Hullabaloo

Friday, June 30, 2006

 
American Hero

by digby

Every once in a while you read about or get to meet someone who displays by his or her actions one of those wonderful fundamental lessons in personal integrity, intellectual consistency and common decency that makes you think this species might not be doomed after all. Here's one:

The U.S. Navy lawyer who challenged the Bush administration's efforts to try terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, walked a professional tightrope between fellow officers trying to gain speedy convictions and what he considered a moral imperative to buck the chain of command and vigorously defend his client.

Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift could have taken the easy route of arranging a plea bargain for Salim Ahmed Hamdan, the Yemeni alleged to have worked as a driver and bodyguard for Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

But fearful of the dangerous precedent that could be set by denying international standards of justice to those swept up in the war on terrorism, Swift battled to get the rights and protections of the Geneva Convention for his client.

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that President Bush had overstepped his war powers in sending Hamdan and nine others to face military tribunals, America's first since World War II.

"I feel like we all won, that the rule of law won, and that is essentially what we are all about," Swift said of the high court's validation of his three-year campaign on behalf of his 36-year-old client.

Swift was assigned to defend Hamdan by the Pentagon in November 2003 and initially was ordered by a superior officer to secure a plea bargain so there would be a timely conviction.

"I had the unenviable task of going down to this guy from Yemen in the uniform of people who had been treating him badly and saying, 'If you don't make a deal you may never see me again,' " Swift recalled of his first meeting at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo with Hamdan and his decision to fight a process stacked against the defendant.

Swift was allowed a rare phone call to the Guantanamo prison Thursday to give Hamdan the news of their legal victory. He described the prisoner as "humble, not jubilant, and very, very thankful."

"It was gratifying to hear the belief in his voice, the recognition that mighty people don't always get to do what they want," Swift said of Hamdan, who, he added, understands that his case is far from over.

After more than 100 meetings at the remote U.S. naval base in southeastern Cuba, Swift said, he and Hamdan have developed a trusting relationship, and he would gladly represent the Yemeni in any future trial, military or civilian.

Colleagues attributed the high court ruling to what they considered to be Swift's determination to protect the integrity of U.S. jurisprudence against a Pentagon bent on retribution for terrorism attacks on U.S. forces.

"It took exceptional courage. He had to risk himself being alienated from the larger military establishment," said David Scheffer, law professor and director of the Center for International Human Rights at Northwestern University. "He must have known when he took this on that he was risking his career, and sadly he may have done that within the U.S. Navy."

Though Swift's successful challenge of the tribunal's legitimacy will probably open doors in the private sector and academia for the Navy lawyer, Scheffer said, Swift has reportedly been passed over for promotion.

"It was a gutsy move, and he did it with complete dedication and devotion to the cause," Benjamin Sharp of the Washington office of Perkins Coie said of Swift, with whom the Seattle-based law firm collaborated in Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld.

Sharp speculated that Swift's military career was probably damaged by his defense of Hamdan, a possibility the naval lawyer also alluded to.

"I love the military. I love my career and I'm proud of it," Swift said, noting he would be eligible for early retirement in nine months and would leave the Navy unless he was promoted. "One thing that has been a great revelation for me is that you may love the military, but it doesn't necessarily love you."

The military has many men and women of great physical courage. That's the point, after all. But it takes a person of exceptional character to be willing to take on the military hierarchy from within in order to preserve our fundamental principles. I'm skeptical that the threat of Islamic terrorism can be properly categorized as a war but if it is, one of the big battles being fought is for the integrity of the American system, and the battle is internal, not external. In that battle, this guy is a hero.

Swift appeared briefly on Hardball yesterday and had to endure an unbearably puerile interview from Chris Matthews, but he said a couple of things that I think are so simple and yet so important that it always boggles my mind that they get lost in the argument:

MATTHEWS: What about the charge made recently, just a couple minutes ago by Kate O‘Beirne of the “National Review,” that people who fight us who are not in uniform, who do not represent countries who are party to the Geneva Convention shouldn‘t be free riders? They shouldn‘t get Geneva Convention treatment. They should be treated like thugs.

SWIFT: Well, you know, if you‘re looking at it from that way, we have a lot of criminals here in this country. And to prejudge anyone that we capture outside the country as a thug, why are we having a trial in the first place? We‘ve already decided they were guilty.

What the Supreme Court said is you have the trial first, you use the procedures that are set up under international law, and then you decide whether they‘re a thug. You don‘t make the thug determination going in.

Why is this so hard to understand? We already know they picked up a whole lot of innocent and low level nobodies in Afghanistan and shipped them off to Gitmo. In the early days, the US was paying the Northern Alliance $5,000 per head and the NA was handing over their tribal rivals and anybody else they wanted to get rid of. I'm sure Kato and her barely repressed racist allies on the right don't think it matters if some poor innocent wog gets tortured and locked up forever, but civilized people have come to recognise that show trials, kangaroo courts and lynching are immoral --- and counterproductive. If you want to stress liberal values, the rule of law and democracy as the way forward in these fundamentalist religious cultures, you can't behave this way. It doesn't make you look tough or strong; it makes you look like you don't believe in your own system --- and that makes you weak.

Bin Laden and his ilk are much more sophisticated than are Cheney and Rummy and the starry eyed neocons. He gets that our soft underbelly is our leadership's cowardly willingness to use him for political purposes. It's lucky for this country that we have people like Lt Commander Swift and many others who didn't buy into the argument that this country was so threatened by this loose band of religious psychopaths that it had to discard everything it believed in. That's the real strength of America and the slim reed we all hang onto: individual citizens who are willing to stand up for principle (and a system that's strong enough (so far) to support them) even as they suffer personally for it.

I thank Lt Commander Swift and all the others in the military justice system who managed to fight off the temptation to give in to the ridiculous GWOT juggernaut to take this all the way to the Supreme Court. It won't solve the numerous problems of this ridiculous "war" or this dangerous administration, but it goes some way in beginning to restore my faith in the institutions of the courts and the military. (Our democratic political institutions, on the other hand, seem on the verge of self-destruction.)



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digby 6/30/2006 09:21:00 AM |

Thursday, June 29, 2006

 

Death Of A Martian

by poputonian

With all this talk about the cosmos, it raises the inevitable question, what would a flea name its dog? The answer, obviously, is Martian. (More on this in a few minutes.)

But first there is a need to address more earthly concerns -- mainstream kind of concerns -- and once again, Susan Jacoby is doing the heavy lifting. Here she leads into a quotation made by Robert Green Ingersoll on July 4, 1876, the 100th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence:

Those who cherish secular values have too often allowed conservatives to frame public policy debates as conflicts between "value-free" secularists and religious representatives of supposedly unchanging moral principles. But secularists are not value-free; their values are simply grounded in earthly concerns rather than in anticipation of heavenly rewards or fear of infernal punishments. No one in public life today upholds secularism and humanism in the uncompromising terms used by Ingersoll more than 125 years ago.

"Secularism teaches us to be good here and now. I know nothing better than goodness. Secularism teaches us to be just here and now. It is impossible to be juster than just. Secularism has no 'castles in Spain.' It has no glorified fog. It depends upon realities, upon demonstrations; and its end is to make this world better every day -- to do away with poverty and crime, and to cover the world with happy and contented homes."

These values belong at the center, not in the margins, of the public square. It is past time to restore secularism, and its noble and essential contributions at every stage of the American experiment, to its proper place in our nation's historical memory and vision of the future.

Yesterday, Pach caught Barack Obama marginalizing the left for not courting evangelicals with enough fervor, but a greater concern to me was BOs outright acquiescence on matters of religious indoctrination via government sponsored rituals:

"It is doubtful that children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance feel oppressed or brainwashed as a consequence of muttering the phrase `under God,'" [Obama] said.

One hundred eighty days of school ... twelve years. Sure. They won't feel a thing.

The flea who named its dog Martian was this Flea, the bass guitarist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. It seems that Martian passed away during the recording of their latest album, Stadium Arcadium. Martian was a fixture and a source of companionship for the band during the recording of their two prior hit albums, Californication (1999) and By The Way (2002). The latest work is comprised of two CDs, one called Jupiter and the other Mars, which suggests the album has something to do with the Universe. But front man Anthony Kiedis tells Rolling Stone magazine that "love and women, pregnancies and marriages, relationship struggles -- those are real and profound influences on this record." If that's the case, why did they close out with a beautiful song called Death of a Martian?

By the way, have you ever noticed that cats are like conservatives -- narcissistic, self-serving, aloof, and pissy -- while dogs are like liberals -- loyal, engaging, altruistic, and eager to please? Just askin'.

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poputonian 6/29/2006 03:11:00 PM |

 
Whatever

by digby

Glenn Greenwald has a nice primer posted about the Supreme Court decision on Gitmo and executive power. He optimistically concludes:

...opponents of monarchical power should celebrate this decision. It has been some time since real limits were placed on the Bush administration in the area of national security. The rejection of the President's claims to unlimited authority with regard to how Al Qaeda prisoners are treated is extraordinary and encouraging by any measure. The decision is an important step towards re-establishing the principle that there are three co-equal branches of government and that the threat of terrorism does not justify radical departures from the principles of government on which our country was founded

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Isn't it pretty to think so? Certainly some of the legal questions about presidential wartime powers seem to have been answered. But from a political standpoint, I'm with Atrios about the practical effect of this ruling:

My quick take is that it's certainly an important symbolic victory, but this administration's contempt for the law, the constitution, and the balance/separation of powers that our system rests on isn't going to be very affected by what 5 people in black robes say. They've ignored Congress and they'll ignore the Court too, leaving our mainstream media with more time to deal with the impending threat of blogofascism.

This decision will ultimately feed into conservative boogeyman number 438: judicial activism. Look for Justice Sunday IV: Vengeance is Mine Sayeth Delay. And expect many more calls to spike John Paul Stevens' pudding with arsenic. This is the beauty of the conservo-machine. When your primary political tools are both intimidation and victimization, you can spin anything to your advantage.

Here's Trent Lott doing a triple axel:

LOTT: I think some people are probably laughing at us. This is ridiculous and outrageous. Now in legal speak, let me say, I have not read the entire opinion, nor the dissents. But preliminarily my opinion is they probably didn’t even have jurisdiction. They shouldn’t have ruled the way they did. This is not a bunch of pussycats we’re talking about here. These are people that have made it clear in many instances that they would kill Americans if they got out. This is Osama bin Laden’s driver. And this is one other example of why the American people have lost faith in so much of our federal judiciary. This is a very bad decision in my opinion.

Tonya Harding never sounded this nuts.

I think this could be used to the Democrats' advantage if they were willing to risk changing the terms of the debate for this midterm election and aggressively confront Karl Rove's "you talkin' to me?" trash talk campaign. The Supremes have provided a basis from which to assert congressional perogatives and a hook on which to hang the discussion. Perhaps they will. I hope so, because I am getting a terrible feeling that a lot of rank and file Democrats are going to take a pass on voting this time; no matter how much they dislike Bush and disapprove of his policies, it's very hard to see at this point what difference it will make if the congress changes hands.

Unless the Dems start making the case that Democrats will confront the president if they take power, it's hard to see why turnout will be high enough to offset the Karl Rove red-meat-travelling-salvation-show. He has made a fetish out of exciting his base for the past two elections and at this point it's all he's got. Unfortunately, the Democratic response, just as it has been since the early 90's, is to run from its base and play to swing voters. This hasn't been working out very well for them and it seems remarkably counterintuitive this time out.

I watched the last big change midterm in 1994 with keen interest and I don't recall the Republicans pulling their punches out of fear of upsetting the swing voters in potential pick-up districts. At least they didn't do it on a national level --- they spent months utterly destroying Bill Clinton and tying every Democrat to his "failures." (I recall being completely exhausted defending the president to a brainwashed wingnut boss who demanded that I "explain" my position to him over and over again.) They made the calculation that they could create a strong enough appetite for blood that their base would turn out in large numbers and the Democrats would be disillusioned and stay home.

In much the same way, I think Democrats desperately need to see their leaders take it to this president. He's dramatically unpopular, his war is considered an abject failure by a large majority and he's obsessed with secrecy and power. I think the concept of presidential overreach, with its echoes of Nixon, are issues that speak to the rank and file and would give the base the assurance that if the Democrats take control of the congress, the congress will take back it's constitutional perogatives and provide oversight.

I doubt this will happen. Apparently a president mired in the mid-30's with a GOP Eunuch Caucus that has enthusiastically signed off on every crackpot policy he's put forth can still say boo! and the Dems will still believe it's in their best interest to be measured and moderate. What a shame.


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digby 6/29/2006 01:18:00 PM |

Wednesday, June 28, 2006

 
Conservative Manifestos For Idiots

by digby

Kevin Drum linked to an article by Michelle Cottle in an obscure, subscription-only, outmoded journal in which she discusses the latest rightwing punlishing phenom, the child brainwashing author named Katharine DeBrecht who wrote the alleged runaway best-seller called "Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed!"

I hadn't heard of this children's book, but apparently Limbaugh is rivaling Oprah these days and managed to get 30,000 of them sold after mentioning it on his show. Debrecht now has a contract for several more books, the announced titles of which include:

"Help! Mom! Hollywood's in My Hamper!"
"Help! Mom! The Ninth Circuit Nabbed the Nativity!"
"Help! Mom! There Are Lawyers in My Lunchbox!"

I'm not kidding.

But, let's be honest about this. These children's books aren't actually aimed at children. They can't be. Kids won't read books about the Ninth Circuit. These books are cheap propaganda items aimed at the neanderthal base of the Republican Party, for whom Ann Coulter's screeds are over their heads. There are millions of them. They'll buyt them "for the children" but they'll read them outloud to the poor tykes over and over again for their own education.

It reminds me of the theory we've all seen circulated about why Bush always sounds like he's lecturing to five year olds when he has one of these town meetings. ("See, social security should make you feel secure. That's why the word security is in the name, see...") The only reasonable explanation for this infantile rhetoric is that he's regurgitating these explanations as they were explained to him.

These "Help Mom!" books will come in very handy as debate prep for George Allen, Junior's intellectual heir. And they will undoubtedly become the "Conscience of a Conservative" of this new Pantload era of the conservative movement. That's how low conservative philosophy has sunk.

Update: I greatly enjoyed Kevin's commenters' suggestions for further books. Here are just a few of the gems:

Help! Mom! There's a Homosexual in My Closet!(...hmmm, not quite right. Too many hidden meanings.)

Help! Mom! There's a Catholic Priest in the Rectory!(...again, no. People could read something into that.)

Help Mom! There are DEA Agents in my Viagra stash!

Help! Mom! A village in Texas lost its idiot!

Help! Mom! There's a Doughnut Hole in Grandpa's Prescription Drug Coverage!

Help Mom! I can't remember the Ten Commandments!

Help! Mom! The Religious Right Won't Stop Sniffing My Panties!

Help! Mom! I've got two moms!
digby 6/28/2006 03:28:00 PM |

Tuesday, June 27, 2006

 
Mainstream Beliefs

by digby


Atrios mentions this kerfluffle about Jerome Armstrong being a believer in astrology and how it's scandalized certain elements of the wingnutosphere (and the left blogosphere, too.) His point is that a belief in astrology is no less mainstream than many of the religious beliefs people hold --- beliefs which we secular liberals must be very, very careful not to disparage or be accused of ruining everything for the Democrats.

Let me tell you, it is as big a faux pas to disparage astrology or any of the new age or non-traditional spiritual belief system as it is to put down mainstream religion. I found this out the hard way when I wrote a very snarky and admittedly insulting post one day and got more angry feedback than any post I've ever done. These beliefs in the aggregate may be as widely held as a belief in God and it cuts across all political and cultural lines. Call it kooky if you will, but those who think secular liberals should STFU about traditional religion would be well advised to STFU about this too.



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digby 6/27/2006 05:54:00 PM |

 
Rush's Law

by digby

I know that a good establishment liberal would refrain from even discussing the fact that Rush Limbaugh likes to go to one of the underage sex capitals of the world with a bottle of Viagra in one hand and God knows what in the other. Lee Siegel would find it wholly imappropriate of me to even bring it up. After all, Rush and his allies may have spent years harrassing Democrats for sexual indiscretions, but it's beneath the blogs to sink to his level and make a big deal out of this.

But I just can't help myself.

Nonetheless, one thing I have learned is that it is useless to call Republicans hypocrites. The word has no meaning anymore and we should just retire the concept. Instead, I would propose that we use these many occasions in which wingnuts are revealed for the degenerate phonies they are as "Oprah moments."

Rush should be the poster boy for a new movement. It isn't right that he is the only man in America who can get his Daddy's Little Helpers prescribed in his doctor's name instead of his own. Many men, I'm sure, would be grateful not to have to deal with the embarrassment of a pharmacist knowing about his need for Viagra and now that he's known as a user, the least Rush can do is promote the right for all Americans to carry them without a prescription in their names, as he does.

Rush should be urged to share his story with America. Here's he is, an impotent, thrice divorced, ex-drug addict, conservative, parolee who went on a sex tour in the Caribbean and found himself rudely embarrassed for carrying recreational prescription drugs in his doctor's name. Who can't relate to that? This is a man who has been run through the mud and I think we would benefit from a thorough national conversation to try to understand Rush's urgent need for sex in one of the most poverty stricken countries in the world. Wouldn't he feel unburdened if he could share his thoughts with some of his staunch allies like James Dobson or Pat Robertson? Surely they'd be willing to hear his testimony.

And from the conservo-libertarian standpoint, I frankly think anonymous Viagra for every American male should be a right, not a privilege. The jack-booted customs agents should not be able to roust good taxpaying citizens who just need a little discrete help when they go on vacation and want to score a couple of underage sex slaves. It's unamerican. Perhaps some legislation is in order. We could call it Rush's Law.

The main thing is that we shouldn't condemn Rush for his hypocrisy. We should extend an understanding hand and help him come to terms with his problems. He's just another flawed, dysfunctional, rich, celebrity Republican drug addict with a taste for kinky sex. Doesn't he deserve our compassion? I think perhaps we need to ask our Republican representatives to step up and show their support for this flawed, but human, leader of their movement. After all, forgiveness is the Christian thing to do.



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digby 6/27/2006 02:20:00 PM |

Monday, June 26, 2006

 
Bob Herbert's Question

by tristero

Bob Herbert poses a question which deserves some thought, because although the immediate answer is obvious, it leads to one of the great question marks of the 21st century:

I wonder whether Americans will ever become fed up with the loathsome politicking, the fear-mongering, the dissembling and the gruesome incompetence of this crowd.

Well, in fact, polls say that some two-thirds of Americans *are* fed up. So maybe Herbert means something about the public expression of outrage, something like, "Where are the legions of mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, lovers, and friends of the soldiers dying for Bush's stupidity? Why haven't we heard from them? Where, after Katrina, are the Kings, the Malcolms, the Stokelys? Where are the Berrigans? The Dillingers? Where are the Edward R. Murrows, the Oppenheimers, the Ellsbergs, the McGoverns, the McCarthys?"

The thing is. there are many of these, too. Including, off the top of my head, Cindy Sheehan, Brady Kiesling, Colleen Rowley, Richard Clarke, Bob Herbert himself, Amy Goodman, James Hansen, Al Gore, Howard Dean, John Murtha, Paul Krugman, Barbara Ehrenreich. All very different people with very different concerns and, to be sure, very different politics. But all share a deep level of competence, intelligence, and public commitment to the notion of a small "d" democratic America.

So in thinking about it, Herbert's question surely isn't about the dearth of protest and dissent. As for positive alternatives to Bushism, Herbert knows as well as the rest of us that plenty of those exist. What Herbert is getting at is that all that protest, all those proposals are happening in an organizational void. His question really is,

"When will America again have two national political parties?"

I honestly wish I could say 2006. There are some positive signs that a second party could emerge, in the face of major attempts to suppress it, from what's left of the Democratic Party. It certainly would save a lot of time. Building a second party from scratch will be no picnic.

But let's not kid outselves. A political party that announces "A New Direction" which scrupulously avoids Iraq, Katrina, and the fundamental issue of competence in government... That's not a political party with national influence as a goal.

That's the bad news. The good news is that the time is ripe - overripe - for a new generation of intelligent, hard-nosed, passionate, and responsible political organizers to create a truly mainstream political party that could easily route the Bushists. 'Cause what's goin' on is just plain ridiculous and everyone knows it.
tristero 6/26/2006 03:33:00 AM |

Sunday, June 25, 2006

 
Premature Anti-Blogofascism

by digby


It is with great regret that I must resign from the vast left wing blogospheric conspiracy today. The time has come to choose one's allegiances, and mine must lie with my liege lords, the journalistic and political leadership who have brought us where we are today. I can no longer be associated with the barbaric, illiterate jacknapes who presume to call their betters' judgment into question.

You see, I've come to realize that this business of "punditry" and "politics" is not something anyone can just "do." It is what one is born to, what one is meant to do, what one is. Some people are simply designed to have superior opinions. And those people are well known by others who have superior opinions. It is outside the natural order of things for unwashed, unknown rabble like me to set forth my ideas in the same public arena as someone like The New Republic's Lee Siegel --- and certainly not an intellectual adventurer such as David Brooks, who wrote the most important sociological work of our time, "On Paradise Drive." (Only a man of great courage could have forced himself to enter a Red Lobster and mingle with the lower ranks and we must all be grateful for those dispatches from the wild. It is from first rate observers such as he that we rustics out in Real America can better understand our own shortcomings --- as well as our delightful simple charm, of course.)

You see, the skills required to opine on political, cultural and current events are very, very special. They cannot be acquired by simply observing or reading or thinking. And writing about such topics cannot be considered useful merely because hundreds of thousands of people read your words. If anything, the opposite is true. Any circulation over 70,000 --- or outside the elite capitals --- must, by definition, be low-brow, cultural detritus and simply not worth our time. (I won't even mention the horror of the rampant solecisms and bad grammar. My God, the grammar!) One must consider this burgeoning "medium," if that is what it is, as just another vehicle for the lowest common denominator (as is that similarly destructive invention, television.) One is best served by simply not participating in it and shunning those who do. Only the wrong people are involved and I'm afraid that tears it for me, gentlemen.

