence presented against their theory wasn't an argument for intelligent design. Darwinist [sic] Kenneth Miller made this argument on the stand and the judge concurred. But in Ohio they wanted to scare people into thinking that simply teaching students the scientific evidence for and against Darwinism was somehow legally dangerous. Since it isn't, the Darwinists had to get creative, had to change their story. So now they asserted that simply exposing students to the evidence against Darwinism constitutes the teaching of intelligent design. Thus, their Ohio position flatly contradicts their Dover position.

Give up? All right, go to Pharyngula and marvel at the extent to which these people can lie without breaking a sweat. And the president of the United States thinks their "theories" deserve equal time with real science. Incredible.

[Note to creationists: All attempts to prosleytize for your nonsense will be ignored. As usual, please take your science questions or your disputations to a science site and air them there. If a reputable scientist - meaning a scientist who understands Darwin and accepts evolution - says you have a legitimate point, come on back and let us know exactly what they said (no "paraphrases" or partial quoting). ]
tristero 3/30/2006 04:40:00 PM |

 
Captain Morgan's First Lieutenant

by digby


I'm sure most of you caught this a couple of days ago, but in case you didn't, this round of Golden Wingers is excellent. This only a runner up:

Chickenhawk grunt Christopher Hitchens finally gives himself the promotion he deserves:

Up until now, I have resisted all urges to assume the mantle of generalship and to describe how I personally would have waged a campaign to liberate Iraq.

General Hitch - after consulting with his trusted military advisor, Captain Morgan - outlines his plan of attack:

I shall go on keeping score about this until the last phony pacifist has been strangled with the entrails of the last suicide-murderer.

Optionally, until I black out. Either one.

Click the link to see the winner (and find out why liberals hate their mommies.)



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digby 3/30/2006 03:47:00 PM |

 
Mudcat Love

by digby


It's clear that Chris Matthews sees the immigration issue as another opportunity to crawl up the GOP codpiece and prove his manly manliness. Yesterday he not only had that silly Dukes of Hazard caricature Mudcat "I call 'em illegal aliens" Saunders on, he said this:

MATTHEWS: Well, the fact is, Bob, it's not just -- and Kate -- it's not just Republicans who don't like illegal immigration. Seventy-one percent of the country say it's their number one concern. They want to stop illegal immigration. These are regular Americans. They're not right-wingers. And they think we ought to have a border.

I don't know how many times this guy has to twist poll numbers before someone calls a doctor and has him tested for some sort of cognitive disorder. Media Matters corrects this massively ill informed bullshit:

Matthews was apparently distorting a March 10-13 NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll that found that 71 percent of respondents would be "more likely ... to vote for a candidate for Congress" who "[f]avors tighter controls on illegal immigration."

In a March 9-12 CBS News poll, 4 percent of respondents identified immigration as "the most important problem facing this country today." And a January 26-29 NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that 9 percent of respondent thought that illegal immigration "should be the top priority for the federal government."

I'm sure that with all the legislation, hysterical coverage and massive protests that it has become "number one" to more people lately, but I will be very surprised if it comes even close to being the number one issue any time soon. This country has a lot of problems.

Matthews could have illuminated this debate if he had noted that according to the latest Democracy Corps poll, the single most important foreign policy issue is globalization and outsourcing. It's more important than terrorism and Iraq. I found that surprising. It explains why there is so much anxiety over immigration right now. The threat of cheap foreign labor is very real to people, they feel powerless to stop it, and the most immediate face of it is low wage Latino migration to the US.

The forces shaping this are massive and it cannot be finessed by crude nativist rhetoric no matter how much people want to run populist campaigns and are tempted to pull out that well-worn playbook. The sharp feelings about immigration right now are a symptom of something much bigger and dislocating than latino day laborers --- and it seems that on some level, the public knows it. It's possible that politicians can cynically divert voters' angst over globalization by stoking anti-immigrant fervor, but it appears to me that it would be a short term solution at best. Deporting every illegal immigrant and putting up a 25 foot wall won't solve this problem. Globalization will continue apace, people will still want to buy massive quantities of cheap disposable stuff and working people are going to be squeezed.

Matthews is a simpleton as we all know, and often misstates basic facts. But he and his new idol Mudcat (who Chris practically blew right on camera)are talking a very aggressive short game with immigration and it's more irritating than usual. I sincerely hope that he is not parroting the establishment CW he's hearing over cocktail weenies or this issue is going to turn into a xenophobic free for all and leave the real issues that are making Americans uneasy about immigration unaddressed --- just as the corporate establishment hopes it does.

Update: I just watched Matthews say that 90% of Americans in small towns in California are upset because "they didn't move to Mexico, Mexico moved to them." "Americans" have had it up to here with Mexican culture, apparently.

It was even too much for Hugh Hewitt, wingnut extraordinaire, who happens to be from Orange County once the most conservative region in California. His home town, Santa Ana, has a 76% Latino population. Hewitt, as a California Republican, knows very well that it is political suicide to make such blatant, xenophobic arguments and he wanted nothing to do with them.

I think it is EXTREMELY important, for this as well as many other reasons, that we make it very, very clear that Chris Matthews is not a Democrat. He's a Republican:

MATTHEWS: People go to vote this November, you know this as well. When I go to vote, I know who my congressperson is. And I always voted for this woman out in Maryland for years, because I know her and like her, a moderate Republican. I always voted for her. Then if I knew somebody running against her personally, I'd vote for them.

It's the way I look at a lot of the elections. I think Bush is OK the first time, then he changed I thought, so I didn‘t like him the second time. I‘m a thinker about this. Or do people just vote the party who my parents voted.

He's a thinker, all right. A Republican thinker.



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digby 3/30/2006 02:30:00 PM |

 

That's Our Howard

by digby


Those of us who live in California have always known that Howard Kaloogian is a clown. It's nice to see that he's getting the national exposure he deserves.

Many of you will remember that his group Moving America Back to the Dark Ages did an ad recently during the John Bolton confirmation hearings:

Wife: Honey, were you watching C-SPAN today? Did you hear how disloyal Senator Voinovich was to Republicans and President Bush? Voinovich stood with the Democrats and refused to vote for John Bolton, the man President Bush has chosen to fight for the United States at the UN

Husband: No, I was streaming it on the Internet at the office, but from what I could tell, Senator Voinovich played hookey from the hearings?

Wife: Yeah that’s right. He’s missed most of the Bolton confirmation hearings, but then shows up at the last minute and stabs the President and Republicans right in the back.

Husband: That’s ridiculous – the United Nations needs reform, we need someone who will stand up for the United States and fight the UN’s corruption and anti-Americanism.

Wife: Shame on Senator Voinovich. After the Democrats smeared Condoleeza Rice for Secretary of State and Alberto Gonzales for Attorney General, how could Voinovich side with the Democrats in smearing John Bolton?

Husband: It seems like Senator Voinovich has become a traitor to the Republican Party.

Wife: Enough’s enough. I’m logging on to Move America Forward dot com to register my protest with Senator Voinovich’s office.

Husband: What was that site? Move America Forward dot com ?

Wife: Yep, Move America Forward dot com

Cute, huh? This was also the group that got on a bus and went down to Crawford to confront Cindy Sheehan and ended up fighting with each other.

But my favorite thing is this "Howard Is A Liar" site that is run by Republicans angry that kaloogian took credit for the California Recall. Lying about the Bagdad pic is just par for the course. He's so bad even Republicans recoil.

Here's the Cafe Press site:

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digby 3/30/2006 01:57:00 PM |

 
On The Future Of Afghanistan

by tristero

In the comments to my recent post on Afghanistan, I wrote,

I have no idea what the Taliban's future is, but I do know Afghanistan's.

Violence bordering on sheer anarchy. Religious extremism. The oppression of women. Heartbreakingly-deep poverty.

In response, commenter gilpead wrote:

To paraphrase:

They're a bunch of wogs who are, due to their backwardness, doomed to a future of misery. Afghanistan can never, ever join the community of nations because the country as a whole is a cesspool of violence and oppression and the poor savages are incapable of ever changing the way things are done"

I've decided to respond to this rather than ignore it and to respond in a serious fashion. *

Dear gilpead,

I'm afraid your paraphrase of my remarks is not accurate, both in the details about my remarks or in the intent behind them.

I have never used the term "wog" in my life. In fact, I don't even know what it means.

I do not believe Afghans are "backwards" and never said so. I have no idea what you mean by that.

I believe that the future for Afghanistan is miserable, the future being defined as "over the next five years." That is a realistic assessment based upon the instability of the present situation and the lack of a serious commitment by the US and the international community to assist the Afghans in overcoming very real, and very serious problems. No one can predict with any degree of accuracy where Afghanistan will be much beyond five years, but if you insist, I would side with those who feel that over the next ten years, the obstacles will make it excessively difficult for there to be much improvement over the present, and with tremendous potential for things to get a lot worse.

Afghanistan can never "join" the community of nations, because it already is a part of that community. The question is whether Afghanistan can join the community of nations which offers its citizens a life free of warlords, fundamentalism, chronic terrorism, and gut-wrenching poverty. Given the lack of interest on the part of other nations, including the US, to help in a truly serious way, the answer is "not very likely." To hope that Afghanistan can pull itself up by its own bootstraps is to hope for the impossible. They need help. And they are not getting anywhere near enough.

Yes, the country (except within the circle of safety created by Karzai's bodyguards) is rife with oppression and violence. I reject the phrase "as a whole" because it too vague, if not meaningless. I'm sure there are plenty of places that have not been scarred by violence. The same is true of Iraq. And Sierra Leone. The problem is that there is far more violence and oppression within Afghanistan's borders than is compatible, in many, many places, with a minimum sense of safety.

I don't know what you mean by the term "poor savages." I have no idea what you're talking about because I neither use such language or understand why anyone would.

Again, the Afghans require the determined, and sensible, longtime assistance of other nations to help rebuild their country. Without it, the situation will remain catastrophic and get worse. It is nothing in "the character of the Afghan people" that compels this. A United States in as bad a shape as Afghanistan would require an equal amount of help.

I have no idea what you mean by a phrase as vague and crude as "changing the way things are done." A country is not a machine. Nor, as the world once again has learned, can any country be compelled into democracy by invasion, conquest, or coercion EXCEPT under very specific circumstances which were not the circumstances in either Iran or Iraq pre-invasion. For details, go to ceip.org and search for articles on nation-building, democracy after invasion, and the like.

LIke any sane human being, the Taliban and their ideas disgust me. But I fail to see where overthrowing the Taliban to replace it with anarchy, violence, poverty and slaughter that can -and will -be blamed directly on the United States is any improvement. The victims of the horrors may be slightly different, but the intensity, even if slightly lessened, will be laid at your feet, and mine.

Afghanistan fascinates me - the people, the culture, the architecture and music, and the geology. I would love to visit someday but I'm afraid I'll never get there. That's merely a personal disappointment, but the tragedy is that the greatness of Afghanistan has been so beaten up and battered that without serious, competent, help - which the Bush administration has proved over and over it is simply incapable of providing - that greatness will be beyond serious recovery for several generations or longer.

One last comment. I assume you will take what I've written here, caricature it, and proceed to refute the caricature. Doing so is your prerogative. Until George W. Bush, however, people who lived their lives within a cartoon reality usually didn't hold places of serious influence within the US government. Sure, Cheney and Rumsfeld were paid with my tax dollars at an earlier time, but their boss knew better than to mistake their screwiest ideas as the products of rational deliberation on foreign policy.

To paraphrase, believe whatever you want. Just stay out of my government and take your hallucinating friends with you.

Love,

tristero



*A few words of explanation: I chose to respond not because I think gilpead had even an inkling of a good point, but because gilpead's arguments are standard neo-conservative idealism of the sort Wolfowitz used to intimidate anyone who dared who talked reason to him or his fellows**, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to take those kinds of remarks seriously. Perhaps, some useful ways to debunk them might come out of it or better yet, spark someone else's mind to come up with something far more effective.

Don't get me wrong. I have no interest in "engaging" trolls, but I do have a lot of interest in developing arguments and rhetoric that can be used to refute the influential people from whom the trolls steal - men like Wolfowitz, Perle, Rumsfeld, Kristol, HItchens and even Packer (should he fall prey once again to the temptations of his narcissistic, naive idealism).

**Wolfowitz at Georgetown University October 31, 2003::

"We hate your policies. We are tired of being feared and hated by the world," Ruthie Coffman (SFS201906) said, also calling Wolfowitz's policies "deplorable."

The killing of innocents is not the solution but rather the problem," she said.

"I would infer that you would be happier if Saddam Hussein were still in power," Wolfowitz responded."War is ugly," he said, "but the alternative is far worse."

tristero 3/30/2006 06:21:00 AM |

 
Afghanistan

by tristero

It seems that when the Taliban announced there would be "a new offensive this year," they meant it:

Taliban militants launched a rare attack on a coalition base in southern Afghanistan Wednesday, killing an American and a Canadian soldier and sparking fierce U.S.-led retaliation that left 32 insurgents dead in the bloodiest fighting in months.

The attack came a day after at least 10 people were killed in two separate roadside bombings and reflected a growing intensity of militant assaults after the Taliban warned of a renewed offensive this year.

''Over the last five or six weeks there have been various proven attacks mainly at night by the Taliban on that base, but I think it is fair to say this is the largest we have seen thus far,'' British spokesman Col. Chris Vernon told reporters in Kandahar.

The battle began hours after Taliban insurgents ambushed an Afghan supply convoy as it returned to the remote forward operating base late Tuesday, killing eight Afghan soldiers, Vernon said.

tristero 3/30/2006 12:07:00 AM |

Wednesday, March 29, 2006

 
Odds and Ends

by tristero

Many of these come via the wonderful Cursor

Ken Mehlman thinks Republican candidates should align themselves with Bush. I agree. That way it will be that much easier to brand the entire Republican party "incompetent."

No question about it: Scalia is losing it. First he had the lack of class to write a letter of complaint to the Boston Herald for reporting his rude gesture. And he wrote in part:

From watching too many episodes of the Sopranos, your staff seems to have acquired the belief that any Sicilian gesture is obscene - especially when made by an ‘Italian jurist.’ (I am, by the way, an American jurist.)”

In fact, the article called him an "Italian-American jurist." [Scroll down. Original available only to susbcribers]Unfortunately for the country, his jurisprudence is just as sloppy and immature as his correspondence. [UPDATE: A commenter disputes my assertion that Scalia is sloppy (but not that he's immature) because the Web version of the article reads as Scalia describes. In comments, at 3.30.06 2:37 am, I respond by examining Scalia's letter in the light of this discrepancy. I argue that if we assume Scalia read only the online version, then a different part of Scalia's letter is sloppy.]

[Update: Atrios posted the Boston Herald photograph of Scalia flipping the bird at the camera. When you look at it, remember: You are looking at a Supreme Court Justice. In a few moments, and while still in church, he will say, "Fuck you."]

Does anyone other than your humble blogger find the headline "Brain drain hits Homeland Security" incredibly funny, in a "I-have-to-laugh-or-I'd-have-to-cry" kind of way?

Howard Kaloogian, he who can't (or his staff who can't), tell the difference between Baghdad and an Istanbul suburb, is quite an asshole.

Want to guess who is responsible for all the violence in Iraq? Wrong! It's not the Clintons! Well, not yet anyway. But it's only a matter of time before some wingnut will say that in fact, had Clinton invaded Iraq when urged to by PNAC, then the utterly incompetent Bush wouldn't have been forced to screw up so badly.

[Update: Scalia's deployment of exaggeration and straw man in his letter looks like a possible geoffy. Amazing how often Scalia seems to do this.]
tristero 3/29/2006 03:08:00 PM |

 
Live Symphony Recordings On iTunes

by tristero

I don't know how many other orchestras or other music groups are doing this yet, but this is just a great idea that's long overdue. Live New York Philharmonic performances of the last three Mozart symphonies on iTunes. Ten bucks for all three.

By the way, if you folks know of similar live concert offerings, drop a note into comments with a link and I'll post the first 25 here. In the interest Let's limit the list to live classical music and jazz. You know, things like live La Scala concerts, Cleveland Orchestra, broadcasts of Kronos, Anthony Braxton.
tristero 3/29/2006 01:46:00 PM |

 
Update below

Jeffie Alert

by digby

Bush just pulled a honker of a Jeffie.

Asked about his relationship with Pootie-poot, he rambled on about how he thinks it's important that he can talk to him face to face. Then he said:

"Some say we shouldn't go to the G8. I disagree..."

Has anyone heard of this movement to withdraw from the G8? I've heard people say that we should purge the G8 of cheese eating surrender monkeys, but this is news to me.

In fact his entire commentary is one long jeffie about "some" who have isolationist tendencies and "some" who want to withdraw within our borders and some who don't think others can govern themselves. He's on a roll.

"I'll be unabash-ed [yep, he pronounced it that way -- very Shakespearean of him] about trying to work for more free societies. I believe that's the calling of the 21st century. I MEANT WHAT I SAID, when I said in the 21st century the goal of the US should be to end tyranny!"

He was really wound up by that point, hunched all the way over the podium, red-faced, pointing his finger at the audience. You know, the hectoring, drunken father bit.

This was good:

"China has recently read the book on Mao.(???) It's an amazing history of a couple of things, one of which was how fooled the world was --- and how brutal the country was."

Sounds like five years into his presidency Junior finally cracked a high school history book. Good for him, seeing as he has a degree in history from Yale.

But civics was never his strong point. Nor economics. Clearly, the 7th grade primers they gave him got his mind all confused 'n stuff:

"One of the most pure forms of democracy is the marketplace, the demand causes something to happen. Excess demand causes prices to go up and vice versa and that stands in contrast to governments that set prices and try to control demand."

Reminder: this is the most powerful man in the world. Can anyone still say it doesn't matter if the president is intelligent?


Update: Oooops. Apparently "some" have said the US should boycot the G8 becuase of the charge that Russia gave US war plans to Saddam. My bad:

Sen. Edward Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat, said on ”Face The Nation” that if it turns out to be true, the United States should review its relationship with Russia and whether to attend the G8 summit in St. Petersburg this summer.

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digby 3/29/2006 10:48:00 AM |

 
Progress

by digby


On Fox this morning:

Bill Hemmer just back from Iraq showing off awsome butch pics of himself all dressed up in uniform and lookin' hot, hot, hot. (The barbie doll who "interviewed" him introduced the segment with "you got to hang out with the marines!")

Lots of good news over there. Lots. He ran some tape of an earlier story that went something like this:

We're in a "cop-shop" outside Falluja. A year ago, they went out on patrol for three hours. Later it was one hour. Then seven minutes. Now they can't get them to go out at all.

But then again, the building wasn't even here a year ago, so there is progress.

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digby 3/29/2006 10:17:00 AM |

 
Update below

Coincidence I'm Sure

by digby

Garance Franke-Ruta would be breaking her new rule against linking to (presumed to be corrupt) pseedonymous bloggers like me if she linked to my post from last night on Ramesh Ponnuru's "Party Of Death," but I can certainly link to her post from this morning which makes exactly the same observation more than twelve hours later.

It's always possible that a reader just happened to have made the same extremely obscure observation at roughly the same time I did. It can happen. Or it could be that the observant reader read my post and did not credit me when he or she sent it to Franke-Ruta. Normally I would assume the second and let it go at that. Unfortunately, I can't help but wonder now if Franke-Ruta believes her new policy allows her not to credit pseeudonymous work, which would make her little better than Ben Domenech. Let's hope that's not the case.


Disclaimer: I haven't been paid by any political entity to write that or anything else. Ever. And my real name is Spartacus.



Update: Franke-Ruta forwarded an e-mail containing the tip, which made no mention of my post. As I wrote, it is entirely possible that someone out there came up with that exact obscure observation at the same time. Nothing is impossible. It's also, considering the time of the e-mail, possible that the person read my post and didn't credit it. It happens all the time.

My point, however, is that those of us who are pseudonymous are naturally going to have to be vigilant about such things with people who have a blanket policy of refusing to link to us. Psuedonymous or not, I have to protect myself. When someone refuses on principle to link to me and then publishes items that could be attributed to my work, I can't just automatically chalk that up to coincidence as I normally would.

Franke-Ruta didn't much like having her integrity called into question on this and I can't say I blame her. I'm not too crazy about having mine impugned either.


Update II: The e-mailer had not read my post. In fact, he e-mailed me the same tip although I had already written my piece and posted it moments before, which he did not see. As it happens I informed him of the Garance Franke-Ruta connection in a return post, at which point he tipped her to the information.

So, Garance Franke-Ruta is in the clear, as is her e-mailer who independently found the same item that I did. It's not pleasant being so suspicious of someone whose work I've been following for years and who has never shown the least tendency toward corruption. I hate when that happens.



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digby 3/29/2006 09:05:00 AM |

 
The Neurobiology Of The Right

by tristero

Something is very, very wrong with the cognition of far too many people on the right. I'm beginning to think seriously it may be organic.

Are there any neurologists or neurobiologists amongst you, dear readers? If so, I'd be very grateful if you could explain what causes the utterly weird correlation between rightwing ideology, pathological lying and geographical incompetence. True, correlation doesn't necessarily imply causation, but really people, this is strange. And this goes way beyond a stupid lie. Like they thought no one would notice all the Turkish in the signs? No, something is wrong with these people.

Besides, Kaloogian isn't the only Republican and/or rightwingnut who doesn't know where things are. Don't ever ask Richard Perle for directions. He thinks the UN is "the chatterbox on the Hudson" when it's clearly on the East River (at least it was the last time I checked; I suppose they could have picked up the offices and moved them crosstown...). And Jeanne Pirro mislaid Pennsylvania. Then, of course, there's Dan Quayle thrilled to be in "the great state of Chicago." As for Bush's awful ignorance of geography - remember the Grecians? - don't get me started. Whoops! Hold on, wait a minute, wait a minute...A terrible thought.

Could it be - my God, it could! Could it be that the reason Bush invaded Iraq was simply because of an organic disorder that left him so geographically challenged he couldn't distinguish it from Iran? "Iran, Iraq - there's a difference? Don't bother me with details. Just invade them, fer Pete's sakes."

And with that utterly awful thought rattling through our minds, consider this. Let's agree, just for the sake, of argument, with Ambrose Bierce that "war is God's way of teaching Americans geography." Now if America is being run by people organically incapable of understanding geography... Oh. My. God... Truly scary.

So, to all you neurobiologists out there, riddle me this: assuming it's organic, where is the problem located? Left brain? Right brain? Is it in the hippocampus (love that word)? Is it genetic? A virus? Do Republican nervous systems use Crisco oil instead of norepinephrine (another fave)? What? We need answers and fast:

What kind of anomaly could cause the unique cluster of symptoms - lying, hostile impulsivity, excessive religiosity, narcissistic delusions of exceptionalism, compulsive anti-social behavior including deliberate law-breaking and fraud, etc, etc, AND geographic incompetence - that characterize Repubican-Neuro-Cerebral syndrome or RNC-s?