I now regret very much having participated in this ignoble discourse over the past four years. When I read Mr Siegel's claim that I was a "blogofascist" I nearly fainted dead away, the pain to my conscience was so sharp. What could be worse, I asked myself, than having the "culture blogger" of The New Republic disdain my work? What could be worse? He might as well have taken a knife and chopped off my middle finger.

Here is a man of high distinction who is clearly a knight among knaves and whose only mission in life is to educate and elucidate for the plebeian masses what they should enjoy. (His review of the Tom Cruise masterpiece "Eyes Wide Shut" alone is a education in superior taste and insight.) Yet from this lofty cliff he boldly stepped off and entered the battle with a couple of blog posts (ah, irony!) so profound and so cutting that he may well have changed the course of history:

It's a bizarre phenomenon, the blogosphere. It radiates democracy's dream of full participation but practices democracy's nightmare of populist crudity, character-assassination, and emotional stupefaction. It's hard fascism with a Microsoft face. It puts some people, like me, in the equally bizarre position of wanting desperately for Joe Lieberman to lose the Democratic primary to Ned Lamont so that true liberal values might, maybe, possibly prevail, yet at the same time wanting Lamont, the hero of the blogosphere, to lose so that the fascistic forces ranged against Lieberman might be defeated. (Every critical event in democracy is symbolic of the problem with democracy.)

Yes. One does wonder about its utility at times like these, doesn't one?

The next day he further expounded on his important new thesis:

I am overwhelmed by the intolerance and rage in the blogosphere. Conscientiously criticize, in the form of a real argument, blogospheric favorites like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, and the response isn't similar criticism, done conscientiously and in the form of an argument, but insults, personal attacks, and even threats. This truly is the stuff of thuggery and fascism.

Dear me!

Mr Siegel knew that the blogofascists would mercilessly attack him with shocking epithets like "asshole" and "wanker" and even threats yet he forged on, unconcerned with his own safety, fearlessly determined to change hearts and minds with his unique professional gifts of subtle argumentation and gentle persuasion. The time had come to draw a line in the sand. My god, what an inspiration this man is.

I shall not let him down. That column changed my life. Even as I knew it had the ring of truth, I tried to resist, telling myself that he couldn't be talking about me --- not me. How can I be a flip-flopping cowardly America-hater while at the same time a fascist? A bleeding heart, terrorist coddler while also a brownshit? How does this work? I was finally persuaded by his preturnaturally sagacious observation that the man I looked up to as a father figure (indeed, a demi-God of sorts) Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, is actually a rootless former soldier looking for meaning in a stark post-modern landscape of internet cafes and shiny espresso carts. This is the man who is leading his listserve army of angry, middle aged, liberal professionals into blind blogofascism. The writing is on the wall, my friends:

Two other traits of fascism are its hatred of the processes of politics, and the knockabout origins of its adherents. Communism was hatched by elites. Fascism was born along the drifting paths of rootless men, often ex-soldiers who had fought in the First World War and been demobilized. They turned European politics into a madhouse of deracinated ambition.

In a 2004 article in The San Francisco Chronicle, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga told a reporter that he moved to El Salvador in the late 1970s with his family--one of his parents is Salvadoran--who apparently had financial interests there. The article relates:

"I believe in government. I was in El Salvador in the late '70s during the civil war and I saw government as a life-and-death situation," he said. "There was no one to root for. The government was a corrupt plutocracy and the rebels were Maoists. The concept of government is important."

He remembers bullets flying in the marketplace and watching on television as government soldiers executed guerrillas. He also remembers watching footage of the Solidarity movement in Poland.

He was 9, and he asked his father what that was all about. His father, a furniture salesman, said, "It's just politics."

The future blogger said, "Tell me all about it."

So he loves government, but hates politics. There's something chilling about that.

It makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck doesn't it? Is Siegel the only man in America who can see the threat? Can he be the only man in America who is willing to stand up and speak the words "Never Again?"

No he is not. Today, I have joined the resistance and say goodbye to all that. I've been called up by my new leader, Lee Siegel, defender of intellectual rigor in our national discourse. The Great Lee Siegel who wrote this:

You'd think that staring into the mirror and repeating your name over and over would have the opposite effect of helping you get out of yourself, but that's not the case. The idea is to find a place so deep inside yourself that, with intense concentration, you look to yourself like a stranger. Your very name becomes an alien phrase. Physically, you start to seem imaginary. Spiritually, you start to seem more real. Hoffenshtoffen suggests keeping a packed suitcase standing in the middle of your apartment as a symbolic reminder of that magical fulfillmentÂ?self-surrenderÂ?when you leave yourself utterly and travel in a trancelike state to pure objective reception of the outer world.

Sounds silly and pretentiously spirituel, I know. But extricating oneself from oneself is the great problem of human life. Buddha's name for the smothering, clamoring self was "desire"; Plato's was "appetite"; Rousseau's was "reason." (The translations are Sylvester Cointreau's.) William James, my favorite American writer, wearily wrote to a friend toward the end of his life that the human ego had begun to repel him. I sort of feel like that sometimes. That's why, more and more, I love the sound of laughter. Not withering, or cruel, or exclusive, knowing laughter. I mean ego-bursting laughter that is like wisdom speaking in slang.

So who is this person staring back at me from the mirror in my bathroom? My lips are small and thin; Maya likes the way the upper lip protrudes slightly over the lower one. Carmencita likes the lower lipÂ?but she also wants me to wear cologne. A certain roundness and softness to my face always bothered me. I wanted to look hard and lean and chiseled, just as I wanted to have that invincible steel will of Central European intellectuals like Arthur Koestler, and not all that moist, tremulous high (and low) feeling I've inherited from my Russian-Jewish forebears. Everyone in my family is vibrato; there is not a note blanche to be found in our entire genetic pool. Weeping was a form of communication. One sob meant hello, two sobs meant good-bye, three sobs meant "There's a call for you," and so forth. Hoffenshtoffen, who gets bored by lachrymosity, says that I was born with a silver violin in my mouth.

That's what the smart people call "insight," my friends, something the narcissistic blogofascists like Markos Moulitsas Zuniga with his puerile nickname "DailyKos" know nothing of. This is how Lee Siegel and his sinecured cadre of noble elite scribblers will lead us simple progressive peasants from the wilderness.

Before you make a decision about whether to join our small resistance movement, I would ask you to think about something --- something important. Have the liberal establishment elites of the past quarter century let us down yet?




Update: I see that "Neville" Wolcott is trying to appease the blogofascists.






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digby 6/25/2006 02:01:00 PM |

 
Reminder Notice

by poputonian

A funny thing happened on the way to Church today. Well actually it was at the bookstore last night. This article, "Heaven Can Wait," by Susan Jacoby, which appears in the Spring issue of Dissent magazine, leapt off the shelf, right into my hands (honest to god):

There is no such thing as generic religion or, for that matter, generic evangelical Protestantism, and most ecclesiastical leaders, whether evangelical or not, are interested in the welfare of all only insofar as welfare is defined in accordance with their particular faith. That is the fatal flaw in all proposals, whether from the left or the right, for a stronger religious voice in the public square. No one would deny that some religious spokesmen are capable of framing moral issues in transcendent fashion; the civil rights leadership provided by black churches is the prime twentieth-century example. But the voices of African American preachers spoke to a broader public morality precisely because they emanated from outside the government and the political establishment. Most southern white Protestant churches, by contrast—churches that helped spawn the present generation of Dixiecans who invoke the name of Martin Luther King in order to push the Republican faith-based political agenda—were closely allied with segregationist politics-as-usual and had no interest whatever in the welfare of blacks.

The absence of any common religious definition of welfare becomes evident in every political battle over “values issues.” Both supporters and opponents of ham-handed, faith-based attempts by the U.S. Congress to intervene in the case involving removal of the comatose Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube, for example, would have said (and did say) that they were concerned about the welfare of Schiavo and those similarly situated. But the two groups defined welfare in irreconcilable ways, largely attributable to religious convictions about whether human beings have the right to “play God” with their own lives.

The limited, and often conflicting, definitions of welfare promulgated by various religions were very much on the minds of the framers of the Constitution when they deliberately omitted any mention of God from the document and instead ceded supreme authority to “We the People.”

The framers did not write, as they might have, “we the people under God”—a phrase that would have prevented angry debates in state ratifying conventions over the Constitution’s unprecedented failure to acknowledge a divinity as the source of governmental power. They did not, as a group of ministers would unsuccessfully propose to Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, write a preamble that declared, “Recognizing Almighty God as the source of all authority and power in civil government, and acknowledging the Lord Jesus Christ as the Governor among nations, His revealed will as the supreme law of the land, in order to constitute a Christian government....”

Americans have always been a predominantly Christian people (overwhelmingly so at the time the Constitution was written), but the founders established a secular central government. Today, religious conservatives are wreaking havoc with that glorious paradox, and they are aided by liberals intimidated by the vilification of secularists over the past twenty-five years. Still worse, many liberals have thrown in the towel and accepted the right-wing premise that there can be no morality, and no exposition of moral issues in the public square, without reference to religion.
...

I could not agree more ... that the left needs to present its case in unapologetically moral terms. But those moral terms should be grounded in reason, not in pandering to the supernatural beliefs of Americans. Indeed, American presidents in the past—and not only the distant past—have had great success in combining reason with moral passion. Perhaps the most outstanding example is John F. Kennedy’s June 1963 American University commencement speech, now regarded as the beginning of détente with the Soviet Union. Kennedy spoke of peace as “the necessary rational end of rational men” and declared, “Our problems are manmade—therefore they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit often solved the seemingly unsolvable—and we believe they can do it again.” Then Kennedy memorably observed that “our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”

Could there be a more reasoned yet passionate statement of secular morality than the assertion that we owe our children a peaceful world not because we are immortal but because we are mortal?

Call me crazy, but I have a feeling that a great many Americans, including religious Americans, are sick of hypocritical politicians who pretend that their policies deserve support because they are the work of a Higher Being. The question is whether there are any political leaders left with the courage to appeal to voters as reasoning adults, with arguments based not on the promise of heaven but on the moral obligation of human beings to treat one another decently here on earth.

Digging though my own archives, I found this reference to Richard Bushman’s 1967 masterpiece From Puritan To Yankee in which the author describes how New England society threw off the shackles of Puritan influence. Remarkably, this transition away from Puritanism, and toward individual freedom, was largely accomplished by the 1760s, just in time (not coincidentally) for the American Revolution. Oscar Handlin, the Pulitzer Prize winning author and renowned former Harvard professor, writes in the forward to the book:

No attempt to trace the history of liberty can deal with the detached individual in isolation. Freedom is a condition not of the single man alone but of man in relationship to a community. The group protects him against the misuse of the power of others and provides the setting within which he can advantageously exercise his own powers. Therefore, changes in the nature of the community, which necessarily either increase or restrain the capacity of the individual to act, affect his liberty.
...
Particularly significant in the analysis of the process by which the Puritans became Yankees is the light it throws on the relationship between society and individual personality. The description of the forces in the community that gave birth to the wish to be free, among men brought up in a closed order, illuminates an important, and neglected, facet of the history of liberty in the United States.

It is ironic that the demise of Puritan religious influence coincides with the emergence of the type of personal and secular liberty that was to become the foundation of America. Richard Bushman, the book's author, describes the process of elections in Puritan days, and how a government meshed with religion was opposed to the concept of Democracy.

Election of these officials, even the highest, did not diminish their authority or make them responsible to the people. Democracy, in the Puritan view, was non-government, or anarchy, and rulers had to constrain [themselves] not to obey a corrupt popular will. Election was a device for implementing divine intentions rather than for transmitting power from the people to their rulers.

Bushman provides a contemporaneous quote from John Bulkley's work The Necessity of Religion, published in Boston 1713, to illustrate the religion-based political thinking of the day:

In elective states, where persons are advanced by the suffrage of others to places of rule, and vested with Civil Power, the persons choosing give not the power, but GOD. They are but the instruments of conveyance.

So, as Bushman concludes, “rulers were obligated to God, not to the people.” I can think of two modern-day despots who follow this doctrine: George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden, each of whom believes himself to be a divine instrument of good, and the other of evil.

A final passage from the book is both compelling and frightening. It speaks to the oppressive and coercive power that results when you mix religion with government, and mix both with other means of authority, such as the institution of family:

The combined force of so many institutions invested law and authority with immense power. In nearly every dimension of life – family, church, the social hierarchy, and religion – a [citizen] encountered unanimous reinforcement of governing authority. The total impact was immense, because each institution was an integral part of a monolithic whole. In each community the agencies of law and authority merged so that the individual felt himself confined within a unified governing structure. The preacher’s exhortation to submit to domestic government reinforced the father’s dominion in his family. Church discipline carried added terrors because censures were delivered before the neighbors and the town’s most prominent families, and the assignment of pews in the meetinghouse according to social rank reminded everyone of the distinctions among individuals and of the deference due superiors. The total environment enjoined obedience: the stately figure of minister or commissioner as he rode through town, the leading inhabitants’ imposing two-storied houses standing near the meetinghouse at its center, the austere graves of the dead in its shadow. As interpreted by the minister’s sermon, even the natural world – the storms, the wolves in the wilderness, and the catastrophes at sea – spoke of the war of good and evil and of God’s mighty government. Social institutions, conscience, and the forces of nature meshed in the communal experience to restrain rebellious dispositions.

After reading this, the parallels are clear that the current movement afoot in our society -- the movement to infuse religion into government -- is working against, and not for, the very same liberty upon which America was founded.

Remarkably, Bushman's book is still in print, more than forty years after it was written. You can find it in almost every library, or here from the original publisher, Harvard University Press. I found it for $3 at one of my favorite haunts, Half Price Books.


Susan Jacoby's book Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism can be found in bookstores everywhere, or at your favorite on-line book dealer.
digby 6/25/2006 12:49:00 PM |

Saturday, June 24, 2006

 
Global Warming

by tristero

Terrific article by James Hansen on global warming.. You remember Dr. Hansen, yes? He's the fellow who George Deutsch tried to silence. And you remember George Deutsch, right? He's the presidential appointee who worked at NASA and was trying to force the agency to label the Big Bang as "just a theory". Deutsch was then forced to resign for lying about graduating from Texas A & M.

I guess Hansen won.
tristero 6/24/2006 07:46:00 PM |

 
ROTFLMAO

by tristero

Who says the right is humorless?

The number of prominent Democrats urging pre-emptive action against North Korea's ICBM grows as Walter Mondale chimes in. These are the Democrats who can win elections because they are serious.

Courtesy Daou Report.

tristero 6/24/2006 08:50:00 AM |

 
It's The Abuse Of Power, Stupid.

by tristero

As expected, the Bush administration tried to shoot the messenger. The purest expression of the administration's position comes from Terri Wagner, a regular New York Times reader from Elberta, Alabama* who writes:

Your decision to print this article is disturbing to me. Timing is the issue with me.

We have troops in the field fighting every day. We have just recently seen the brutality of the enemy.

The time to consider which programs are successful or not is after the troops come home, which in this case means a free Afghanistan and Iraq.

Please consider the timing of your articles in matters of national security when troops are still on the ground. [Emphasis in original.]

As long as troops are abroad, Bush should not be criticized. Ever. And you wonder why Bush has said troops will be in Iraq during the rest of his term in office.

No one's criticizing the effort to track terrorist finances, duh.** The real issue is simple:

The Times (and others) would never have decided to break the story were it not the fact that the Bush administration is once again abusing its power and refusing to recognize any rules or limits on that power.


*Of course, Terri's a regular reader of the Times, even if she lives in Elberta, Alabama which is, I admit, pretty far from New York City. How else could she have learned about the article? She may even have a subscription. You're not suggesting her letter was part of an organized rightwing campaign against the Times, are you? Honestly, the cynicism of some people.

** From the first time I heard the term a few days after 9/11, I've repeatedly said (and of course, this is far from an original thought) the US should infiltrate and thoroughly corrupt the hawwalas, making them unreliable. That, of course, is rather difficult to do when you don't have more than five fluent Arabic speakers tops working in the FBI (which is true, by the way, at least until very recently). Far easier - and far less effective, if your real goal is to catch terrorists and not hoover up as much info as you possibly can - is to once again operate with no serious oversight and troll through " 'at least tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of searches' of people and institutions suspected of having ties to terrorists."


tristero 6/24/2006 08:14:00 AM |

 
The Times Book Review Index

by tristero

[NOTE: Please see update at end of post.]

For several years now, when Saturday rolls around and we receive the New York Times Book Review in our paper, I have been in the habit of totting up the number of left-leaning and right-leaning books on the hardcover non-fiction besteller list. It's probably a worthless exercise, so far I haven't perceived a trend I can correlate to anything, except maybe to election cycles where more rightwing books make the list. But I thought it might amuse you as well so here is this week's tally based on the online bestseller list which seems one week ahead, strangely enough, of the printed one (dated July 2 instead of July 25). In any event, I only look at the official (to be printed) list of top 15.

Now caveat lector, boys and girls. Of course, to anyone with even a smattering of statistics, the whole enterprise is a hopelessly crude metric (and of absolutely nothing to boot). At the very least, the index should also weight length of time on the list and relative placement, if not also take into account actual sales. As for determination of political leanings, sometimes they are open to serious question as they are this week with all three "left" bestsellers (and perhaps two of the authors on the "right" might object to my forcing them to share the red bed, ideologically speaking of course, with Coulter). You wanna make a better NYT Bestseller Index, be my guest.

Anyway...

It's a tie this week, 3 to 3.


Left:

Cooper: DISPATCHES FROM THE EDGE
Friedman: THE WORLD IS FLAT
Levitt/Dubner: FREAKONOMICS

Right:

Russert: WISDOM OF OUR FATHERS
Coulter: GODLESS
Stossel : MYTHS, LIES, AND DOWNRIGHT STUPIDITY

[UPDATE: Some folks in comments have objected that at best the so-called "left" books are centrist or centrist-right. DukeJ astutely observes: "[A]re we so conditioned that we see centrists or even 'objective' journalists as representing the left?"

Good point. He's exactly right. If the index has any utility at all, it is as a stark demonstration of precisely how constipated our public discourse on politics has become. With this in mind, perhaps it is worthwhile (but only a little) to track the index as the election season progresses.]
tristero 6/24/2006 07:20:00 AM |

Friday, June 23, 2006

 
Tired Of Jimmy Swaggert Tears

by digby


Here's another reason for Democrats to stop running scared and start running on privacy:

Latest Gallup Poll:

"The public is divided ... on whether the federal government should be involved in promoting moral values, with 48% saying it should and 48% saying it should not. In 1996, Americans took a very different view on this matter, with 60% saying the government should be involved and 38% saying it should not... That change appears to be a fairly recent phenomenon." From 1993 until recently, majorities of at least 10 percentage points chose "Government should promote traditional values" over "should not favor any values."

People are getting sick of these phony busybodies blathering on about moral values when everybody knows they are anything but moral. There's always been a strain of moral sanctimony in America. And there's always been an equally strong strain that wants to shove a grapefruit in their faces. It looks like we might be coming back into balance.

(Speaking of which, is everyone excited about this week's Deadwood? I know I am...)



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digby 6/23/2006 04:44:00 PM |

 
More Of The Same

by digby

I initially had some second thoughts about this post from yesterday. I thought perhaps I was being to harsh in criticizing the Democrats for their response to this Republican trash talk on the war. But I posted it anyway because I honestly believed that they were in danger of screwing this up at a time when there is no reason for it and I feel almost apoplectic at the prospect.

I'm not the only one. From Josh Marshall:

Consider this post an open letter to Senate Democrats.

You're really doing a poor job in the public debate over Iraq.

Luckily, unlike what's imagined by the imbeciles who write The Note and others in Washington, reality is not simply a DC media and politics confection. The Dems can muff this several times before coming back and getting it right. And they'd still be more or less fine. Because the Iraq War is still really unpopular. And the great majority of the country has lost faith in President Bush's conduct of the war.

But that's still no excuse for handling this so poorly.

The Democrats have to be much more aggressive. But 'more aggressive' doesn't mean a quicker withdrawal. It means making your point forcefully, on your own terms, repeatedly.

But they're not doing that.

What I see is Republicans on TV repeating their 'cut and run' charges. And to the extent I see Democrats, it's Democrats denying the charge. No, we're not for cutting and running.

The president wants to stay in Iraq for at least three more years. It's not that he won't set a date to withdraw. He doesn't even have a plan that gets to the point where the US could end the occupation. In practice he wants to stay in Iraq forever. What Repubicans are voting for is More of the Same, More of the Same failed policy.

More here.

The war is unpopular. It's a quagmire. Yet, they change nothing. The only proposal they can come up with is to grant amnesty to the insurgents in the hopes they will be so grateful they will just give up. That's it. This war just grinds on, nothing improves, they make no progress.

And they refuse to change course because the president sees everything in terms of losing face and covering ass. From what we've been reading this week, it's his prime motivation for everything. He believes that if he loses face, the country loses face --- l'etat c'est moi.

In the face of that, it doesn't matter whther or not the Democrats all agree to the last comma on a plan for withdrawal. What matters, as Marshall says, is that we are against the status quo:

The thing is that the status quo is morally indefensible because it just means continue to burn through men and money for a failed policy because President Bush isn't capable of admitting his policies have failed.

He's like an owner of a business that's slowly going under. He doesn't know how to save the situation. So he won't get more money or resources to fix the business. That's throwing good money after bad. And he won't just liquidate and save what he can, because then he'd have to come to grips with the fact that he's failed. So his policy is denial and slow failure. Here of course the analogy to President Bush is rather precise since he only has to hold out until 2009 when he can give the problem to someone else, just as he did in his past life with other businesses he drove into the ground.

But for the country that's not acceptable. We don't have a policy except for slow burn and denial. And the president's ego isn't enough to ask men and women to die for. We need an actual plan. And the president doesn't have one.

Democrats need to hammer this point again and again and not get tripped up in the president's bully-boy rhetoric. The president has no plan. He wants to stay in Iraq forever. He says for at least three more years. All the Republicans agree they want more of the same.

The Republicans are like mortally wounded dogs who are barely standing but who bare their teeth and growl dangerously when you get too close. When that happens, if you are a responsible person, you don't get afraid and run away. You get some help and you put the dog down.

They can hammer us with "cut 'n run" all they want, but they can't "cut n' run" from the fact that they are telling the American people there is no end in sight and there is nothing they can do about it. That's the reason why Dems must step up now and aggressively pound this message home that the president has no plan. In order to win, the people must believe that by electing Democrats they are taking action to change the status quo. Democrats need to hammer the fact that for all the president's bluster --- he's paralyzed by his inability to admit that he's made a mistake.

Democrats may not have all the answers. The administration has got us in a hell of a mess and it's not easy to get us out of it. But the Republicans have made it quite clear that their intention is to keep doing exactly what they are doing until somebody stops them. Democrats need to stop them --- and they need the American people to understand that they are the only ones who can stop them. The Republicans can't stop themselves.



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digby 6/23/2006 03:11:00 PM |

 
Privacy For The Common Good

by digby

Kos wrote an interesting post yesterday that deserves some further discussion. He offered his thoughts on Hillary Clinton (which were right on the money in my opinion) and in the midst of it mentions something that Hillary did last week that has not gotten nearly enough attention. (I would suggest that it would have gotten a lot of blogospheric attention if she wanted to use this medium to promote her ideas. This speaks to us directly.)

Last week Hillary introduced what I think should be a primary plank of the the Democratic Party:A Privacy Bill Of Rights. Indeed, I think this is the most fertile territory out there to gain some disaffected Republican voters and put some of the mountain west in our electoral quiver. It's smart politics.

I happen to be a believer in the Democratic strategy that includes pulling on the civil libertarian threads in our coalition to weave a bigger tent. I'm personally horrified by the excesses of this administration and terribly worried that the huge bureaucratic domestic surveillance apparatus they are building is going to be impossible to control. I hear tales from all over the country of wads of DHS pork going to local and state police departments to use to spy on their own citizens and we know that at the national level they've pretty much discarded the fourth amendment and have enabled both the foreign and military spy agencies to work within our borders. There's a lot of money and power involved, it's secret and it's fundamentally anti-democratic. We are building a police state and I firmly believe that, politics aside, if you build it they will use it.

That all this has been done by the alleged libertarian small government Republicans is no surprise to me. They have always been about big bucks and authoritarianism over all else. But it seems to me that it may come as a surprise to people with a certain "don't tread on me" kind of ethos, particularly in the west which has a long tradition of such sentiment. If these tribal divides about which I often write exist, then there is a big one here. And if politics need to play to the gut as much as the head and the heart, this issue is powerful. Democrats have an opportunity to craft a real message of American independence if they choose to take it --- and it might just be the way to beat back the fear factor a little bit, which I think people are getting tired of.

But there is another aspect of this which is important, as well. Clinton's privacy Bill of Rights includes a lot of consumer protections, which is something that I think is a truly sellable, populist idea. The intrusion into our private lives by government is a threat to our individual liberty. The intrusion (and collusion) by its ally, corporate America, is truly a threat to the fundamental definition of what it means to be an American. The ability to amass all this data and create profiles of us and put us into categories and label us as being one thing or another according to complex formulas, means that the great innovation of America --- the ability to reinvent ourselves and take risks --- will no longer be optional. The great nation of immigrants and hucksters and innovators will become a stratified society based on criteria that has nothing to do with our potential and everything to do with our past.

Hillary said in her speech the other day: "privacy is synonymous with liberty." This is correct. We give it up far too thoughtlessly in our culture and its going to come back to bite us if we don't wake to the fact that big powerful forces are poking into our lives in unprecedented ways and will use the information they get to force us into little boxes they design.

Democrats need to make some new arguments. They need to talk in terms that are relevant to today's world. Progressives are about progress; we cannot only be concerned about maintaining what we've got. We must forge on. If we believe in the common good, which I do, it must be tempered with a healthy respect for individual privacy. Without that we will not have the freedom or the ability to come together to create a better world. We'll all be too busy furtively looking over our shoulders to pay attention to the road ahead.


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x-posted for Jane on FDL



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digby 6/23/2006 10:13:00 AM |

Thursday, June 22, 2006

 
Hoovering, In More Ways Than One.

by tristero

When I first saw the headline in the Times, "Bank Data Sifted in Secret by U.S. to Block Terror" I naturally assumed that Bush was sniffing through my bank account. After all, he's listening to my phone calls. Why should my finances be any different? But then I read the article:

The program is limited, government officials say, to tracing transactions of people suspected of having ties to Al Qaeda by reviewing records from the nerve center of the global banking industry, a Belgian cooperative that routes about $6 trillion daily between banks, brokerages, stock exchanges and other institutions. The records mostly involve wire transfers and other methods of moving money overseas and into and out of the United States. Most routine financial transactions confined to this country are not in the database...

The program is grounded in part on the president's emergency economic powers, [Treasury Undersecretary] Levey said, and multiple safeguards have been imposed to protect against any unwarranted searches of Americans' records.

Whew. Well, that's reassuring. There's really no potential for abuse. None. Just read the article.

I'm sure they have to obtain the proper warrants. And the outside firm that verifies there really is a good reason to examine the data has zero ties to the Republican party.

Look, it's not as if there's a systematic attempt on the part of the Bush administration to break down longstanding legal or institutional barriers to the government's access to private information about Americans and others inside the United States. It's only a temporary thing anyway, a response to a national emergency.

They're not just turning on a vacuum cleaner and sucking in all the information that they can.




tristero 6/22/2006 11:54:00 PM |

 
"Personal Psychodrama Seems To be Involved"

by digby


Gene Lyons has a great column up this week about Murtha and Karl Rove. You'll enjoy it. I particularly liked this line:

Murtha didn’t say so, but there’s no chance of an Iraqi democracy friendly to the U. S. That’s a delusion. Bush’s photo-op visit merely underscored the point. Three years after “Mission accomplished,” and the mighty conqueror flies into the fortified “Green Zone” unannounced and can’t trust Iraq’s prime minister enough to give him, oh, an hour’s notice ? That’s not how Alexander the Great did it.

No it's not. One of the most infuriating things about the triumphal coverage of the Baghdad trip is the fact that the media didn't seem to think it was noteworthy that after all this time the president (or anybody else) still can't make a planned visit because he can't trust anyone and the situation on the ground is so dangerous. Why that's considered "good news" for him is anyone's guess. Rational people are right to conclude that there has pretty much been no progress since Bush dropped in exactly the same way for that stupid Turkey stunt. By this time we should have been able to have a state visit and a parade.

Gene brings up something else that I've been meaning to write about and keep forgetting:

For the record, Rove’s military experience, like Vice President Dick Cheney’s and that of virtually all the neo-conservative architects of this ill-conceived utopian fantasy, is absolutely zero.

Rove has an interesting story to go along with this, which I've not heard discussed and which I'm sure a lot of patriotic Republicans would be interested in rationalizing for us:

While Rove was in high school in Utah, a future president Bill Clinton, was finishing Georgetown University and then moving to England to attend Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. He escaped the draft and, in the famous ROTC letter, outlines his reservations: "The draft system itself is illegitimate. No government really rooted in limited, parliamentary democracy should have the power to make its citizens fight and kill and die in a war they may oppose, a war which even possible may be wrong, a war which in any case does not involve immediately the peace and fredom of the nation."

Curiously, Rove's view at the time was not so different, according to classmates. Rove had doubts about the war --- which after all was being prosecuted by a Democrat, Lyndon Johnson. In any case he felt government had no right to require citizens to serve in the military.

He and classmate Mark Gustavson sat by the huge windows in the cafeteria discussing the issue. "He was opposed to compulsory service. He felt we don't need the damn government telling us what to do. We can do it on our own."

According to Gustavson, Rove had reached his conclusion not from the left, but the right --- as an expression of libertarianism. Supporting the war was equivalent to supporting big government and the intrusion of big government, especially the bloated, post-New Deal government of LBJ and Hubert Humphrey and the rest of the liberal washington establishmnent. Whether guided more by the apprehension of being drafter or a commitment to individual liberty, Karl Rove was no fan of the war, or at least the draft.

He brought this passion to the topic of compulsory military service, winning debate after debate in classrooms of receptive draft-age young high school students. He used what he called the "mom, apple pie and flag," defense meaning the position of the true American patriot. It was a fine piece of rhetorical jujiotsu, friends remembered, which allowed Rove to reconcile opposition to the draft with conservative principle. (Bush's Brain p. 124)

Jujiotsu indeed. If my draft age brother had tried that argument on my Dad, he would have found himself face down in the dirt. Conservatives of that day didn't buy it one bit. My father hated Frank Sinatra his whole life because he didn't go overseas during the war and all the girls were drooling over him back home. (He wasn't too thrilled with Reagan either, although he voted for them.) This was a big thing to the WWII generation wingnuts who were in charge of Rove's GOP at the time. No excuses.

I think it's just awfully interesting that he and Bill Clinton had he same rationale for being against the draft, don't you? Yet I've never hear Karl speak out defending old Bill on this. And when the swiftboat liars were making John Kerry out to be an opportunistic coward in Vietnam, we now know that phony chickenhawk #2982 was a guy who contructed elaborate libertarian arguments to justify being against the draft and that same war. Oh my, he's always been a slick one.

Lyons writes:

As history, this cut-and-run business is nonsense. It wasn’t Democrats who made peace in Korea. It was President Dwight Eisenhower. Democrats didn’t dispatch Henry Kissinger to whisper to China in 1972 that the U. S. could live with a communist Vietnam. President Richard Nixon did. He began the long, bloody retreat that ended with the North Vietnamese taking Saigon under President Gerald Ford.

Maybe the oddest thing about the legacy of Vietnam is that the worst thing that could happen, from a rightwing perspective, did happen. The U. S. lost the war. Communists conquered much of Southeast Asia. And the effect on national security ? Well, we got lots of good Vietnamese restaurants out of it. Otherwise, none.

The communists soon fell to fighting among themselves, with Vietnam invading Cambodia, China attacking Vietnam, and the Chinese and Soviet Russians entangled in a blood feud. Next, Russia invaded Afghanistan. Domestic fallout from that bloody fiasco helped cause the collapse of the U. S. S. R. and the demise of communism almost everywhere—also because nobody but a few crackpot professors in the West believed in it anymore.

Exactly why so many like Rove, Bush and Cheney, who avoided Vietnam, subsequently metamorphosed into countryclub Napoleons is mysterious. Personal psychodrama appears to be involved.

I don't think there's any doubt.



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digby 6/22/2006 03:08:00 PM |

 
More Brokeback Kossack

by digby


Until reminded by a Dave Weigel just now, I'd forgotten that the gay Kos bashing thing was actually used in a campaign mailer earlier this year down south. It's actually quite hilarious.

Here's a nice way to deal with it. Send a couple of bucks to Brad Miller, the jackass's opponent. Let's put our outrage and revulsion to work in a positive way shall we? Be sure to tell him Kos sent you...



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digby 6/22/2006 02:53:00 PM |

 
Downsizing The Punditocrisy

by digby


I'm much too disgusted to write about this stuff in any depth right now, but luckily Peter Daou has done it for me. He comments on the latest scribblings by Dame David Broder (thanks CP) and reminds us of a comment from a rightwing blogger acquaintance of his:

I got a call from a conservative blogger with whom I'm appearing at a blog workshop. He'd just read the Cohen piece and much as he said he enjoyed watching liberal bloggers get criticized, he articulated a response to Cohen that was far less polite (and shorter) than the one I intended to post: "Tough sh*t! So after thirty years of writing this stuff in a bubble, you're finally getting feedback from people who are pissed off. Deal with it."

Yes indeed. Change is painful. You can either fight it or you can find a way to adjust. But it's happening. I'm sorry these people are upset about all the "vituperation." But what the hell did they expect? They've been lounging around the beltway court of Versailles eating tarte tatin out of Grover Norquists' chubby little hands for years now while the country is going to hell. And now the services of the punditocrisy are no longer necessary.

You've been outsourced fellas.



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digby 6/22/2006 02:32:00 PM |

 
We're Not That Innocent

by digby

... at least I hope not.


This is a psych-out, Democrats. You know that don't you?

... people who attended a series of high-level meetings this month between White House and Congressional officials say President Bush's aides argued that it could be a politically fatal mistake for Republicans to walk away from the war in an election year.

White House officials including the national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, outlined ways in which Republican lawmakers could speak more forcefully about the war. Participants also included Mr. Bush's top political and communications advisers: his deputy chief of staff, Karl Rove; his political director, Sara Taylor; and the White House counselor, Dan Bartlett. Mr. Rove is newly freed from the threat of indictment in the C.I.A. leak case, and leaders of both parties see his reinvigorated hand in the strategy.

The meetings were followed by the distribution of a 74-page briefing book to Congressional offices from the Pentagon to provide ammunition for what White House officials say will be a central line of attack against Democrats from now through the midterm elections: that the withdrawal being advocated by Democrats would mean thousands of troops would have died for nothing, would give extremists a launching pad from which to build an Islamo-fascist empire and would hand the United States its must humiliating defeat since Vietnam.

It's ballsy and it's "bold," but what would you expect from a party that is looking at losing its majority in the fall? Of course they are going to try to run on some faux, patriotic, don't "cut n run" crapola. What else have they got? It's their tried and true playbook and the best they can hope for is to trash talk the Democrats into cowering into the corner.

But just because they are running their game again that doesn't mean that Democrats need to run theirs and get all flustered trying to find a way to appear to support whatever the Republicans say without actually supporting them so they don'tlook soft --- and end up looking soft. That is losing politics and never more than now when we have these bastards on the run for the first time in decades.

As U.S. Grant famously said "it's time to stop worrying about what Bobby Lee is going to do to us and start thinking about what we are going to do to him."

Go on the offensive on the war, Democrats. Hard. Do not fall for this nonsense again. This is Karl Rove at his most obtuse and obvious. He is not magic (although his latest escape certainly adds to his mystique on that count) and he is not a genius. He's a cheap thug who is going to try to squeeze one more narrow win out before he retires to teach and lecture younger cheap thugs in how to win by cheating and character assassination.

The best approval rating Bush gets on Iraq is below 40%. Independents are breaking heavily against his policies. There is nothing to be afraid of. The country's desperate for some leadership. Give it to them. I'm begging you.

Update: I see that Greg Sargent at the Horse's Mouth discussed this earlier from a different angle, by noting that the elite media always seem to categorize the Republicans as being on offense and the Dems as being on defense, when in fact the parties are attacking each other furiously.

This is an important observation. The problem has been that the Democrats have too often in the past reacted to the elite media and began to see themselves as being on the defensive. It's a Dem disease. They seem to pay too much attention to the political press and don't keep their ear to the ground very effectively out in the country.

They must resist this impulse. It is bullshit, particularly in this situation. This is Bush's war, it's dramatically unpopular, it's a horrible meatgrinder and the country has grown tired of the lies. If anyone is on the defensive it's Bush and his Eunuch Caucus who have made this war their pet cause. The press doesn't want to report it that way because it feels uncomfortable for them to pile on Republicans. They get a lot of shit for it and are never happier than when they can align themselves with the establishment.

But no matter. The people were able to see through the gauzy, Woodward-created hagiography of Dear Leader after a while and they still do. The fall election is a turnout election. Rank and file Dems will support the party if the party supports them.

Let's not lose our nerve here.



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digby 6/22/2006 10:55:00 AM |

 
Get It Out There

by digby


I've told this story before, but those of you who've heard it will just have to bear up. In the 1992 election when I was making volunteer calls for Clinton, Mary Matalin made a major gaffe she had to apologize for quite publicly. (Doesn't matter what it was.) I was riding down in the elevator with a high level political consultant (who didn't know me from Adam, of course) and I smugly mentioned that Matalin had really stepped in it. He looked at me like I was a moron and said, "she got it out there, didn't she?"

Here's another little pointer on wingnut gossip mongering and dirty politics. As you sling the shit with the biggest megaphone you can find, be sure to primly assert that you don't believe a word of it and chastize those who are doing it on the victim's behalf. It makes you look like a good guy even though your purpose is to spread the gossip far and wide.

In this case it doesn't matter much because the "gossip" is irrelevant to normal people and would make no difference if it were true. This gossip is aimed solely at the wingnut doughboy losers who couldn't manage to get laid at the Bunny Ranch with 5k in their pockets. Still, it's nice of one of the leading voices in the blogosphere to spread it around, (while being above it all, of course.) It's good practice for serious swift-boating.


Thank to Tristram Shandy


Update: Well that didn't take long. From the comments I find that Little Green Footballs has taken the next step (no linky to exterminationist sites):

I can’t help noticing how much Moulitsas’ conspiracy-oriented mindset echoes the anti-rational paranoia of radical Islam.

Now that's how a real smear is done folks!


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digby 6/22/2006 09:37:00 AM |

 
Good Argument For Gun Control

by digby

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Americans mistakenly worried the
United Nations is plotting to take away their guns on July 4 -- U.S. Independence Day -- are flooding the world body with angry letters and postcards, the chairman of a U.N. conference on the illegal small arms trade said on Wednesday.

"I myself have received over 100,000 letters from the U.S. public, criticizing me personally, saying, 'You are having this conference on the 4th of July, you are not going to get our guns on that day,"' said Prasad Kariyawasam, Sri Lanka's U.N. ambassador.

"That is a total misconception as far as we are concerned," Kariyawasam told reporters ahead of the two-week meeting opening on Monday.

For one, July 4 is a holiday at U.N. headquarters and the world body's staff will be watching a fireworks display from the U.N. lawn rather than attending any meetings, he said.

For another, the U.N. conference will look only at illegal arms and "does not in any way address legal possession," a matter left to national governments to regulate rather than the United Nations, he added.

The campaign is largely the work of the U.S. National Rifle Association, whose executive vice president, Wayne LaPierre, warns on an NRA Web site (http://www.stopungunban.org/) of a July 4 plot "to finalize a U.N. treaty that would strip all citizens of all nations of their right to self-protection."

Sweet Jesus this country has a lot of stupid people in it.


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digby 6/22/2006 01:03:00 AM |

Wednesday, June 21, 2006

 
I Beg Your Pardon

by digby


I think it's fairly obvious that this trial balloon over the week-end to pardon Scooter Libby is for real and we should all take it quite seriously. It wasn't just Mr Joe DiToensing who said it, it was none other than William Kristol on Fox news:

[Fitzgerald] indicted one person, not for any underlying crime, but for allegedly mis-remembering a couple of conversations with reporters when talking about them to the grand jury — these were conversations that went nowhere. No one thinks Scooter Libby actually leaked Valerie Plame’s name, even if that were a crime, which is isn’t.

Bush should pardon Scooter Libby and get the whole thing over with…I am blaming Ashcroft for recusing himself. And the CIA was out to get people in the White House at that point. And Bush should pardon Scooter Libby.

Here's a little reminder of our friend Kristol from a few years back:

What Republicans now need is the nerve to fight. They must stand for, to quote Helprin again, "the rejection of intimidation, the rejection of lies, the rejection of manipulation, the rejection of disingenuous pretense, and a revulsion for the sordid crimes and infractions the president has brought to his office." (Weekly Standard, May 25, 1998, page 18.)

I guess it all depends on the gravity of the crime. Clinton as we know, was accused of lying in a civil case and covering up an extra-marital affair --- by a flamboyantly partisan prosecutor who selectively leaked like a sieve. Libby, on the other hand, is accused of lying about whether he leaked the name of a CIA officer to the press --- by a non-partisan, tight-lipped prosecutor who has been very conservative in developing this case (something for which Karl Rove should thank his lucky stars.) I'm not even going to make the argument as to why one is more deserving of approbation and legal consequence. It's obvious.

As for a pardon, I realize that the administration believes in pre-emption, but this is ridiculous. As Elizabeth Edwards, writing today on her blog over at One America Committee pointed out:

Is there some greater benefit here to a pardon or some mitigating circumstances that make a pardon acceptable? The prosecution was not political; the defendant was knowledgeable about the law and the offense; the prosecution itself will not be disruptive to our national interest and in fact might give other potential leakers some pause before they use damaging information for political purposes. I think the only rationale for a pardon is that the inner political chicanery of the administration could be revealed during the trial of Libby.

Well, here's a message: the country already knows. All a pardon does is confirm the perception that in addition to being a White House where the powerful think they can do what they want regardless of what is right or lawful, it is also a White House where responsibility and accountability (remember, those things they wanted from fourth grade public school teachers?) are nowhere to be found.

Thank you.

I wouldn't put it past them to pardon Libby. After all, they've gotten away with pardoning themselves for their crimes for the past 30 years. Indeed, the precedent for this was set when Poppy pardoned Cap Weinberger et al on Christmas eve as he was leaving office. And nobody said a peep.

As Robert Parry wrote in this prescient piece:

In marked contrast to the continuing Republican investigations of President Clinton, the Democrats eight years ago cooperated with Republicans in shutting down substantive inquiries that implicated President George H.W. Bush in a variety of geopolitical scandals.

At that time, the Democrats apparently felt that pursuing those inquiries into Bush’s role in secret contacts with Iran – both in 1980 and during the Iran-contra affair – and getting to the bottom of alleged CIA military support for Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the mid-1980s would distract from the domestic policy goals at the start of the Clinton presidency.

That judgment, however, has come back to haunt the Democrats. Clearing George H.W. Bush in 1993 ironically set the stage both for the Republican scandal-mongering against Clinton and for the restoration of the Bush family dynasty in 2000.

Certainly, the Democratic gestures of bipartisanship were not reciprocated by the Republicans. They opted for a pattern of aggressive politics that challenged the Clinton administration from its first days and has continued through the 2000 Election and into the new round of investigations of ex-President Clinton.