[Note to rightwingers: I realize that your powers of comprehension lie closer to those of a hamster than to most of the world human community, so let me make it clear that the above is satire and not serious. Oh, if only your problem was merely organic! How easy it would be to understand and sympathize. And to treat! Doctors could create a tiny little pill that could keep you grounded in consensual reality for at least a few minutes a week. My goodness, a Republican with a mere three minutes of accurate perception a week! How much safer the world would be.

But that's not possible. Your problems are, to use the jargon, characterological as much as they are physcial. Prognosis: negative.

I...sob...pity you.]

[Update: Typos fixed.]
[Update: Link To TPM's "Busted!" post added.]
tristero 3/29/2006 08:15:00 AM |

Tuesday, March 28, 2006

 
Misty Water Colored Memories

by digby


Here's a little flashback to September 2001 when the country lost its mind and decided that the first thing we needed to do was throw away the constitution or we'd never catch the boogeyman. You can't blame it all on Bush. He had plenty of help:

Big Brother No Longer So Scary

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 19, 2001; 9:30 AM

The clash was all but inevitable.

For decades, they have shadow-boxed their way through all manner of policy disputes, the champions of more aggressive law enforcement and the guardians of civil liberties.

The FBI wants to wiretap more phones or intercept e-mail communications? Civil libertarians complain about the loss of privacy. One administration or another wants to pare down the rights of accused criminals, junk Miranda warnings or allow the use of improperly seized evidence? The ACLU-types attack the proposals as unconstitutional. The battles are fought in Congress, in the Supreme Court, in the court of public opinion.

Sometimes the reformers have the upper hand, such as when the CIA runs amok and public sentiment supports new restrictions. Sometimes the prosecutors get their way, such as when there's a public clamor for a crackdown on lawlessness.

From the moment terrorists attacked New York and Washington, it was clear that this age-old battle would be waged on a global scale. And there's little question that momentum is on the side of those who want spies and investigators to have a stronger hand to hunt down those who are, or might be, involved in terror.

In short, Big Brother may no longer have such a menacing image. And the White House, not surprisingly, is seizing the moment.

Yes they did. I'm sure the government hasn't been spying on Kurtz, though. But then they don't need to. He's already so far in the tank he's probably spying on himself.



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digby 3/28/2006 10:19:00 PM |

 
Party Of Hacks

by digby


I think it's awfully nice of Jane to offer her hand in friendship to conservative writer Ramesh Ponnuru, don't you? Clearly this upcoming book tour is going to be very difficult for him, what with all the questions about his sleazy rightwing publisher and the 24 year old plagiarist editor they assigned him. I wouldn't wish that on anyone.

There is no word on whether Lil' Benji Domenech is still editing away over at Regnery publishing, but it won't make much difference. He's just one of many GOP operatives given sinecures in the myriad conservative front groups out there. There's always more where that came from.

But there's no doubt that Regnery holds a special place in the organization. From Nicholas Confessore's great article in TAP:

Regnery Publishing's right-leaning corporate philosophy actually goes back to 1947, when the late Henry Regnery, Sr., set out to publish "good books," as he wrote in the company's first catalogue, "wherever we find them." Works by Regnery's friends among the nascent conservative intelligentsia soon followed, including Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind, William F. Buckley, Jr.'s God and Man at Yale, Whittaker Chambers's Witness, and Barry Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative. Henry Regnery's son, Alfred Regnery, who took over in 1986 and moved the company to Washington, D.C., has likewise been both a friend to and publisher of conservative authors. After stints in law school (where he roomed with American Conservative Union Chairman David Keene) and as college director of Young Americans for Freedom, Alfred Regnery was appointed head of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention by Ronald Reagan in 1983. While there, as reported by Murray Waas in The New Republic, he helped run Edwin Meese's ill-fated President's Commission on Pornography; disbursed generous grants to Jerry Falwell's Liberty College, Meese pal George Nicholson, and professional antifeminist Phyllis Schlafly; authored, with then-Assistant Secretary of Education Gary Bauer, a much-ridiculed report called "Chaos in the Public Schools"; and in general cultivated an updated version of his father's network of friends.

But by the time Alfred Regnery took over the family business, the firm had slipped into semi-dormancy. Regnery Publishing's 1993 purchase by newsletter magnate Tom Phillips woke it up. Phillips, one of the Republican National Committee's "Team 100" and a board member of the Claremont Institute, lavished both money and attention on his new acquisition. Leaving Alfred Regnery at the helm, Phillips folded the company into his Eagle Publishing division, an overtly political enterprise with a distinguished stable of conservative media: Human Events, a 56-year-old,ultra-right weekly newspaper; the Evans-Novak Political Report; the 75,000-member Conservative Book Club (founded in 1964 as "America was walking down Lyndon Johnson's path to a socialist 'Great Society'"); and a similar operation called the Christian Family Book Club. But perhaps most significant--given the central role direct mail has played in the conservative resurgence of recent decades--is Eagle's list brokerage operation, which rents out Eagle's own customer lists and those of organizations like Newt Gingrich's GOPAC, Empower America, the Western Journalism Center, and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation, not to mention Pat Buchanan's American Cause and the Steve Forbes for President campaign.

By the time Phillips Publishing spun off Eagle last July, an entirely new entity had emerged: a company that treats publishing less as a media enterprise than as a form of political activism. With a new, almost Gingrichian sensibility, Regnery's titles have begun to reflect the particular ideological and policy concerns of foundation-funded, third-wave conservative thinkers. Believe that the American family is in its death throes? Read Maggie Gallagher's The Abolition of Marriage: How We Destroy Lasting Love. Worried that American higher education is overrun by radical feminists and licentious left-wingers? Pick up the late George Roche's The Fall of the Ivory Tower: Government Funding, Corruption, and the Bankrupting of American Higher Education, or David Horowitz's The Heterodoxy Handbook: How to Survive the PC Campus. Believe that corrupt teachers' unions are the bane of the American education system? Read G. Gregory Moo's Power Grab: How the National Education Association is Betraying Our Children. If you suspect that the Walt Disney Corporation is out to lead children astray with Miramax films and "Gay Day" at Disney World, have a look at Disney: The Mouse Betrayed, by Peter and Rochelle Schweizer. And if you wonder whether more assault rifles equals less crime, imbibe the pithy wisdom of Wayne LaPierre's Guns, Crime, and Freedom.

[...]

Since 1996, Regnery has published no less than eight presidential exposés: Roger Morris's Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America, Bill Gertz's Betrayal: How the Clinton Administration Undermined American Security, Edward Timperlake and William C. Triplett's Year of the Rat: How Bill Clinton Compromised U.S. Security for Chinese Cash, Ann Coulter's High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard's The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories, Gary Aldrich's Unlimited Access: An FBI Agent Inside the Clinton White House, and R. Emmett Tyrrell's The Impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton: A Political Docu-Drama and Boy Clinton: The Political Biography. To date, five of these books have made various best-seller lists.

For all intents and purposes, the eight are interchangeable--with each other and, stylistically, with most of the other political books in Regnery's catalogue. Each posits a nebulous conspiracy centered around the Clinton White House, a murky stew that typically blends one or more of the following ingredients: shady banking and land deals loosely grouped under the "Whitewater" rubric; the murder--or induced suicide--of Vince Foster; Filegate and Travelgate; dalliances with prostitutes and nymphets; rampant drug use; treason via Chinese spies; and an Arkansas-based, Clinton-masterminded drug-smuggling outfit.

And yet these character assassins are considered mainstream and legitimate by the political establishment. I think we can we all see now why Lil' Benji Domenech's "credentials" as an "editor" are so absurd and why so many of us immediately understood him to be a cheap ideological shill for the Republican Party. Believe me, he didn't get the job at the WaPo because he was a founder of Redstate. He got it because he worked for John Cornyn, National Review and Regnery publishing --- all jobs that would have led someone with any sense of how modern politics operates to look, very, very, .... very carefully at his past work. These are not jobs that should have given anyone in mainstream journalism confidence in his abilities. It should have made them suspicious.

But I digress. Regnery is publishing Ramesh Ponnuru's new book "The Party of Death" this next month. Check out what Amazon has to say about it. I'm sure you'll find it compelling. Here's a little taste:

Ponnuru's shocking expose shows just how extreme the Party of Death has become as they seek to destroy every inconvenient life, demand fealty to their radical agenda, and punish anyone who defies them. But he also shows how the tide is turning, how the Party of Death can be defeated, and why its last victim might be the Democratic Party itself.

Ponnuru's editor Lil' Benji wrote similarly (there's a surprise) on RedState not long ago:

Some still hope, legitimately or not: "There must be some common ground." But there is none. No one can make that case any more, not with a straight face. We are past that point. The Party of Death won't accept compromise, and neither will those who oppose the taking of innocent life.

That post entitled "Do not Mourn" is quite the diatribe. If I were Ramesh Ponnuru, I'd check it thoroughly. With Lil' Benji's proven proclivity for lifting others' work, I might be concerned that while he was "editing" my book he may have "inadvertantly" absorbed some of my writings.

It would seem that both Domenech and Ponnuru are ardent believers in the sanctity of "life" however. (One wonders if they spent time together watching "the greatest pro-gun movie ever" where "they actually show the jackbooted communist thugs prying the guns from cold dead hands.")

Now Ramesh, ever the "reasonable" conservative, claims that he never meant "The Party of Death" to apply to the Democratic party. He wrote on NRO recently:

Franke-Ruta mentions my forthcoming book The Party of Death, which she describes as a "book on Democrats." The book does have quite a bit to say about the Democrats, and it's tough on them. But the book is about more than that, and the title isn't meant as a pejorative term for the Democrats. I explain, mostly in the introduction, what I mean and don't mean by the phrase. I'm not saying this to complain about Franke-Ruta. It was nice of her to mention the book, and her assumption was an easy one to make, partly because the Amazon page on the book is a bit misleading. (I've tried to get Amazon to change it a few times.)

Thank goodness it isn't a pejorative term for Democrats. That would be quite ugly. But it's odd then that the cover that's shown at the Regnery web site shows a book called: "The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life." Is he describing some sort of social gathering where judges, Democrats and media all get together and "party?" Or does the phrase more logically describe The Democratic Party? Interestingly, there is an alternate book cover that shows "The Party of Death: The Assault on The Sanctity of Life." Odd, don't you think? Has Ponnuru had second thoughts about spending every day for months defending that slanderous, scurrilous title?

Of course, the one thing that hasn't changed about the title is "The Party of Death" part and I think we can be fairly confident that he isn't talking about a fun afternoon with balloons and a pony. Let's hope he doesn't persist with this line that it isn't about the Democrats because he is insulting the intelligence of anyone over the age of ten. Even some mainstream pundits might find that hard to swallow.

And anyway, it takes some nerve calling the Democrats The Party Of Death when you support a party led by a man who said this:

From: "Devil May Care" by Tucker Carlson, Talk Magazine, September 1999, p. 106

"Bush's brand of forthright tough-guy populism can be appealing, and it has played well in Texas. Yet occasionally there are flashes of meanness visible beneath it.

While driving back from the speech later that day, Bush mentions Karla Faye Tucker, a double murderer who was executed in Texas last year. In the weeks before the execution, Bush says, Bianca Jagger and a number of other protesters came to Austin to demand clemency for Tucker. 'Did you meet with any of them?' I ask.

Bush whips around and stares at me. 'No, I didn't meet with any of them,' he snaps, as though I've just asked the dumbest, most offensive question ever posed. 'I didn't meet with Larry King either when he came down for it. I watched his interview with [Tucker], though. He asked her real difficult questions, like 'What would you say to Governor Bush?' 'What was her answer?' I wonder.

'Please,' Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, 'don't kill me.'

I must look shocked -- ridiculing the pleas of a condemned prisoner who has since been executed seems odd and cruel, even for someone as militantly anticrime as Bush -- because he immediately stops smirking.

Call me crazy but it seems to me that the man who personally (and casually) signed 157 death warrants and sent the nation to an unnecessary, bloody war of choice might just have a greater claim to lead a Party Of Death. Somehow all this fretting about blastocysts and spilled sperm just doesn't have much resonance when you look at this:

I'll be looking forward to many more posts about Ramesh Ponnuru and his sleazy publisher Regnery as he goes about his book tour over the next few months. I'm tired of this nonsense.



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digby 3/28/2006 06:31:00 PM |

 
I Wonder Why Bush Didn't Attack Zarqawi When He Had The Chance?

by tristero

Peter Daou catches an NBC news story that somehow seems to have fallen through the cracks. Apparently, Bush ignored several chances to take out or capture Zarqawi:

C News has learned that long before the war the Bush administration had several chances to wipe out his terrorist operation and perhaps kill Zarqawi himself — but never pulled the trigger.

In June 2002, U.S. officials say intelligence had revealed that Zarqawi and members of al-Qaida had set up a weapons lab at Kirma, in northern Iraq, producing deadly ricin and cyanide.

The Pentagon quickly drafted plans to attack the camp with cruise missiles and airstrikes and sent it to the White House, where, according to U.S. government sources, the plan was debated to death in the National Security Council.

“Here we had targets, we had opportunities, we had a country willing to support casualties, or risk casualties after 9/11 and we still didn’t do it,” said Michael O’Hanlon, military analyst with the Brookings Institution.

Four months later, intelligence showed Zarqawi was planning to use ricin in terrorist attacks in Europe.

The Pentagon drew up a second strike plan, and the White House again killed it. By then the administration had set its course for war with Iraq.

“People were more obsessed with developing the coalition to overthrow Saddam than to execute the president’s policy of preemption against terrorists,” according to terrorism expert and former National Security Council member Roger Cressey.

In January 2003, the threat turned real. Police in London arrested six terror suspects and discovered a ricin lab connected to the camp in Iraq.

The Pentagon drew up still another attack plan, and for the third time, the National Security Council killed it.

Military officials insist their case for attacking Zarqawi’s operation was airtight, but the administration feared destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam.

The United States did attack the camp at Kirma at the beginning of the war, but it was too late — Zarqawi and many of his followers were gone. “Here’s a case where they waited, they waited too long and now we’re suffering as a result inside Iraq,” Cressey added.

I just can't wait to hear the excuses for this screwup. Funny, this plus all those memos about fixing the intelligence and concocting fake incidents makes me downright suspicious that maybe, just maybe, Bush intended to go to war no matter what. Now what's OIL so special about OIL Iraq that OIL would so obsess OIL an American president that OIL he would risk thousands of OIL soldiers' lives OIL rather than do whatever OIL he could to prevent OIL OIL OIL it?
tristero 3/28/2006 03:21:00 PM |

 
Stanislaw Lem

by tristero

Stanislaw Lem has died. I have to confess that I've never been a big reader of sci-fi. But I always loved Lem's novels. Time to read some more of him. Try this or this or, of course, this.
tristero 3/28/2006 03:04:00 PM |

 
Bad Precedent

by digby

I can't help but feel a tiny bit confused by all this righteous rightwing aversion to "rewarding lawbreaking" with an amnesty program for immigrants. The argument seems to be that it sends a bad message to allow people to get away with unlawful behavior by legalizing it after the fact. What'll they tell the children?

Of course, it all depends on who's doing the breaking, doesn't it?



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digby 3/28/2006 02:42:00 PM |

 
Bush's Busboy Goes Bye-Bye

by digby

"Go get me Andy Card," Bush said to one of the Secret Service agents. Card, the designee as chief of staff, entered from an adjoining room . . . Bush looked impatiently at Card, hard-eyed. "You're the chief of staff. You think you're up to getting us some cheeseburgers?"

Card nodded. No one laughed. He all but raced out of the room.

I'm sure he'll be missed. Perhaps we should all send Josh Bolton some McDonald's menus. He's going to need them.


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digby 3/28/2006 01:58:00 PM |

 

I just know there are a few of you who would love to take some action today to show the powers that be that the grassroots have a sense of humor. Christy at FDL has the next phase of the "rubber stamp" action plan ready to roll. Think of it as a way of bonding with our representatives --- and telling the other side that we are on to them...



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digby 3/28/2006 12:30:00 PM |

 
Intervention

by digby

A couple of months ago when Deborah Howell was "deluged" with "uncivilized" comments about her failure to correct a blatant misrepresentation, the Washington Post ombudsman and others had a shrieking fit of the vapors and spent days on the fainting couch mumbling incoherently about the rude insults they had to endure. I thought Howell would have to take a leave of absense and get herself to a nunnery for a few weeks just to regain her belief in the goodness of mankind after such an assault.

As was amply demonstrated, the vast majority of the comments were not, in fact, crude or filthy. They condemned the Post for uncritically recycling RNC talking points and failing to provide proof of their assertions. And they used aggressive language to do it.

But as Busy, Busy Busy's Elton Beard noticed, Howell only seems to be truly stunned, angry and upset by certain kinds of criticism. Others, not so much. Here's Howell this past Sunday:

One critic of the coverage is John Dowd, a Washington lawyer: "I can't subscribe to your newspaper anymore because you have lost all sense of balance and perspective in your coverage of the war in Iraq and against the terrorists. It is clear to those of us who have our sons and daughters who are in harm's way that you support the terrorists and you are opposed to the efforts of our Marines, all who are sacrificing so that you are free to publish without interference."

Dowd's son Dan is a Marine captain, just back from his second tour as a helicopter pilot in Iraq. Dowd sees his son and other U.S. and Iraqi soldiers "as the most selfless people I've known in my life." I found his letter haunting; it pains me that he would think Post journalists support terrorists.

Beard says:

Think about that.

A reader accuses Washington Post journalists of siding with Goldstein - er, terrorists - and Deborah Howell doesn't think, this man is either demented or trying to manipulate me. She doesn't crumple up and toss the letter and she doesn't add it to her loony folder, already overflowing with missives from crazed liberals. She does not take offense at the slur on her colleagues. Quite the opposite. She takes the complaint seriously

It pains her to think this fine man believes that the Washington Post supports terrorists. She's "haunted" by that criticism. But those of us who would like the Post to correct their errors are uncivilized beasts from the fever swamp who are dragging down the discourse. That's very revealing, I think. Deborah Howell, like so many of her brethren, has so internalized rightwing criticism that it doesn't even seem unreasonable anymore. She "understands" it. This man called her a traitor to her face and all it does is make her feel sad. She doesn't even know that she has completely absorbed the right's criticisms.

And when liberals point out that she has become subsumed by a radical Republican establishment, when they bring attention to the fact that she no longer even knows when she is being manipulated and abused --- she gets angry and tries to kill the messenger.

The truth is that we are not trying to destroy the media with our barbaric uncouth ways and unflattering criticisms. We are trying to save it. It's not surprising that they have become self-loathing, addicted to RNC spin and dependent on the approbation of the Republican establishment. We can all see why they would no longer be able to tell the difference between rational conservative discourse and RNC propaganda. They've been under sustained attack for years.

That's why we've decided we need to stage an intervention. The first step is to wake them up and make them realize that when a reader calls them a terrorist sympathizer the proper response is not to "feel pained" or be "haunted." It's to recognize that the person who is saying it is a deluded rightwing nutcase --- and then get righteously pissed. That is not a benign charge --- they are fighting words.

And conversely, when someone calls them on an error, the proper response is to admit it and correct it, not become freaked out by the passion of those who demand it. These two kinds of feedback from readers are not equivalent and the second is certainly not more deserving of anger and shock than the first. Being called a traitor to your country is a deeply offensive insult. Being told you are not doing your job correctly may be insulting, but it's hardly in the same league. The fact that Deborah Howell cannot see that --- and takes the first one more seriously than the second --- is the very essence of the problem with the mainstream press.



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digby 3/28/2006 11:05:00 AM |

 
Cheating By Reflex

by digby


If they aren't plagiarising, they're lying. If they aren't lying they're cooking the record. If they can't win, they cheat.

And anyone who ever believes a word of anything coming out of the mouth of that unctuous phony Huckleberry Graham is just looking to get punked. Get a load of this, from Anonymous Liberal:

Today the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the case of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. The Court will be called upon to determine--among other things--whether a provision in last year's Detainee Treatment Act ("DTA") effectively strips the Court of jurisdiction to hear Hamdan's case. The Government contends that it does and in support of this position, Republican Senators Lindsey Graham and John Kyl have filed an amicus brief with the Court.

This amicus brief argues that the legislative history of the DTA supports the Government's position. Specifically, the brief cites a lengthy colloquy between Senators Kyl and Graham themselves which purportly took place during a Senate floor debate just prior to passage of the bill. In the exchange, both Kyl and Graham suggest that the bill will strip the courts of jurisdiction over pending detainee cases such as Hamdan. But here's where the story gets interesting.

Apparently this entire 8 page colloquy--which is scripted to read as if it were delivered live on the floor of the Senate, complete with random interruptions from other Senators--never took place. It was inserted into the Congressional Record in written form just prior to passage of the bill.

They even went to the trouble of making it appear to be a "real" debate with conversational asides and colloquial language. The very, very pious and godly Sam Brownback lied outright and said he'd participated in the debate when it never actually happened. (He's got a bit part in the script.) This article in Slate leads me to believe that there may have been some collusion between the Justice Department and Graham.

They knew that the entire Senate did not intend that the court be stripped of jurisdiction in pending cases. It probably wouldn't have passed if that had been the case. So they cheated. This has been the story over and over and over again with this rubber stamp Eunuch Caucus. If they can't deliver for their Dear Leader by following the rules --- even with a majority --- they ignore them. They are the outlaw party.



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digby 3/28/2006 07:59:00 AM |

 
The Iraq Document Dump

by tristero

Shorter Peter Bergen: There is no credible evidence in the Iraqi document dump of a Saddam/Qaeda link beyond the most desultory of contacts, as the 9/11 Commission, et al. has already concluded.

And before taking a quick squint, finding something ambiguous and shrieking, "Smoking gun, smoking gun!" I'd like to remind our rabid friends on the right that, as the introduction to the documents clearly states: "The US Government has made no determination regarding the authenticity of the documents, validity or factual accuracy of the information contained therein, or the quality of any translations, when available." That should be taken as a very strong hint to be very skeptical about what you think you've found.

Of course, it would be outrageous to accuse the Bush administration of salting the document dump with deliberate forgeries. Completely outrageous.

It would also be outrageous to accuse the Bush administration of witholding documents that would tend to make their justifications for the war look even more specious than they already do. Completely outrageous.

I urge everyone on the right to drop everything they are doing for the next few years and carefully, carefully study this archive. And be sure to triple-check what you find. Studying this material with the detail it deserves will require your full, undivided attention.

Take your time, boys and girls, as much as you need. I can wait.
tristero 3/28/2006 12:32:00 AM |

Monday, March 27, 2006

 
More Pretexts

by digby

In reference to my post below about Bush and Blair casually throwing around possible pretexts for the war, Jonathan at A Tiny Revolution pointed me to a post he wrote almost a year ago in which he showed that this was openly discussed at the time by none other than the likes of liberal hawk hero, Kenneth Pollack:

...The Threatening Storm by Kenneth Pollack was the book all good liberal hawks claimed had convinced them we just HAD to invade Iraq. And Pollack spoke about this strategy quite openly.