The Democrats have found themselves constantly on the defensive, sputtering about the unfairness of it all.

[...]

Beyond obscuring these important chapters of recent history and thus adding to the confusion of the American people, the Democrats discovered that their deferential strategy gained them nothing from the Republicans. If anything, the Democratic behavior was taken as a sign of weakness.

After the Democrats folded the Reagan-Bush investigations, the Republicans simply swept their easy winnings off the table and raised the stakes.

No kidding. These zombie Republicans just keep coming back, more crooked and more blatant about it every time. They just sweep their winnings off the table and raise the stakes.



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digby 6/21/2006 05:25:00 PM |

 
When The Troops Come Home And Not before

by digby

There has been quite a debate in blogging circles about the "amnesty for insurgents" bill that was defeated in the Senate yesterday and I'm a little surprised that there is even a discussion about it. As you probably know, the administration has been supportive of an idea by the fragile Iraqi government to give amnesty to killers of American troops in exchange for their laying down their weapons. A lot of people think this is a good idea.

I don't. I really, really don't. Amnesty is something you grant when hostilities are over as part of a settlement. Until troops are off the ground, or a very serious cease fire has been called at the least, the mere idea of this is just nuts in my book.

Our troops are sitting ducks over there as it is. Many are slowly losing their minds, as this stunning post by Arthur Silber illustrates. The war is ill-defined and unwinnable. And yet they remain in grave danger with many, many thousands of them maimed or killed for reasons that we all know are spurious. It's cruel to do this to them on top of all that.

Alternet printed a letter today from a soldier serving in Iraq who makes a very eloquent argument, from his perspective, as to why this is wrong:

I am one of the soldiers that these proposals are dishonoring.

Did any of these men ever serve??? Have to go through memorial service after memorial service day after day for comrades they knew and loved???

Have they had to live in fear every moment of every unchanging, horrible day, waiting for a never-seen rocket or a mortar to kill them--or worse, kill those to whom they are close???

Have they bore body armor in 120 degree heat in the face of an unrecognizable enemy, one who uses terrified civilians as shields?

Have they seen the remains of tanks, HMMWVs, BODIES!!! that were rent asunder by invisible bombs, planted by fanatical zealots???

Have they truly seen the shatter[ed] lives of Iraqis, these lives broken by the very people they propose to grant amnesty?

Have they had to pull the trigger with the aim of killing another human being, someone you have never met or seen before, never knowing if the target was truly an enemy?

Do these gentlemen wrestle at night with the nightmares of guilt and second-guessing?

Every IED that injures or kills an American soldier exacerbates the normal soldiers' attitude toward those who he is sent to help and protect. Every sniper shot hardens our hearts.

Propose accolades for those who have lived through this hell, not for those who have opposed them in the shadows, in the dark.

When an insurgent--a terrorist--an enemy combatant--call them what you will--strikes at an American, he attacks Iraq.

When these "right, honorable" gentlemen realize that we are in a war we should have never entered--one where our very presence provokes and increases the enemy's resolve and recruitment--perhaps then I will consider their words.

But until then, tell these paper warriors to go to Walter Reed, to Landstuhl, to Sam Houston and face the soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen whose lives have been drastically altered or ended.

Tell them to face the families of the fallen and propose their accolades to our foes.

Instead of resolutions that honor those who are trying to kill us, these senators, these congressmen should devote their efforts, their words, their very lives to try and figure out how we can extricate ourselves from this war.

Perhaps then they can look themselves in the eye and admit Iraq was a mistake and commit all our energies to saving American lives, instead of worrying about mollifying our enemies' rage.

Sean Frerking, a soldier serving in Iraq

There's a lot there that I might not feel comfortable with as a civilian living in a nice safe environment in california. But I get where this guy must be coming from. And I appreciate his ability to see the bigger picture.

19 Senators voted for this amnesty yesterday. All Republicans. No Democrats. Those are the "right and honorable" men to whom this soldier is referring. And they aren't just any Republicans. They are the leading national figures of the party, including John McCain.

The fact is that we are not leaving Iraq until 2009, at the earliest. Bush has said it, he means it, he will not be the man who "lost Iraq." Until American troops are off the ground --- or at least a cease fire is in effect --- amnesty makes little sense. It rewards killings of the past and prevents none in the future. Amnesty is a valuable card you play as part of a comprehensive settlement. Bush is simply trying to prop up the rickity Iraqi government and like all the rest of his ploys to save face and assert his authority, it comes at the expense of the military.

We should take that soldier's argument and ram it down the Republican party's throats. Here we had a day when two poor American schmucks were just found tortured and killed. We have no moral authority left with which to even condemn the torture --- after all, we've made torture cool again. And yet 19 Republican senators voted for amnesty for their killers. I ask you to contemplate what the Republicans would do to us if the shoe were reversed --- regardless of the merits. You don't have to think very long do you?

Politically, this should have been Dubai all over again, a media firestorm, forcing the Republican rank and file to see what was being done in their name. Rove is going to run on the patriot card again, calling us cowards for wantin' to cun 'n run, and here they are proposing to forgive the killers of 2500 Americans while we still have 140,000 more of them sitting over there like sitting ducks for no good reason. We should hang this around the Republican Party's neck and light it afire.


Here's the list of the Amnesty 19.

Wayne Allard of Colorado Kit Bond of Missouri Jim Bunning of Kentucky Conrad Burns of Montana Tom Coburn of Oklahoma Thad Cochran of Mississippi John Cornyn of Texas Jim DeMint of South Carolina Mike Enzi of Wyoming Lindsey Graham of South Carolina Chuck Hagel of Nebraska Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma Jon Kyl (R-AZ) Trent Lott of Mississippi John McCain of Arizona Jeff Sessions of Alabama Ted Stevens of Alaska Craig Thomas of Wyoming John Warner of Virginia

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digby 6/21/2006 10:37:00 AM |

Tuesday, June 20, 2006

 
The Good Husbands

by digby

Steve Benen of the Carpetbagger Report has an interesting piece in the latest issue of The Washington Monthly, noting that three of the top potential Republican candidates are admitted adulterers.

Until relatively recently, a self-confessed adulterer had never sought the presidency. Certainly, other candidates have been dogged by sex scandals. In the 1828 presidential election, John Quincy Adams questioned whether Andrew Jackson's wife was legitimately divorced from her first husband before she married Old Hickory. Grover Cleveland, who was single, fathered a child out of wedlock, a fact that sparked national headlines during the 1884 election (though he managed to win anyway). There have been presidential candidates who had affairs that the press decided not to write about, like Wendell Wilkie, FDR, and John F. Kennedy. And there have been candidates whose infidelities have been uncovered during the course of a campaign: Gary Hart's indiscretions ultimately derailed his 1988 bid, and in 1992, during the course of his campaign, Bill Clinton was forced to make the euphemistic admission that he "caused pain" in his marriage.

But it wasn't until 2000 that McCain, possibly emboldened by Clinton's survival of his scandals, became the first confessed adulterer to have the nerve to run. Now, just a few years after infidelity was considered a dealbreaker for a presidential candidate, the party that presents itself as the arbiter of virtue may field an unprecedented two-timing trifecta. McCain was still married and living with his wife in 1979 while, according to The New York Times' Nicholas Kristof, "aggressively courting a 25-year-old woman who was as beautiful as she was rich." McCain divorced his wife, who had raised their three children while he was imprisoned in Vietnam, then launched his political career with his new wife's family money. In 2000, McCain managed to deflect media questioning about his first marriage with a deft admission of responsibility for its failure.

It's possible that the age of the offense and McCain's charmed relationship with the press will pull him through again, but Giuliani and Gingrich may face a more difficult challenge. Both conducted well-documented affairs in the last decade--while still in public office. Giuliani informed his second wife, Donna Hanover, of his intention to seek a separation in a 2000 press conference. The announcement was precipitated by a tabloid frenzy after Giuliani marched with his then-mistress, Judith Nathan, in New York's St. Patrick's Day parade, an acknowledgement of infidelity so audacious that Daily News columnist Jim Dwyer compared it with "groping in the window at Macy's." In the acrid divorce proceedings that followed, Hanover accused Giuliani of serial adultery, alleging that Nathan was just the latest in a string of mistresses, following an affair the mayor had had with his former communications director.

But the most notorious of them all is undoubtedly Gingrich, who ran for Congress in 1978 on the slogan, "Let Our Family Represent Your Family." (He was reportedly cheating on his first wife at the time). In 1995, an alleged mistress from that period, Anne Manning, told Vanity Fair's Gail Sheehy: "We had oral sex. He prefers that modus operandi because then he can say, 'I never slept with her.'" Gingrich obtained his first divorce in 1981, after forcing his wife, who had helped put him through graduate school, to haggle over the terms while in the hospital, as she recovered from uterine cancer surgery. In 1999, he was disgraced again, having been caught in an affair with a 33-year-old congressional aide while spearheading the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton

Benen wonders, in light of the recent page one above the fold NT Times' dishy speculation about the Clintons' sex lives, whether the press will follow up when the Republican primaries begin in earnest. I frankly doubt it. The CW seems to be that Clinton rules only apply to Democrats. Republicans are allowed to hypocrites because, well... just because. But there is one little fly in the ointment for the GOP, whether Modo and Lil' Russ apply certain standards to their moral behavior or not:

But if GOP operatives dangle the infidelity bait, and the press fails to bite, its importance to Christian conservatives won't be so easy to ignore. Since the press awoke to the phenomenon of evangelicals in 2000 and so-called "values voters" in 2004, reporters have become fond of gaming out every possible permutation of evangelicals' political concerns. Evangelicals' attitudes towards the marital problems of McCain, Giuliani and Gingrich might actually deserve such an inquiry. In 2000, for example, James Dobson issued a personal press release specifically to "clarify his lack of support for Senator McCain." "The Senator is being touted by the media as a man of principle, yet he was involved with other women while married to his first wife," Dobson said.

These remarks received little attention in 2000, possibly because reporters hadn't yet grasped the extent of Dobson's influence, but Carrie Gordon Earll, a spokesperson for Dobson's Focus on the Family, recently made it clear that the adultery issue hasn't lost any of its toxicity among evangelicals. "If you have a politician, an elected official, and they can't be trusted in their own marriage, how can I trust them with the budget? How can I trust them with national security?" she asked me. Although Earll was reluctant to discuss specific politicians, she noted that a candidate who "had an affair and then moved on and restored that marriage" might find forgiveness with Christian conservatives, but someone "who had an affair and then left his wife" would not.

Now, I find that interesting, don't you? There is only one politician among all the adulterous sinners of '08 who could possibly meet Dobson's criteria for forgiveness: Bill Clinton. I think we can all feel fairly confident that the religious right will not embrace a Hillary candidacy anyway. But I happen to think that McCain is the most formidable challenge to the Democrats in 2008. He's the guy Junior pretended to be --- and the maverick-who-has-always-been-his-own-man the Republicans would love to be able to throw up there as big Daddy who's gonna fix everything. If he can get past James Dobson he's going to be tough to beat, I think.

How can the religious right come to terms with this? (I ask that only rhetorically. We know that they are hypocrites coming and going.) But this could be a successful wedge issue that forces the religious right to either cop to their true permissiveness on an issue they use as a cudgel to beat liberals over the head, namely the sanctity of marriage. Or it will expose them as the rigid, unrealistic tight-asses they really are, and perhaps brand the GOP further as the party of ... unrealistic tight-asses. It's worth thinking about a little bit.

Benen's article also mentions that if the press decides to run its usual double standard that bloggers are prepared to take up the slack. I think I can speak for everyone here tonight when I say, "damn right." I have never been as appalled in my life as when the Republicans and the DC media establishment freakshow decidedduring the lewinsky scandal to hold a national hen party on what constituted a proper marriage. It was the most unctuous, hypocritical, sanctimonious display of phony piety I have ever had the misfortune to witness. These high powered celebrities all wringing their delicate hands over sexual indiscretions as if all of them hadn't been witness to or participants in countless examples of marital foibles and error. Yet, they all pretended to be pure as novitiates, delicate and easily startled by the notion that marriage, particularly long term modern marriage, is a little bit more complicated than a romance novel plot line.

Indeed, if I didn't know better, I would have assumed that the Republican party, the religious right and the DC press corps were conspiring to destroy the institution of marriage within their lifetimes. Gay people wanting to participate isn't the problem; they are buying into the great old creaky thing, strengthening it for all. What threatens it is this idea that strangers can intrude on this most deep, complex and intimate of relationships and shine a harsh spotlight on all the things we do to keep it going over years of compromise, adjustment, excitmement, boredom and love --- and then cast judgment on our choices. If you want to destroy marriage, force everyone to submit to James Dobson, Chris Matthews and Cokie Roberts sitting at the end of their beds running a scorecard on whether their union is acceptable.

I'm against delving into people's private lives. In fact, it makes me sick. But, when we start to see this happen (and I think the New York Times and the Washington Post have made it quite clear that they are going to fall right back into Clinton rules the minute they get the chance) we are going to have to fight back. If they are going to use it against Democrats, the adulterous sinners of the GOP are going to get a taste of this medicine and see how much they like it. The three amigos seem ripe for the picking to me.

x-posted at FDL for Jane and Kobe
digby 6/20/2006 09:22:00 PM |

 
Knight In Shining Armor

by digby


I'm busy today so I won't have time until later tonight to write about a couple of things that are on my mind, so I thought I'd entertain you with this stirring defense of Ann Coulter from Wingnut Ted, who sends me these e-mails all the time, looking for a link and an argument. They never fail to give me a chuckle.

He calls it "Defending Ann Coulter:"

Key Facts:

1) She is a graduate of an Ivy League College and top rated law school and so is perhaps 10 times more intelligent than most of her critics.

2) Her latest book, which caused the "9/11 widows controversy" is 300 solid pages of sophisticated arguments befitting a sophisticated lawyer, that virtually all of those who hate her can't understand, let alone respond to except with obscenity or silly, childlike ranting.

3) She describes herself as a controversialist which I think is accurate. Others describes her as a satirist; also accurate. This means she exaggerates to attract attention. She doesn't exaggerate facts or arguments but rather the environment around the facts and arguments.

4) She is also very pretty, sexy, and aggressive which attracts even more attention because, when combined with her intelligence, it makes for a very unusual and interesting combination.

5) She adds to her mystique by smiling and laughing a lot as she displays her absolute contempt for the absolute stupidity of Democrats. It makes you doubt that she is just a pugnacious lawyer who fights as a professional or as a personality type, and might be a caring person trying bravely to save civilization from the Democrats.

6) Shakespeare said people come to their fame by accident, talent, or hard work. Ann came to hers by all three I think, while the "9/11 widows" came to theirs primarily by accident. But, to start an argument that challenges the logic or truth of what people say based on how they got to be in a position to say something, is an intellectually fruitless dead end. If, though, such an argument can create a controversy that sells books that help defeat Democrats it is perhaps worth the somewhat tainted effort, certainly to Ms. Coulter and her publisher anyway, and probably to the nation.

7) If you said to someone 10 years ago that in 10 years the Republicans will have cheerleading allies like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Fox News, Billy O'Reilly, Michael Savich, Ann Coulter, and dozens of others, with a weekly audience of perhaps 50 million adults you'd be sure the Democrats were about to disappear. That the Democrats stand to become the majority in the next election may indicate that nobody is listening at all, or perhaps not.

8) No one can really explain why it is that criticizing four 9/11 widows for statements that seemingly reflect little more than the irrational mumbling of four grief stricken widows is more controversial than the serious and detailed accusation, in the book, that liberals naturally enable pedophiles, rapists, and murderers?

The most obvious explanation is that Democrats (Sheldon Silver being the very best example) do love criminals because they are the natural product of the foul country they hate so much. The more vicious the criminal the more Democrats know they are right about America. Rudeness toward four grieving widows can then be seen as the greater offense because genuine criminality is not really criminality to a Democrat, it is vindication.

In fairness, one has to mention that hatred of America isn't the only reason Democrats prefer criminals. Money seems to be the other motivation. Lawyers are the greatest contributors to Democrats. The Democratic defense bar would suffer tremendously under the simple Republican regime of mandatory minimums and throwing away the key.

9) Republican intellectuals like Ms. Coulter have to be largely forgiven because there are very few good targets around these days. Does Sheldon Silver go on TV in our supposed democracy to explain his position on pedophilia? Does Ted Kennedy go on TV to explain is love of socialism after seeing it in Nazi Germany, The Soviet Union, Communist China, and Cuba? Democrats prefer abortion to love, treason or surrender to national defense, failed public schools to successful private ones, looting of public pensions to safe, secure, and extremely profitable private pensions, divorce to marriage, crime to punishment, inflation to monetarism, gov't monopoly to efficient competition, 50 Cent to Pat Boone,labor unions that mass produce unemployment to companies that produce sustainable jobs, and France to America.

The Democrats don't dare defend the indefensible so what is a Republican to do? Sometimes they end up in a duel with 9/11 widows and others the Democrats use as human shields.

10) Oddly, and quite tragically most intellectuals are Democrats? In fact, some believe the rise of liberalism actually represents little more than the failure of the Ivy League, which, many would argue, sets the entire world's political agenda. But these liberal Ivy League intellectuals won't defend the indefensible either. They are no where to be seen. So how did this happen? Its simple really: they are against America the way a doctor is against cancer. If America weren't a cancer to them they would have little value any more than a medical doctor would have value to someone without cancer. They would have to get real jobs.

For a time, after The Communist Manifesto and after the Depression, there was a some legitimate debate that did need to be resolved. Much to the surprise of the neglected Ivy League it was largely resolved by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and their lingering friend, Castro. Nowadays they live on in what must be a left wing schizophrenic hell, pretending to be intellectual and radical thinkers with a bold new transformative prescription for America, when in reality they are deathly afraid to come out of their ivory towers where the long discredited anti-Americanism to which they so desperately cling, if only by default, would be exposed by the likes of an of Ann Coulter.

11) So how do the Democrats do so well electorally while being AWOL from our Democracy? They dumb down the electorate. They started Air America Radio whose daytime line up features three comedians: Jerry Springier, Al Frankin and Jeanine Garafalo. They register convicted felons and everyone conceivable through the "make every vote count" initiative, no matter what their qualifications. They produce slick 30 second TV commercials. They buy every vote they get with their tax and spend philosophy (really tax and buy votes subversion). They promise that they are more caring than Republicans. In short, they do everything possible to steal votes and everything possible to avoid a very American democratic debate. They hate Ann Coulter because her very presence serves notice on them that they are intellectually bankrupt, too cowardly for debate, and shamefully reduced to silence or sexual/scatological imprecations.

I think Ted needs to join the wingnut welfare queens over at NRO, don't you? He's better than K-Lo.



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digby 6/20/2006 04:10:00 PM |

Monday, June 19, 2006

 
Frothy Junior

by digby

Yee Haw! The Codpiece is back with a vengeance! And guess who can’t keep his grubby little hands away from it. You guessed it: Joe Klein.

Via John Amato:

"I was up there in the cockpit of that airplane coming into Baghdad," the President told the press corps assembled on the White House lawn after his dash into and out of the war zone last week. "It was an unbelievable, unbelievable feeling." In fact, George W. Bush’s body language—let’s call it the full jaunty—was reminiscent of his last, infamous cockpit trip, onto the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln in May 2003 to announce the "end" of major combat operations in Iraq, beneath a mission accomplished sign. His public language is more cautious than it used to be, but he seemed downright frothy in a private session with the congressional leadership after his press conference.

He called the new Iraqi Defense Minister an "interesting cat" and Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, the deceased al-Qaeda leader, "a dangerous dude." Bush had reason, finally, to strut. The al-Zarqawi raid had netted valuable intelligence data that were enabling U.S. and Iraqi forces to roll up al-Qaeda cells—the best haul since the capture of Saddam Hussein, which made it possible for U.S. forces to disable much of the dictator’s inner circle in early 2004. What’s more, the first elected Iraqi government was finally fully in place. Back home, Karl Rove was officially unindicted in the CIA leak case, and the Democrats were busy being Democrats-divided, defensive and confused about the war, with Bush’s favorite punching bag, Senator John Kerry, leading the charge..

That’s right. Bush is stuck in the mid-30’s, his brain narrowly escaped indictment and he had to mount the most top secret trip since Kissinger went to China (someone left the cakewalk in the rain) yet Klein is drooling and panting over the president’s pants again, getting all hot and bothered when the frat-boy in chief calls the Iraq defense Minister an "interesting cat" and al-Zarqawi a "dangerous dude." Why it’s almost as if Joe got invited to a kegger with the BMOC’s and got to hang with them and "rap" all night about "chicks" (or "dangerous dudes", whatever.)

Perhaps someone can explain to me the strange male attraction to George W. Bush. I have never encountered anything quite like it. From day one, DC nerds like Klein have had massive man-crushes on Junior, describing him as "loose-hipped" and "swaggering" and showing all manner of strange obsession with his masculine body language. Klein seems to barely be able to contain his squeal as he writes about Bush’s "strut" and his "full jaunty" (which sounds suspiciously like "full monty" — giving full rise, as it were, to speculation about what Klein was thinking about when he came up with it.) But, can someone please tell me what in the hell he’s talking about when says that Bush was "downright frothy?" What in god’s name was Klein doing while he wrote this column? (Don’t go there…)

Seriously, this has been a huge problem since the beginning of the Bush administration. And it tracks quite handily with the opposite reactions among the chattering geeks during the Clinton years. Bubba was female friendly (if you know what I mean) and was the object of a great deal of derisive coverage for his tomcat vibe by the priggish DC press. What worked in his favor out in the country — his smarts ‘n sexual charisma — made the Washington media squirm like a bunch of little old ladies caught by accident at a Marilyn Manson concert. And then along came the codpiece and they all fell in love. Wassup with that?

On the substance of Klein’s column, such as it is, after he extolls the vitues of Bush’s manly manliness for two paragraphs he points out that his policies are all wrong and that Karl Rove is a lying sack of manure — but that Democrats are icky so we need to stay the course. John Kerry says we should leave by the end of the year and that’s crazy Democratic defeatist talk. Hawkish, man’s man Klein, on the other hand, thinks we shouldn’t get out for another six months. You do the math.

It’s a typically shallow analysis that could have been written in his sleep, but the first two paragraphs are carefully crafted observations of the president’s confidence, demeanor and manly assurance. (How many people can manage to get past the first paragraph of any Joe Klein column, do you think?) It’s the image of Bush as some sort of cowboy hero that kept him propped up for so long (if you’ll excuse the expression) and which the press corps has been dying to get another lingering look at. They love their man when he’s all sweaty and swaggering. Preferably in a tight jumpsuit.

But this will do too.

Joe’s screensaver:

















Pay no attention to the transmitter on his back.



Filling in for Jane, I crossed posted this on FDL tonight
digby 6/19/2006 06:15:00 PM |

 
Bitchy Little Dork

by digby

Here's Iowa Republican congressman Steve King on al-Zarqawi:

“There probably are not 72 virgins in the hell he’s at,” King said. “And if there are, they probably all look like Helen Thomas.”

He sounds like a pretty funny guy, eh? A real towel-snapping frat boy. Catnip with the ladies, I'm sure.

Think you're fooling anyone with that rug, Steverino?





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digby 6/19/2006 03:02:00 PM |

 
Fogies and Hippies

by digby

Atrios wonders today why everybody is so derisive about the (incorrect) idea that the left blogosphere (or Jon Stewart's audience) consists of a bunch of college kids when it would be a benefit to have college kids reading papers and being informed etc.

I'm pretty sure it's because the right's narrative hasn't changed since the 1960's --- the Democrats are held hostage a bunch of radical students who know nothing of how the world really works but are dangerously trying to destroy capitalism and civilized society. Listen to Rush. You can't tell much difference between what he says and what my Dad used to blather on about at the dinner table in 1970's on the subject. The "crazy teenagers vs the grown-ups" paradigm still persists.

Doesn't it seem that this tired, old-fashioned trope, which bears no relationship to reality anymore, if it ever did, is ripe for the dustbin? How is it possible that it persists after all these years?

This is one of those fundamental, ingrained images that undergirds the conservative narrative and we have not even tried to counter it except by having our politicians act like fogies --- which hasn't changed a thing. Isn't it past time to unveil a new set of images that are actually relevant to the new millenium? Any ideas?


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digby 6/19/2006 09:20:00 AM |

Sunday, June 18, 2006

 
Iraqi Nervous Breakdown

by digby

Al Kamen:

Hours before President Bush left on a surprise trip last Monday to the Green Zone in Baghdad for an upbeat assessment of the situation there, the U.S. Embassy in Iraq painted a starkly different portrait of increasing danger and hardship faced by its Iraqi employees. This cable, marked "sensitive" and obtained by The Washington Post, outlines in spare prose the daily-worsening conditions for those who live outside the heavily guarded international zone: harassment, threats and the employees' constant fears that their neighbors will discover they work for the U.S. government.

Here's the cable(pdf)

In a very straighforward descriptive style, Khalilzad writes that Iraqis must hide the fact that they work for the US or face ostracism or worse. Women are being treated only slightly better than if they were living under the Taliban in 1999 --- and they are being asked to wear clothing that Khalilzad admits was not even required by the most repressive Iranian Ayatollahs. They are losing their driving privileges and are considered suspicious if they use a cell phone --- they might be calling a lover, you see. (This is your fundamentalist religion working to "free" women from the burden of being full citizens.)

People are being gouged for electricity, to which they barely have access anyway (in 115 degree heat!) They face kidnappings and violence every day of their lives. Sectarian divisions are showing up in all their social interactions, even among families. They must adopt separate customs, dress and manner of speaking to travel freely through various neighborhoods in Baghdad or risk violence. They cannot trust the security forces, who seem to be getting more hostile to the population, especially those who work for the US. Their anxiety is palpable as they feel their lives are hurling out of control.

Did I mention that the people he is talking about in this cable are all employees of the US embassy in Baghdad? That's right. These are the highly privileged, educated elite who work inside the Green Zone. Imagine what it's like out in the hinterlands.

He does touch upon this with one very disturbing observation:

One colleague beseeched us to weigh in to help a woman who was uprooted in may from her home after 30 years on the pretext of some application of a long-disused lawy that allows owners to evict tenents after 14 years. The woman, who is gayli Kurd, says she has nowhere to go, no other home, but the courts give them no recourse to this new assertion of power. Such uprooting may be a response by new Shiite government authorities to similar actions against Arabs by Kurds in other parts of Iraq. (Note: an arab newspaper editor told us he is preparing an extensive survey of ethnic cleansing, which he said is taking place in almost every Iraqi province, as political parties and their militias are seemingly engaged in tit-for-tat reprisals all over Iraq. One editor told us that the KDP is planning to set up tent cities in Irbil, to house Kurds being evicted from Bagdad.)

The country has obviously already spiraled into a state of civil war. It's not surprising that it's taken on this character of secret informants, ethnic cleansing, paranoia and neighborhood militias because the whole society was shaped by an authoritarian police state. But civil war it is, and from the sound of this cable, it's happening on a far more fundamental level than we knew. The whole society is breaking down from inside out.

Although out staff maintain a professional demeanor, strains are apparent. We see that their personal fears are reinforcing divisive sectarian or ethnic channels, despite talk of reconciliation by officials. Employees are apprehensive enough that we fear they may exagerrate developments or steer us toward news that comports with their own worldview. Objectivity, civility and logic that make for a functional workplace may falter if social pressures outside the Green Zone don't abate.

He pretty much says that he doesn't know if he can trust his own employees much longer because they are being driven a little bit crazy by fear and paranoia. Heckuva job, there, Uncle Sammy.

This seems like a pretty interesting document. I have to wonder why it was merely linked by pdf in a throwaway paragraph in Al Kamen's Sunday column. Khalilzad is, after all, the ambassador to Iraq. You'd think that his thoughts on the deterioration of the social fabric of Iraq would be of interest. Apparently not so much.



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digby 6/18/2006 09:43:00 AM |

 
Gore's Moral Imperative

by tristero

I finally saw An Inconvenient Truth and I simply can't stress enough how important it is for as many people as possible to see it. Not only because it is a superb, sobering description of an imminent environmental catastrophe. Something even more important is on display.

An Inconvenient Truth depicts a genuine American politics of engagement and character. Or more precisely, the untapped potential for it. In the film, Gore says several times that tackling head-on the serious problems that global warming causes is an urgent moral duty. He's right, of course. But the film makes abundantly clear Gore himself has a moral imperative. And that is to return to electoral politics as soon as possible. Man oh man, does this country need more like him.

Should Gore run for president again? Hell, I'd vote for him in a heartbeat. Gladly, juat as I did in 2000. [Update: As per suggestion in comments, here's a link to a draft Gore site.] But Somerby has a good point. The mainstream press loathes Gore and that makes it exceedingly difficult to determine how much of a chance he has. That said, a Gore campaign conducted at the political and intellectual level of the film would be so inspiring it could just motivate considerable interest and commitment by young people which could help counter that kind of assault.

In contrast, the latest bundle of snoozers packaged into an "agenda" by the Democratic party's utterly inept national political consultants is a major league embarassment. It's almost as if the party consultants concluded that since the world is facing an energy crisis, the Democratic party should set an example and not have any.

The modern Al Gore, however, points the way towards a seriously exciting Democratic politics, one that can see a deeply important problem clearly, find ways to tackle it, and inspire the political will to do so. We need that kind, and how.

If the presidency is closed to him, there is the Senate again or a governorship. Why not? But relegating a person like Gore to permanent outsider status in national electoral politics is a waste of a precious natural resource that this country simply can't afford, even in the best of times. And these are not the best of times.
tristero 6/18/2006 03:35:00 AM |

Saturday, June 17, 2006

 
Insurgent Sympathisers

by digby


I'm sure you've all heard about the charming song "Hadji Girl" by now. Here's a little clip of the video from German TV if you haven't had a chance to see how some US Marine officers uphold American values in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Meanwhile, the NY Times today reports that special operations troops used abusive techniques, but in at least a couple of cases, they were against "insurgent sympathizers." This is a new phrase but I suspect it is going to be a very useful one. See, Hadji Girl's little sister (the one who gets her brains blown out in the song) could easily be an "insurgent symnpathizer." Indeed, anyone who is related to an insurgent or even knows one --- little kids especially --- can be seen as soft on insurgency when they cling to their mothers and fathers begging for their lives. The rules of engagement being what they are, apparently, killing these insurgent sympathizers is a-ok.

Throughout this latest report on abuses, they make the case that the blame lies up the chain of command who failed to make the rules clear. There is no indication that anyone up the chain of command will be held liable, however. And everyone else involved were just operating under a misunderstanding. No harm no foul. Water under the bridge. Move along, people.

General Formica said in the interview on Friday that he believed that the Special Operations troops thought they were following authorized procedures, and corrected them after he pointed out their error. "I didn't find cruel and malicious criminals that are out there looking for detainees to abuse," he said.

I was out in the sands of Iraq
And we were under attack
And I, well, I didn't know where to go.
And the first thing I could see was
Everybody's favorite Burger King
So I threw open the door and I hit the floor.
Then suddenly to my surprise
I looked up and I saw her eyes
And I knew it was love at first sight.
And she said

Durka Durka Mohammed Jihad
Sherpa Sherpa Bak Allah
Hadji girl I can't understand what you're saying.
And she said
Durka Durka Mohammed Jihad
Sherpa Sherpa Bak Allah
Hadji girl I love you anyway.

Then she said that she wanted me to see.
She wanted me to meet her family
But I, well, I couldn't figure out how to say no.
Cause I don't speak Arabic.
So, she took me down an old dirt trail.
And she pulled up to a side shanty
And she threw open the door and I hit the floor.
Cause her brother and her father shouted

Durka Durka Mohammed Jihad
Sherpa Sherpa Bak Allah
They pulled out their AKs so I could see
And they said
Durka Durka Mohammed Jihad
Sherpa Sherpa Bak Allah

So I grabbed her little sister and pulled her in front of me.
As the bullets began to fly
The blood sprayed from between her eyes
And then I laughed maniacally
Then I hid behind the TV
And I locked and loaded my M-16
And I blew those little f***ers to eternity.
And I said

Durka Durka Mohammed Jihad
Sherpa Sherpa Bak Allah
They should have known they were f***ing with a Marine

What sets this apart from most war songs, which are obviously often violent and celebrate the death of the enemy, is the fact that he holds a little girl in front of him as a shield and then laughs maniacally when blood sprays from between her eyes. Michelle Malkin thinks this is business as usual and maybe she's right. In the video the guys listening hooted and hollard at those lines in particular, so the idea of a young girl getting shot in the head is obviously not considered any kind of taboo. They enjoyed this particular image very much.

I worry about people who think like this coming back into society. That kind of thing cannot be considered gallantry on the battle field. It's ugly and dirty and ultimately is going to blow back on some of these guys. I hope the Republicans are prepared to spend as much on VA mental health as they've spent filling their right wing cronies' bank accounts because a lot of these guys are going to need help. Our troops are in danger of losing their humanity in a war being fought for bogus political reasons. Some of them are going to have a hard time living with that.


Update: The New York Times also has a big story today on Haditha, having interviewed some of the soldiers and their lawyers. They claim thier actions were SOP, which means we will probably have another round of this "the rules weren't clear" so nobody's responsible.


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digby 6/17/2006 10:03:00 AM |

 
Original Inquisitor

by digby


Kieran Healy makes what I think is the most salient observation about the Supremes gutting of the fourth amendment in Hudson v. Michigan and I would really love to see some smart legal scholars ask Justice Scalia about it at his next controversial speech:

Scalia, writing for the majority, is happy to set his originalism aside and argue that the growth of “public-interest law firms and lawyers who specialize in civil-rights grievances ... [and] the increasing professionalism of police forces, including a new emphasis on internal police discipline ... [and] the increasing use of various forms of citizen review can enhance police accountability” all mean that the fourth amendment can be reinterpreted.

There have been many cases that put the lie to Scalia's "originalism," but in this one he isn't even trying. He is claiming outright that the fourth amendment is no longer necessary because cops have adopted certain bureaucratic systems and are trained well so we don't have to worry about government intrusion anymore. I suppose it's possible that the founders would agree with him, I don' know, but if they meant for the fourth amendment to be removed from the BOR once cops were trained to always do the right thing, then they made a big mistake and forgot to write it into the constitution. And I certainly haven't seen the legislature submit an amendment to that effect, much less get it passed. Scalia is openly just making it up as he goes along now --- and this new court is going to be just as bad as we predicted.

Is it just me or does the sight of Alito, Scalia, Roberts and Thomas doing what they consider to be god's work, remind you of something?

The Inquisition Tribunal by Francisco de Goya

Via kevin drum
digby 6/17/2006 08:52:00 AM |

Friday, June 16, 2006

 
Calling All New Yorkers

by digby

Check it out:

The Writer's Voice Visiting Author Series Presents:

Glenn Greenwald “How Would a Patriot Act?”

Saturday, June 17, 2006

8:00 PM

Reading/Discussion/Q & A

West Side YMCA-- The George Washington Lounge

5 West 63rd Street (between Central Park West & Broadway)


~Admission Free and Open to the Public~


We are pleased to continue our partnership with 67Wine, who in part provide beverages for our readings, in order to make your experience here even more pleasurable. Please visit their web site.

Copies of “How Would A Patriot Act” will be available for sale from our good friends at BookCourt, from downtown Brooklyn.

Go drink wine with Glenn and buy the book if you haven't already. You won't be disappointed.



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digby 6/16/2006 02:14:00 PM |

 
Creative Scapegoating

by digby


Wow. It's rare to see conventional wisdom being created right before your eyes, but this Chuck Todd piece is a masterpiece. Cokie just got her cocktail party chatter in nice bullet pointed talking points:

"From 30,000 feet, all of the elements for a big Democratic triumph seem to be in place, but zooming in closer on the nation's landscape reveals a Democratic Party that just isn't sure enough of itself to lead.

Consider:

• Ned Lamont's Democratic primary challenge to Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman. (You've heard of "rose-colored" glasses; well, some in the party view everything through "war-colored" glasses.)

• Pennsylvania Rep. John Murtha's (D) incredibly premature bid for House "majority" leader against longtime party stalwart, Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md. That introduced a level of cockiness the party didn't need, particularly after last week's less-than-stellar performance. Moreover, challenges like this only serve to divide the party. At least Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., is showing signs of knowing when a bad idea has been launched by squelching the Murtha campaign.

• The rigorous "party credential" test Reagan Secretary of the Navy James Webb (D) was forced to undergo in Virginia. Republicans throw parades and clear primary fields for Democratic Party interlopers; former Reagan Navy secretaries-turned-Democratic Senate aspirants don't grow on trees.

• The tepid response Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., is receiving among liberal bloggers. Love her or hate her, it's surprising that liberal activists seem to be turning their back on someone who has carried an enormous amount of water for the party.

• The throwback ticket of statewide nominees California Democrats picked last week. There's nothing like stunting the growth of the party in the biggest state of the union by nominating throwbacks. The biggest thing the party has to fear is a victory of the Democratic ticket.

• Pelosi's difficulty in purging her caucus of Rep. William "Freezer Cash" Jefferson, D-La. When are some in the party going to realize that not everything is about race?

Not one of these intraparty disputes is cause for alarm, but collectively, they paint a picture of a party that's not yet ready to lead."

I particularly like the phrase "throwback ticket" to describe progressives. And the biggest thing the party has to fear is victory. It just doesn't get any better than that.

"The Democrats are not ready to lead." I think we all know why, don't we? The "war colored glasses" crowd is a terrible influence, don't you know. We're so out of control we are supporting a challenger in a Senate primary! Call out the guard!

The DC press corpse has been terribly distressed having to report so negatively about Republicans all the time. After all these years of being mau-maued by the right about being liberal I suspect the current political situation feels like their fur is being rubbed the wrong way. This Chuck Todd narrative gives them a much more comfortable way to report this.

And the best part is that if we win, they can use this narrative to describe us as immature and unready to govern right up through 2008, at which point they can deliver their favorite tough talker, John McCain, as the grown-up Daddy who will save us all.

You see, this "immature" label goes back a long, long way --- all the way to the 60's. It's the standard baby boomer narrative that gets more absurd by the day as huge numbers of us greying lefties get closer to the grave. But I suspect it won't die until we do, and maybe not even then. Liberals do tend to be idealists, which jaded insiders always find distasteful (unless it's Junior Codpiece blathering on incoherently about the "Almighty's gift of freedom" in which case they applaud wildly.)

Coverage of the Clinton administration from day one was all about the "undisciplined" atmosphere. Indeed, you'll recall that the very last story of the administration was the RNC manufactured lies about the rampaging Clintonites trashing Air Force One. It was so silly it was hard to believe the press would go for it, but they did. Democrats, you see, are perpetual teen-agers. Cokie and her friends will tell you all about it, even as they gleefully rummage through underwear drawers and babble about haircuts and earthtones with all the gravitas of a seventh grade slumber party.

As much as Todd's piece is pure CW drivel, he does make one point I think may be important. He notes:

...some realism has finally entered the equation when it comes to 2006, mostly based on one result -- the Calif.-50 special election.

The race told us two things:

* There's no extra excitement in the Democratic base, as there was no increase in the Democratic vote in Calif.-50. (The same was true of the entire state.)

* Immigration is an issue powerful enough to rally the Republican base.

These lessons run counter to the conventional wisdom from just two weeks ago that presumed Democrats were more fired up about the 2006 elections than Republicans, who supposedly were having their own problems firing up their base.

I don't know if that race actually proves that, but I think the general observation may be correct. I have to agree that Democrats have yet to fire up the base enough. And the reason is that although many voters are unhappy with Bush they can't see how things will be any different with Democrats in charge of the congress.

The Democracy Corps memo of a week or so ago said this:

Democrats have a strong and consistent lead in both the "real" Congressional vote and
Senate races. In our latest survey, Democrats enjoy an 8-point advantage in the "real" vote for Congress and have led by an average of 9 points over the past three months. In the race for Senate, the Democrats hold an 11-point edge in the "real" Senate vote over the past three months and even more impressively, lead by 10 points in races with vulnerable Republican incumbents. These advantages are impressive, but they are not big enough for Democrats to recapture the House or Senate.

The Democrat’s current advantage in the "real" vote for Congress is still a couple points short of the swing needed to match 1994 and what the data says is possible for the party to achieve. On virtually every test of message and policy direction in this survey, the Democratic advantage is twice that of the current vote margin. The voters want to give the Democrats a bigger margin than they are currently achieving. If the challenger campaigns are effective, they can catch this wave.

If the Democrats and challengers fail to show voters something more, this disillusionment could show itself in fragmentation to smaller parties and more likely, a stay-at-home protest. The current measures of potential Democratic turnout and enthusiasm are not impressive. And while it is likely that a low turnout election will hurt Republicans more than Democrats, a stay-away protest vote could also cut into the margin Democrats might have achieved.

Democrats can ignore this and fret about the immature and distasteful grassroots --- or they can start giving their base a reason to vote for them. Mid-terms are about turn-out. Until rank and file Dems see that their party won't just excuse, enable and endorse GOP policies they have no reason to get off the couch.

Let's be clear about this: if we lose this fall, it will not be because the "war colored glasses" crowd was immature and failed to behave properly at the debutante ball. It will be because the Democratic establishment blew off its own voters in order to please David Broder and the stale DC punditocrisy --- the same thing they have been doing for more than a decade and losing.

Don't look at us. We're trying to get Democratic voters charged up about being Democrats again. Pissing and moaning because Joe Lieberman is facing a primary challenge is having the opposite effect. If we lose, it will be because the party establishment once more showed contempt for Democratic voters --- a fatal error the Republicans never ever make.



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digby 6/16/2006 09:10:00 AM |

Thursday, June 15, 2006

 
Memo To Democrats

by tristero

Issue #1 is Bush. Issue #2 is everything else. Until Bush no longer has a Republican majority in the House and the Senate to rubber stamp nearly everything he wants, your opinions and ideas mean squat. No. Less than squat.

Make reining in Bush *the* issue. Republicans in Congress will do whatever Bush wants, but the country is fed up with what Bush wants. They've seen how much damage he causes. Only Democratic majorities in Congress can prevent him from wreaking even worse havoc on the country. Bush is the issue. And hoo boy! has Bush made the your job incredibly easy:

Remember: Bush really is incompetent. And the American public sees it now.

Remember: Bush really has governed above the law. And the the American public understands that now.

Remember: Bush has bogged this nation down in an insane war. And the American public understands that now.

Remember: Bush does not have a genuine plan to deal with Iraq, nor is he capable of creating and implementing one. People are dying because he doesn't know what he's doing. And the American public understands that now.

Remember: Bush's supreme callousness and negligence led to the hiring of the incompetents in charge of FEMA during Katrina. And the American public knows it.

Remember: This is one helluva unpopular president. The American public has very good reasons for disliking him and his policies so intensely. They are all but begging you to stand up and refuse to go along with his incompetent, extremist, and unlawful behavior.

Focus on Bush. Everything else is detail.


Love,


tristero
tristero 6/15/2006 02:06:00 PM |

 
V I Day At Last

by digby


This is just awesome. The US found some al-Zarqawi documents that prove that we are smokin 'em outa their caves and that we've gottem on the run! And Bush was right all along! Yeaaaah!

A blueprint for trying to start a war between the United States and Iran was among a "huge treasure" of documents found in the hideout of terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Iraqi officials said Thursday. The document, purporting to reflect al-Qaida policy and its cooperation with groups loyal to ousted President Saddam Hussein, also appear to show that the insurgency in Iraq was weakening.

The al-Qaida in Iraq document was translated and released by Iraqi National Security Adviser Mouwafak al-Rubaie. There was no way to independently confirm the authenticity of the information attributed to al-Qaida.