And yet as far as I can tell not a single member of the media pointed out how weird this was. (Of course, it's likely most of the people touting The Threatening Storm never bothered to read it.)

Specifically, Pollack writes about this in the "Case for an Invasion" chapter. He explains we have to invade Iraq because of Saddam's relentless pursuit of nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, other countries refuse to recognize this grave, grave danger. So in order to build as large a coalition as possible, we need some help from Iraq:

Click the link to see Pollacks explicit advice that the government use covert action provoke Saddam into retaliation so that we might invent a cassus belli. Pollack patiently explains,however, that even if we are unable to manufacture a proper pretext, we must invade anyway.

This was the reasonable liberal position, you'll recall. Those of us who were against the war because it made no sense were so beyond the pale that we didn't even merit a mention. Those who argued that invasion was unnecessary to contain the threat were relegated to obscure foreign policy journals. Those who said that it was counterproductive were called appeasers. Kenneth Pollack represented the "respectable" liberal position --- and he argued quite openly that the government should invent a pretext to invade Iraq --- and if that proved impossible we had to invade anyway.

And nobody said a word. Of course, his book was nearly hysterical in its threat assessment, so the idea of having to create a pretext to invade another nation seemed a small thing to some, I suppose. (The NYRB didn't mention it.) But why did no one note that the fact the US could not make its case straightforwardly may just have meant that it didn't actually ... have a case?

After excerpting Pollack's blithe list of potential phony pretexts, Jonathan concludes with this observation -- one that really takes the cake and shows how intellectually bankrupt the liberal hawks were:

The best part is that later ON THE SAME PAGE Pollack piously explains "the administration needs to do an honest job explaining to the American people... why the United States needs to undertake this effort."

So, there you have it: we're going to invade no matter what, but we should try to come up with some pretext, all the while being honest about why we're invading. If you're capable of believing that makes any sense whatsoever, you'll be a welcome member of the US foreign policy establishment.

9/11 changed everything. It made people stupid.



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digby 3/27/2006 09:12:00 PM |

 
The Lowest of The Low

by digby

Andrew Sullivan has been writing about discrimination against atheists lately. Today's post on the subject is particularly interesting:

Eugene Volokh has just written a law article (PDF file here) on how atheist fathers and mothers are routinely discriminated against in child custody cases. He cites over 70 recent cases across the country - and these were only the ones which were appealed, so they probably represent a fraction of the actual cases. Volokh recalls how Percy Byshe Shelley was the first father to be denied custody because of his atheism - but his dilemma doesn't belong to a different time and place

The post goes on to show that this is actually fairly common. Frankly, I'm not surprised at all. Despite the ridiculous hype to the contrary, our society dictates that religion is required to be a decent person. If you can't get elected to office as an atheist, why would a court grant you the right to raise children?

From a telephone sampling of more than 2,000 households, university researchers found that Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians and other minority groups in "sharing their vision of American society." Atheists are also the minority group most Americans are least willing to allow their children to marry.

Sullivan, in an earlier post on the subject, points out the obvious:

A government that screws with the rights of atheists is screwing with the rights of believers as well.

True, but then religious freedom isn't really the point for most theocrats, is it?


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digby 3/27/2006 08:40:00 PM |

 
The Liberal Clergy Gets Serious

by digby

We've had quite a few discussions about religion on this blog lately, which led me to believe that there is a serious need for the religious left to assert itself and make a case for Democratic religiosity. The Republicans simply do not own the church and they have no right to claim they do.

But I, being a non-believer, cannot make that case effectively. I can't even discuss it in terms other than dry pragmatic political language. So, I'm thrilled to read through Street Prophets that the United Church of Christ has teamed up with Media Matters to "fight the pronounced tilt toward the Religious Right in mainstream media news." Pastordan writes:

The conclusion is hard to escape: unless you're Jesse Jackson (and it's before 2001), if you're on Sunday morning television to talk religion and politics, you're almost certainly white, male and conservative, and you probably don't represent anyone other than your own advocacy group. Is it any wonder that public discourse about religion has become so distorted in the past few years? The news shows have stopped talking to people who do religion in favor of people who talk about "religious values," and usually from a particular perspective.

That's a real filter, and it doesn't just hurt faithful progressives. It hurts our churches, temples and mosques as well, by buying into the spin that conservative activists - who can give great soundbite on politics - represent the true face of faith in America. For that matter, it hurts all denominations, who are usually more interested in doing good than playing political footsie with the Republican party.

So thank God there's a way to fight back. The first action is a letter/e-mail campaign to ask ABC why it is there's such an imbalance on their news shows. Drop them a line, and let's get this party started. It really has been too long that we've allowed the hucksters and bigots to speak for us.

And the UCC will be running a new ad soon as well, if the networks will play them. Today's New York Times reports:

The church will return on April 3 with a second commercial, also from Gotham, titled "Ejector Pew." The spot depicts a smug, traditional-looking family looking askance as they are joined inside a church by worshipers who are significantly different from them.

Suddenly, the worshipers who are disabled or elderly, or who appear to be gay, Hispanic or of Middle Eastern origin, are forcibly ejected from their seats. "God doesn't reject people," the commercial says. "Neither do we."

This time, the campaign, with a budget estimated at $1.5 million, extends well beyond television. The intent is to stimulate conversation and debate with so-called viral efforts that are to include a substantial online presence, on Web sites and blogs; chain letters, in the form of e-mail messages; audio podcasts; posters; events at local churches; and even merchandise like decals, tote bags, pens and golf balls bearing the phrase "God is still speaking," which is the campaign's theme.

Smart stuff.


Click over to Street Prophets for links to the ad.



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digby 3/27/2006 01:41:00 PM |

 
Fresh Blood In The White House

by tristero

As Bush's poll numbers cluster down around a still-phenomenally-too-high-to-believe-there-are-that-many-clueless-people-left-in-the-country 33%, one would think he'd start to reach out for bipartisan support before he runs the country entirely onto the rocks. Y'know, like fire the morons around him and hire some people with at least half an ounce of common sense.

One would think Bush might start behaving like a real grownup instead of a spoiled rich bastard, but one would be wrong. Guess who's been spending more quality time with the president of the United States than ever?

Grover Norquist. That's right. Grover Norquist who, The Carpetbagger reminds us is:

a guy who believes the Estate Tax is morally equivalent to the Nazi Holocaust, calls WWII veterans "anti-American," and believes "bipartisanship is another name for date rape." This is the guy the White House turns to for policy briefings?

Moreover, there's Norquist's recent corruption scandals.

As in Abramoff scandals. Oh, and this is the very same Grover who wanted to drown government in a bathtub (unfortunate metaphor post-Katrina). The very same Grover who said:

Once the minority of House and Senate are comfortable in their minority status, they will have no problem socializing with Republicans. Any farmer will tell you that certain animals run around and are very 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.

And once again, we will hear from Bush about how important it is to have a non-partisan, "respectful" debate.

Grover Norquist, a major adviser to the most powerful man in the world. What next? He'll sit down to get advice from Pat "assasinate Chavez" Robertson? Hahahahahah! Oh, wait...
tristero 3/27/2006 01:32:00 PM |

 
Click This Link

by digby

If you haven't already heard, Redd Hedd has a little project for you today:





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digby 3/27/2006 12:36:00 PM |

 
Small Stupid Men

by digby

Here is more proof that the president lied repeatedly to take this nation to war. Undoubtedly this is completely lawful since the Infallible Republican President Doctrine asserts that the president can do anything he chooses. Still, it's unpleasantly discomfiting to see proof that the president and his number one ally casually strategized which lies and provocations they could come up with to justify their decision to invade a country that presented no threat.

Just last week President Bush said this:

THE PRESIDENT: Excuse me, excuse me. No President wants war. Everything you may have heard is that, but it's just simply not true. My attitude about the defense of this country changed on September the 11th. We -- when we got attacked, I vowed then and there to use every asset at my disposal to protect the American people. Our foreign policy changed on that day, Helen. You know, we used to think we were secure because of oceans and previous diplomacy. But we realized on September the 11th, 2001, that killers could destroy innocent life. And I'm never going to forget it. And I'm never going to forget the vow I made to the American people that we will do everything in our power to protect our people.

Part of that meant to make sure that we didn't allow people to provide safe haven to an enemy. And that's why I went into Iraq -- hold on for a second --

Q They didn't do anything to you, or to our country.

THE PRESIDENT: Look -- excuse me for a second, please. Excuse me for a second. They did. The Taliban provided safe haven for al Qaeda. That's where al Qaeda trained --

Q I'm talking about Iraq --

THE PRESIDENT: Helen, excuse me. That's where -- Afghanistan provided safe haven for al Qaeda. That's where they trained. That's where they plotted. That's where they planned the attacks that killed thousands of innocent Americans.

I also saw a threat in Iraq. I was hoping to solve this problem diplomatically. That's why I went to the Security Council; that's why it was important to pass 1441, which was unanimously passed. And the world said, disarm, disclose, or face serious consequences --

Q -- go to war --

THE PRESIDENT: -- and therefore, we worked with the world, we worked to make sure that Saddam Hussein heard the message of the world. And when he chose to deny inspectors, when he chose not to disclose, then I had the difficult decision to make to remove him. And we did, and the world is safer for it.

That is a bald-faced lie. He had made the decisions to invade, come what may, long before and it was obvious to anyone who was paying attention at the time. And the world most certainly is not safer for it --- there's now a hot civil war taking place in the middle east, the entire region is destabilized and we're right in the middle of it.

If there is any proof needed of what we saw with our own eyes just three years ago, the NY Times reports (linked above) that they have seen a copy of the memo (the existence of which which was revealed a couple of months ago in "Lawless World") showing that on January 31, 2003, Bush and Blair discussed ways to provoke Saddam into giving them an excuse to invade on the predetermined date of March 10th 2003.

Stamped "extremely sensitive," the five-page memorandum, which was circulated among a handful of Mr. Blair's most senior aides, had not been made public. Several highlights were first published in January in the book "Lawless World," which was written by a British lawyer and international law professor, Philippe Sands. In early February, Channel 4 in London first broadcast several excerpts from the memo.

Since then, The New York Times has reviewed the five-page memo in its entirety. While the president's sentiments about invading Iraq were known at the time, the previously unreported material offers an unfiltered view of two leaders on the brink of war, yet supremely confident.

The memo indicates the two leaders envisioned a quick victory and a transition to a new Iraqi government that would be complicated, but manageable. Mr. Bush predicted that it was "unlikely there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups." Mr. Blair agreed with that assessment.

The memo also shows that the president and the prime minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq. Faced with the possibility of not finding any before the planned invasion, Mr. Bush talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal to paint a United States surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire, or assassinating Mr. Hussein.

[...]

At their meeting, Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair candidly expressed their doubts that chemical, biological or nuclear weapons would be found in Iraq in the coming weeks, the memo said. The president spoke as if an invasion was unavoidable. The two leaders discussed a timetable for the war, details of the military campaign and plans for the aftermath of the war.

Without much elaboration, the memo also says the president raised three possible ways of provoking a confrontation. Since they were first reported last month, neither the White House nor the British government has discussed them.

"The U.S. was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in U.N. colours," the memo says, attributing the idea to Mr. Bush. "If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach."

It also described the president as saying, "The U.S. might be able to bring out a defector who could give a public presentation about Saddam's W.M.D," referring to weapons of mass destruction.

A brief clause in the memo refers to a third possibility, mentioned by Mr. Bush, a proposal to assassinate Saddam Hussein. The memo does not indicate how Mr. Blair responded to the idea.

They knew there were no WMD at this point. They knew they wouldn't find any. But that lying sack of GOP talking points, George W. Bush, mused casually that they could possibly "bring out" a US defector who could give a public presentation about Saddam's WMD.

And they still expect us to believe that they didn't cook the intelligence. (Hey, where's that phase two report, anyway?)

I suspect the country's still a bit blinded by the hail of bullshit that the Republicans threw out during that period, but the light is beginning to shine through. People know they heard something about smoking guns and mushroom clouds and they know that they were lied to. They haven't completely absorbed the full degree of this president's mendacity and maybe they never will --- it is hard to believe. But it's indisputable: George W. Bush, and his lapdog Blair, are being revealed in their own time as among the most destructive leaders their countries have ever produced.

The picture of these two democratic leaders sitting around a table casually tossing out possible lies to delude their respective populations into supporting a war which they otherwise wouldn't is sickening. And they are being studied by despots and tyrants around the world who see the utility of using the "loopholes of democracy" they've exposed. (See this fascinating post by Steve Clemons about military conman Khadaffi's co-opting of the language of democracy for his own purposes.)

So please let's can the talk once and for all about how the invasion was a good idea that was just badly executed. It was a terrible idea, as all such ideas hatched by small, stupid men with big ambitions must be. If we ever hope to regain our credibility we need to seriously contemplate plans to bring about a reckoning.



Update: E&P has the transcript of Bush and Blair's short press conference after the meeting in which they discussed how to better provoke Saddam into starting the war so they didn't have to. I'm sure you'll be shocked to find out that they lied.



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digby 3/27/2006 12:20:00 PM |

 
Try Decaf

by digby

Somebody needs to tell CNN's Kelli Arena to lay off the coffee. Her reports on the Moussaoui trial today are hysterical. She's shocked, SHOCKED, that Moussaoui took the stand and admitted to knowing about the 9/11 plot beforehand and being part of it. She's pulling faces, acting out the body language of those in the courtroom and dancing around like a marionette, she's so excited. It's a good thing she didn't cover the OJ trial --- she would have had a heart attack on the day the "glove didn't fit." Talk about an audible gasp in the courtroom.

This is exciting testimony, I'm sure, but not all that shocking. The defense tried mightily to keep him off the stand because they knew that he would do this --- something Kelli appeared not to realize as she went on and on about how the defense was slaughtered by this testimony. He is an admitted al Qaeda member with an agenda and they knew he would use the opportunity to expound on his crime. (What else has he got?) And he's not all that bright, obviously. Indeed, he said that he and the shoe bomber were supposed to fly a plane into the white house. There's a brain trust for you. How surprising they were both caught.



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digby 3/27/2006 11:02:00 AM |

 
Tony Flips A Bird And A Jeffy

by tristero

Check it out:

Minutes after receiving the Eucharist at a special Mass for lawyers and politicians at Cathedral of the Holy Cross, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had a special blessing of his own for those who question his impartiality when it comes to matters of church and state.

“You know what I say to those people?” Scalia, 70, replied, making an obscene gesture under his chin when asked by a Herald reporter if he fends off a lot of flak for publicly celebrating his conservative Roman Catholic beliefs.

“That’s Sicilian,” the Italian jurist said, interpreting for the “Sopranos” challenged.

I think we got a Jeffy, boys and girls. Yes, many have questioned Tony's partiality on church/state rulings and for very good reasons: he's told the world in his writings that he is prepared deliberately to misread the Declaration of Independence to establish his religious beliefs. In particular, Tony wrote that it is a mistake to think that, in his words, " a democratic government, being nothing more than the composite will of its individual citizens [sick]"* has any moral power that does not derive directly from the authority of God. And since that belief is downright anti-American and theocratic, it's no wonder Tony has alarmed so many patriots who question his ability to judge objectively when it comes to church/state issues.

But has anyone, anywhere, anytime ever criticized Tony, or any other Catholic politician or judge, merely for celebrating Mass in public and for no other reason? And not because of their extra-religious political views?

Not likely. And so we have today's first official Jeffy.


*Note to the humor challenged: That was not a typo. Not "sic" but "sick," as in a mistakenly sick thing to believe. Get it? No? Oh, well, never mind.

[Update: The question the reporter asked doesn't count. It was a question, not a criticism.]

[Update: Scalia seems to be losing it. Understandable given that he's apparently got a son in harm's way in the Bush/Iraq war. Who could possibly be objective about war tribunals given how hysterical and irrational Tony sounds about it? He has to recuse himself.
tristero 3/27/2006 08:27:00 AM |

 
What The Middle East Believes About Bush/Iraq

by tristero

Recently, Anne-Marie Slaughter was asked by Time Magazine her opinion of the question, "Was the War Worth It?" Here, she reports that three Middle-Easterners say, "Yes." This drives her to this remarkably illogical conclusiont:

For those of us who increasingly think that the balance sheet of the war is almost entirely negative (in my case because of the way it has been fought more than its undertaking in the first place) -- which describes virtually every American queried, the gap between our perceptions and the perceptions of those actually in the region should give us pause.

By the way, that is not taken out of context. That is her entire comment on the quotes she provides. A few comments:

1. It is impossible to find anyone in the United States who has even the slightest standing in the discussion on Bush/Iraq who also believes that Saddam was a nice, fluffy, warm-hearted kind of a guy who'd gotten a bum rap.

2. If she thinks the views here are at variance with the opinion of many Americans, there's a protein wisdom I'd like to sell her. But hell, why pick on poor Jeff (besides the fact that it's incredibly easy, as Wolcott would say)? In today's NY Times there's a nifty graphic you can click on where you'll learn that 69% of all Republicans think the American military effort in Iraq is still going very well or fairly well. Dollars to donuts most would agree the war was worth it for, among other reasons, precisely the reason her Middle East commenters give.

3. Not only are the people she quotes not even crudely representative of Middle East opinion because they are all male, but they are also middle class or upper middle class. They do not begin to represent the huge populaton of Middle Eastern Arabs whose income falls far below any rational level of poverty.

4. I do not, as Anne-Marie writes, "increasingly think" the balance sheet of the war is almost completely negative. I've consistently thought so since I first heard that pre-emptive unilateral war against Iraq was being planned by the Bush administration. Following her logic - not mine - I therefore find nothing in the comments she quotes to give me the slightest pause. That Saddam's regime would last more than 30 years? Who knows? That you can't negotiate with these dictatorships for reform but you can now? Oh? Well, I guess the president of the United States holding hands with a Saudi oil bigwig is kind of, sort of, a negotiaton for genuine reform if I squint at the video just right.

Bush/Iraq has proven an all-but-umitigated disaster, plain and simple, for Iraq and the US. The proof is in the chaos, the deaths and mutilations, and the descent into a state of anarchy and/or civil war. Its effect on the rest of the region can hardly be said to be positive. Witness, for example, the election of Hamas, to name the first of many disasters that come to mind.

And in truth, the full effect of the Bush/Iraq has not yet been felt. For that we will have to wait for the children, whose fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters and friends and lovers have been blasted to kingdom come by American action, to grow up.
tristero 3/27/2006 08:01:00 AM |

 
Now This Is Going Way Too Far

by tristero

Josh Marshall informs of us of some truly cruel and unusual punishment. Tom DeLay's license to carry a concealed handgun has been revoked.

You laugh. But let me put this into perspective for you. To a rootin'-tootin' Texan, that's like confiscating a ten-year old Volvo from a liberal. Or forcing us, when we order our tall lattes, to have them made from whole milk, not skim. There'd be riots, riots! if the guvmint dared to infringe our rights like that.

Goddamm activist judges. Besides, it's not as if DeLay shot anyone in the face, you know. If I were Tom DeLay, I'd immediately contact these folks for assistance in having justice done.
tristero 3/27/2006 06:36:00 AM |

Sunday, March 26, 2006

 
More Good News

by digby

From Marquer in the comments:

...more violence was reported across Iraq, including a terrifying incident earlier in the week in the western city of Ramadi. On Wednesday, armed insurgents burst into the classroom of Khidhir al-Mihallawi, an English teacher at Sajariyah High School, accused him of being an agent for the CIA and Israeli intelligence and beheaded him in front of his students, according to students, fellow instructors and a physician at a local hospital.

But the school in question had of course been freshly repainted. Let's not lose sight of what's really important here.

And why aren't we hearing stories of all the teachers who have not been beheaded in front of their students? Liberal media bias, of course.



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digby 3/26/2006 06:33:00 PM |

 
Who Else Can They Steal From?

by digby


Via Wolcott (who promotes this as "L'il Debbie Snackcake versus Monica the Harmonica!") I see that plagiarism is actually epidemic on the right and that it's, unsurprisingly, embittering some of those who are being ripped off by their ideological brethren. This explains why PJ O'Rourke didn't sound any happier about Lil' Benji stealing his words than NRO sounded when they had to admit that they'd published stolen movie reviews.

I'm sure the rightwing plagiarists would prefer to steal from liberals if they could, but for obvious reasons that won't work. It's an interesting conundrum for wingnut hacks, isn't it?

(And who would have ever dreamed that Jerome Corsi was dishonest? Why you could bowl me over with a feather...)



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digby 3/26/2006 04:13:00 PM |

 
School Days

by digby

Via Attaturk, I see there may be a good reason why there aren't a lot of nice stories about schools in Iraq.

I know Lil' Benji is for homeschooling and all, but maybe he'd like to take tristero's advice and sit in on one of those classes for a few days so he can show the American people all the good news. If he lives through it.



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digby 3/26/2006 03:08:00 PM |

 
Rant Of The Year (In A Good Way)

by tristero

Oh, this is delicious writing by Jane Smiley. Read the whole thing. Here are just a few highlights:

Bruce Bartlett, The Cato Institute, Andrew Sullivan, George Packer, William F. Buckley, Sandra Day O'Connor, Republican voters in Indiana and all the rest of you newly-minted dissenters from Bush's faith-based reality...those of us who have been anti-Bush from day 1 (defined as the day after the stolen 2000 election) have a few pointers for you that should make your transition more realistic.

1. Bush doesn't know you disagree with him. Nothing about you makes you of interest to George W. Bush once you no longer agree with and support him...

2. Bush doesn't care whether you disagree with him....You know that Katrina tape in which Bush never asked a question? It doesn't matter how much you know or how passionately you feel or, most importantly, what degree of disintegration you see around you, he's not going to ask you a question. You and your ideas are dead to him...

3. Bush does what he feels like doing and he deeply resents being told, even politely, that he ought to do anything else. This is called a "sense of entitlement". Bush is a man who has never been anywhere and never done anything, and yet he has been flattered and cajoled into being president of the United States through his connections, all of whom thought they could use him for their own purposes...

4. President Bush is your creation...Bush does what he wants because you have let him...

5. Tyranny is your creation. What we have today is the natural and inevitable outcome of ideas and policies you have promoted for the last generation...

The US could have become a moderating force in what seems now to be an inevitable battle among the three monotheistic Abrahamic religions, but you have made that impossible by flattering and empowering our own violent and intolerant Christian right.

You have created an imperium, heedless of the most basic wisdom of the Founding Fathers--that at the very least, no man is competent enough or far-seeing enough to rule imperially...

Now you are fleeing him, but it's only because he's got the earmarks of a loser. Your problem is that you don't know why he's losing. You think he's made mistakes. But no. He's losing because the ideas that you taught him and demonstrated for him are bad ideas, self-destructive ideas, and even suicidal ideas... [emphasis added.]

6. As Bad as Bush is, Cheney is Worse.

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tristero 3/26/2006 02:44:00 PM |

 
Looking Backwards

by digby

"This is an important program," said Lieberman, who is seeking a fourth term this year. "I don't find anybody in Congress who thinks we ought not to be listening to the phone conversations and reading the e-mails of people that we think are involved in and we have reason to believe are involved in terrorist groups. But it has to be done in America in my opinion pursuant to the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. It has to be done with a court order."

Lieberman, who has been criticized by liberals for supporting Bush's war policy, faulted a censure move against the president that was proposed last week by Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis.

"My own opinion, and it seems to be shared by most Democratic senators, is that it would be an unproductive use of our time," Lieberman said. "Again, it's looking backward. It would be divisive. The best thing we could do about this program is to bring it under the law and I'd prefer to spend my time and the Senate's time figuring out how we can adopt a law that allows the administration to continue this program but force them to go to court to get a warrant before they do."

I love these guys who claim to be our moral arbiters, don't you? Yes, the president broke the law and defiled the constitution, but we shouldn't hold him accountable because it would be divisive and "looking backward."

It's funny how he wasn't concerened about wasting time or looking backward when he railed for half an hour on the Senate floor about President Clinton dragging down the moral values of the country for lying about his sex life, thus bringing the shrieking media harpies to full hysteria for weeks with the idea that the Democrats "were deserting Clinton." Indeed, even after president Clinton was acquitted, Holy Joe thought censure was needed heal the divisions in our nation at the time.

I do believe the Constitution allows for one recourse that would provide a means for us as the people's representatives to register our and their disapproval, and would, I believe, help us to bring appropriate closure to this terrible chapter in our nation's history. It is well within the Senate's constitutional prerogatives to adopt a resolution of censure expressing our contempt for the President's misconduct, both that which is charged in the articles and that which is not. Such a censure would not amount to a punishment, nor would it be intended to do so. What it would do, particularly if it united Senators across party lines and positions on removal, is fulfill our responsibility to our children and our posterity to speak to the common values the President has violated, and make clear what our expectations are for future holders of that highest office.

And what it could do, I believe, is to help us to begin healing the wounds the President's misconduct and the impeachment process's partisanship have done to the American body politic, and to the soul of the nation. I have observed that roughly two-thirds of the public consistently expresses its opposition to the President's removal. But I do not think we can leave this proceeding, especially those of us who have voted against the Articles, without also noting that roughly one-third of the American people have consistently expressed their belief that this President is unfit to lead this nation. That is a startlingly large percentage of our people who have totally lost confidence in our nation's leader.

Hey Joe, you putz. Have you looked at the polls lately? And do you think it might be worth your notice that most of your fellow Democrats believe that George W. Bush has been unfit to lead this country since he stole the election, with you on the damned ticket for gods sake, in 2000? Maybe you don't mind being punked by Karl Rove, but the rest of us kind of resent it. How about healing those wounds?

Lying and breaking the law and spying on Americans without a warrant, well, it's wrong, but we needn't punish anyone for it. It's not like there's anything important (like extra-marital sex) involved or anything. We should just make it legal and carry on. Oh hell, let's just crown the half-wit and get it over with.


Joe Liebermann's little eight year old grandkid asked him at the dinner table the other night if he thought the president broke the law, like the kids at school said he did.

"Is he gonna get in trouble?" he asked.

"No, son," Liebermann replied, "we're just going to change the law so what he did isn't illegal anymore. We don't want his friends to get upset."

"Neat," the kid replied, "I took four candy bars from 7-11 after school and the man said he was gonna call the police. Can you change the law for me so I won't get into trouble either?"

Lieberman looked indulgently at the naive little pup and said, "I'm sorry son. You're the grandson of a Democrat. You shall have to pay the price for your misdeeds. Breaking the law and having a private personal life is only OKIYAR. It's time you learned that."



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digby 3/26/2006 01:37:00 PM |

 
How Domenech Can Redeem His Sorry Ass.

by tristero

Many bloggers have suggested that the recently unemployed Ben Domenech should seriously consider signing up for service in the military (but not, presumably, as a blogger for the Army Times). Far be it for me to disagree, but I would like to suggest an equally worthy alternative.

Ben can grab himself one of those groovy new digital videocams, catch the next plane to Iraq, and hitch-hike around, carefully filming all the good news in the country. You know what I'm talking about, Ben: All the schools opening, the pipelines flowing, the new businesses being generated (terrorism insurance not included; that's been covered), the overstaffed hospitals, the fearless Iraqi policemen, and the many public squares all over Iraq's villages and towns renamed in honor of George W. Bush.

Most importantly, Ben can document on video the thousands of truly poignant stories of Sunni and Shiites putting aside their ancient differences to embrace each other as fellow Muslims. now working together to forge the future destiny of their beloved homeland.

This is the perfect chance for Ben, the legendary gentleman that Jeff and his pals at RedState perceive, to redeem himself. Since no one's been able to find these sorts of stories and live to tell them, he'll be reporting completely unique news.

No one could possibly accuse him of plagiarizing. Faking the videos, maybe. But not plagiarzing.
tristero 3/26/2006 01:20:00 PM |

 
She Said It

by digby


I just want to second tristero's endorsement below of Lara Logan's rapier-like take down of Howie Kurtz's lame reiteration of GOP talking points. Crooks and Liars has the video, here.

As I wrote earlier in the week:

Memo to the news media: The mere fact that reporters must risk their lives every time they attempt to report the "good news" means that the news, by definition, cannot be all that good. It means that all those new schools and soccer games and litters of adorable puppies exist in the shadow of horrible violence.

And speaking of lameass reiteration of GOP talking points, could someone wise up our sleepy, naive New York Times Babydoll, Elizabeth Bumiller, about how the Republicans work please? Perhaps someone from the "conservative beat" could take her out for coffee. Or maybe she could open her little eyes and look around her:

MR. HARWOOD: ... When, when you have, as Charlie said, journalists over there who cannot move around the country to report because they know that, that they’re in danger of being killed at any moment, that tells you about the state of security in the country. It’s not good.

MR. RUSSERT: The White House?

MS. BUMILLER: The other thing that's interesting, what you didn't show was the president's response to her. I was there that day, and he was very, very careful not to jump on her bandwagon. In fact - I mean, obviously, he didn't have to, she did it for him. But the point is he said, "Look, wait a minute. You know, I understand your frustration, but we have a free press in this country, we can't tell them what to do.” He pulled back somewhat from her comment.

And I think you're right, Charlie, that they aren't - they know they can't sell this, and when they've tried in the past, it has backfired on them.

MR. RUSSERT: But the president also said don’t be afraid to go to blogs and find out some more information.

MS. BUMILLER: Yes. I mean, I mean, I'm, I'm—these are gradations here, I mean, in White House response.

MR. RUSSERT: But is the White House convinced that in order to secure the base of the Republican Party for the president, it doesn't hurt to go after the media a little bit?

MS. BUMILLER: Not - of course not. They do it all the time. And, and they complain all the time about, about, about what we do. But, but I, I have noticed this past week Scott McClellan saying, the White House press secretary, you know, "We're not blaming the media for the war in Iraq." He said that a couple times this week, and so, so it, it's - they're - again, they're being a little more careful here than usual.

That military wife, who just happens to be married to a public affairs officer, made her comments all on her own. Why, the president didn't publicly endorse them or anything! And Scott McClellan never says one thing while Rove's RNC minions say another. They are much too straighforward and honest to do something like that.

Good girl Elizabeth. Have a dove bar.


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digby 3/26/2006 12:48:00 PM |

 
And Just How Does A Death Squad Act When It's IN Control?

by tristero


Horrific:

The bodies of 30 beheaded men were found on a main highway near Baquba this evening, providing more evidence that the death squads in Iraq are becoming out of control.

"Becoming out of control?" WTF?

[Update:] From km4 in comments comes this link to Lara Logan's on the Good Time Boys, the Last Throes Brigade:

You don't think that I haven't been to the U.S. military and the State Department and the embassy and asked them over and over again, let's see the good stories, show us some of the good things that are going on? Oh, sorry, we can't take to you that school project, because if you put that on TV, they're going to be attacked about, the teachers are going to be killed, the children might be victims of attack.

tristero 3/26/2006 12:21:00 PM |

 
Cool Hand

by digby

MR. BRODER: Well, if they're going to be responsible, they need some policy. And the great void on the Democratic side is nobody can tell you today what their policy is about Iraq, about entitlements, or about any of the other challenges facing the country. Whether they need that politically, somebody else is smart enough to decide, but if they're going to be a responsible party, they need to talk about policy.

MR. RUSSERT: Do they need to do it?

MR. COOK: See, I would argue that minority parties don't have to be responsible. That's the one good thing going for them, and when they try to be responsible, they're just going to dig themselves into a hole. I mean, you're on - your job is to throw rocks. Once you start offering alternatives, then suddenly you're playing defense as well. I think Democrats would be crazy, from a political standpoint, to offer up proposals.

MR. RUSSERT: That movie, "Cool Hand Luke," sometimes nothing's a real cool hand.

MR. COOK: Exactly.

The Democrats' problem is not policy, it's politics.

The Republicans spent many millions and many years building up their second rate think tank-based policy infrastructure which we now know functioned mainly as a front for their political machine. Their policy apparatus, to the extent it exists, has been proven to be intellectually bankrupt, not that they will ever admit it. The Democrats, on the other hand, have a surfeit of first rate analysts, thinkers and academics who will provide numerous choices and pragmatic solutions for problems Americans face, not that they will ever get credit. Broder can relax.

I hope the Democrats will listen to Cook, not Broder. If we've learned nothing else these last few years, it's that the modern Republican party has no interest in practical, bipartisan solutions to the problems Americans face. Their gift, and the reason they are in the majority is because they dominate modern election campaigning with superior messaging, analysis and coalition building. In this era, responsible policies are meaningless unless Democrats can gain and keep a majority -- and they aren't going to get there trying to impress David Broder with their 10 point plans. They need to learn to do politics as well as they do policy.

As Kevin Phillips wrote over on TPM cafe earlier this week:

I believe that Democrats and liberals in 2006 stand to have their greatest opportunity since 1992 (which was lost). You will have the substantial support of many lapsed Republicans and doubters of Bush conservatism like myself. But I also have the sense that many Democrats and liberals have an instinct for the capillaries, not for the jugular. If that leads to failure in 2006, there will be a major price to pay, not just for the United States but in terms of the credibility of your party and movement.

It is our duty as the grassroots of the Democratic party to continue to pressure our leaders to go for the jugular, not for the capillaries, and show them that we will support them when they do it.

Reminder: If you are in a town or city where your senator has an office, consider dropping by and telling him or her that you support the Feingold resolution.


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digby 3/26/2006 10:19:00 AM |

Saturday, March 25, 2006

 
Outlaw Party

by digby


It has been a while since I have weighed in on the particulars of the illegal NSA spying scandal, mostly because Glenn Greenwald has this story covered so thoroughly and so well (and I'm sure you are all reading him every day.) But today we are reminded just how pernicious this scandal is: the Bush Justice department has asserted their right to ignore any law that congress makes, and which a former president signed, under a theory of executive power so sweeping that it essentially declares that this nation is a constitutional, elected monarchy (the elected part being debatable since the president could theoretically assert his unfettered powers to cancel elections.)

Glenn writes:

There are numerous noteworthy items, but the most significant, by far, is that the DoJ made clear to Congress that even if Congress passes some sort of newly amended FISA of the type which Sen. DeWine introduced, and even if the President "agrees" to it and signs it into law, the President still has the power to violate that law if he wants to. Put another way, the Administration is telling the Congress -- again -- that they can go and pass all the laws they want which purport to liberalize or restrict the President's powers, and it does not matter, because the President has and intends to preserve the power to do whatever he wants regardless of what those laws provide.

I was digging around in my archives the other day and came across this post from three years ago as the Iraq war began:

Julia points out this article in the Washington Post that clearly reveals the Bush administration's only governing principles are loyalty to the President and strong arm tactics. Period.

As the United States wages war this week following a pair of ultimatums to the United Nations and Iraq, the airwaves and editorial pages of the world have been full of accusations that President Bush and his administration are guilty of coercive and harrying behavior. Even in typically friendly countries, Bush and the United States have been given such labels this week as "arrogant bully" (Britain), "bully boys" (Australia), "big bully" (Russia), "bully Bush" (Kenya), "arrogant" (Turkey) and "capricious" (Canada). Diplomats have accused the administration of "hardball" tactics, "jungle justice" and acting "like thugs."

At home, where support for the war on Iraq is strong and growing, such complaints of strong-arm tactics by the Bush administration nonetheless have a certain resonance -- even among Bush supporters. Though the issues are vastly different, Republican lawmakers and conservative interest groups report similar pressure on allies at home to conform to Bush's policy wishes.

Although all administrations use political muscle on the opposition, GOP lawmakers and lobbyists say the tactics the Bush administration uses on friends and allies have been uniquely fierce and vindictive. Just as the administration used unbending tactics before the U.N. Security Council with normally allied countries such as Mexico, Germany and France, the Bush White House has calculated that it can overcome domestic adversaries if it tolerates no dissent from its friends.

In recent weeks, the White House has been pushing GOP governors to oust the leadership of the National Governors Association to make the bipartisan group endorse Bush's views. Interest groups report pressure from the administration -- sometimes on groups' donors -- to conform to Bush's policy views and even to fire dissenters.

Often, companies and their K Street lobbyists endorse ideas they privately oppose or question, according to several longtime Republican lobbyists. The fear is that Bush will either freeze them out of key meetings or hold a grudge that might deprive them of help in other areas, the lobbyists said. When the Electronic Industries Alliance declined to back Bush's dividend tax cut, the group was frozen out when the White House called its "friends" in the industry to discuss the tax cut, according to White House and business sources.

[...]

Conservative interest groups get similar pressure. When the free-market Club for Growth sent a public letter to the White House to protest White House intervention in GOP primaries for "liberal-leaning Republicans," the group's president, Stephen Moore, picked up the phone at a friend's one evening to receive a screaming tirade from Rove, who had tracked him down. On another occasion when Moore objected to a Bush policy, Rove called Richard Gilder, the Club for Growth's chairman and a major contributor, to protest.

"I think this monomaniacal call for loyalty is unhealthy," Moore said. "It's dangerous to declare anybody who crosses you an enemy for life. It's shortsighted." Leaders of three other conservative groups report that their objections to Bush policies have been followed by snubs and, in at least one case, phone calls suggesting the replacement of a critical scholar. "They want sycophants rather than allies," said the head of one think tank.

Corporations are coming under increasing pressure not just to back Bush, but to hire his allies to represent them in meetings with Republicans. As part of the "K Street Project," top GOP officials, lawmakers and lobbyists track the political affiliation and contributions of people seeking lobbying jobs.

In a private meeting last week, chief executives from several leading technology firms told Rep. Calvin M. Dooley (Calif.) and other moderate Democrats that they were under heavy pressure to back the Bush tax plan, even though many of them had reservations about it. "There is a perception among some business interests there could be retribution if you don't play ball on almost every issue that comes up," Dooley said.

Read the whole thing. (And the editor's note at the beginning.) It is now out in the open. No excuses. Any real libertarian or conservative who continues to back these Mafiosi is complicit. These people are undemocratic and intolerant of dissent. They openly use threats to intimidate their allies and strike fear into their enemies. This is not business as usual. We are seeing more elements every day of a new and unique American form of totalitarianism.

There have been signs of this coming for the last 10 years. The propaganda machine, the intense partisanship, the trumped up impeachment ... an unelected court deciding a presidential election and now an illegitimate and illegal war being pursued under a doctrine of preventive war in pursuit of American hegemony. And, we are operating under de facto one-party rule within which no dissent is tolerated.

That is the administration that created this illegal spying program --- an administration that had no compunction about strong-arming its own allies, issuing threats and insisting on blind fealty to the white house. It is mind-boggling that anyone would believe that an administration that behaves this way should be trusted to spy on Americans without a warrant. The fourth amendment was written with a future Karl Rove explicitly in mind.

Glenn quotes Madison in Federalist #47 in his post on this this morning. I'll turn to #51:

... the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

The assumption here is that each branch of government would jealously guard its perogatives. In a one party government that answers to Karl Rove, that is not likely to happen. The discipline is finally breaking down, as the president becomes dramatically unpopular, the war drags on and 2008 ambitions assert themselves. But if we are to redeem our system, the Democrats must take power and they must hold Republicans accountable for what they've done. It cannot be otherwise, or the entire system is in jeopardy:

Asked if spying on the American people was as impeachable an offense as lying and having sex with an intern, Fein replied:

"I think the answer requires at least in part considering what the occupant of the presidency says in the aftermath of wrongdoing or rectification. On its face, if President Bush is totally unapologetic and says I continue to maintain that as a wartime President I can do anything I want - I don’t need to consult any other branches - that is an impeachable offense. It's more dangerous that Clinton's lying under oath because it jeopardizes our democratic dispensation and civil liberties for the ages. It would set a precedent that - would lie around like a loaded gun, able to be used indefinitely for any future occupant." --- Bruce Fein, Constitutional Scholar and former Deputy Attorney General in the Reagan Administration (Diane Rehm Show, 12/19/05)

The president continues to say that as a wartime president he can do anything he wants, openly and without any sense of shame. He has loaded that precedent and unless somebody puts a stop to it, it will lie there waiting for the next time a despotic president and his party want to use it.

The congress explicitly dealt with warrantless spying on Americans when it wrote the FISA law. It did this in response to abuses that were exposed in the aftermath of Watergate. But many of the people who were in the Nixon administration never accepted these limitations on executive power and simply waited until they took power again to reinstitute the practices. (Then, they needed to usurp the constitution because of the communist threat. Now it is terrorism. It's always something.)

Peter Beinert, in an otherwise uncharacteristically politically savvy essay in last week's TNR (on which I'll comment later) wrote:

Was Bush's surveillance program illegal? Absolutely. (As George Washington University's Jonathan Turley notes, "It's not a close question. Federal law is clear.") Did Bush lie about it? You betcha. ("When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so," Bush declared on April 20, 2004, while doing exactly the opposite.) But other presidents have lied, broken the law, and trampled civil liberties, too, especially during wartime. That doesn't mean Congress shouldn't investigate Bush's surveillance program. It should probe mercilessly. But censuring Bush--right after the Republican Congress tried to impeach Bill Clinton--could make such efforts a normal part of partisan conflict, which they have not been throughout U.S. history. That's a depressing prospect, no matter what your politics.

On the other hand, there is something highly unsatisfying about saying that, because the Republican Congress tried to impeach Bill Clinton for lying in a civil suit about sex, Democrats can't censure George W. Bush for lying--and breaking the law--on an issue of national security. It's a little like telling someone who has just been punched in the face that he can't hit back because that would perpetuate the cycle of violence. Or, put another way, if Republicans really still think they were right to impeach Clinton--if they'd do it again--then there's no reason for Democrats to abandon censure in the name of civility. After all, if you don't punch back, and the other side keeps hitting you, your efforts to stop the cycle of violence have failed.

So Democrats should only eschew censure if, by so doing, they can make censure and impeachment what they historically have been: constitutional weapons wielded in only the rarest, gravest of circumstances. And that depends on the GOP. Prominent Republicans don't talk much about Clinton's impeachment today; it doesn't quite square with their more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger fretting about Bush hatred. But I don't know of a single major Republican politician or conservative pundit who has admitted the obvious: that impeaching Clinton was a farce and a disgrace, the likes of which we should pray never to see again.

They will never admit that. And these are the gravest of circumstances. There is nothing to be gained by Democrats abandoning anything in the name of civility Republicans will simply impeach the next Democratic president for double parking without so much as a second thought if they have the chance. They play the hardest of hardball and they do not see such minor setbacks as losing a few seats as any kind of repudiation. In fact, they see nothing as repudiation, not even Nixon's disgrace. They waited patiently for 30 years for the opportunity to reinstitute the imperial presidency and were operating under it even before 9/11. (See: energy task force.)

The only thing that might make them repudiate Bill Clinton's impeachment would be George W. Bush's impeachment and I doubt that we will see either. But what we should see, and I dearly hope we will see, is a Democratic congress that puts the bright light of investigations on what this administration and its GOP allies have done --- and if we should get a Democratic president in 2008, a justice department that seeks out and punishes those who broke these laws. I don't think we should shut up for one minute about demanding accountability for what these people have done.

Back in 1974, I was in favor of pardoning Richard Nixon. I thought that it was wise to "bind up the country's wounds." I was wrong. The Republicans barely missed a beat and just went right on with the program. Whether George W. Bush can be charged with a crime, I don't know. But I have no doubt that it would be good for the country, not bad, if the Republicans were held to account for their undemocratic actions once and for all. They're impeaching, stealing eleactions and starting unnecessary wars now. What is it going to take before people realize that we are dealing with an outlaw political party?



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digby 3/25/2006 07:13:00 PM |

 
Big Issues

by digby

Wow.

Joining what some are calling the nation's largest mobilization of immigrants ever, hundreds of thousands of people boisterously marched in downtown Los Angeles Saturday to protest federal legislation that would crack down on undocumented immigrants, penalize those who help them and build a security wall on the U.S. southern border. Spirited crowds representing labor, religious groups, civil-rights advocates and ordinary immigrants stretched over 26 blocks of downtown Los Angeles from Adams Blvd. along Spring Street and Broadway to City Hall, tooting kazoos, waving American flags and chanting "Si se puede!" (Yes we can!). The crowd, estimated by police at more than 500.000, represented one of the largest protest marches in Los Angeles history, surpassing Vietnam War demonstrations and the 70,000 who rallied downtown against Proposition 187, a 1994 state initiative that denied public benefits to undocumented migrants.

[...]

n recent weeks, hundreds of thousands of people have staged demonstrations in more than a dozen cities. The Roman Catholic Church and other religious communities have launched immigrant rights campaigns, with Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony taking a leading role in speaking out against the House bill and calling on his priests to defy its provisions that would make felons of anyone who aided undocumented immigrants. In addition, several cities, including Los Angeles, have passed resolutions against the House legislation and some, such as Maywood, have declared itself a "sanctuary" for undocumented immigrants.

This issue is huge. It's splitting the GOP right up the middle. So what are Democrats going to do about it?

Here's one idea.

These huge protests all over the country show that Tom Tancredo and the Minutemen are not going to be the only game in town. Politicians had better start thinking about how they are going to deal with this.

The first thing on the agenda might be to give Pete Wilson a call. And then take a look at demographic trends.

From Ruy Texeira:

As two recent reports document, the Hispanic population of the United States continues to increase rapidly, especially in areas that we now think of as "solid red." The Pew Hispanic Center report describes and analyzes the extraordinary growth of the Hispanic population in six southern states, Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee, down to the county level. The Census report shows that Texas has now become a majority-minority state (joining New Mexico, California and Hawaii), primarily due to its burgeoning Hispanic population.

The political impact of this demographic trend should generally favor the Democrats. But the extent to which this is true will be limited if Democratic margins among Hispanics continue to be shaved, as they were in the 2004 election.