Now, "some" might say since the Bush administration has been proved to be planting propaganda in both the Iraqi and US press, since we've "found" many spurious documents in Iraq before, and since they are lying scumbags about virtually everything including whether the sun came up this morning --- that we should be skeptical of such things. I am not one of those people. Clearly, the war is won and we can bring the troops home.

I think it's really lucky, though, that al-Zarqawi was keeping such meticulous notes and blueprints. Why do you suppose he was doing that? Was he required to send regular reports back to headquarters? A potential book deal perhaps? Maybe he was a blogger.

Anyway, note to revolutionaries, terrorists and insurgents everywhere: my mother told me many years ago, "never put on paper what the world can't see." You might want to think about that. Coz' look what your sloppiness has done. Now the infidel knows all your plans and that you know they are winning. Gawd, how embarrassing! Moral is going to be shit after this.

While the coalition was continuing to suffer human losses, "time is now beginning to be of service to the American forces and harmful to the resistance," the document said.

The document said the insurgency was being hurt by, among other things, the U.S. military's program to train Iraqi security forces, by massive arrests and seizures of weapons, by tightening the militants' financial outlets, and by creating divisions within its ranks.

[...]

According to the summary, insurgents were being weakened by operations against them and by their failure to attract recruits. To give new impetus to the insurgency, they would have to change tactics, it added.

Can you believe it? Why George W. Bush was right on every single thing! Boy, is my face red.

There's a lot more at the link --- example after example of how the insugency is being beaten down by the superior US battle plan. There can be no more doubts. We've turned the corner. When the evil mastermind himself writes on his blog that he is helpless in the face of your superior superiority and that he's just about to give up because you are so much stronger and better and gooder --- well, there can be no further doubt that the US has kicked some terrorist ass but good. It's morning in America folks. The war is won!


Now lets go get us some illegal aliens!


Hat tip to GL.


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digby 6/15/2006 09:08:00 AM |

 
A New Ed Helms Movie!

by tristero



Cool! It looks like Ed Helms, one of the funniest guys on tv, is set to play a bumbling White House counselor with a fear of flying in a 21st century remake of the Abrahams/Zucker masterpiece, Airplane! Man I can't wait!

But who's that guy next to Ed? It looks like it could be Moe Howard's grandson. Better check the cast list...

Ooops. My bad.
tristero 6/15/2006 08:58:00 AM |

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

 
Democratic Terrorists

by digby

This new Lieberman poll is an earthquake. Ned Lamont could win this thing. The word is that Lieberman is actually quite serious about leaving the party, but that's not actually correct. Connecticut Democrats seem to be leaving him.

Naturally, this is just terrible. Who has ever heard of supporting a candidate in a primary to challenge an incumbent with whom you are unhappy? Why, it's political terrorism, I tell ya!

"I think to be terrorized through the summer by an extremely small group of the Democratic Party, much less the voting population, is total insanity for a person who is a three-term senator," Droney said.

Looks like that extremely small group of terrorists is on its way to becoming a majority of Democrats. How very untidy. Usurping a three term Senator simply isn't done, you see. He's been ordained by God.

Josh Marshall put it well in this post about the campaign from last week:

But what was Lieberman's excuse [for refusing to back protecting social security]?

We went back and forth with him. I'd talk to his staffers and folks around him and work and work and work to get a straight answer, but just had the hardest time. It was always this statement or that that seemed to support Social Security but really left the door open to some compromise on phase out when you looked at it closely. On and on and on.

And what was the point of that? Certainly it wasn't political, at least not in the narrow sense. Lieberman didn't have anything to worry about in Connecticut. If it was ideological, what's that about? It's a core Democratic issue. Not a shibboleth or a sacred cow. But a core reason why most Democrats are Democrats.

In the end it just seemed like a desire to be in the mix for some illusory compromise or grand bargain, an ingrained disinclination to take a stand, even in a case when it really mattered. There's some whiff of indifference to the great challenges of the age, even amidst the atmospherics of concern.

This of course doesn't even get into everything on Iraq or the pussy-footing over running the Pentagon for President Bush.

I think the most generous read on Lieberman is that he's just out of step with the parliamentary turn of recent American politics which I myself, Mark Schmitt and many others have discussed. But I think that's too generous. The whining in Washington that it's somehow an affront that Lieberman's hold on his senate is being threatened is entirely misplaced, a good example of what's wrong with DC's permanent class.

Exactly. The establishment would obviously like to do away with primaries. They would prefer to simply tell the plebes for whom to vote and just take their money. But, that's not the way it's going to work anymore. It's not just that politics have taken a parliamentary turn, which is quite true. It goes to the heart of why so many Americans don't trust Democrats to lead: the spineless factor. It's why the Democratic terrorists are going to take the radical step of trying to elect someone who doesn't publicly kiss George W. Bush on the lips every chance he gets.

You don't have to look any further than Joe Lieberman to understand why the entire world thinks Democrats are a bunch of chickenshit losers. We're tired of being associated with someone who can't even stand a fair fight in the Connecticut Democratic party without whining like snivelling schoolkid and threatening to take his ball and go home. Why should anyone trust such a gutless tool with the reins of government? I know I don't. The party is on notice that this just won't be tolerated anymore by leading Blue State Democrats.

Here's the plan. First, the Democratic terrorists are going to kick Lieberman's ass. After that, they are going to kick the Republican party's ass. And finally they will kick bin Laden's ass. We didn't create this hard core political environment, the Republicans did, with the help of self-serving Dems like Lieberman. Now somebody has to clean up all these messes. The crazed Democratic terrorists who are willing to cast aside all morality by ruthlessly supporting a primary challenger (who is not a travelling Deadhead, but rather a middle of the road self made millionaire) seem to be the only ones who are willing to do it.

Update:

This is outrageous:

Schumer said that the DSCC "fully supports" Sen. Joe Lieberman in his primary bid, and he refused to rule out continuing that support if Lieberman were to run as an independent.

There were degrees of independence, Schumer said. "You can run as an independent, you can run as an independent Democrat who pledges to vote for Harry Reid as Majority Leader."

Uhm, no. You don't get to leave the party to avoid losing in a Democratic primary and then expect Democratic party financial support to run against the Democratic candidate. That's just nuts. And it's so disrespectful to the Democratic voters of Connecticut I can't honestly believe he has thought this through.

If they do this, it will cause a full on backlash against the Democratic Party by the rank and file and the party elders like Shumer have no one to blame but themselves. Frankly, this arrogant dictatorial attitude would be a little bit easier to take if the party hadn't given away the fucking store for the last quarter century and gotten exactly nothing in return. The last time I checked these people haven't won anything in a long, long time. Why we are supposed to keep putting our faith in their greater capacity to win is beyond me. Certainly, the unmitigated gall of these goddamned losers lording over the voters like this is going to kill this party. A little humility is called for here.

Call your senators' offices.
Sign this petition for Ned Lamont.

Remember, this is the crowd that spent millions to come up with this stirring slogan: "Together, America can do better."

Meanwhile, the Republicans say, "America is the best!"

You tell me which statement appeals more to the American people.


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digby 6/14/2006 02:24:00 PM |

 
Brand Ex

by digby


This is probably going to be an interesting site. I haven't had a chance to read it over very carefully (except to note that Elain Kamarck is openly suggesting that we run the Dukakis campaign again because it might work this time.) But I think it's probably going to be a useful insight into the thinking of the strategic workings of the Democratic party.

I can't help but wonder, however, why anyone would think that calling the thing "The Democratic Strategist" was a great idea? Talk about bad branding. If there is a more ridiculed and disrespected phrase in the party at the moment, I can't think of what it would be.

Somehow, I have a feeling this wrong choice says something important. I can't quite put my finger on what it might be ...




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digby 6/14/2006 12:44:00 PM |

 
Pandermonium

by digby


Ana Marie Cox's latest dispatch from YKOS online cautions all you funny little bumpkins who have never been to a political bash before to be careful of being co-opted by the elite. She's been a real "journalist" for almost five minutes now so she understands how to handle being handled. You, on the other hand, are putty in their hands. Word to the wise.

But Cox is very confused about something else. She writes:

Many marveled that Warner would spend so much on bloggers — bloggers! — especially given that the progressive Internet movement has yet to claim a significant general election victory. But from publicity perspective, the campaign got a significant bang for its buck. "Think about it," said a Warner staffer, "If we threw this kind of thing for the DNC [Democratic National Committee], it would be just another party." As it was, the event's buzz reverberated throughout the community and into the mainstream media.

Warner was the first Presidential hopeful to commit to coming to Yearly Kos. Jerome Armstrong, the co-author of "Crashing the Gate" with Yearly Kos namesake Markos Moulitsas, is the governor's Internet consultant and unofficial blogger liaison. Clearly, the Warner campaign has great hopes for leveraging what convention-goers call "the netroots." Yet to judge by Warner's actual speech, the netroots are just another constituency, a Democratic special-interest group to be placated by a campaign promise or two. Aside from a warm-up that referenced the night's festivities, Warner delivered his time-tested stump speech to the crowd, its paeans to the need for education and national security indistinguishable from what he might say to the Milwaukee teacher's association or the Charleston VFW. This lack of special treatment—or absence of pandering—is either a sign of respect or confusion.

(Note that "many" marveled. Not the vague and ill defined "some" that that George Bush uses all the time, but "many." How many, I wonder? And who? Were they really, really cool insiders who know about this stuff, or the hillbillies from Mud Holler who don't know nothin' bout no big time politickin'? Just curious.)

But that's not why I highlighted this paragraph in her otherwise fairly uninformative and ennervating piece. Cox's observations about politicians pandering to the netroots as a special interest show she misunderstands the meaning of both special interest and pandering.

A "special interest group," by definition, has a special interest. Like the environment. Or gun rights. If Warner or any other candidate saw the netroots as a special interest group, what's the special interest? Net neutrality? Free broadband? Censorship?

I'm not saying that we don't have an interest in keeping the net free from government interference etc., but that's just a basic necessity to keep doing what we're doing. Our "special interest" is progressive politics --- which is a pretty broad definition of "special." We care about all the same stuff that Democrats everywhere do and we are perhaps even more interested than most in hearing the whole program, how it's presented and what the priorities are, because we are a communication medium and we will be spreading the good news if we hear it. So, it's wrong to say that Warner made a mistake in not tailoring a speech to the Netroots. There is simply no way to pander to our special interest because we have no special interest. The netroots are just grassroots progressives organized in a new way.

She goes on to claim that Dean, on the other hand, did pander to the conventioneers as a special interest group by giving a partisan speech. If the Chairman of the Democratic party is considered to be pandering when he gives a rousing pep talk to a group of hard core grassroots Democrats then let the panderfest begin. It's part of the job description. (I'll make sure to let the broadcasters know that when Bill Cohwer gives a halftime pep talk to the Steelers next season, they should refer to it as pandering.)

Cox spends the rest of her column observing that bloggers yearn to be mainstream journalists, but don't have the skills. She may not know much about how politics work, but Cox's current gig at TIME magazine as their ex-blogger expert shows her to be uniquely qualified to comment on that particular subject.

Update:

Cox was reportedly distraught that her notebook went missing during the convention. Somebody found it.



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digby 6/14/2006 09:37:00 AM |

 
The Libertarian Blues

by tristero

In comments to a previous post, NY Expat was correct that I had not read Kos's description of a "Libertarian Democrat" worldview. Having now read it, I find it a brilliant example of framing a set of political beliefs in an attractive way. What Kos is describing, of course, is not so much a brand of libertarianism as it is a moderate form of contemporary liberalism (somewhat more moderate than my own, by the way, but certainly respectable and defensible).

If this kind of relabeling helps attract more voters, I'm all for it. Nevertheless, actual libertarianism - with its radical emphasis on the elimination of government regulation, coupled with a frankly naive attitude towards the obvious potential for such policies when implemented to create a profoundly illiberal society - remains a political philosophy which most liberal Democrats will find rather unhelpful. Liberal Democrats need to articulate a genuinely serious set of commonsense proposals to help this country regain its democracy and its stature, so majorly battered by the present Republican "mainstream" and other extremists on the right.

It is unclear to me what positive ideas libertarianism can offer to liberalism that are unique. For example, if affirmative action and Social Security are such cancers on the nation, what does a libertarian believe would be sensible improvements. Mere elimination of these programs will not responsibly address the underlying issues that led to their proposal in the first place.
tristero 6/14/2006 04:58:00 AM |

Tuesday, June 13, 2006

 
He Threw it Away A Long Time Ago

by digby

Josh Marshall has a nice response up to Jonah Goldberg's plaintive cry of "where can Rove go to get his reputation back?"

As Andrew Sullivan aptly quips, maybe Rove can go look for it in South Carolina. More to the point, let's not forget the salient facts here. The question going back three years ago now is whether Karl Rove knowingly participated in leaking the identity of a covert CIA operative for the purpose of discrediting a political opponent who was revealing information about the White House's use of intelligence in the lead-up to the Iraq War.

That was the issue. From the beginning, Rove, through Scott McClellan, denied that he did any of that. There weren't even any clever circumlocutions. He just lied. From admissions from Rove, filings in the Libby case, and uncontradicted reportage, we know as clearly as we ever can that Rove did do each of those things.

So he did do what he was suspected of and he did lie about it.

These things may not have risen to a level of criminality, but they were low-down political dirty tricks at the very least. We know this. And we know that Rove has done whisper campaigns about judges being pedophiles and governors being lesbians and war heroes being cowards. He plays a form of despicable hardball politics by character assassination. He makes no bones about it. These things are not illegal. But they are despicable and loathesome, nonetheless.

As Marshall points out, Fitzgerald gave up on charging under the leak statute early on. This has always been about perjury and obstruction. Whether Rove cut a deal or Fitz just couldn't make a case for those two crimes is unknown. What is not unknown is whether Rove is a lying, scumbag piece of shit. He is.

And when the the Libby trial happens next winter, I suspect it will be spelled out in uncertain terms just how low these people are willing to go.

Remember this:

[Rove] also told the FBI, the same sources said, that circulating the information was a legitimate means to counter what he claimed was politically motivated criticism of the Bush administration by Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.

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

And this:

Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten of the Los Angeles Times reported on July 18 that top White House aides were in a state of mania around this time two years ago, “intensely focused on discrediting” Joseph Wilson after he wrote his now-famous New York Times op-ed piece.

Hamburger’s and Wallsten’s sources tell them that Karl Rove’s animus toward Wilson was so intense that curiosity arose within the White House about it. When asked about this, Rove reportedly said, “He’s a Democrat.”

I'm sure that many Republicans feel that this was just great. It shows that Karl has the biggest balls in town. But I suspect there are others who aren't quite so enamored of this petty political crapola when it comes to serious issues like why went into Iraq.

As I wrote earlier, Karl's testimony should be very interesting.



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digby 6/13/2006 12:21:00 PM |

 
Brass Ones

by digby

You've got to hand it to the Republicans. Karl Rove must have heard that he was off the hook --- and the first thing he did was head up to New Hampshire to raise money for the most crooked state GOP operation in the nation:

MANCHESTER, N.H. --Presidential adviser Karl Rove is the keynote speaker Monday night at the state Republican Party's annual dinner -- which Democrats say is to raise money to help the party pay legal fees in a phone jamming case.

State Party Chairman Wayne Semprini acknowledged Friday he would like to raise enough money so the suit "represents a very small portion of our budget."

But he said the case has nothing to do with Rove's appearance.

"He won't say boo about phone jamming," Semprini said. "There's absolutely no connection between his being here and phone jamming. Period. This is our annual dinner."

Democrats are suing Republicans to find out who knew about the phone jamming done Election Day 2002 that tied up a Democratic and nonpartisan effort to get out the vote and provide rides to the polls. Three Republican operatives have been convicted in the plot.

Democrats and New Hampshire Citizen Action plan demonstrations to coincide with Rove's speech to draw attention to the event and the phone jamming case.

Semprini blamed the case on a "rogue employee who did a real dumb thing."

"As a party, we're paying a price," he said, but added that the state party won't go out of business as a result.

Not that anyone has any regrets. Here's the rogue employee whom I quoted last week:

In his first interview about the case, Raymond said he doesn't know anything that would suggest the White House was involved in the plan to tie up Democrats' phone lines and thereby block their get-out-the-vote effort. But he said the scheme reflects a broader culture in the Republican Party that is focused on dividing voters to win primaries and general elections. He said examples range from some recent efforts to use border-security concerns to foster anger toward immigrants to his own role arranging phone calls designed to polarize primary voters over abortion in a 2002 New Jersey Senate race.

``A lot of people look at politics and see it as the guy who wins is the guy who unifies the most people," he said. ``I would disagree. I would say the candidate who wins is the candidate who polarizes the right bloc of voters. You always want to polarize somebody."

Karl couldn't have said it better himself. And I'm sure that Karl will make sure that Mr Raymond is taken care of. He did his time so more important Republicans didn't have to. That's how it works.

Feelin' good about that Scooter?



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digby 6/13/2006 11:52:00 AM |

 
Rover Rollover

by digby


So Rove's not going to be frog marched out of the white house any time soon. At least not for Plame. But c'mon. It's pretty clear that he cut a deal, don't you think? His lawyer says that Fitzgerald “does not anticipate seeking charges.” Yeah, unless he fails to live up to his agreement to testify. He went before the grand jury five times, and it wasn't because he had nothing to say. He saved his own neck at Libby's expense --- and maybe Cheney's.

This post from Chicago's Archpundit from last October says it all, I think, about Fitzgerald's techniques:

In his high profiles cases that I've followed, Fitzgerald is not the kind of guy to shoot all of his ammunition at once. He's strategic in what he brings at any given time with the seeming strategy to leverage current indictments to move up the food chain.

[...]

The last U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois was a guy named Scott Lasser who was generally seen as an honest guy, but most of his public corruption trials involved alderman and other assorted small fry. Lasser always seemed to be complaining behind the scenes that he couldn't get anyone to talk. The reason is obvious from the outside, Lasser looked to build a case and do it at one time. He never exhibited a pattern of building cases slowly and then moving up the food chain. He wasn't corrupt by any account, but perhaps not very imaginative.

Peter Fitzgerald brought in a Patrick Fitzgerald to change that sense of helplessness. Fitzgerald had worked a number of different kind of cases, but the big ones were two terrorism cases involving the first World Trade Center bombing and the African Embassy Bombings. What isn't mentioned as much, but is probably as critical to how he tries white collar crime, is he participated in several mafia related prosecutions including one of the Gambino trials.

What does all this mean assuming indictments come down tomorrow? It means that most likely, they won't be the last and the purpose of them may not be simply to bring justice and an end to the investigation. If Fitzgerald thinks he needs to crack someone to get the top banana, he'll use all the pressure he has available to get Libby or Rove or someone else to flip if that is where he feels the law will take him.

As far as the great Vizier Rove's ability to pull naother rabbit out of the hat in November goes: we'll see. He's always been overrated. After all, he's called "Bush's Brain." That's worked out really well hasn't it?

And the good news is that Libby's trial is going to be a barn burner if Rove testifies against him.


Update: Christy at Firedoglake has more.


Update II: Jeralynn at Talk Left spoke to Rove's lawyer who said categorically that there was no deal. Rove is apparently completely in the clear. Long live the man behind the curtain.


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digby 6/13/2006 09:09:00 AM |

Monday, June 12, 2006

 
Ann Gets Voted Off The Island

by digby

Oh my goodness. Guess who's being purged from the movement for not being a real conservative? From skralyx at Daily Kos:

I was just at RedState, though, and I got a strange breath of fresh air: a recommended diary over there tonight is about boycotting Ann Coulter. It got mixed comments, with some dittoheads bellowing, "I love Ann! I'm buying her book! Woohooo! Don't bother me with facts and analysis. La la la! I can't hear you!!", but a nearly equal number agreeing that she is no service whatsoever to conservatism.

Redstate: I am somewhat reluctant to write about Ann Coulter this week. The last thing I want to do is help her sell more copies of her book. But I am willing to take that chance in order to denouce her, to show that she is one of the greatest dangers that exists to the conservative movement.

[...]

Captain Ed says it best about this:

...impugning the grief felt by 9/11 widows regardless of their politics is nothing short of despicable. It denies them their humanity and disregards the very public and horrific nature of their spouses' deaths. The attacks motivated a lot of us to become more active in politics in order to make sure our voices contribute to the debate, and it is impossible to argue that the 9/11 widows (and widowers, and children, and parents) have less standing to opine on foreign policy than Ann Coulter...

Of course Ed isn't the only conservative denoucing Coulter on this.

-----

Hugh Hewitt:

Ann Coulter owes an apology to the widows of 9/11, and she should issue it immediately. This is beyond callous, beyond any notion of decency. It is disgusting.

RedState:

this sort of savage attack on people who have suffered a horrible tragedy is beyond any excusing and, really, beyond any apology. Coulter, who was a friend of Barbara Olson (killed on the plane that hit the Pentagon), should know better; heck, any first-grader would know better. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

The Anchoress:

...she is embodying everything I currently cannot abide in the "conservative movement", the arrogant presumption of absolute moral certitude (which is ugly, ugly, ugly coming from the left, so honey, it's not pretty when it's from the right, either), combined with the sense of over-confidence which is sending so many on the right into a self-destructive Roy Moore/Tom Tancredo plunge off a cliff.

Ace of Spades:

this nastiness is uncalled for. Even if something is actually felt deep inside -- even if you're filled with toxic hatred for very annoying, very presumptuous, very left-leaning women with an overweening sense of entitlement -- most people would find less abrasive ways to express such an emotion. Does that mean that Ann is just more honest than us "nancy boys"? Not really. A lot of the time the excuse of "I was just being honest" is just a code for "I'm basically an inconsiderate [butthead] who cannot be bothered to modify my behavior in even the slightest fashion in order to observe basic conventions of social decency."

The Strata-Sphere:

I don't know what happened to Anne, but she is a walking disaster for conservatives...Anne Coulter is no Conservative. She cannot be. Either that or I am no conservative. There is no way to condone such cruelty. Anne, sit down and just don't talk anymore. You have done enough damage.