However, according to a useful new report by the indefatigable folks at Democracy Corps, the Democratic margin among Hispanics seems likely to expand in the future, not contract. If so, the pro-Democratic impact of Hispanic population growth should be very substantial.

The Democracy Corps report is based on a June survey of Hispanic voters, whose basic results I previously summarized. There is much rich detail in this report, but here are some of the most important observations:

Democrats witnessed the loss of a small though significant portion of their Hispanic support to George Bush in 2000 and 2004, but by no means were these dislodged voters an advance party for a greater flight of Hispanics from the Democratic Party. Hispanic voters remain instinctively very Democratic, but more important than that, they hold values, views of society, the economy and the role of government, as well as issue priorities and hopes for America, that put them deep inside the Democratic world. The Democrats will stem the erosion of the Hispanic vote, not by chasing the defectors or waving the partisan banner, but by rediscovering their own values and beliefs. The route to a national Democratic majority goes right through the Hispanic community, where Democrats will find the themes that best define the modern Democratic Party. . . .

[Hispanic] voters were disappointed and dislodged; they did not defect. In this survey just completed, Hispanics had swung back to the Democrats with a vengeance, giving them a 32-point margin in a generic race for Congress (61 to 29 percent). The Republican vote today is 10 points below what Bush achieved just six months earlier. These voters are deeply dissatisfied with the Bush economy and Iraq war; they are socially tolerant and internationalist; they align with a Democratic Party that respects Hispanics and diversity, that uses government to help families, reduce poverty and create opportunity, and that will bring major change in education and health care. This is even truer for the growing younger population under 30, including Gen Y voters, who support the Democrats by a remarkable 46 points (70 to 24 percent). All together, this paints a portrait of a group that respects Bill Clinton, indeed giving him higher marks than the Catholic Church, and that embraces his vision of the Democratic Party. . . .

[...]

That values issues were part of the erosion in 2004 and 2000 is not the same as saying that addressing those issues directly is the best way to rebuild the Democrats' majority. Majorities of Hispanics believe we should be tolerant of homosexuality, would keep abortion legal, and support stem cell research, even with church opposition. This is especially true among the large younger and more middle-class segments of the community. . . .

[Hispanics'] views on values, family, the economy, the poor, working people and the middle class, community and government, and how best to expand opportunity and realize the American dream put these voters in the center of a Democratic world-if the Democrats would remember what it means to be a Democrat in these times. (emphases added)

Do I detect a theme here? Just as Democrats-see the post below-will do best among difficult, contestable voter groups by making clear what they stand for, they will maximize their potential gains among Democratic-leaning Hispanics by doing the very same thing. Sounds like a winner to me.

Me too.



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digby 3/25/2006 06:07:00 PM |

 
The Voice Of Truth

by digby

In case anybody's wondering which left wing bloggers accused Lil' Benji of incest with his mother, be advised that it was none other than our Supreme Leader, heterosexual Republican and all around man's man, General J.C Christian, Patriot. Let there be no doubt that like our Dear President, when the General speaks, he means it.



Once again: they can't help it.

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digby 3/25/2006 11:05:00 AM |

Friday, March 24, 2006

 
Weekend Voting

Koufax Awards finals are closing this Sunday -- last chance to vote for all your favorite bloggers. Do it. It's fun.

If the servers are slow, you can also vote via email at wampum @ nic-naa.net. (subject: Koufax)

Here's a list of categories (and links to list of nominees for each category) to cut and paste into your e-mail:

Best Blog (non-pro):
Best Blog Community:
Best Blog (pro/sponsor):
Best Group Blog:
Best Post:
Best Series:
Best Writing:
Best Expert Blog:
Best Single Issue:
Most Humorous Blog:
Most Humorous Post:
Best state and local Blog:
More Deserving of Wider Recognition:
Best New Blog:
Best Commenter:



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digby 3/24/2006 10:23:00 PM |

 
Smothering The Baby

by digby

Responding to Adam B's post on Kos about how the Domenech affair impacts bloggers, Garance Franke Ruta says that blogs shouldn't be afraid of regulation:

Adam B and Atrios are right in noting that nothing about the need for members of the press to make distinctions between online personalities who are also journalists and those who also work in politics implies anything about the F.E.C. But after a week in which liberal blogs and organizations, such as Media Matters for American, repeatedly called on the Post to make such distinctions, it's a little peculiar to turn around now and say such lines are impossible to draw.


Nor ought concern for regulation to be considered "an elitish fetish." Regulation has been at the heart of progressivism since early in the last century, and the regulatory state is something Democrats have been desperately trying to preserve over the past five years in the face of a Republican onslaught, because it is what has given America back its rivers and lakes, its national bird, and the ability to breathe clean air -- among many, many, many other things.

This is true. But I think this blogging regulation proposal may be the first time anybody's tried to regulate a problem before it even exists. I don't get it. It's theoretically possible that something nefarious could happen with blogs and money and politics, but so far it's been nothing but citizens donating small amounts to politicians and causes at the behest of other citizens --- which seems to me to be the essence of democracy.

Nobody was saying that Ben Domenech should not be writing for the Washington Post because bloggers should not be considered press. It's because the Washington Post should not be hiring political activists to balance non-partisan journalists. Surely everyone understood that. If the Post had been smart enough to hire a "Blue State" blogger from among the ranks of activist blogs along with Domenech, I would imagine this would have taken much longer to unfold. (He would have been found out eventually.)

Let's not lose sight of the fact that this issue is fundamentally about money in politics not whether certain uncredentailed people are qualified to call themselves "journalists." And the problem with money in politics isn't the money itself. It's the concentration of big money and special interests buying off politicians that McCain-Feingold was designed to mitigate. There is simply no mechanism currently by which this is likely to happen on blogs. And might I make the bold suggestion that we wait until there is evidence that it has before writing legislation to stop it?

Why the big hurry on this? They haven't even gone after internet commerce yet even though states have been lobbying for years that they are losing tax revenue. The reasoning has always been that nobody knows yet where the internet is going and nobody wants to smother the baby before it even opens its eyes. The same is true here. There will be plenty of time to assess the impact of online activism and partisan speech on elections. Leave it alone. All will reveal itself eventually.


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digby 3/24/2006 05:11:00 PM |

 
Tribal Ethics

by digby

Lil' Benji strikes back and unwittingly reveals the working ethos of the modern Republican party:

Asked about the voluminous amount of documentation cited by left-wing bloggers and some conservatives' decision to believe it, Domenech said: "In a lot of this stuff, it's based on who you believe. And if you believe the lefties are right or if you believe someone who you know and who you've worked with is right, I guess the thing I would point out is that I've done my best to never do anything to raise any kind of question about this sort of thing. And if you look at the overwhelming bulk of everything I've written, you'll find there is no question about it. The questions are about small things, a lot of them easily explainable, especially the things that come after college."

Domenech believes in epistemic relativism (as well as moral relativism.) He thinks that truth is contingent upon who is delivering it. And he's right as far as the right is concerned. They have proved that they will believe anything if it emanates from the tribe.

President Bush believes this. For instance, inspectors and Iraq. You can choose to believe him or you can choose to believe what you saw and heard and remember in acute detail, which was that inspectors were in Iraq before the invasion and found nothing at which point Bush pulled them out and invaded --- an act he now says was precipitated by Saddam's refusal to accept inspections. Anyone who sees this differently is a partisan leftist. As Rob Corddry sagely observed, "the facts are biased."


Iraq is full of good news! The economy is great! George W. Bush is a brilliant leader on the scale of Winston Churchill and Alexander the Great! Who're you gonna believe, the Republicans or your lyin' eyes?

Lil' Benji never studied much it appears. He was engaged in GOP partisan politics from about the age of 15. Apparently, he didn't even have time to see the movies and listen to the CD's he was assigned to review. All he knows is modern Republican ethics:

"While I appreciated the opportunity to go and join the Washington Post," Domenech said, "if they didn’t expect the leftists were going to come after me with their sharpened knives, then they were fools."

That's true enough. They were fools for not expecting the left blogosphere to find out that Domenech was a phony and a plagiarist. And they were fools for assuming that the blogger from the racist RedState blog, the editor for the sleazy Regnery publishing, and the speechwriter for the unprincipled John Cornyn was anything but an unethical GOP operative. When will they ever learn?



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digby 3/24/2006 04:05:00 PM |

 
Good News

by digby

Memo to the news media:

The mere fact that reporters must risk their lives every time they attempt to report the "good news" means that the news, by definition, cannot be all that good. It means that all those new schools and soccer games and litters of adorable puppies exist in the shadow of horrible violence.

Don't be fooled. The fact that life goes on in Iraq, even during a violent occupation, doesn't mitigate the death and destruction that makes Iraq a daily story of unimaginable terror. Bush and his minions would like to make Americans believe it does, but it isn't true. All we have to do is imagine if we would agree that a new school being opened in St Louis was newsworthy on a day when 30 people were killed while shopping at the Safeway down the street and four Catholic churches around the country were blown up.

It's the violence, stupid. Until that stops, there is no good news.



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digby 3/24/2006 02:37:00 PM |

 
Terminal Dork

by digby

Oh hell. Lil' Benji resigned. And just when it was starting to get fun.

I did want to make one last point before the Post hires a disgraced South Korean scientist to clone David Brooks and the kid fades into obscurity. This sad homeschooled little fellow, who failed to learn how the world works the way the rest of us do --- in high school --- was evidently considered quite the arbiter of popular culture in his crowd. His "Red Dawn" obsession gave us all quite a few laughs over the past few days. But it is no surprise that he plagiarized huge numbers of film and album reviews and stole outright a humorous essay from PJ O'Rourke (the only funny conservative on the planet) on how to party. These are things a true wingnut cannot understand.

The vast majority of right wingers are simply incapable of cool, even the frat rats like Junior, although the bonafide dorks always believe they are. (Karl Rove, mesmerized by the 23 year old Junior's insouciant chewing and bubble blowing, says his first impression was "He was .... cool.") They can't help it. I don't know why. Look what's happened to Dennis Miller.



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digby 3/24/2006 11:57:00 AM |

 
The Moral Relativism Of The Right

by tristero

Like gambling and cheating on your wife, plagiarism's a moral disgrace, except when rightwing conservatives do it:

And now those opposed to Ben have googled prior writings that on the surface appear suspicious, but only because permissions obtained and judgments made offline were not reflected online by an out dated and out of business** campus newspaper. But that's all the opponents want - just enough to sabotage a career, though in the process they will sabotage themselves. Facts have no meaning. Only impressions have any bearing on this. The charges of plagarism [sic] are false, meant to bring down a good and honest man. The presented facts to prove plagarism are specious -- products of shoddy work.

Don't you love the Austin Powers "This is not my Swedish Penis Enlarger" defense? Because the paper is out of business and nobody can produce any possible agreements, therefore the charges are specious, shoddy work. Y'can't prove they didn't have those agreements, can you? Riiiiiiiight.*

Well at least our Red State comrade got this right:

Facts have never been debate winners among the haters. This is another example.

Indeed, and that is why it is so deplorable that a hater like Domenech has a job at the Washington Post. Domenech called Coretta Scott King a "communist" surely knowing the communist canard was code among racists to vilify the Kings.

Of course, it goes without saying the Red Stater will claim those remarks of poor Ben were decent, intelligent, and fact-based. Which just goes to show how deeply far right wing hate will corrupt one's soul.

*Oh, if only this amount of proof was something the right demanded from God's Avatar Here On Earth, the man they call "Commander-In-Chief" whenever they can, to emphasize we owe HIm unthinking obedience.

[Update: Corrected and expanded after original post.]

**{Update: Thanks to our intrepid gang of commenters, I've learned this is a lie. The paper is not out of business. Go here for an editorial on Domenech mess. The extent to which the rightwing will lie never ceases to amaze me. The moral of the story is this:

If a rightwinger says, "Gee, the sun is shining, gonna be a beautiful day!" grab your galoshes and umbrella.
tristero 3/24/2006 08:06:00 AM |

Thursday, March 23, 2006

 
Monument To Pro-Life

by digby

A nude Britney Spears on a bearskin rug while giving birth to her firstborn marks a 'first' for Pro-Life. Pop-star Britney Spears is the "ideal" model for Pro-Life and the subject of a dedication at Capla Kesting Fine Art in Brooklyn's Williamsburg gallery district, in what is proclaimed the first Pro-Life monument to birth, in April.

Dedication of the life-sized statue celebrates the recent birth of Spears' baby boy, Sean, and applauds her decision of placing family before career. "A superstar at Britney's young age having a child is rare in today's celebrity culture. This dedication honors Britney for the rarity of her choice and bravery of her decision," said gallery co-director, Lincoln Capla. The dedication includes materials provided by Manhattan Right To Life Committee.

"Monument to Pro-Life: The Birth of Sean Preston," believed Pro-Life's first monument to the 'act of giving birth,' is purportedly an idealized depiction of Britney in delivery. Natural aspects of Spears' pregnancy, like lactiferous breasts and protruding naval, compliment a posterior view that depicts widened hips for birthing and reveals the crowning of baby Sean's head.

The monument also acknowledges the pop-diva's pin-up past by showing Spears seductively posed on all fours atop a bearskin rug with back arched, pelvis thrust upward, as she clutches the bear's ears with 'water-retentive' hands.

"Britney provides inspiration for those struggling with the 'right choice'," said artist Daniel Edwards, recipient of a 2005 Bartlebooth award from London's The Art Newspaper. "She was number one with Google last year, with good reason --- people are inspired by the beauty of a pregnant woman," said Edwards.

Britney responds.



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digby 3/23/2006 10:40:00 PM |

 
Media Contortionism

by digby

I have never been much for blog triumphalism. Aside from being self-aggrandizing, it didn't seem to me to be particularly true that blogs would replace the mainstream media. But I am actually beginning to think that what we know as the mainstream press might end up going the way of the Dodo bird after all. It's not because we are so great or even that we are capable of doing what they do. It's because they have been manipulated for so long that I'm not sure they can function properly anymore.

Regarding complaints about the hiring of Ben Domenech, Howard Kurtz writes:

John Amato at Crooks and Liars says: "The Washington Post continues to become more and more a mouthpiece for the GOP by hiring a rightwing blogger."

I don't get it. One conservative blogger? It's not like The Post doesn't have a left-leaning blogger, or liberal columnists. Is the New York Times a GOP mouthpiece because it employs David Brooks and John Tierney? If people don't like what Domenech has to say, don't click on him. It's not like you can say "cancel my subscription!" since the Web site is free.

Of course poeple don't have to read him. But we do have to consider the obvious fact that Kurtz and the Washington Post believe that this blatantly partisan Republican blogger "balances" an allegedly "left leaning" White House critic. That they still don't understand the difference between the conventions of overt partisan media and mainstream online criticism like Dan Froomkin's column is painfully clear. That this particular blogger has been exposed virtually overnight as a racist and plagiarist proves that they had no idea how the right wing media works. Still.

But then, Kurtz didn't understand the difference between rightwing talk radio and mainstream media either, even more than a decade after it was clear to listeners all over the country:

"Sure, he aggressively pokes fun at Democrats and lionizes Republicans, but mainly about policy. He's so mainstream that those right-wingers Tom Brokaw and Tim Russert had him on their Election Night coverage."

Neither he, nor those vapid anchors on NBC, apparently knew that Rush Limbaugh commonly fantasizes about "policies" like kicking half the Democratic party out of the country:

LIMBAUGH: We just had Stephen Breyer saying, oh, yeah, totally appropriate, we must import what they're doing around the world in other democracies, it will help buttress their attempt to establish the rule of law, and we might learn something, too. Well, here's something I'd like to import. I'd like to import the ability that the Brits are doing to export and deport a bunch of hate-rhetoric filled mullahs and imams that are stoking anti-American sentiment. Wouldn't it be great if anybody who speaks out against this country, to kick them out of the country? Anybody that threatens this country, kick 'em out. We'd get rid of Michael Moore, we'd get rid of half the Democratic Party if we would just import that law. That would be fabulous. The Supreme Court ought to look into this. Absolutely brilliant idea out there.

Apparently, the mainstream press is so enveloped in the warm, cozy womb of the DC establishment that they either don't know what is going on around them or they've been willingly co-opted. I saw that same kind of wide-eyed, naive wonder on the face of Bob Woodward recently, when he realized that junkyard dog Patrick Fitzgerald wasn't actually a slavering liberal determined to expose all of his Republican sources going back to Deep Throat. It's in the defensive posture of Jim Brady as he recoiled in horror at unwashed liberal masses daring to criticize his ombudsman's glaring error. It's demonstrated by the fatuous guilelessness of the NY Times creating a "conservative beat" in the year 2005, as if they just discovered Rock and Roll or bell-bottoms.

They are like sheltered children. They do not know when they are being played. Indeed, they don't even seem to know the game exists.

Perhaps it would be useful, then, to try to figure out how this happened, and strange as it may seem, it can be traced to a specific moment in 1968 when, after the police beat up protestors and newsmen alike at the Democratic convention in Chicago, Joseph Kraft, the Richard Cohen of his time, wrote:

"Are we merely neutral observers, seekers after truth in the public interest? Or do we, as the supporters of Mayor Daley and his Chicago police have charged, have a prejudice of our own?

"The answer, I think is that Mayor Daley and his supporters have a point. Most of us in what is called the communications field are not rooted in the great mass of ordinary Americans--in Middle America. And the results show up not merely in occasional episodes such as the Chicago violence but more importantly in the systematic bias toward young people, minority groups, and the of presidential candidates who appeal to them.

"To get a feel of this bias it is first necessary to understand the antagonism that divides the middle class of this country. On the one hand there are highly educated upper-income whites sure of and brimming with ideas for doing things differently. On the other hand, there is Middle America, the large majority of low-income whites, traditional in their values and on the defensive against innovation.

"The most important organs of and television are, beyond much doubt, dominated by the outlook of the upper-income whites.

"In these circumstances, it seems to me that those of us in the media need to make a special effort to understand Middle America. Equally it seems wise to exercise a certain caution, a prudent restraint, in pressing a claim for a plenary indulgence to be in all places at all times the agent of the sovereign public."

The "Middle America" that expressed such horror at the events in Chicago in 1968 did go on to elect Richard Nixon twice. (The Republicans have always had a direct line to the nation's id.) But the forces that were pulling at the country then resulted forty years later in both a more conservative politics, a more liberal culture and an electorate as divided as ever. The elite media have never been able to wrap their arms around any of that. And they have never admitted that the insecurity that descended upon the establishment at that moment has been relentlessly exploited for maximum effect by the Republican party.

When the poobahs of the GOP read Kraft's column they smelled blood and they haven't let up since. Today, prudent restraint has become cowed submission to every republican complaint and an overweaning desire to please them with narratives of Democratic fecklessness. The Washington Post hears that Dan Froomkin, White House critic, is disliked by Republicans. Writers themselves feel uncomfortable with (and jealous of) the free-wheeling, critical tone of his online White House column, an irreverent style that is common in modern online journalism (see: sister site Slate.) They solve the "problem" by hiring the rabidly partisan 24 year old son of a Bush administration official.

This goes beyond bending over backwards. It's gymnastic contortionism. They are as bewildered by the grassroots fervor of this modern polarized culture --- and cannot see the forces creating them --- today any more than they could see them in 1968.

This very day all the networks were indulging in another tiresome round of self-flagellation over this mind-numbingly predictable Republican campaign, (documented in this thorough report by Peter Daou) to convince the public that the liberal media is to blame for the country's bad opinion of the war in Iraq. Howard Kurtz once again dutifully steps up to the plate and takes the first pitch right in the middle of the forehead:

BLITZER: ...Howie, is it true, based on your observation of the news media, as the president, the vice president continue to maintain that the negative -- all of our mainstream media reporting has tended to be on the negative?

HOWARD KURTZ, CNN'S RELIABLE SOURCES: Well, certainly not all of it, Wolf, and I don't agree with that woman in West Virginia who said that journalists are doing this because they don't agree with the Bush policy.

But I've look very carefully in recent weeks from the time of those mosque bombings through the third year anniversary stories of the U.S.-led invasion, and the tone of a whole lot of this coverage has been negative, has been downbeat, has been pessimistic, in part that's because a lot of the news out of Iraq has not been good. But I think we may be reaching kind of a tipping point here that we saw in Vietnam where the press coverage seems to tilt against this war effort.

BLITZER: So you've seen a change in recent weeks? Is that what you're saying?

KURTZ: Absolutely compared to say a year ago or two years ago. I think it's not unconnected to the public opinion polls. I think journalists are finding it easier to ask aggressive questions of President Bush, to frame the stories more negatively in terms of the American presence there because they know a majority of the country now questions or disagrees with that war effort.

I do think, however, that a lot of journalists make an effort to talk to ordinary Iraqis and to report on signs of progress. But, let's face it, in our business, the car bombing, the suicide attack, the attack on a police station, those tend to be top of the newscast, top of the front page kinds of stories. The other reconstruction efforts are less dramatic and tend to get pushed back.

BLITZER: It's the same basically covering any story. Here in Washington, D.C., if there's a major incident, let's say a shooting incident, whatever. We don't report, you know what, 99.99 percent of the kids went to school today, businesses were open, things were flourishing. But if there's a horrible shooting incident, we're going to report that in local media as well.

KURTZ: There certainly is a bad news bias in that sense. We cover plane crashes. We don't cover safe plane landings.

But the additional complicating factor here, Wolf, as I know you know, is that it's very dangerous for journalists in Baghdad. We've seen that with some of the deaths and injuries of journalists there. Most recently ABC's Bob Woodruff. And so journalists are frustrated that they can't tell more of the story of ordinary Iraqis and what they think about the U.S. presence there because they have to curtail their travels or travel with security details.

So when you add that to the natural tendency to play up violence, the dramatic pictures that television, of course, loves, I do think we are seeing more negative coverage now. And, obviously, it's in the political self-interest of George Bush and Dick Cheney to highlight that because they are trying to make the case that things are not as bad as they seem in Iraq and the media are a handy target.

BLITZER: Very briefly, is there any sign of a backlash against the mainstream media because of our coverage of what's happening in Iraq?

KURTZ: Yes, among conservatives, among military family members and others. A lot of people, as we saw that woman from West Virginia, blaming us for the situation there.

You can smell panic coming off the media in waves today. In 2006, there is nothing that screams "Middle America" (or perhaps the more accurate "Real America") than the phrase "military families." (Watch this video at Crooks and Liars of the modern Mencken, Jack Cafferty, having none of it and exposing Kurtz's analysis for the sophistry it is by pointing out the obvious: the news is getting worse because the war is getting worse.)

Those journalists who haven't taken the easy way out and simply adopted the GOP worldview (and there are many of them) are so paranoid that they can't trust their own eyes and ears. They are perpetually vulnerable to the manipulations of a cynical Republican establishment that has been pounding the trope for forty years that if a journalist tells a story that is critical of conservatives, he or she is a liberal who is out of touch with the people.