-----

AJStrata is completely correct: Ann Coulter is no conservative. Ann Coulter stands for nothing more than herself. And this is the curious thing. Many conservative friends of mine are defending Coulter. Well, I think the joke is on them.

[...]

It is high time to "excommunicate" Ann Coulter from the conservative movement. So I am issuing this call to the conservative movement across the country: Boycott Ann Coulter! Do not buy her book. Do not attend her speaking engagements. My goal is to see her new book fall off the New York Times Top 10 Bestseller List very soon.

So if you are with me on this one please drop me a note in the comments below. And more importantly, get the word out. Pass this post on to others. It is high time to separate from Coulter just like we did with Pat Buchanan and David Duke.

Apparently commenters throughout the right blogosphere are aghast at this proposed purging of their blond heroine. They'd better get with the program. This is only the beginning.

Coulter has been a shrieking harpy for years, saying the most vile things imaginable and making a good profit at it. What in the world has changed?

They supported her when she said:

When contemplating college liberals, you really regret once again that John Walker is not getting the death penalty. We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed too. Otherwise they will turn out to be outright traitors."

and this:

"[The] backbone of the Democratic Party [is a] typical fat, implacable welfare recipient"

and this:

"it's far preferable to fight [terrorists] in the streets of Baghdad than in the streets of New York where the residents would immediately surrender."

and this:

"My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building."

or this:

"Liberals can't just come out and say they want to take our money, kill babies and discriminate on the basis of race."

and this:

"Name-calling has been the principal argument liberals have deployed against conservative arguments".

Those quotes go back all the way to 1997 and they are just the tip of the iceberg. This woman has been coarsening the discourse with her hateful swill for more than a decade and made big bucks selling that swill to eager rightwing readers.

So what has precipitated this new wingnut sensitivity? Republican popularity, that's what. That's when the movement starts casting its dead weight overboard.

Sorry, Ann. That's the way it goes in the conservative movement. When someone becomes a bother they are no longer conservative --- no matter that you've spent your whole life doing exactly the same disgusting thing to great acclaim by all these people. You've been voted off the island. For the good of the Party. Long live conservatism --- the "pure" ideology that never fails.

But guys, if you have a problem with Coulter's attacks on the 9/11 widows, you're going to have to take a look at the big guy himself. Ann Coulter didn't create the slandering of the 9/11 widows theme. Limbaugh did. Is he no longer a conservative either?


Update: John Amato has posted a hilarious Coulter moment.

Update II: Howie Klein has another hilarious Coulter moment, by Henry Rollins.



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digby 6/12/2006 08:21:00 PM |

 
Can A Libertarian Find True Happiness In The Blues?

by tristero

My libertarian cyber-friend Mona has a very interesting guest post on the demonization of Michael Schiavo by the extreme right. From my standpoint there are several things that strike me as remarkable about it.

First of all is her underlying assumption that there is a controversy about this that needs to be addressed. In liberal and even centrist-right circles, the obscene behavior of the mainstream GOP during Schiavo- that's correct, dear close-reading reader: "mainstream GOP" is today a synonym for the American far right - is simply accepted as fact (Joan Didion's dismayingly bizarre dissent to this consensus is the only exception I know of, and there were extenuating circs for that which had nothing to do with Schiavo). In any event, knowing a little about Mona's politics, it is not surprising she sides with the angels on this one.

Truly astonishing, imo, is that she seems open to exploring the possibility that her libertarian politics are closer to the modern Democratic Party than the Republican. And that brings up a host of very interesting questions that cluster around two axes: (1) Is the Democratic Party congenial to libertarianism?; (2) If so, is that a good thing for liberals?

(Full disclosure compels me to remind you of something I've mentioned several times in the past. I am a registered Independent and not a Democrat. In reality, I've never voted other than Democratic, Liberal Party, or Working Families Party - the candidates overlap quite often in New York. )

Let's start with what Mona means by "libertarian." In this post, she writes:

We libertarians are frequently caricatured as “Republicans who just want to smoke dope and have orgiastic sex.” Actually, we hold fealty to many serious general principles, including: the rule of law, basic human rights, federalism, and, yes, the individual adult’s liberty interest in making all manner of personal decisions sans interference from the state; we are also usually skeptical of moralistic social crusades.

A quick skim of this list reveals considerable agreement (agreeance? Calling the grammar police) with liberal values. With some serious caveats:

"Basic human rights" appears to be code for "affirmative action stinks." I won't rehearse the arguments pro/con affirmative action here other than to reassure readers that I fully support affirmative action (even if it produces the occasional Clarence Thomas) and don't think American culture has changed enough vis a vis racism and poverty since the 60's and 70's to merit its abandonment - it can always be improved, however.

The point Mona is finessing here is, of course, not affirmative action per se but more general objections to the kind of social engineering liberals are often accused of advocating in their latte-addled interfering way. What libertarians fail to understand - and it is what makes me characterize libertarianism as utopian and naive - is that essentially *all* political action is social engineering.

Neither conservatives nor the extreme right - neither of which is naive - make that mistake, even if, for polemical reasons, they reframe what they're up to as not social engineering. The argument between liberals, conservatives, and the extreme right revolves around what kind of social engineering is best. Tax breaks for corporations? Affirmative action? Coathangers? A strong FEMA? But the reality of government as social engineer is accepted as a given.

Libertarians were sold a bill of goods by Republicans. As all, repeat all, recent Republican history has shown, they are as much the party of Big Government as the Democrats. Before going blue, however, libertarians will need seriously to refine their notion of what government is. Make no mistake: Democrats do not loathe government. They recognize that there are some functions a government must do. And they are honest - unlike their red counterparts - about their belief that there are some things governments should do. Furthermore, Democrats are once again honest in asserting that there are some things governments do far better than private corporations or charities. (And it goes without saying there are many things the government should keep its filthy hands out of.)

The argument, within the party, is over the details and the relative balance. But the Norquistian notion of shrinking the US government so that it is so small it will slip down the drain (or whatever his odious metaphor was) is recognized as sheer idiocy or propaganda. The US government will change. It will not get substantially smaller. You can, God forbid, get rid of the NEA, but that just means that there will be more money going to fund bridges to nowhere in Alaska.

As long as Mona clings to the illusion that any human society can exist with "minimal" or no social engineering from the top, she will find politics among the blues majorly annoying.

Turning it around, from the standpoint of this liberal, "existential" arguments about social programs are a complete waste of time. Social Security is a good thing, Mona. Like any human institution, of course it can be improved and every liberal welcomes substantive discussions on how to do that. But eliminated? Privatized? That's just social engineering John Birch-style. It's not smaller government but, in the present day, a movement towards a rapacious authoritarianism. This liberal wants to...move on from such rightwing timewasters and address real issues, such as the construction of an affordable and just national healthcare system. There are serious, honest disagreements on how to do this. But I, for one, have zero interest in arguing whether it is creeping communism or not. I've seen communism up close; the charge that liberals advocating universal healthcare are a bunch of pseudo-commies is an outrageous canard that does not merit serious argument.

All of the above implies that federal taxes will have to be restored to rational levels to fund the workings of the US government. The fiscal irresponsibility exhibited by the rightwing whenever they obtain power is unconscionable. That plus the moral irresponsibility of deliberately shifting the tax burden to benefit the rich at the expense of the poor is criminal (maybe not legally, but certainly spiritually, by any serious standard including Christian and atheist value systems). Taxes will rise once the rightwing loses power. If paying your debts is a virtue, and it is, that is a Very Very Good Thing.

Potentially more troubling for the libertarian interested in the Democratic Party is Mona's advocacy of federalism. I say "potentially" because I don't know enough about what Mona herself means by the term. From what I can tell in a quick search, federalism is just States Rights rewritten as a polysyllable. And that is troubling.

Today, less than 40 years after the assasination of King, racism is still a shameful, omnipresent reality in the US (that it is true all over the world does not make it less shameful in the US, which has a terrible history of racism that adds a particular context). Liberals have a lot of problems with Katrina, for example; we believe the avoidable components of the disaster were permitted to happen due in large part to racism coupled with endemic corruption and incompetence. True, the Democratic Party does not, qua party, officially share this conviction, and Mona may find many Democrats who think racism had nothing to do with the awful images of human bodies floating in sewage. But it is hard to imagine that advocates of "federalism" will find many brothers and sisters in the party.

The issues centered around federalism are ancient ones in American history, as Sean Wilentz reminds us, in considerable detail, in his not-to-be-missed The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln. Suffice it to say that arguments for "federalism" that depend upon chimera like "original intent" are, when you examine the history closely, exceedingly crude to the point of useless, except to advance partisan contemporary objectives. Original intent, as any fan of early music knows, is simply impossible to recover. It can be approximated to a greater or lesser extent, but there are always significant differences that make no performance "authentic." Similarly attempts to base a modern political philosophy on slavish adherence to original intent are doomed to failure; such attempts represent a kind of secular fundamentalism, cherry-picking desired characteristics from a wide and contradictory canon of texts.

It goes without saying that there are useful arguments to be had about the intent of the Founders, the following generations, and their relevance today. It is the framing within the Procrustean bed of "original intent" that foreordains a conclusion that can only be illiberal. An argumentative structure that, as one of its givens, eliminates liberalism is not a structure I care to privilege with "engagement." Ever.*

So in sum, Mona, you may find parts of the Democratic Party worldview congenial. But you will also find much that you won't like; even if the Democrats, God forbid, move farther away from Enlightenment values, ie liberalism, broadly defined, it is hard to imagine the party advocating anything remotely close to libertarianism. From my standpoint, if the Democrats did so move, my despair about the future of democracy in this country would deepen, hard as that is to believe for some of you.

On the other hand, if you can, as you have in the past, continue to query your own belief system, I am confident that you will come to the conclusion that liberalism is far more congenial to your worldview than you currently think. You may be remain seriously bugged by my particular brand of liberalism, but those kinds of disagreements are part and parcel of the liberal tradition. No genuine liberal ever wants lockstep agreement. That's for Republicans.

There is, however, a disagreement in kind between arguments within liberalism and those intended to destroy it. There are very few of those that stand on their own merit, without positing a dependence upon an unseen Authority or an innate permanent inequality between people that deserves to be codified into law. Liberals emphatically reject arguments that categorically depend upon such assumptions; it is there our tolerance meets its limit. And a Democratic Party that moves further to embrace such assumptions would be a terrible party, indeed.


*Many dishonest critics of liberals assume that our interest in understanding what Islamism is about represents a desire to "engage' radical Islamists in an argument over values during a shared meal of hummus, red wine, and brie. They know very well that is a lie. Unfortunately, many other people, who understand nothing about liberal values of inquiry and knowledge, believe the lie.
tristero 6/12/2006 07:11:00 PM |

 
BlogGods

by digby

I've got a post up this afternoon over at FDL in which I suck up shamelessly to just about everyone in the blogosphere, especially you readers. But I really mean it.



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digby 6/12/2006 02:04:00 PM |

 
Meet The New Cokie

by digby


I got in a lot of trouble a few weeks ago for being disrespectful toward Ana Marie Cox. I have no intention of being disrespectful now. I think it's just terrific that she's become a full fledged member of the mainstream media and is covering bloggers as if they are pod people from mars. It's the smart career move. Still, it's quite a transition since for several years she represented the liberal blogosphere on countless blogging panels and media appearances. It's a testament to her faking skills that she could convincingly be a blogging pioneer one minute and a befuddled mainstream journalist the next. It's trailblazing, actually.

This article, which has been promised as the first of an exciting series on the YKOS convention is not illuminating in any way. It could have been written by Adam Nagourney. In fact, Adam Nagourney wrote the first draft.

Cox, being unfamiliar with flamethrowing blogging as she is, appears to be shocked to hear something like this:

One journalist presses some workshop attendees on the apparent disconnect between the online bomb- throwers and the chatty, eager conference goers. A woman explains that one would never attack someone in person the way you can online: "It's the difference between bombing someone from 50,000 feet and sticking a bayonet between their eyes." And most people, she observes, can't deal with sticking a bayonet between the eyes. "Unless you're really psychopathic."

As a mainstream journalist now, it would imappropriate for her to offer any insights into the hyperbolic nature of blogging, despite her own contribution to the genre. That would be wrong. Instead, she just lets it hang out there as an example of the way the bloodthirsty left blogosphere thinks, even referring to the attendees sarcastically as "cordial" (and drunk) in the next paragraph. TIME must have been pleased.

TBOGG reports that Instapundit was very pleased when Cox sent him this private email which he posted on his blog:

"Bonus material: I saw Joe Wilson get not one but two standing ovations today; he was also called 'a true American hero.' People waited in line for his autograph. I'm going to begin drinking now."

Can a Regnery special be far in the future? That's the predictable move for her.

In the meantime, she throws her lot in with her new MSM pals explicitly when she writes:

A gaggle of mainstream media reporters in the back grows nervous. “Are you worried they’re going to blog us?” I ask someone. He replies, “I’m worried they’re going to lynch us.”

"Are you worried they're going to blog us?"

I'm not sure what that means. I can only assume it bears some relationship to assfucking --- Anna Marie's special contribution to blogospheric discourse. Perhaps she'll write about how one can parlay a blog about anal sex into a gig at the kewl kidz table in the next installment. It stands to reason that it's that kind of "insider" insights for which TIME magazine signed her for this gig. If they wanted Cokie Roberts they would have hired Cokie Roberts.


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digby 6/12/2006 10:58:00 AM |

 
Ligeti

Gyorgy Ligeti died today after a long period of declining health. I'm at a complete loss for words, he was one of the great composers of our time but that doesn't begin to describe him. More sometime later, maybe. Right now is a time to listen and listen and listen.
tristero 6/12/2006 09:44:00 AM |

 
Fashionable Babbling

by digby


Following up tristero's Dear Joe letter below, here's Jonathan at A Tiny Revolution:

For years Peter "Pe-Nart" Beinart has attempted to speak in complete gibberish. And he's gotten close—70% gibberish, 86% gibberish, 93% gibberish. But it's only in a recent Q & A with Kevin Drum about Beinart's book The Good Fight that he's reached his goal of 100% (reg. req.):

Jihadism sits at the center of a series of globalization-related threats, including global warming, pandemics, and financial contagion, which are powered by globalization-related technologies, and all of which threaten the United States more than other countries.

This is outstanding work. The only way his point could be improved would be to put it like this:

Gerbil narcolepsy sofa-bed detritus squanders Bigfoot. Crapulent snurf machine? Crapulent snurf machine knob knobbler! Groucho lithe koala traipsing noreaster flange mucus. Mithril acne fluffernutter shamus fling-ding-a-ling-doo!

Seriously: in what sense can jihadism be said to "sit at the center" of global warming, pandemics, and financial contagion? In what possible way can these all be claimed to be greater threats to the U.S. than to other countries?

You may wonder, then, why Beinart's saying something so blatantly absurd. The answer is that the "liberalism" he espouses is incoherent. The Cheney platform—Let's Rule The World By Hate And Fear—at least has an undeniable internal logic. So too does a radical evaluation of U.S. foreign policy. They both tell coherent stories. But the mushy tale "I, Peter Beinart, will run the planet except I'll be nice" simply doesn't make sense. Thus he doesn't have any alternative to saying preposterous things.

What's this talk about incoherent gibberish? We're at war! I know some say that terrorism isn't responsible for global warming. I disagree. We're fightin' evil. Global warmin' is evil and America is good. Like that bird flu thing. It's anti-American. It harbors terrists. We're gonna have tah bring it tah justice. Financial contagion? Unless we repeal the death tax the terrists will've won. Everybody knows that.

Thank the good lord for reasonable liberals like Peter Beinert, that's all I can say. At least he understands that there has never been a threat like terrorism in the whole history of the world and unless we stop them, they are going to take over the planet and eat our children with a knife and fork! And that's after they take all our money and give us sunburns with their secret global warming death ray.

What's incoherent about that?


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digby 6/12/2006 09:14:00 AM |

 
Left Behind: Eternal Forces

by tristero

In the desperate and probably futile strategy to embarass the manufacturers into withdrawing this sick product from the market, I am happy to add to the free hype Atrios and troutfishing are providing for the soon-to-be-released Left Behind: Eternal Forces. Perhaps the imminent release under a well-known christianist brand name of a videogame in which people are either converted or killed will focus minds on what these people people are up to.

What is important to remember is that we're not talking here about the insane Phelps marketing a cheap knockoff, someone the right is happy to disown. Nope, the perpetrators of Left Behind: Eternal Forces are part of the network of established goto guys for commentary on religion in the mainstream media, and the gang behind the anti-family Constitutional amendment, and so much other crap. These are among the people who talk to the leaders of the House, leaders of the Senate, and to the president of the United States on a regular basis. They are not outliers in terms of power. But the videogame makes it clear how fanatical they are. The so-called "Christian" Right is eliminationist, anti-American, intolerant, and far removed from the mainstream of religious belief in this country.

Equally important: There is nothing about the worldview of this videogame that cannot be found in the writings and speeches of political operatives like Dobson, LaHaye, Robertson, Falwell, Rushdoony, and others in their milieu (here's a paean to intolerance co-authored by James Dobson's son. ). The particular balance of extremist positions varies to some extent among all these people, but the overall thrust is clear: they advocate replacement of a democratic American republic with a theocracy (Christian Nation)and the conversion or elimination of all non-believers.* The craziest of them - eg Rushdoony - are not merely cynical dirtbags trying to snatch every last nickel they can from ignorant rubes. The worst of them actually believe this stuff. But here's the rub: even the less worse are willing to listen to the worse, and prominent politicians today are are also listening.

It is the very same immoral scum who can't decide whether or not to release an obscenity like Left Behind:Eternal Forces who are succeeding in passing laws to eliminate the right of the poor to receive decent medical care instead of a coat hanger. They are the same folks trying to ban the purchase of contraceptive devices and sex toys. These are the same people who would deny a child a safe, effective vaccination against cancer because it conflicts with their "beliefs." These are the same people who are also the main funders and strategists backing "intelligent design" creationism. These are the same people trying to rewrite the American Constitution for the 21st century so it celebrates bigotry. Finally:

These are the people without whose support the Republican Party believes it would never win an election.



*Oh sure, it's hard to find Dobson saying in public that come the revolution, let's kill all the Jews, scientists, and atheists (I have no idea what he says in private). Occasionally, though sometimes one of them slips a little and lets loose a torrent of xenophobia, racism, and/or anti-semitism (remember Saint Billy Graham to Richard Nixon), or recommends the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as good history, yet still receives fawning coverage by the New York Times. Even so, just a little bit of digging turns up death threats and kill lists against doctors who don't subscribe to extremist theology (see the so-called "Nuremberg Files." Similar sites exist today, for example the one currently at http://forerunner.com/fyi/killer/index.html). A little more digging exposes discussions which hold a woman guilty of accessory to murder if she has an abortion, no punishment specified but the death penalty ominously hovers over the discussion (this ideo being so psychotic and cruel, it's one the mainstreamers don't mention too often, like banning rubbers). Tying this level of rhetoric directly to the famous extremists like Falwell or Dobson is all but impossible, but this is the milieu they inhabit. They know these guys, and they listen to them.
tristero 6/12/2006 08:46:00 AM |

 
Dear Joe Klein

by tristero

In your effusively positive review of Peter Beinart's latest typing, you write:

This is not to say Beinart has always been right. He supported the war in Iraq — for two reasons, he writes. He wanted to prevent Saddam Hussein from acquiring nuclear weapons, which was reasonable. He also hoped the American-led invasion might produce an admirable democratic government in Iraq, which was not. "On both counts, I was wrong," he writes. "It is a grim irony that this book's central argument is one I myself ignored when it was needed most."

Beinart's humility is charming, but unfair to himself. The argument at the heart of "The Good Fight" is a product of intellectual growth. It evolved as Beinart watched the disaster unfold in Iraq; it is the result of a rigorous search for principles that might guide the United States as it confronts the challenge of Islamist totalitarianism and the other viral threats of the Information Age.

I have a problem with this, Joe. Y'see, for this liberal, the public space is not first and foremost a sandbox for drooling kids. It's a place for the intellectually grown. You seem to forget that people died to advance Beinart's, Remnick's, and Packer's (to name just three) intellectual development. Thousands upon thousands of them.

Am I actually saying that Beinart, et al nurtured their intellectual growth in a soil they fertilized with countless litres of innocent human blood? Yes, Joe, that is exactly what I am saying. But this isn't a bad horror film. They really were, despite all their pretenses to worldliness and wisdom, naive and stupid. And to this day, those who were neither cannot find regular purchase anywhere in the mainstream American discourse.

Being intellectually mature does not equal Bush-style mental sclerosis. Indeed, many of us have grown intellectually in the past five years. Krugman has changed dramatically, for example.

But here's the thing: we were already intellectually mature to begin with. Beinart wasn't. And based on the attitudes you describe in the review, he's still in short pants. And if ever there was a time to hear from the grown-ups, that time is now.

Love,

tristero
tristero 6/12/2006 04:48:00 AM |

Sunday, June 11, 2006

 
Catblog Sunday

by digby

I don't usually do catblogging, even though I am a cat person, because I take terrible pictures and others do a much better job of it than I would. But I can't pass up this story.

Meet Jack:



Look what Jack did:

WEST MILFORD, N.J. - A black bear picked the wrong New Jersey yard for a jaunt earlier this week, running into a territorial tabby who ran the furry beast up a tree — twice.

Jack, a 15-pound orange-and-white cat, keeps a close vigil on his property, chasing small animals when he can, but his owners and neighbors say his latest escapade was surprising.

"We used to joke, 'Jack's on duty,' never knowing he'd go after a bear," cat owner Donna Dickey told The Star-Ledger of Newark for Friday's newspapers.

Neighbor Suzanne Giovanetti first spotted Jack's accomplishment after her husband saw a bear climb a tree on the edge of their northern New Jersey home's back yard on Sunday. Giovanetti thought Jack was simply looking up at the bear, but soon realized the much larger animal was afraid of the hissing cat.