The country is in the middle of several "wars" in both the literal and metaphorical sense. If it was ever called for, the time to "exercise a certain caution, a prudent restraint, in pressing a claim for a plenary indulgence to be in all places at all times the agent of the sovereign public" is long past. The public isn't crying out for "balance," particularly when those who claim to provide it have no earthly idea even how to define it. They are looking for truth. Plain, simple truth.

If the mainstream media hope to even be relevant, much less pressing a claim of plenary indulgence to be agents of the sovereign republic, they must wise up quickly and stop being agents of the right wing propaganda mills. If they don't, they will finally lose the patience of their readers who will turn to the many alternative means of finding information.

I have very mixed feelings about how our country will fare with such a system. I think a thriving democracy needs a vital mainstream press. But since the mainstream press keeps getting punked over and over again by the right wing machine, you have to wonder if it really makes any difference anymore.



Hat Tip to Rick Perlstein for the Kraft column.



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digby 3/23/2006 07:46:00 PM |

 
Right Wing Values

by tristero

Turns out the Washington Post's new blogger, a product of the rightwing homeschooling movement, has some moral problems. As in plagiarising other people's work. And if you scroll through Atrios' posts today, you'll learn it wasn't just once or twice. Hoo boy.

Well, that was fast.

[UPDATE: Joe Conason weighs in and it's worth clicking through the ads just to read the last line of his column.]
tristero 3/23/2006 06:02:00 PM |

 
Religious Discrimination

by digby

American's increasing acceptance of religious diversity doesn't extend to those who don't believe in a god, according to a national survey by researchers in the University of Minnesota’s department of sociology.

From a telephone sampling of more than 2,000 households, university researchers found that Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians and other minority groups in "sharing their vision of American society." Atheists are also the minority group most Americans are least willing to allow their children to marry.

Even though atheists are few in number, not formally organized and relatively hard to publicly identify, they are seen as a threat to the American way of life by a large portion of the American public. "Atheists, who account for about 3 percent of the U.S. population, offer a glaring exception to the rule of increasing social tolerance over the last 30 years," says Penny Edgell, associate sociology professor and the study's lead researcher.

Edgell also argues that today's atheists play the role that Catholics, Jews and communists have played in the past-they offer a symbolic moral boundary to membership in American society. "It seems most Americans believe that diversity is fine, as long as every one shares a common 'core' of values that make them trustworthy-and in America, that 'core' has historically been religious," says Edgell. Many of the study's respondents associated atheism with an array of moral indiscretions ranging from criminal behavior to rampant materialism and cultural elitism.

Excuse me while I run down to Walmart and shoplift a copy of "Huck Finn." (That is, if they have it. Twain was one of those degenerate unAmerican "A" words you know.)



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digby 3/23/2006 02:47:00 PM |

 
Feel The Hum

by digby

March, 23rd. New York City - Today Sean Patrick Maloney, former senior Clinton White House official and investigative attorney running for the Democratic nomination for New York Attorney General, revealed a fresh idea to "legalize" the Bush Administration's warrantless wiretapping program using a complaint that can be filed in federal court.

The complaint would seek a federal court order requiring the Bush Administration to comply with the law. The plan does not stop, compromise or hamper ongoing operations but instead compels the Bush Administration to appear in federal court, in secret session, to show cause for wiretapping any citizens of New York.

It is against New York state law to monitor communications over the phone without consent of the parties or without a court order. The benefit to New Yorkers, who cannot sue on their own behalf because the wiretapping is secret, is to initiate judicial oversight of the Bush Administration's program.

Maloney said, "As a New Yorker, I am committed to stopping, capturing, punishing or killing the terrorists who target America for attack, but I am also committed to the rule of law in this country, or at least this state. George Bush is not above the law.

"My plan both fights terrorism and protects New Yorkers' privacy from unauthorized or unconstitutional government intrusion. It does not compromise or halt ongoing anti-terror operations. It legalizes them. It's clear the Bush Administration is operating outside of New York law without legal federal authority."

There is recent case law and precedent for state attorneys general to act against federal actors who break state law and are acting outside of congressional authority. The Oregon Attorney General successfully sued then-United States Attorney General John Ashcroft, stopping him from undermining that state's assisted suicide law (analogous to New York's wiretapping law) without Congressional authorization to do so (as with the NSA's actions here).

The Maloney campaign is supporting this idea with the first paid television ads of the campaign for Attorney General. Entitled "Good Question" the 30-second spot, which airs statewide starting today, makes the charge that the President is outside his authority in using warrantless wiretaps and is violating New York state law. In the ad, Sean Patrick Maloney asks, "The founding fathers didn't trust George Washington with unlimited power, so why would we trust George Bush?"

Some Democrats are getting the idea that they might win by challenging the unpopular Bush's assertions that the only way to deal with terrorism is to undermine the constitution. Not only is it the right thing to do, it's good politics.

Remember, Brit Hume didn't have an aneurysm about this on Fox News Sunday because he's confident that the issue is a winner. He had an aneurysm because he's afraid that it will turn out the Democratic base and lose his pals the congress.




Update: Nobody is going to believe this, but I actually wrote this post before I got the ad that is now appearing on the left sidebar. However, I honestly believe this is a great trend and I encourage New Yorkers and others to click through the ad and take a look.

People from all over the country, in different ways and using different approaches are challenging this adminstration's lawlessness and abuse of power. It's not enough to just win at the ballot box. A requirement that our leaders must adhere to the rule of law must be affirmed in no uncertain terms, and the specifics of Bush's power grab must be repudiated.

Members of the Bush adminstration who were around in the 70's and 80's (the "grown-ups") waited for many years to gain power and re-assert these principles of executive authority which we thought were succesfully legally proscribed (with laws such as FISA) after Nixon. They were wrong then and they are wrong now. These radical, undemocratic, unAmerican ideas need to have a final stake driven through them. This is not a monarchy, even at war.



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digby 3/23/2006 09:35:00 AM |

 
Jeffies

by tristero

What are "jeffies?" - Jeffies comprise a sub-category of the strawman argument which either explicitly use the construction, "There are some who..." or an obvious variation thereof. They describe a ridiculous position that no one seriously holds and include a firm, if obviously banal and vacuous, assertion of disagreement from the "jeffer" (the person who uses the jeffy; the audience upon which jeffies are used are said to have been "jeffed").

Jeffies are, by definition, limited to members of the Bush administration and their propagandists. Other people can, and have, used the same language on occasion, but only statements by the Bushies using this construction will be considered authentic jeffies. Just as the Bush administration's lawyers have concocted an exclusive set laws that apply to them and them only, I have determined (for reasosn I cannot divulge) that jeffies are unique to the Bush goverment and their cronies.

What if a strawman argument does not quite pass the litmus test of being a pure jeffie? - Such arguments are called "geoffies," and their designation as such will be determined on a case by case basis. As Darwin demonstrated, categorization by species is inherently ambiguous and I believe that insight also applies here.

Why are they called jeffies? - No particular reason, they had to be called something. It has no bearing on recent kerfuffles in the blogosphere and those who think so will soon need to reckon with the wrath of the Giant Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Future posts which report the latest jeffies will refer back to this one so that I needn't redefine it over and over. The definition may be updated from time to time.

Today's jeffies come courtesy of The Carpetbagger Report and were discovered in in yesterday morning's White House press conference emanating from the maw of George W. Bush:

"Our foreign policy up to now was to kind of tolerate what appeared to be calm. And underneath the surface was this swelling sense of anxiety and resentment, out of which came this totalitarian movement that is willing to spread its propaganda through death and destruction, to spread its philosophy. Now, some in this country don't — I can understand — don't view the enemy that way. I guess they kind of view it as an isolated group of people that occasionally kill. I just don't see it that way."

..."The enemy has said that it's just a matter of time before the United States loses its nerve and withdraws from Iraq. That's what they have said. And their objective for driving us out of Iraq is to have a place from which to launch their campaign to overthrow modern governments — moderate governments — in the Middle East, as well as to continue attacking places like the United States. Now, maybe some discount those words as kind of meaningless propaganda. I don't, Jim. I take them really seriously."

The following I would also characterize as a jeffy as "some" is clearly implied before "people":

"[T]he United States of America must take this threat seriously and must not — must never forget the natural rights that formed our country. And for people to say, well, the natural rights only exist for one group of people, I would call them — I would say that they're denying the basic rights to others."

[Update: Jeffies were recently described, but not named as a specific sub-category by Jennifer Loven of the AP. While I have enormous respect for Ms. Loven's work, the fact remains that I have priority on the discovery of the jeffy by over three years and therefore claim the right to name them.]
tristero 3/23/2006 08:46:00 AM |

 
Born Again Nihilist

by digby

In an interesting exchange on the Lehrer News Hour Wednesday night (in which David Frum proved again that he is an inveterate GOP shill who cares more for the party than the country) David Gergen mentioned several times that thre Bush administration saw Bush as Truman, in the sense that he would be vindicated by history. He said:

The surprise to me has been that, when you talk to people around the president, the model they cite is often that of Harry Truman. Truman was someone whose polls fell down into the 20s in the final year in office. And, indeed, he could not run in 1952 because he was so low because of the Korean War.

And as time went on, historians would look back and said he's a wonderful president. And if that's your model, then, you know, you just keep on keeping on, which is what this president is doing.

He's not changing course; he's not changing people; he's not making any serious adjusts. He's simply coming out, and keep talking, keep talking. "And, ultimately, history will vindicate me." That's the theory.

I think he's probably right about how the administration is rationalizing its actions. Bush is temperamentaly incapable of changing course. He can't allow any doubts because to admit that his "gut" is fallible leaves him with no way to make decisions. He certainly is incapable of analyzing a situation and making a decision based upon information and advice. But in his mind that's ok, because he's been convinced that his "gut" knows what his mind doesn't.

But as I listened to Gergen I couldn't help but be reminded of another famous line of Bush's, recorded by Bob Woodward:

In his interview with Woodward, conducted over two days in December of last year, Bush displayed no second thoughts about Iraq's postwar miseries or the failure to turn up any WMD. "I haven't suffered doubt," he told Woodward. When the author - quoting Bush's political adviser Karl Rove - suggested that "all history gets measured by outcomes," Bush "smiled," reports Woodward. " 'History,' he said, shrugging, taking his hands out of his pockets, extending his arms out and suggesting with his body language that it was so far off. 'We won't know. We'll all be dead'."

Bush doesn't care if history will vindicate him. He's not comforting himself that someday he'll be judged as a Truman who successfully guided the world through the immediate post war period. Maybe Karl Rove thinks that but Bush could not care less how history will judge him because "we'll all be dead."

He's refusing to change course because he refuses to admit he's wrong. There's nothing complicated about it. He's an arrogant, stupid man. And he's the most powerful man in the world.

Gergen concluded:

And it's just remarkable to me, to go back to the Truman analogy, that he's just walking a straight line. And we've always appreciated the fact that he was resolute. Now he appears stubborn.

You know, "I'm going to walk a straight. I'm not listening. I believe I'm on the right course. I believe history will vindicate me."

Well, Mr. President, you may believe that. But, you know, you could put all the rest of us in one hell of a mess if your gamble doesn't pay off.

He doesn't care. After all, we'll all be dead someday anyway. President Bush, the alleged born again Christian, is a nihilist.



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digby 3/23/2006 07:54:00 AM |

Wednesday, March 22, 2006

 
Archbishop Of Canterbury Defends Christianity From Cheapening By Creationists.

by tristero

You read that right:

Williams described creationism as ''a kind of category mistake, as if the Bible were a theory like other theories.''

''And for most of the history of Christianity ... there's been an awareness that a belief that everything depends on the creative act of God is quite compatible with a degree of uncertainty or latitude about how precisely that unfolds in creative time,'' Williams said.

Asked if creationism should be taught in schools, Williams said: ''I don't think it should, actually. No, no.''

Williams' office confirmed that he had been quoted accurately in The Guardian, and said he was not scheduling further interviews immediately.

I can find plenty to snark about in this, if I want to. Like somehow, the good Archbishop seems to have forgotten that it took, what, 350 plus years for the Vatican to cut Galileo some slack? And does "creative act of God" leave a hole wide open for "intelligent design" creationism? I really don't know what the Archbishop was thinking about regarding the first, but I'm pretty sure he's too smart to fall for IDiocy. In any event, as important as they may be to clarify sometime in the future, I really don't think those are the main issues. What's important is that the Archbishop has irrevocably recast the debate within the Christian community. The question has become this:

Now that a widely respected religious leader has bluntly declared creationism bad theology, why do the Dobsons and the LaHayes of the world continue to demand that all good Christians foolishly believe that the Bible is a scientifically accurate textbook?
tristero 3/22/2006 05:50:00 PM |

 
The Worm Turns

by digby


Greg Sargent at TAPPED sees what's important about the emerging new and improved conventional wisdom about the Feingold resolution:

Lockhart speaks out in an interview with Chris Lehmann in his entertaining piece on Feingold in this week's New York Observer. Lehmann writes:

[Lockhart] sees no political downside to Senator Feingold's proposal - and likewise sees much desperation in the Republican spin that it would be another self-inflicted Democratic wound that would haunt the minority party in the fall elections. All the G.O.P. bluster about an early vote on the Feingold proposal to smoke out weak-sister Democrats for elimination in November, Mr. Lockhart said, "is complete nonsense."

He said: "One simple rule of politics is that the more ferociously you're pushing your talking points, the less you believe in them. The Republicans jumping so hard on this tells you that they believe they're in a really vulnerable position - that this issue is not the winner they thought it was."

Whatever you think of censure, Lockhart's hitting on a really critical point that can't be emphasized enough. Reporters and commentators have grown conditioned to believe Republicans when they say an issue's a political winner for them -- mainly because Democrats too often act as if they're convinced they're going to lose. When Karl Rove threw down the gauntlet in that speech about NSA wiretapping, few if any commentators even thought to imagine that Rove might be bluffing, even though it was perfectly likely that he was trying to psych out moderate Dems and get them to break ranks. And of course, some moderate Dem thinkers immediately followed Rove's script.

This is exactly right. They've been conditioned over the course of many years. During the Clinton era the Republicans ruled the discourse with non-stop scandalmongering which the press eagerly aided and abetted. During the 2000 campaign the press trivialized and derided Al Gore despite George W. Bush's clear lack of qualifications and helped the GOP character assassination squad at every turn. Since 9/11 the Republicans have held the line with brute intimidation tactics accusing anyone who disagreed with lack of patriotism or cowardice. I know it's been tough and I salute the Democrats for taking the amount of invective that's been hurled at them all through these dark years. Nobody who faces Republican thuggishness day after day can be called cowards.

But times have changed. The Republicans are being hoist on their own hubris and it's time to recognise that people are sick of their tired cant and want to hear from us again. Listening to George W. Bush's speeches for the last five years, particularly after 9/11, is like having someone sing "It's a small world after all" over and over and over again. It was bad the first time. Now it makes you want to stab your ears with a letter opener. The press, forced to listen more often than anyone else, seems to have reached its limit as well.

Make the argument, Dems. People are ready to listen.


Read all of Chris Lehman's article if you haven't had the chance. It's great.



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digby 3/22/2006 04:37:00 PM |

 
Oh, You Mean that Freedom

by digby

Oh my goodness, the Fox All-Stars have discovered that religious freedom is hard to guarantee in a theocracy. Seems this Christian who has been sentenced to death by an Afghan court for converting from Islam has opened their tired little eyes to the fact that "democracy" isn't easy to impose on a nation that's following strict Islamic law. Yah think?

They agree that this kind of thing has implications for Iraq too, can you believe it? Mort Kondrake says that he's been hearing that women in Basra are all having to cover themselves up in burkas now!(No kidding) Fred Barnes is concerned about Iraqi Christians too.

Evidently, the wingnuts are up in arms about this story. Someone in the handpicked military family audience even brought it up during Bush's Q&A today. (And here I thought everything was going great over there but the press isn't reporting it.) The whole place can go to hell in a handbasket but if Christians are persecuted then there's a problem.

Oh wait, that's only certain Christians. Some deserve what they get for "putting their heads into the mouth of the alligator."



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digby 3/22/2006 03:48:00 PM |

 
Animal Magnetism

by digby


Since this is shaping up to be bloggy fun day, I can't help but weigh in on this delicious little dust-up over at Jeff Goldstein's dog house pertaining to none other than my pal and blogging companion, tristero.

Tristero already wrote about it, as you all probably know. But he failed to properly highlight Goldstein's bizarrre and freakish dog-fantasy comment, which I feel is important for posterity. I suspect it was because he felt that its exceedingly disturbing images of bestiality might have been too vile and odious for discerning readers. He is right. But I believe that there should be a record of right wing insanity and I think people should be forced to look at it so they know that when these same people claim the left is unhinged, they are merely projecting their own incredibly fucked up psyches on to others.

These are the people, remember, who claim to have better values than you:

Today's subject: tristero, who (let's face it) has the intellect of a gibbon, though he clearly fancies himself a brilliant debunker of lockstep winguttery. In fact, his post
(as seen on Digbysblog) - Loven stole HIS idea about the strawmans, we're told / and Atrios was exactly right that I'm an idiot who doesn't realize my own idiocy (a pronouncement, incidentally, that can only be made by one who assumes he is far more intelligent than the object of his scorn, which position essentially deconstructs the study in the Atrios post tristero fellates, or else proves it to his detriment, I'm not sure which) - is par for the course with these bandwidth sucking cocklords. You allow them to stay and say their piece, and they interpret that as a "right" that you now owe them, and they then take that as an invitation to start helping themselves to things in the fridge, or slipping a finger up your dog's asshole, etc.

Well, sorry, but that ain't my thang. These fucktards want to take shots at me on their own sites, they can have at it. But from now on, they can keep it there, or they can bitch about me on sites I don't give a shit about anyway.

What they can't do is take pot shots at me on other sites, then slather some peanut butter on their joints and show up here hoping to help themselves to a quick hummer from my dog.

So goodbye to tristero. And there will be others, as well. I won't let this place turn into the cesspole Cole nurtures.

And seriously, what did tristero offer here? He's a mouthpiece for lib-Dem talking points, from the few posts of his I read, and I have more interesting conversations with beets and sea monkeys than I ever could with someone who is so bent on getting noticed by Atrios that he's already committed to sing a Katrina and the Waves cover at the next Eschacon - while wearing nothing but one of those bitchin' Che berets.

Keep in mind that tristero's post on Goldstein's blog was inoffensive. It was the post on this blog that got him banned. The offensive line?: "Hat tip to Jeff at Protein Wisdom who really is exactly as Atrios describes him."

That's it. That's what brought on this gut-wrenching, noxious screed. Somebody appears to have a very, very thin skin.

But let's talk about the rather, shall we say, hallucinatory imagery we see in that post. I'm beginning to think that someone needs to do a serious psychological study of the effects of bestiality on conservative politics (or is it the effects of conservative politics on bestiality?) There are just too many instances of this for it to be a coincidence. Lil' Benji and his box turtles, Santorum and his man-on-dog action, Rush and his fantasies of women and german shepards, Laura Bush and the horse cocks --- the list goes on. (Oh boy, here comes another round of freaky google hits. Hello Abu, howya doin?)

Here's Rush:

"...the trend toward more new mothers leaving the workforce. Yes, it's a trend. It started years ago when the feminist movement decided that their best friends were going to be German shepherds. You know. So that's -- well, it's true. You go to the right airports and you can see it."

What is it about these people that makes them constantly think of animal sex? (In Rush's case it's also an obsession with being tortured by women, but that's another story.) When you think about how to insult a political rival, does your mind automatically turn to bestiality? Mine doesn't. The idea of someone slathering their joint and asking the dog for a hummer has literally never entered my mind. (And I have a dirty mind.) But this goes way beyond any pornographic visual I have ever entertained. Ever. In fact, it makes me sick. Sticking your finger up a dog's ass is something that I would think only occurs to veterinarians and perverts.

This imagery is not exactly well ... mainstream. And yet, right wingers seem to come up with it all the time. I know that pets are part of the family and all, but I don't this is what most Americans have in mind when they hear the wingnuts lecturing everyone about family values. And, just because it's a dog doesn't mean it isn't sodomy, you know. Even if your dog's a girl.

ugh

Now, I've got a picture of Jeff Goldstein wearing nothing but an "Uncle Sam Wants You" t-shirt, his joint slathered from top to bottom with a 1/4 teaspoon of peanut butter, singing "How much is that doggie in the window?" If you'll excuse me, I have to go puke and then get my brain dry-cleaned.

Oh, not just because of the synapse frying revulsion of that image. Sorry. As bad as that is, I can take it. It's this, featuring even more disturbing bestial images --- and even worse writing.

Thanks to Hilzoy at Obsidion Wings for that coup de grace. She shall burn in hell for making me read that.


Update: Oh. My. Dear. God. This peanut butter thing is part of the whole Abu Ghraib horror. Read Jeanne D'Arc.



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digby 3/22/2006 12:50:00 PM |

 
Stop By And Say Hi

by digby


This is a great idea. Senators are all home (for what, their 6th or 7th break of the year?) and are going to be hearing from their constituents. It would be very effective if any of you in cities or towns where your Democratic senator has an office, to walk in and have a little chat with the staff (or the Senator if he or she is around) about how you would like them to support Feingold's censure motion. Give them the personal touch.

You could also call and find out if your senator has any public appearances --- town hall meetings or such -- where you could go and have a nice chat about how you think it's important to support Feingold because the country needs to know that Democrats don't endorse breaking the law --- and don't think that any president has a right or a necessity to do it, even in a time of war. You know, just remind our elected representatives what Democrats actually stand for.

Read Glenn's post for pointers on how to make the argument.



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digby 3/22/2006 11:20:00 AM |

 
Lil Benji, Day 3

by digby

I think it's awfully of interesting that the Washington Post hired a 24 year old ex-Bush staffer, whose daddy (also a Bush staffer) was in charge of the making sure Abramoff got what he wanted. (Wasn't the entire Deborah Howell flap about the shoddy Abramoff coverage in the first place?)

Josh Marshall has the scoop:

You see, it turns out the Domenech family came in for a number of Bush administration appointments. Not only Ben, but Ben's dad, Doug, who was White House liaison to the Department of Interior.

Or to put it more colloquially, White House guy to make sure Jack Abramoff got what he wanted with the Indians and the Pacific Island stuff.

Wayne Smith was the point man for Indian casino policy at the Department of Interior. He ended up having kind of a rough ride over at Interior. And, according to Smith, as reported last year in the Denver Post, Domenech told him "we had to pay attention to [Jack] Abramoff, because otherwise the religious right and (Ralph) Reed are going to come up and bite us, and our whole base will go crazy. They will light up our phones, shut down our phone lines."

According to Smith, Domenech was the conduit for Abramoff operative Italia Federici. Said Smith: "Doug would come down and say, 'Italia called and Jack wants this' That's how it all happened internally."

Oh my. He's not just "involved." He's in it up to his eyeballs.


Here's our new writer for the Washington Post, back when he was "Augustine" on Red State, writing about how the Republicans are actually the party of ethics (not that Abramoff is really that bad of a guy.)The "do what's right Republicans" need to flush the system of the "do as you're told Republicans." Looks like Dad is one of those "do as you're told" guys. Oooops.

(Are we dealing with another one of those weird Republican father-son deals again? Haven't we had enough of that these last five years? I even hear the kid has a Henry V obsession. Of course, that's better than a "Red Dawn" obsession, but still.)

I think this may have been a poignant, if weak, defense of dear old Dad:

Oh please By: Augustine

That's bullcrap. Abramoff boasted of being an insider at EVERY agency, not just Interior. Because he lied to his clients, we're supposed to believe that he actually had any effect on policy? Please.

Norton is hated by environuts, for good reason: she got more done on environmental issues than anyone else has since James Watt.

That's sweet. Just because his father was up to his eyeballs in Abramoff's deals at interior doesn't mean that Abramoff actually had any effect on policy.

Besides, Dad knew it was just about keeping the "wackos" in the base happy, see. The forced childbirth fanatics, for instance. Like his own son.

And I'm sure others have already found the most intriguing "Augustine" post --- the one that probably brought him to the attention of the people who evidently hate Froomkin at his place of employment:

If one spends any amount of time reading the columns of washingtonpost.com's Dan Froomkin - whose status as leader of the hack is without compare - it's easy to realize that, on any given day, the cut and paste function has to be a tiring chore. Every day, it's use the same template, find a new reason to hate. "Bush is a liar because X." "The President is a fool because X." "The White House wants to kill your child's pet because X." Etc. He has his crowd, and he plays to it.

Coming from a little boy who calls Coretta Scott King a communist on the day of her funeral, that seems a little bit much, don't you think?


Jim Brady and John Harris: Happy at last.


Update: Jane says "fly little wingnut fly" and sends Jim Brady a personal thank you note. I agree that Lil' Benji is going to be the gift that just keeps on giving.


UpdateII: For those of you who don't read wingnut talk fluently, Publius at LawandPolitics was kind enough to translate Lil' Benji's first post.



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digby 3/22/2006 08:25:00 AM |

 
The Anti-Pleasure Brigade

by tristero

Ampersand makes a good case that the anti-choice gang's statements are less consistent with a moral opposition to abortion than they are with a desire to punish women for having sex. This reminded me of a response Digby got recently:

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.

This is not the attitude of a person opposed to abortion, but of someone who doesn't want women to have access to pleasure. If he was merely opposed to abortion and only abortion, he would have written, "If you're in a position like this woman, a low paying job and two kids already, guess what? You and your partner damn well better use good contraception or get your tubes tied or be prepared to accept the consequences of raising a third kid."

But no, it's either/or to this guy. Either you have sex or you don't. He lives in a world where there is no morally acceptable way to use condoms, birth control pills, diaphragms, or any other effective means to enjoy sexual activity without the potential for procreation.

It is insane to call these people "pro-life." If they are pro anything, it is pro-misery. They wish to make everyone's lives, especially women's, as dreary, as guilt-ridden, and as fearful as possible. Unless you do exactly as we say and especially, don't fuck, you will be hounded by furies, and we are only too willing to be those furies. And if you're not happy following our "God-given" orders for a moral life (an outrageous, blasphemous lie), if you don't love raising that third or fourth kid you really don't want, or enduring a grim, neutered existence stripped of all potential for pleasure and joy, hey don't blame us. That's your problem.

Fortunately, there is an alternative to this sickening, cramped, and phony worldview. It is called liberalism, which holds, as one of its self-evident truths, that human beings have a right to the pursuit of happiness.
tristero 3/22/2006 03:34:00 AM |

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

 
Al's Vision

by digby


I will always have a great fondness for Al Gore. In 2000 I watched him get trashed by a ruthless Right Wing Noise Machine and a sophomoric press corps who were determined to punish him for Clinton's sins (which only they and the very right wing of the Republican party felt required punishment in the first place.) It was one of the most god-awful displays of character assassination we've ever seen --- and the way it ended, with the Republicans pulling every lever of brute institutional power they had to seize the office, had to have been a terrible, dispiriting event. I know how bad I felt. I can only imagine the searing disappointment he must have endured.

But what seems to have happened to him in the aftermath is quite inspiring. Rising from the ashes of his defeat, he has come back to be an authentic, inspiring voice for progressive thought. I suspect that when you have been publicly cheated out of something so huge, you figure nothing in your public life could ever hurt you again.

It turns out that Gore took exactly the right lessons from his defeat and has focused his attentions not only on the vapid bloodlessness that has become the Democratic approach to politics -- but he has also focused on the primary instrument of his demise: the establishment media.

In a fascinating cover article in The American Prospect, called The New, New Gore, Ezra Klein uncovers what's up with Al Gore's new media obsession and what he's really doing with that TV network he started. Unsurprisingly, the guy who invented the internets, has a lot of ideas about the future. Check it out.



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digby 3/21/2006 11:28:00 AM |

 
A New Goldberg Is Born

by digby


Like his progenitor, Jonah Goldberg, this new "Red State" blogger at the Washington Post proves that conservatives should never, ever (EVER) discuss popular culture. They are in over their heads and it always makes them look very foolish.

He pontificates at length about the fact that his allegedly liberal bosses (Jim Brady???) didn't know the ultimate, totally awesome, awesomliness of the film "Red Dawn." In his world this movie is what they call "cool."

Back here on planet earth, it's what 10 year olds call "cool," and everybody else calls "camp." It would be the equivalent of Left Wingers revering "Wild In The Streets" for its serious political message.

I'm with Brad DeLong. This is going to be fun.
digby 3/21/2006 10:20:00 AM |

 
A Great Honor Has Been Conferred

by tristero

Apparently, I have become the
first person officially banned by Jeff Goldstein from commenting on his site. He cites as one of his main reasons that I tried to solicit a blowjob from his dog. At least that's what I think he said, it's kinda hard to tell with poor Jeff.

For the record, I want to state categorically I did no such thing (and what is it about rightwing nuts and their obsessions with man-on-dog?). I never met his dog and have no interest in doing so. Everyone knows I have far more kinky...proclivities.

Now we're talkin' hot, Jeff.

Tx to Kevin K. in comments for the heads up.
tristero 3/21/2006 08:07:00 AM |

 
Bad News And Good News From Iraq

by tristero

Looks like the Iraqi police cannot protect themselves. Eighteen police officers died - eighteen! - when a police station - a police station! - was attacked.

But, as Tom Friedman says, where some see lemon, others see lemonade. The good news is that at least some business is thriving in Iraq: terrorism insurance. Now there's a racket...sorry, career with a bright future.
tristero 3/21/2006 06:57:00 AM |

 
Amy Sullivan Redux

by tristero

Amy Sullivan responded, and graciously, to my open letter to her. Here are some excerpts, posted with her permission (spelling hers):

... It is good and right to criticize wacked-out crazy conservative religious beliefs. Yes, it is. If you follow *all* of my writing--not just the stuff that gets people hopped up--I do in fact critize all of those guys. Often. But you don't say,"Boy, I hate that George Bush because he talks about Jesus all the time." Or, "Man, the whole idea of faith-based initiatives is just religious crap." Or, "We have a theocracy because Bush went into Iraq and that's what the apocolyptic crazy Christian nuts want him to do."

You say, "Bush can talk about Jesus all he wants, but he can't base his policies on religion and he has to explain why he's bringing religion into political debate." And, "The faith-based initiative is a political sham; Bush hasn't put any money into it because he doesn't actually want to help poor people." And, "Bush was wrong to go into Iraq, and those apocolyptic people are crazy, but those are two separate things."

It may sound like I'm splitting hairs, but I'm not. If you don't delineate, it's easy for people to dismiss you because it's sounds like you're being reflexively anti-religion. And it makes it harder for you to have any credibility when you do go after them for trying to recruit churches to do GOP campaign work or for giving Dobson a say in picking justices or for wrapping themselves in the Christian flag without living up to any of the social gospel principles in the Bible.

In the sentence directly after the one you quoted, I went on to say that it's perfectly appropriate to criticize them and I think that should happen. But I think people need to recognize that everything we say and do is scrutinized for evidence of religious hostility. That's reality. So be smart about it. Give thoughtful religious moderates a reason to say, "Yeah, they're right. These guys are a bunch of hypocrites. I belong over there instead." Not, "Boy, those guys seem to hate people like me." Because they're NOT all fundamentalists.

Her point is clear and it's one I, too, have made: focus your rhetoric. She's right about that general point. There are just a few problems with her own rhetoric.

First, aside from a few village atheists with absolutely zero political power, like a few bloggers and commenters, no one has said any of the things she deplores. So I have to ask directly: Amy, who exactly among the important Democrats or commenters has made these kinds of intemperate comments? Where has, to use your earlier examples, Kevin Phillips or Bill Moyers talked that way?

Secondly, it is not the religious moderates in either party that provoke criticism. It is the genuine apocalyptic loons in the Republican party that have all of us, including Amy herself, alarmed. The serious problem, which Amy finesses, is that these people are in positions of immense power. In fact, the must-read article Amy references makes this abundantly clear. Brownback was appointed by Frist, himself a radical christianist as his remarks on AIDS, abortion, and Schiavo make abundantly clear. Brownback was influenced by Charles Colson, prays with Ed Meese. The man who mentored Pat Robertson has the power to send an envoy to the president of the United States to remind him to be more christianist.

Furthermore, the article describes what can only be characterized as a very serious and very secretive 25 year plus attempt to overthrow the Constitution of the United States and replace it with a theocracy, a conspiracy between Catholic and Protestant christianists (a "co-belligerency") which, if they were, say communists and socialists, could only be described as treason.

Amy thinks there is no theocracy in the US and that Bush doesn't want one. She's right and she's wrong, respectively. There is still religious toleration, but over the course of his career Bush has let slip several comments, about Jews for instance, that reveal his desire. The seriousness of what is going seems to escape her. Amy apparently misunderstands what is meant by the phrase "religious freedom" (as may Sharlet himself) when used by Brownback and his ugly ilk. She tends to think that this means that genuine Christians feel oppressed by a secularist society that is arrayed against them. Not so. "Religious freedom" is a term Rushdoony uses in "The Roots of Reconstruction" as an explict synonym for a christianist theocracy.*

No one has a problem with Colin Powell's expression of religious beliefs. Or Christie Whitman's. Or Chuck Hagel's. And so on. Unfortunately, they are not at the very top of the Republican Party and the people who *are* are theocrats (political) as well as fanatics (religious). Yes, indeed, we need to hone our rhetoric. But not for a moment must we forget who these people are. Nor can we minimize their extremism. That is a serious mistake, and that is the mistake Amy makes when she criticizes "the left" for allegedly going after religious people when, in fact, that simply is not the case in the mainstream discourse.

[*Update: I am not, for a moment, suggesting that Bush subcribes to Dominionism or Christian Reconstruction. What I am asserting, and hope to demonstrate in some future posts, is that Reconstructionist objectives and language pervades the discourse of the radical right christianists, that Reconstructionist influence is direct via extensive associations with other sects and cults, such as Robertson's and Dobson's and that major effort is being expended to minimize these associations and to hide them from wider scrutiny. Bush desires a theocracy, it is true, but he is neither intellectually, morally, or emotionally equipped to understand or advocate pure Reconstructionist thought. He does, however, share many of the same obsessions and use many of the same tactics.]
tristero 3/21/2006 04:24:00 AM |

Monday, March 20, 2006

 
Jessica T. Mathews On Iran

by tristero

Jessica T. Mathews, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, advocated "coerced inspections" of Iraq as an alternative to invasion and conquest. Time and again, she and other CEIP members warned against the dangerous illusion of forcing democracy at the point of a gun. In short, she and CEIP were among the majority of the world who needed to be taught no lessons on the perils of naive idealism (a la George Packer and the other liberal hawks), far right militarism (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al), or reality-deficient neo-conservatism (Wolfowitz, Kristol, etc).

There isn't a chance in hell that the Bush administration will take what Jessica T. Mathews has to say about Iran seriously. But, by God, you should, and so should anyone who cares about constructing a sensible alternative to the slow-motion slide into nuclear catastrophe that is the current American foreign policy:

The administration must, finally, hold its nose and recognize that the nuclear challenge is the indisputable priority. It must get off the sidelines and into negotiations with Tehran. It must solidify agreement among its fellow permanent [United Nations security] council members by working closely with Russia, not least by concluding a long overdue pact on civil nuclear cooperation. Russian participation would make it possible to provide Iran with a credible international guarantee of uranium enrichment and reprocessing services.

With China and the others, the United States needs to make clear that the Security Council can resort to other steps besides economic sanctions to significantly raise the cost to Tehran of its continued defiance, beginning with making International Atomic Energy Agency inspections mandatory rather than voluntary.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (and her fellow foreign ministers from the council's permanent members) should be flying to Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa and other leading countries of the G-77 to explain why Iran is wrong to claim that the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty gives it the "right" to enrich uranium, and why Iran's abuse of the treaty devalues each of their commitments to give up nuclear weapons.

Given the American record with Iraq and Iran, others will be skeptical that Washington has made a clear choice for nonproliferation and away from regime change. The message will have to be steady and unequivocal. If President Bush and Secretary Rice continue to say one thing and Vice President Dick Cheney and our ambassador to the United Nations, John R. Bolton, say another, the effort will quickly fail.

Members of Congress have a direct responsibility as well. Only they — especially the Democrats — can make such a policy change possible. They will have to forgo the indulgence of slamming the administration from the right and currying favor with pro-Israel voters by vying to see who can be the most anti-Iranian.*

All of this, and more, is what serious anti-nuclear diplomacy would look like. It has not yet been tried. Anyone who promotes the use of military force from the present position of American indecision and before the obvious political steps have been taken is repeating the error that led us into Iraq.

The international community's record on Iran's nuclear program (as on North Korea's) has been feckless. Only the United States can change that. If we fail to pursue this effort with unwavering, clear-minded diplomacy, a nuclear-armed world will be the Bush administration's chief legacy, no matter how the war in Iraq and the war on terrorism turn out.

Open memo to Kevin Drum and Matthew Yglesias: You all but dismissed Mathews in 2002/03. This time, boys, listen up. Once again, she's absolutely right.

[UPDATE: The talks have not been going well. But apparently, they will continue.]

* Note to right-wingers, especially neo-conservatives: Jessica Tuchman Mathews is the daughter of Barbara Tuchman. Yes, THE Barbara Tuchman. This means that in addition to having one helluva brilliant mom, Mathews' background is Jewish. So don't even begin to try accusing her of anti-semitism merely because she places America's interests above those of Richard Perle's far right business friends in Israel.
tristero 3/20/2006 11:56:00 PM |

 
Why We've Got His Back

by digby

Russ Feingold appeared on Charlie Rose and I suspect it may be what forced Bill Kristol to admit that he was "an impressive politician" who made the case very effectively.

Crooks and Liars has the video and I urge you to watch it all. He has his finger on the pulse of the Democratic base --- which, by the way, represents the new majority.

Here's a short excerpt. When Charlie asked about all the pearl clutching about his censure motions among the beltway courtiers, he replied:

Shades of October 2002. These are the same pundits, consultants, and spin miesters who said you've gotta vote for the Iraq war or George Bush is going to hang you out to dry and he's gonna show that you don't care about the troops and you don't care about the fight against terrorism.

They pull it every time. And the Democratic insiders in Washington and the consultants fall for it every time. They don't realize that the thing that bugs people about the Democratic party right now is that we don't seem to stand strongly enough for what we believe in.

How can we be afraid at this point, of standing up to a president who has clearly mismanaged this Iraq war, who clearly made one of the largest blunders in American foreign policy history? How can it be that this party wants to stand back and allow this kind of thing to happen?

And then add to that the idea that the president has clearly broken the law --- and a number of Republican senators have effectively admitted that, by saying "you know, we need this program so let's make it legal," --- so they are admitting it's illegal.

The idea that Democrats don't think it's a winning thing to say that we will stand up for the rule of law and for checking abuse of power by the executive --- I just can't believe that Democrats don't think that isn't something, not only that we can win on, but it does, in fact, make the base of our party, which is so important, feel much better about the Democrats. The Republicans care deeply about making the base of their party feels energized. What about the people of our party who believe in the Democratic Party especially because they fight for the American values of standing up for our rights and civil liberties?

Word.


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digby 3/20/2006 07:54:00 PM |

 
Bad Arguments 101

by digby


I just heard someone say "they've been calling it a quagmire for years!"



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digby 3/20/2006 04:04:00 PM |

 
Hoisting The Sail

by digby

There is no more reliable arbiter of beltway conventional wisdom than Cokie Roberts. Her entire career has been built on the idea that she knows what the establishment is thinking (which the establishment then inexplicably twists into what "the people" are thinking.) She has spent her life in Washington DC and is as much a part of the firmament as the Arlington cemetary. When she speaks, the poobahs have issued an verdict. This morning on NPR she said this:

Democrats are enjoying their miseries. Jack Reed of Rhode Island said to me this week-end "we have a strong wind at our back and all we have to do is get a sail up, any sail, some sail" but they haven't managed to do that yet.

They were interested to see how Senator Russ Feingold's call for censure worked with the blogosphere, mainly, and also in polls. Because Democrats backed away from his call just dramatically, even Democrats like Nancy Pelosi of California didn't want anything to do with it. But a Newsweek poll out today shows 42% of the people supporting censure including 20% of Republicans. So Democrats are feeling pretty good about where they are in all this.

Apparently the establishment needed some numbers in order to know what to think. OK. As I wrote earlier, I think some of our leaders' natural political instincts have been hobbled by an over-reliance on strategists and pundits. But I would remind the courtier class who are advising the Democrats of what Bill Kristol said this week-end: politics is not just about running on issues people already agree with, it is trying to change public opinion. Somebody had to jump start the debate about the president's theory of presidential infallibility and abuse of power. It's a huge issue to millions of Americans and it's vital that politicians of both parties recognize this.

The Newsweek poll says that 53% of the people believe it is a political ploy, but I suspect that there are more than a few Democrats within that number who are vastly relieved to see a Democrat with enough imagination to try to seize the debate and change public opinion. One can call it a political ploy (although Fiengold is one of the few guys in the congress with a real reputation for integrity) but to the base it's a political ploy in service of bedrock principle. Democrats cannot pass legislation. They cannot force the president to change his Iraq policy. They don't have the power to call hearings or subpeona witnesses. Even when they have hearings, the Republican chairmen refuse to put the witnesses under oath.

Political ploys are the only way the minority can make its voice heard. I have the cable blathering on in the backround most days, much of the time tuned to C-Span. There are dozens of press conferences held each week on both sides of the aisle. It's is a very rare one that anybody sees or hears. This is no way to get your message out.

I have no idea how many people might have favored censure before Feingold put it out there. But it's amazing that without any prior discussion at all, this large minority, including a large chunk of Republicans, were ready to agree with his motion. Or perhaps it isn't so amazing. Kos reminds us this morning:

The Alito filibuster was supposed to be a disaster for Democrats. Somehow, their numbers didn't suffer. Murtha was going to kill Dems by making them "look weak on defense". But somehow, people seem to agree with him. Now, Feingold's censure resolution is supposed to be a disaster for Democrats. Yet if that was the case, why are Republicans reacting so virulently against it? Bill Kristol admits the censure motion is hurting Bush. Meanwhile, Brit Hume's head exploded at the resolution. Not the action of a man confident that Feingold is hurting the Democratic Party.

That's because they know that these things aren't hurting the Democratic party. The only party hurting right now is the Republican party.

People want to know what Democratic base really stands for? The same thing that the majority of the country stands for. We believe in the rule of law, civil liberties, civil rights and supporting the troops --- all of those things are embodied in the Alito filibuster motion, the Feingold NSA wiretapping resolution and the Murtha plan. None of them were done out of an expectation that they would win passage in the congress or force the president to change course. These actions, regardless of motive, have laid down the stakes in the next election, which is why Brit Hume had an aneurysm about the proposition that the NSA wiretapping issue might actually play to the benefit of Democrats.

If that's so, then it's true that Republicans are going to be in for a tough time under a Democratic congress. People need to prepare for the fact that accountability is going to be on the menu. Nobody is going to be impeached over silly blow-jobs but there are some very serious matters that the Republican congress has refused to deal with. If that stirs up the GOP base, then fine. It stirs up the Democratic base too.

In any case, the Republicans are going to move their base anyway, so there's no margin in worrying about it. (Via Joe Gandelman) I see that Fred Barnes reports that aside from the usual labeling of Democrats as traitors and cowards, the Republicans are planning to begin another assault on civil liberties in order to turn out their conservative Christian voters.

There's another part of the 2006 Republican strategy. This spring and summer, Republican leaders in the Senate and House plan to bring up a series of issues that are popular with the Republican base of voters. The aim is to stir conservative voters and spur turnout in the November election. Just last week, House Majority Leader John Boehner and Whip Roy Blunt met with leaders of conservative groups to talk about these issues.

House Republicans, for their part, intend to seek votes on measures such as the Bush-backed constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, a bill allowing more public expression of religion, another requiring parental consent for women under 18 to get an abortion, legislation to bar all federal courts except the Supreme Court from ruling on the constitutionality of the Pledge of Allegiance, a bill to outlaw human cloning, and another that would require doctors to consider fetal pain before performing an abortion.

I assume that it will be successful with those voters, too. They tend to be very supportive of the party that articulates their views, and everyone agrees that they form an important component of the Republican base. The Republicans know what they are doing with this. They have a very sophisticated GOTV effort that significantly outperformed the Democrats in 2004:

It is ... particularly disturbing that while both Republican and Independent turnout increased sizably from 2000 to 2004, Democratic turnout remained flat. We may have helped move a lot of unlikely voters, but we did not mobilize our base nearly as well as Republicans did.

Mid-terms are turn-out elections. It's always lower than the presidential years. The Alito filibuster motion, the Murtha withdrawal plan and the Feingold resolution all serve to shake up the establishment and public opinion. But they also send a message to the base of the Democratic party that the party hears their concerns. The establishment at large can take them for granted if they choose. The Republicans won't take their base for granted. They never do.



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digby 3/20/2006 03:49:00 PM |

 
The Moussaoui Memo

by tristero

Here's a reminder in case the Bush epoch has caused you to forget why you need a competent, knowledgeable administration and not a bunch of ignorant fools and top officials who value faith over facts. Someone has to make sure the right dots are getting connected. During the spring/summer of 2001, that did not happen:

"Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, Clarke wrote, scowled and asked, 'why we are beginning by talking about this one man, bin Laden.' When Clarke told him no foe but al Qaeda 'poses an immediate and serious threat to the United States,' Wolfowitz is said to have replied that Iraqi terrorism posed 'at least as much' of a danger. FBI and CIA representatives backed Clarke in saying they had no such evidence.

'I could hardly believe,' Clarke writes, that Wolfowitz pressed the 'totally discredited' theory that Iraq was behind the 1993 truck bomb at the World Trade Center, 'a theory that had been investigated for years and found to be totally untrue.'"

And sure enough, when your leaders are total morons, that leads to a clear pattern of inexcusable neglect and wasted effort:

The FBI agent who arrested Zacarias Moussaoui in August 2001 accused headquarters of criminal negligence for its refusal to investigate Moussaoui aggressively after his arrest, according to court testimony Monday.

Agent Harry Samit testified under cross-examination at Moussaoui's trial that FBI headquarters' refusal to follow up "prevented a serious opportunity to stop the 9/11 attacks" that killed nearly 3,000 people.

...

Under cross-examination by defense attorney Edward MacMahon, Samit acknowledged that he predicted in an Aug. 18, 2001, memo that Moussaoui was a radical Islamic terrorist in a criminal conspiracy to hijack aircraft. Moussaoui ended up pleading guilty to two specific counts that Samit had explicitly predicted in his Aug. 18 memo.

Despite Samit's urgent pleadings, FBI headquarters refused to open a criminal investigation and refused Samit's entreaties to obtain a search warrant.


"You needed people in Washington to help you out?" MacMahon asked.

"Yes," Samit said.

"They didn't do that, did they?"

Samit said no.

He confirmed under questioning that he had attributed FBI inaction to "obstructionism, criminal negligence and careerism" in an earlier report.

It makes me sick to read about this. How do these people sleep at night?
tristero 3/20/2006 03:26:00 PM |

 
update below

He Takes Questions

by digby

Someone finally asked George W. Bush the one question I've been wanting someone to ask since 9/11:

"Do you believe terrorism and the war in Iraq are signs of Armageddon?"

He sputtered and blinked, the audience laughed and he said: "I've never really thought about it that way" and "this is the first of heard of that, by the way." And then he blathered on with his usual incoherent boilerplate, making no further reference to it openly or in religious codes speak, except to the extent he said we would militarily defend our ally Israel. I wonder how the Bosh loving legions of the Christian Right feel about that?

The questioning was quite pointed and he didn't much like it, practically begging part of the way through for it to be over. ("How long do you people do questions around here?" and "Doesn't anybody work in this town?")

He claimed that he'd never said that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11. Where did people get the idea that it was, do you suppose?

Posted 9/6/2003

Poll: 70% believe Saddam, 9-11 link

I believe that he majored in history at Yale, which is something that Yale should be very concerned with in terms of recruitment. His understanding of 20th century European history comes in at about fifth grade level.

He has said that his job is "to protect you" about 50 times. Does anyone find this paternalistic "I will protect you" stuff as creepy as I do? I thought Americans were supposed to be self reliant. I think Democrats ought to consider saying that "the president doesn't protect the American people all by himself. He isn't our father or our nanny. The American people, working together, protect our country."

What's the difference between Iraq and Iran? With Iraq there were 16 UN resolutions. (Of course, the invasion resolution to actually invade didn't pass, but who's counting?) Apparently, invading Iran is just a matter of getting the paperwork in order.

I did enjoy the question about domestic policy in which the questioner said that American children were facing "terrorists" in the streets every day. And then mentioned the images from Katrina and poverty and wondered what Bush was going to do about it? What do you suppose he was talking about?

His adolescent sense of humor seems more and more out of place considering the state of the world --- and his presidency. People still laugh, but it is awkward now.

When it was over he looked like he really, really needed a drink.

Oh and in case you haven't heard, we're fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here, the oceans don't protect us anymore, we have an enemy that hides in cave and 9/11 changed everything. And his job is to make decisions and protect us.


Update: Jonathan Schwartz at A Tiny Revolution noticed a few months ago that Bush's desire to protect us is very similar to Saddam's professed desire to protect the Iraqi people. It's one of those "I'm doing this for your own good, it hurts me more than it hurts you" kind of deals. no wonder I find it so creepy.


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digby 3/20/2006 10:10:00 AM |

 
Paint It Black

by tristero

Welcome to another Monday in Bushland. Let's catch up on two recent minor little incidents you may have missed celebrating three years of success in Iraq. What prevents either of them from being characterized a scandal of nation-shaking proportions should be patently obvious by now: neither involved, as far as we know, coitus per os.

The Black Room:

The new account reveals the extent to which the unit members mistreated prisoners months before and after the photographs of abuse from Abu Ghraib were made public in April 2004, and it helps belie the original Pentagon assertions that abuse was confined to a small number of rogue reservists at Abu Ghraib.

And Black Bag Jobs:

n December, the New York Times disclosed the NSA's warrantless electronic surveillance program, resulting in an angry reaction from President Bush. It has not previously been disclosed, however, that administration lawyers had cited the same legal authority to justify warrantless physical searches. But in a little-noticed white paper submitted by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to Congress on January 19 justifying the legality of the NSA eavesdropping, Justice Department lawyers made a tacit case that President Bush also has the inherent authority to order such physical searches. In order to fulfill his duties as commander in chief, the 42-page white paper says, "a consistent understanding has developed that the president has inherent constitutional authority to conduct warrantless searches and surveillance within the United States for foreign intelligence purposes."

...

It could not be learned whether the Bush administration has cited the legal authority to carry out such searches. A former marine, Mueller has waged a quiet, behind-the-scenes battle since 9/11 to protect his special agents from legal jeopardy as a result of aggressive new investigative tactics backed by the White House and the Justice Department, government officials say. During Senate testimony about the NSA surveillance program, however, Gonzales was at pains to avoid answering questions about any warrantless physical surveillance activity that may have been authorized by the Justice Department.

...

At least one defense attorney representing a subject of a terrorism investigation believes he was the target of warrantless clandestine searches. On Sept. 23, 2005--nearly three months before the Times broke the NSA story--Thomas Nelson wrote to U.S. Attorney Karin Immergut in Oregon that in the previous nine months, "I and others have seen strong indications that my office and my home have been the target of clandestine searches." In an interview, Nelson said he believes that the searches resulted from the fact that FBI agents accidentally gave his client classified documents and were trying to retrieve them. Nelson's client is Soliman al-Buthe, codirector of a now defunct charity named al-Haramain, who was indicted in 2004 for illegally taking charitable donations out of the country. The feds also froze the charity's assets, alleging ties to Osama bin Laden. The documents that were given to him, Nelson says, may prove that al-Buthe was the target of the NSA surveillance program.
The searches, if they occurred, were anything but deft. Late at night on two occasions, Nelson's colleague Jonathan Norling noticed a heavyset, middle-aged, non-Hispanic white man claiming to be a member of an otherwise all-Hispanic cleaning crew, wearing an apron and a badge and toting a vacuum. But, says Norling, "it was clear the vacuum was not moving." Three months later, the same man, waving a brillo pad, spent some time trying to open Nelson's locked office door, Norling says. Nelson's wife and son, meanwhile, repeatedly called their home security company asking why their alarm system seemed to keep malfunctioning. The company could find no fault with the system.

In October, Immergut wrote to Nelson reassuring him that the FBI would not target terrorism suspects' lawyers without warrants and, even then, only "under the most exceptional circumstances," because the government takes attorney-client relationships "extremely seriously." Nelson nevertheless filed requests, under the Freedom of Information Act, with the NSA. The agency's director of policy, Louis Giles, wrote back, saying, "The fact of the existence or nonexistence of responsive records is a currently and properly classified matter."

tristero 3/20/2006 08:12:00 AM |

Sunday, March 19, 2006

 
Liberal Bias In The Washington Post

by tristero

Propagating secularist creation myths:.

Scientists said yesterday they have found the best evidence yet supporting the theory that about 13.7 billion years ago, the universe suddenly expanded from the size of a marble to the size of the cosmos in less than a trillionth of a second.

And not a word of balance from the other side, as if the sincere faith of millions of Americans in a Christian God didn't matter at all to the Post's editors.

I just hate it when the media reports carefully vetted scientific data as fact and not as just one of many valid points of view. I'm not asking for them to ignore the opinions of these so-called scientists, but they really should report the fact there's a lot of controversy about whether this kind of evidence is valid. LIke, were you there, huh, Mr. Hotshot Washington Post? As if this ludicrous nonsense - a marble blows up like a baloon to become the entire universe in a trillionth of a second - is more plausible than Genesis? Give me a break!

Have some scepticism, people!
tristero 3/19/2006 06:01:00 PM |

 
Changing Public Opinion

by digby

John Amato has the video up of Brit Hume having a hyperventilating hissy fit this morning on Fox news at Bill Kristol's assertion that Feingold's motion is good for Democrats. Wow.

Brit seemed unusually concerned that Mara Liasson, Bill Kristol and Juan Williams all indicated that Feingold's move was either principled or good politics (or both) didn't he? And then he went completely ballistic when Juan Williams challenged his misleading assertion that the public is "surprisingly" "astonishingly" "overwhelmingly" in favor when asked "should we listen in on al Qaeda communications in the U.S." --- by pointing out that it's the illegality of the program that concerns people.

Hmmm. Brit's a bit emotional on this issue. In fact, he sounded downright defensive about it, which is very puzzling. The last I heard, this was great for Republicans, Democrats look silly, they're rallying the GOP base and alienating the middle. Just yesterday it seems I'd heard that Feingold is going to cost the Democrats the election. Why get so upset when everyone who's anyone agrees that this is NSA wiretapping is such a winner for the Republicans?

Now, you don't suppose that the Republicans have been bluffing about this issue, do you? It's a coincidence, I'm sure that they cracked the whip on Lincoln Chafee who's running in an extremely anti-Bush state. They can't worried that those numbers that show 25% percent of Republicans favor censure mean that this thing could actually motivate Democrats more than Republicans in the fall, can they?

Nah. He just had a little too much coffee this morning.

I think it's worthwhile to note what Bill Kristol said after Brit's little tirade:

This is smart for the Democratic Party. It is going straight at a strength of president Bush. You don't get into politics only to play at issues where you already have public opinion on your side. He's trying to change public opinion. I disagree with it, and I hope he doesn't succeed, but he's making the case that it's illegal, he's going to have editorial pages backing him up, and the Republicans are just whining that "oooh he's just trying to censure the president." They aren't making a substantive defense of the program.

It's a tough defense to make, once you start getting into the legality of it, as Hume's sputtering anger showed.

When one party is as unpopular as the president the the Republicans are now, the public is open to hearing things they haven't been willing to hear in a long time. Our polarized electorate suddenly isn't so polarized anymore, even though the gasbags refuse to admit it. For the first time in a long time, some people are willing to give our side a listen. It is vitally important that the Democrats use this opportunity to draw the country back from the hysteria that overtook it after 9/11, an emotional conflagration stoked by an opportunistic administration and a slavering media. That hysteria permitted them to normalize preventive war, torture and kidnapping --- and assert a radical, unconstitutional view of the role of the president in our government, none of which the country signed on to because it was all done in secret. This simply has to stop, and people need to start seeing Democrats stand up and declare "enough is enough."

There has never been a greater time or a greater hunger for our political leadershihp to offer a straightforward, principled way back from the feeling that the country is hurtling out of control. The censure motion puts out a marker that the end of this wild ride is almost over.


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digby 3/19/2006 04:18:00 PM |

 
Please Steal From MORE Of My Posts! I Don't Mind In The Slightest!

by tristero

Sorry, folks. I just can't resist. Jennifer Loven of AP today (March 19, 2006):

"Some look at the challenges in Iraq and conclude that the war is lost and not worth another dime or another day," President Bush said recently.

Another time he said, "Some say that if you're Muslim you can't be free."

"There are some really decent people," the president said earlier this year, "who believe that the federal government ought to be the decider of health care ... for all people."

Of course, hardly anyone in mainstream political debate has made such assertions.

When the president starts a sentence with "some say" or offers up what "some in Washington" believe, as he is doing more often these days, a rhetorical retort almost assuredly follows.

The device usually is code for Democrats or other White House opponents. In describing what they advocate, Bush often omits an important nuance or substitutes an extreme stance that bears little resemblance to their actual position.

He typically then says he "strongly disagrees" — conveniently knocking down a straw man of his own making.

...

Because the "some" often go unnamed, Bush can argue that his statements are true in an era of blogs and talk radio. Even so, "'some' suggests a number much larger than is actually out there," said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

A specialist in presidential rhetoric, Wayne Fields of Washington University in St. Louis, views it as "a bizarre kind of double talk" that abuses the rules of legitimate discussion.

Tristero, January 17, 2003:

Here is a three sentence excerpt of what he [Bush] actually said in that speech:

[T]here are some who would like to rewrite history -- revisionist historians is what I like to call them. Saddam Hussein was a threat to America and the free world in '91, in '98, in 2003. He continually ignored the demands of the free world, so the United States and friends and allies acted.

This short phrase is packed with a breathtaking array of logical fallacies, grammatical errors, lies by omission, distortions, and grotesquely unfair attacks. The most egregious tactic is, of course, projection . As Bush rewrites the WMD search out of history, he has the unmitigated gall to accuse his opponents of rewriting history.

Bush also uses personalization here: 'revisionist historians is what I like to call them.' In a very interesting article in The Nation this week, Renana Brooks discusses the extraordinary amount that Bush personalizes. While The Nation article is not available online, a similar article on Brooks's website notes that personalization is the 'hallmark' of an abusive personality. And, Brooks notes, Bush uses personalization all the time, for example in his speech to Congress immediately post 9/11: 'I will not falter, I will not tire, I will not fail.'

In addtion, Bush employs one of his favorite constructions in the above quote: 'There are some who...' Usually, Bush uses the 'some who' technique merely to exaggerate an opponent's position (the straw man) as ,for example, here, regarding tax cuts: 'Some members of Congress support tax relief but say my proposal is too big' . It is rather rare for Bush to combine the straw man with projection, and for good reason. The purpose of a straw man is to create an easily refuted argument. If that straw man is, in fact, a projection of your own position, you are saying that your argument is incredibly weak.

Also, Tristero, June 1, 2003:

And did you catch that straw man towards the end? "Some on the left, I guess are saying force in Iran..." Common Bush construction.

I'm quite serious: if you can use something I wrote in a blog, steal it. Make it your own; don't bother crediting me if you don't want to. I'm perfectly delighted! And you don't have to wait three plus years, you know.

Hat tip to Jeff at Protein Wisdom who really is exactly as Atrios describes him.

[Update: Needlenose notes that when you have arguments with non-existent people, there are some (hah hah!) who will rightly question your sanity.]

[Update: There are some - I just love it! - who think I was seriously accusing an AP reporter of slogging through my three-year-old blogposts looking for story ideas to rip off. To clarify (I hope): I'm sure she wasn't; obviously I was joking around about that. What's no joke is that, apparently, it took more than three years before someone in the MSM noticed this obsessive rhetorical tic of Bush's. If anyone knows of an earlier discussion of the "there are some who" construction, by all means lemme know. When I wrote my posts, I knew of none. I don't think even Renanna Brooks pointed to them in the Nation article I mentioned.]
tristero 3/19/2006 02:35:00 PM |

 
For Republicans, Bad News Is Good News. And Good News Is Good News.

by tristero

It's been blogged around, but it's too great to pass up. Jamison Foser::

...NBC's Matt Lauer made an extraordinary claim this week. Referring to Bush's approval ratings -- which seem to reach a new low every day -- Lauer asked Tim Russert:

LAUER: These approval numbers, Tim, are they in some ways a blessing in disguise for Republicans in these midterm elections? Because, basically, they can look and say, 'Look, I don't have a popular president here. I can turn my back on that president, or even oppose that president going into these elections and stem the tide of this voter anger.'

Think about that for a moment: Lauer suggests that Bush's low approval rating is a good thing for Republican candidates, because now, they can run away from him. We assume Lauer would agree that it would be a positive for Republican candidates if Bush had a high approval rating. What, then, is left? Can anything be bad news for Republicans?

...

It's about time media stop portraying every new controversy as a danger to Democrats, and start recognizing that these things are threats to Republicans: they're the people in charge of a government widely seen as incompetent and corrupt; they're the party led by a horribly unpopular president; and they're the people who pushed a soundly rejected Social Security privatization scheme. And yet, media see everything as an opportunity for them, and a danger for Democrats. Osama bin Laden may be dead? Good news for Republicans: They got bin Laden! New tapes prove bin Laden is still alive? Good news for Republicans: It reminds people of the threat of terrorism! Democrats don't criticize Bush? Good news for Republicans: Democrats are timid! Democrats do criticize Bush? Good news for Republicans: Democrats are shrill!

Enough.

tristero 3/19/2006 02:06:00 PM |

 
The Boundries Of Our Power

by digby

I'm glad to see Steve Clemons being quoted saying this in today's harsh Philadelphia Inquirer editorial:

Before Iraq, said Steven C. Clemons, a useful mystique surrounded the strength of the United States. Clemons heads foreign policy studies at the New America Foundation.

Rogue nations such as Iran didn't know the boundaries of our power. This blundering war of choice in Iraq has revealed them.

I've been saying this for a long time and it still seems to me to be the most salient strategic argument for not going into Iraq after 9/11. Back in February 2004 I wrote:

I get the impression from casual conversation and reading the papers that a lot of Americans understand that Junior lied to get us into Iraq, but they don't think it really hurt anything. In fact, since Saddam was a prick and it didn't really cost us much to take him out (well, except for the loss of life and the billions spent), it was a pretty good thing to do, on balance. Kicking a little butt after 9/11 probably sent a message we needed to send.

The problem with this is that they don't understand what a huge error in judgment the Iraq operation was in terms of our long term security and readiness. Nor do they understand the extent to which we damaged our alliances and how dangerous it was to blow our credibility at a time like this.

[...]


... Wes Clark and others made the argument some time ago that Iraq was a distraction from the real threat and it has been said by many that the invasion would lead to more recruitment of terrorists. And, there have been other discussions about the effects of a stretched thin military of reserves and national guard troops. But, I haven't heard any talk about what an enormous amount of damage has been done by the conscious exposure of our intelligence services as paper tigers.

Regardless of whether they hyped, sexed up or pimped out the intelligence on Iraq, the fact is that by invading Iraq the way we did and being proved complete asses now that no WMD have been discovered, one of our best defenses has been completely destroyed. It may have always been nothing but a pretense that we had hi-tech, super duper satellites with x-ray vision and all-knowing eavesdropping devices that can hear a pin drop half a world away but it was a very useful pretense. Nobody knew exactly what we were capable of. Now they do. It appears to everyone on the planet that our vaunted intelligence services couldn't find water even if they fell off of a fucking aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf.

It's this kind of thing that makes really crazy wackos like Kim Jong Il make mistakes. When a hugely powerful country like the United States proves to the entire world that it is not as powerful as everyone thought, petty tyrants and ambitious generals tend to get excited. This is why mighty nations should never fight wars unless they absolutely have to. It is always better to have enemies wonder whether they are as omnipotent as they appear. They should not risk proving otherwise unless they have no choice.

The Bush administration (and frankly, many in the country) believed that it was necessary to make a strong show of force in order to deter more terrorist attacks.It didn't matter where, just that it was done. But Rumsfeld and Cheney and Wolfowitz and others who had been nurturing ever more bizarre, ivory tower theories of American power over two decades believed that it would be better to do it with fewer troops than the professionals considered necessary. Not finding WMD was never considered a serious problem, because they had never really felt it would make a difference one way or the other. Indeed, on some levels, it was better if they didn't. To prove to our enemies that even if we lie, even if we send in a handful of troops, even if we don't prepare and even if we go it alone with only Great Britain and Poland as our allies, we still win --- well, that's power.

(They have used this theory of power quite effectively in domestic politics. They prefer to win with a slight majority and then declare a great victory, rub the other side's nose in it, because it creates a sense of helplessness to constantly lose narrowly.)

Take another look at that famous comment by the anonymous Bush aide in the New York Times magazine article by Ron Susskind:

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

This was not metaphorical. They literally believed that they could create their own reality. I don't think people really understand that. And why wouldn't they? It's what they had done for some years with great success in this country.
It's their worldview. They believe that if the act like victors, if they say they are strong, if they procalim victory --- then it's true.


The mantra on the right remains that everything changed after 9/11. (Dick Cheney said it again today.) Let's assume that's correct. If so, then undertaking this war was a recklessly dangerous experiment in psychological warfare that failed and left this country much weaker than it was before 9/11. All this money spent, all this fighting, all this messianic freedom rhetoric has actually made this country weaker than it has been at any time since the end of WWII. We have proven that we are a befuddled, undisciplined giant that allowed a radical political faction with half-baked delusions of grandeur to hijack the country. Either we make a precipitous course correction pretty soon, or the rest of the world will start banding together to get us under control.



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digby 3/19/2006 12:50:00 PM |

 
Liberal Boogeymen

by digby

In an otherwise uncharacteristically astute column, George Will writes:

But who, he wonders, will control the likes of Moqtada al-Sadr? Imagine, Ricks says, another cleric, the Rev. Al Sharpton, controlling the Bronx with a militia he can call into the streets at any time.

Writers at the Washington Post believe that the closest thing we Americans have to a violent radical cleric is a black liberal from godless NY city. (He didn't even have to the good graces to pick Farrakhan, for god's sake.) And here I thought liberals' biggest problem was that we didn't have enough of that old time religion.

I have news for both Ricks and Will. There are plenty of radical American clerics who I can imagine controlling large portions of the country with a well-armed militia, and none of them are black or liberal.



And why do you suppose an image of armed blacks came to mind when they wanted to evoke the boogeyman?



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digby 3/19/2006 10:52:00 AM |

 
We Told You So.

by tristero

Three years on, the Times finally gets it.

The last three years have shown how little our national leaders understood Iraq, and have reminded us how badly attempts at liberation from the outside have gone in the past.

We told you so. And we weren't alone. The truth is that the majority of the entire world told you so. Long before March 19, 2003, a day as infamous as Dec 7, 1941. Or September 11, 2001 for that matter.

I'll say it again. I have never felt worse about knowing I was absolutely right than I did about the March of Folly. This was a lesson only incompetents unfit for public service needed to learn.

Furthermore, it was - no, it is - inexcusable that the American press, including the New York Times, deliberately refused to report the real story of the run-up to war. They did so out of fear and out of greed. They were afraid of retaliation from the extreme-right Bush administration and their amen choirs. They were seduced with big bucks via increased ratings and sales from dramatic we-are-there imbedded coverage. There were also outright bribes.

But even if the Times now does get it, they still see fit to cut the man personally responsible for opening the Gates of Hell more slack than he deserves. They write, "Chances are that at the time George W. Bush did not have an inkling of how badly he was being served by the decision makers at the Pentagon." Bullshit. Bush knew exactly what was going on. He knew he was being fed lies. And he knew he was deliberately feeding the American public lies. Look again at The Sixteen Words, my friends, every single syllable of which was carefully crafted to lie. Look at his body language as he told that lie and all the other ones.

Nope. Bush was in on the lying and inept planning from the start. As he was with the response to Katrina and every other disaster of his administration.
tristero 3/19/2006 03:19:00 AM |

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