After about 15 minutes peering down at the cat from the tree, the bear descended and tried to run away, only to have Jack chase it up another tree.

At this point Dickey, who feared for her cat, called Jack back home and the bear scurried back to the woods.

"He doesn't want anybody in his yard," Dickey said.

They're like that.



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digby 6/11/2006 11:35:00 AM |

Saturday, June 10, 2006

 
Death Star Strategery

by digby


So Newtie's getting serious about running. And he's going to be running as the kinder, gentler, smarter GOP. I kid you not. Of course, he's as insulting as ever:

When Americans look at the current roster of Republican and Democratic leaders, Gingrich said, they face an unappealing dilemma.

"We have a choice between those who are failing to deliver and those who are unthinkable," he said, adding that he would put "even money" on the Democrats taking back the House this fall. "Neither party currently is where the country is."

President Gingrich? Unthinkable, all right.

There's a lot in this article to guffaw over and I'll leave it up to you to enjoy it on your own. I have to mention this one little part though, because I've written extensively about this subject and Newtie and I honestly can't believe he's still pushing the idea. It should disqualify him (among many other things) from ever holding any office again:

Gingrich also questioned some of the administration's tactics, noting that he had warned the White House privately in the fall of 2002 to put only a small force on the ground in Iraq and move quickly to install Iraqis in power. Given the current situation, however, he said the United States can take just one course of action in Iraq: "Grind it out."

Newt was for the original Rumsfeld plan which was to put about 40,000 troops on the ground and install Ahmad Chalabi as the puppet president of Iraq. He is nuts on this RMA (revolution in military affairs) bullshit and always has been.

…their [old] answer has been to design campaign plans that are so massive - I mean the standard plan in Afghanistan was either Tomahawks or 5 divisions, and that's why Rumsfeld was so important. Cause Rumsfeld sat down and said, "Well what if we do this other thing? You know, 3 guys on horseback, a B-2 overhead." And it was a huge shock to the army. I mean, because it worked. Now I'll tell you one guy who does agree and that's Chuck Horner who ran the air campaign.

You can still find people out there who are warriors who came up during the Reagan years, all of whom will say flatly to the Secretary of Defense, "The right model is simultaneous, massive, immediate combined air and land forces, period."

And there's this:

Gingrich, who also is a member of the Defense Policy Board, a Pentagon advisory panel, said he was confident that General Tommy Franks, the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, would not be swayed by suggestions that he include more reinforcements and plan a more cautious attack.
He said that Franks, an army general, "will probably have a more integrated, more aggressive and more risk-taking plan."

"If the chiefs wanted to be extremely cautious, extremely conservative and design a risk-avoiding strategy, that would be nothing new," he said in an interview.

This guy takes himself very seriously as a military historian and strategist. He also likes dinosaurs. In other words, he's a twelve year old geek who wants to play with real soldiers. Like many wingnut "intellectuals" he seems to have some serious developmental problems.

Admittedly, I am no military strategist. But I read up on Rummy and Newtie's RMA back in 2002, and while it is not entirely bullshit, this particular aspect of it certainly is, especially in the hands of people who simply refuse to accept reality. In Newtie's little fantasy Iraq, perhaps using even fewer troops than we did could have worked. Here on planet earth, the results of sending in too few as it was are manifest and horrifying.

In this article at Antiwar.com called "Off With His Head" William S. Lind discusses the fallacy of Rumsfeldian "transformation:"

While Rumsfeldian "Transformation" represents change, it represents change in the wrong direction. Instead of attempting to move from the Second Generation to the Third (much less the Fourth), Transformation retains the Second Generation's conception of war as putting firepower on targets while trying to replace people with technology. Its summa is the Death Star, where men and women in spiffy uniforms sit in air-conditioned comfort zapping enemies like bugs. It is a vision of future war that appeals to technocrats and lines industry pockets, but has no connection to reality. The combination of this vision of war with an equally unrealistic vision of strategic objectives has given us the defeat in Iraq. Again, Rumsfeld lies at the heart of both.

And his little dog Newt too, who served on the Defense Policy board with Richard Perle and the rest and advised Rummy every step of the way. Gingrich may not be the only one who refuses to see reality on this. But he's one of the most flamoyantly "optimistic" about this transformation after our massive tactical and strategic blunder in Iraq. He still believes that we could have "taken" Iraq with a cell phone and a couple of special forces guys on camels. That is nothing short of delusional.

I doubt that he can win. He's an iconic figure of loathing in American politics. (I think the Dickensian name alone disqualifies him.) But you never know. The American people elected Nixon twice.


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digby 6/10/2006 10:28:00 AM |

 
Committing Hara-Kiri For Your Emperor

by digby


Isn't this rich?

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The former emergency management chief who quit amid widespread criticism over his handling of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina said he received an e-mail before his resignation stating President Bush was glad to see the Oval Office had dodged most of the criticism.

Michael Brown, former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said Friday that he received the e-mail five days before his resignation from a high-level White House official whom he declined to identify.

The e-mail stated that Bush was relieved that Brown -- and not Bush or Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff -- was bearing the brunt of the flak over the government's handling of Katrina.

The September 2005 e-mail reads: "I did hear of one reference to you, at the Cabinet meeting yesterday. I wasn't there, but I heard someone commented that the press was sure beating up on Mike Brown, to which the president replied, 'I'd rather they beat up on him than me or Chertoff.' "

The sender adds, "Congratulations on doing a great job of diverting hostile fire away from the leader."

[...]

Brown's attorney, Andy Lester, who first wrote about the e-mail in the conservative weekly publication Human Events, said the White House was handling the situation in "a cowardly way."

"What the White House was actually doing was taking some stories that got started in the media and pushing them and pushing them until everything got diverted to Mike," Lester said. "Mike Brown was being made the scapegoat."

I think the e-mailer is a guy named Joe Hagen, who Brown mentions every time he's interviewed as being a good friend and a stand up guy.

It's very likely that it's true. After all, Bush has said similar things before:

During a trip to West Point on June 1, Bush pulled White aside for a private talk. "As long as they're hitting you on Enron, they're not hitting me," said Bush, according to this Army official. "That's your job. You're the lightning rod for this administration."

The Bushies are counting on being vindicated by history as Truman was. I don't think so. This president is on record, more than once, saying that he expects his underlings to fall on their swords for him. It's not exactly "the buck stops here." History will properly record him as a coward, a dunce and a failure.



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digby 6/10/2006 09:46:00 AM |

 
YKOS Update

by digby

Skippy will be live blogging several panels today. Check him out from time to time. Right now he's at the Building a Progressive Infrastructure panel.

And as I wrote yesterday, CSPAN is going live at noon. I'm not sure which programs they will cover, but it's sure to be interesting.


Update: Properly chastised, I hereby amend the above to stipulate that I am talking about pacific daylight time. Here's a link to the CSPAN schedule.



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digby 6/10/2006 09:17:00 AM |

 
PSA

Blogger says it's about to go down again. At least they gave us notice. It might last for five minutes, or it might last for 5 hours, I don't know. I just thought I'd let you know.

I think a bunch of people are watching a World Cup match at a pub across the street from me right now. It's only 8:30 AM. Do you think they'll serve me a pint?


sigh ...
digby 6/10/2006 08:19:00 AM |

 
Coming To Jesus

by digby

WASHINGTON -- For nearly a decade, Allen Raymond stood at the top ranks of Republican Party power.

He served as chief of staff to a cochairman of the Republican National Committee, supervised Republican contests in mid-Atlantic states for the RNC, and was a top official in publisher Steve Forbes's presidential campaign. He went on to earn $350,000 a year running a Republican policy group as well as a GOP phone-bank business.

But most recently, Raymond has been in prison. And for that, he blames himself, but also says he was part of a Republican political culture that emphasizes hardball tactics and polarizing voters.

Raymond, 39, has just finished serving a three-month sentence for jamming Democratic phone lines in New Hampshire during the 2002 US Senate race. The incident led to one of the biggest political scandals in the state's history, the convictions of Raymond and two top Republican officials, and a Democratic lawsuit that seeks to determine whether the White House played any role. The race was won by Senator John E. Sununu , the Republican.

In his first interview about the case, Raymond said he doesn't know anything that would suggest the White House was involved in the plan to tie up Democrats' phone lines and thereby block their get-out-the-vote effort. But he said the scheme reflects a broader culture in the Republican Party that is focused on dividing voters to win primaries and general elections. He said examples range from some recent efforts to use border-security concerns to foster anger toward immigrants to his own role arranging phone calls designed to polarize primary voters over abortion in a 2002 New Jersey Senate race.

``A lot of people look at politics and see it as the guy who wins is the guy who unifies the most people," he said. ``I would disagree. I would say the candidate who wins is the candidate who polarizes the right bloc of voters. You always want to polarize somebody."

Raymond stressed that he was making no excuses for his role in the New Hampshire case; he pleaded guilty and told the judge he had done a ``bad thing." But he said he got caught up in an ultra-aggressive atmosphere in which he initially thought the decision to jam the phones ``pushed the envelope" but was legal. He also said he had been reluctant to turn down a prominent official of the RNC, fearing that would cost him future opportunities from an organization that was becoming increasingly ruthless.

``Republicans have treated campaigns and politics as a business, and now are treating public policy as a business, looking for the types of returns that you get in business, passing legislation that has huge ramifications for business," he said. ``It is very much being monetized, and the federal government is being monetized under Republican majorities."

My, oh my. It's amazing what happens to people when they run into trouble with the law, isn't it? Talk about your moral clarity.

Now, we all know this has been true for a long time. The modern GOP plays the hardest of hardball. There are no limits. And if they weren't such arrogant assholes, they could probably always get away with it because law enforcement tends to be conservative. These guys have pushed the limits so far, however, that the law just can't ignore it any longer.

Hacker and Pierson's "Off Center" discusses this polarization philosophy in terms of governance, making the case that the Republicans work hard to pass legislation on strict party lines in order to maintain the polarized atmosphere that benefits them so well come election time. And if they lose an election or two they can blame it on the other side --- for being obstructionist or partisan. It's very creative. And they have constructed quite the WATB argument to justify it:

DELAY: In preparing for today, I found that it is customary in speeches such as these to reminisce about the good old days of political harmony and across-the-aisle camaraderie, and to lament the bitter, divisive partisan rancor that supposedly now weakens our democracy. Well, I can't do that --

RUSH: Oh, right.

DELAY: Because partisanship, Mr. Speaker --

RUSH: Amen.

DELAY: -- properly understood.

RUSH: Amen.

DELAY: -- is not a symptom of democracy's weakness but of its health and its strength, especially from the perspective of a political conservative.

RUSH: Damn A straight. He is so right; he may not even know how right he is. And partisanship has often been used as a criticism of the right by the left, and the way they want to say, "We gotta get rid of this partisanship." If you get rid of your partisanship it means you become liberal; you agree with Democrats; you agree with the left, and he's right. Every time one of these bigwigs leaves the House, they lament the, "Long lost days where camaraderie and getting along across the aisle, celebrating, going to barbecues, bar and so forth, after a session. Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan tipped a couple drinks every day after fighting like cats and dogs in the middle of the legislative process," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And all that is a liberal's lamenting the days when they ran the show. Here's the second of our four bites.

DELAY: Liberalism, after all, whatever you may think of its merits is a political philosophy, and a proud one, with a great tradition in this country, with a voracious appetite for growth. In any place or any time, on any issue, what does liberalism ever seek, Mr. Speaker? More. More government, more taxation, more control over people's lives and decisions and wallets. If conservatives don't stand up to liberalism, no one will. And for a long time around here, almost no one did. Indeed, the common lament over the recent rise in political partisanship is often nothing more than a veiled complaint instead about the recent rise of political conservatism.

RUSH: Amen bro, number two. He's nailed it. This is exactly right. When they talk about this partisanship, all they mean is that conservatives have too much power, too many conservatives in this place, too many people disagreeing with us, the libs say.

Gotta love 'em. Vicious partisanship is necessary to thwart the liberal monolith, but when liberals complain, it's sour grapes because liberals have no power anymore.

One thing I think Dems haven't discussed enough is that last paragraph in the New Hampshire phone jamming piece--- how the Republicans have set up politics as a business. We've often noted that they have the wingnut welfare system through their phony "think" tanks and media outlets. And the K Street project is notorious. But there's another factor involved that I hadn't thought much about --- all these satellite consulting firms that make money directly from the RNC --- you know, the group that's funded by millionaires and little old ladies on social security.

After Forbes lost, Raymond became executive director of the Republican Leadership Council. Around that time, he set up GOP Marketplace, which served as a middleman [my emphasis]for telemarketing services sought by Republican campaigns.

The firm was funded with a $246,000 loan from a group of elite Republicans. One of the investors was Raymond's former boss, Barbour, who said at the time he was ``convinced that GOP Marketplace will not only be a profitable business, but will also give Republicans an edge in the 2000 election." Another investor was lobbyist Ed Rogers , who had served as executive assistant to former White House chief of staff John H. Sununu during the administration of George H.W. Bush.

The firm landed contracts worth nearly $2 million during the first two years, typically involving calls to determine where voters stood on issues and candidates. But it became involved in more aggressive tactics that drew the attention of federal prosecutors. The first sign of the questionable tactics was on Super Bowl Sunday in 2002. Raymond's firm had been hired by the campaign of James Treffinger, a New Jersey Republican. Raymond's company was asked to arrange phone calls that attacked one of Treffinger's opponents on abortion without revealing that Treffinger was paying for the calls and to make those calls during the Super Bowl. ``It was shenanigans," Raymond said. ``You put the call in at 6 p.m. on Super Bowl Sunday," which was designed to irk voters who didn't want to be called away from the television. After complaints were raised, prosecutors interviewed Raymond about the matter, but he was not charged.

I suspect the Republicans aren't the only ones who create lucrative "middleman" jobs for political consultants. But I've never heard of the Democrats doing this kind of "shenanigans" with the money, although it's always possible. Nonetheless, it's the GOP that has institutionalized this system and created a formidable national political machine out of it.

This next election is going to be a major test of this philosophy of polarization and the political machine that's been carefully designed to capitalize on that. They are very, very good. They got sloppy up there in New Hampshire and left some fingerprints on their work, but that's unusual. Generally, they are much smoother. And this next election is the ultimate challenge. They are dramatically unpopular. If they can pull it off, they will be political magicians. I have no reason to believe they won't give it a good run.

Remember, Democrats are not only cowardly sissies who will give away the country to gay terrorists at the drop of a hat --- they are hiring millions of illegal aliens to cast illegal votes. This is a known fact. They've been doing it for years, but they've really pumped up the operation this time because they are afraid the Republicans are going to deport all their voters. I swear it's true. Rush told me. Somebody even called me on the phone and asked if I agreed with the Democrats doing that. I said no way.



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digby 6/10/2006 07:21:00 AM |

Friday, June 09, 2006

 
She Eats!

by digby

NEW YORK - Conservative author Ann Coulter, in the midst of her new book tour for Godless: The Church of Liberalism, snatched a mother’s newborn child from her arms last night and swallowed her whole.

Bonnie Seaberg, the mother of six-week old Jennifer, stood in horror as Coulter unhinged her jaw and dropped the infant straight down her gullet. “Yes, I was wearing a ‘Gore in ’08’ button,” Seaberg began, teary-eyed, “but it’s a free country, isn’t it? And that woman, that devil-whore-Nazi-cokehead, spotted me and my little Jenny, stopped reading in mid-sentence, ripped her from my bosom and swallowed her like a grape.”

Coulter, in her defense, says, “Look, every audience member who shows up at my book tour must sign a release form. Okay? It specifically affirms that they are not a liberal, are not having liberal thoughts and are not wearing any liberal paraphernalia. Period. I’m very upfront about that. All right?”

When asked if swallowing a newborn whole was simply another publicity stunt to boost sales of her book, Coulter shrugs off the suggestion. “That’s ridiculous! Another convenient accusation spun out of the law of liberal infallibility. Liberals are never willing to take responsibility for their actions. Look, Mrs. Seaberg accepted the conditions of the release form – in a free society, actions have consequences. And you really think I need to feed on the flesh of small children to sell my books? Didn’t you see me on the Today Show with Matty Lauer? Didn’t you see Hillary Clinton doing a better job than my faggy publicist?” Pausing a moment, she adds, “Besides, I’ll defer to the Jews when it comes to eating the flesh of small children. Historically, they’ve certainly set the benchmark. I’m an amateur.”

Read the rest of this shocking tale at Media Bloodhound.

Naturally, the MSM fails to cover it ...

And the entire Right Wing Noise Machine comes to her defense.


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digby 6/09/2006 07:19:00 PM |

 
Hotlines

by digby

Since this is such a blogerrific day, it seems like a good one to link to this Blogometer Bloggers poll. They asked the top 500 traffic blogs to rank their top 20 favorite bloggers and this is what they came up with.

Thrilling for me, I'll tell you that. I may not have the hot traffic, but it pleases me to no end to be respected by my peers --- even if my peers are at this very moment drinking tequila shots out of Duncan's fuzzy navel and singing "These Boots Are Made For Walkin'" at the Riviera Karaoke and Kahlua Lounge.


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digby 6/09/2006 06:08:00 PM |

 
YKOS Update

by digby

CSPAN1 will be rerunning today's coverage today at 6:02 PM PDT and at 12:43 AM PDT tomorrow. They'll be running it again on CSPAN2 at 5:37AM.

They'll be running more programming live tomorrow beginning at Noon PDT. All times listed here.

That concludes our public service announcements for the day.



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digby 6/09/2006 05:45:00 PM |

 
Privates

by digby

Since I blog anonymously, it's pretty obvious that I'm a big fan of privacy. As such, I admit that I'm kind of shocked at how much information people put online about themselves. It's probably a temperamental thing more than anything else, but I just can't fathom why people are so anxious to lay everything out for strangers. (But then I never got why anyone would go on Jerry Springer either.) And I suspect that it's not a very healthy thing in the long run.

From Sadly No!

Wanna freak yourself out? Consider the Big Brotherly implications of blogging:

New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon’s National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks. And it could harness advances in internet technology - specifically the forthcoming “semantic web” championed by the web standards organisation W3C - to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals.

Gee, I can’t imagine how that capability might possibly be abused.

No kidding. My rather paranoid assumption is that there are certain forces in the world that will always use whatever power they have against you. Certainly, I believe that in a country in which the secret policing agencies have been empowered with virtually limitless funds and are allowed to operate in secrecy, it is virtually assured that information will be abused. It's the nature of authoritarian power.

My spouse is up in Alaska right now working. Apparently, the place is crawling with police, everywhere, and the local daily police blotter is much bigger than it's ever been despite no population growth. They have received a lot of homeland security money from Uncle Ted Stephens.

This story, which I've written about before,really tells the tale:

DILLINGHAM, Alaska — 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.

I suspect that this is happening all over the country and it is almost certainly happening at the federal level. If you pay for it, they'll use it. And cops will use it to find people who are committing "crimes." I think we all know where that leads.

Gavin at SN highlights some earlier work he and Lambert did on this topic and it's really creepy. I predict that this issue is going to be very big. in fact, I would put a pitch in right now that the democratic party becomes the party of privacy. Somebody's got to.

Speaking of which, I haven't commented on the "Armando issue" until now because it's just so depressing. Armando has been a supporter of mine over the years. Before he became a bigshot blogger on his own, he used to comment here prolifically and was always a great booster of my work over on Kos. We have both written a lot about Lincoln 1860 and the American tribal divide and the like. I'm not a DKos regular so I only interact with him on this larger blogospheric level, but in a wierd way we've been close.

His outing is disgusting to me, however, on principle and not because he's been a friend. There have been a spate of these things lately coming from the right and it's a problem. It's not surprising, unfortunately. Character assassination has long been one of the most potent weapons in the wingnut arsenal. It was only a matter of time before they began to use it against bloggers. But it's a cautionary tale. If malevolent people can use their power against you they will. QED.


Update: Here's a link to Lambert's entire series on this issue called "Weapons of Mass Surveillance." (He writes "Use the "up/next/previous" feature at the bottom of the post to see the whole series.") It's some fascinating, if scary, stuff.


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digby 6/09/2006 01:25:00 PM |

 
More YKOS

by digby

Here's the schedule, which includes those panels that are being streamed. CSPAN 2 will be carrying the DailyKos superstar panel later today. (Or so they announced.)

This one looks like fun.

I hope they talk about Coulter. Scathingly...


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digby 6/09/2006 11:53:00 AM |

 
Cipher

by digby

Bush is on TV right now, going on and on about Al Zarqawi being a criminal mastermind whose raison d'etre was to stop democracy in iraq. Blah, blah, blah.

Does he have any credibility at all these days? I hear this stuff and my first reaction is to say "sez who?" I realize that I'm a member of the partisan angry left and all, but I have to suspect that at 30%, I'm not the only one. I look at the guy now and see nothing but a lying loser.

Imagine what other world leaders think. Or terrorists. It's dangerous.

Update: Get a load of this:

People are goin' ta look back on this moment in history and say a democracy in Iraq helped change the world for the better and helped provide security. It certainly helped address the simmering resentment that exists in a part of a region that for too long has been ignored, see...

It's addressed it allright. Jesus, what a delusional fool he is. We'll be lucky if 9/11 and Iraq are the worst things that happened to us under this idiots leadership.



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digby 6/09/2006 11:26:00 AM |

 
YKOS Update

by digby

C-Span2 is broadcasting the Plame panel at Yearly Kos as we speak. I'll let you know if I find out when it is to be re-broadcast. It's fascinating. The panel includes Larry Johnson, Joseph Wilson, Murray Waas, Christy Smith and Marcy Wheeler. Heavyweights all.

And yes, Jane Hamsher is a babe.


Update: You can also sign up for Air America's streaming coverage, here.

Update II: For those of you at work, Skippy thoroughly liveblogged it, here!



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digby 6/09/2006 11:05:00 AM |

 
Epistomolia

by digby


I have written a lot about the right's infuriating epistemic relativism over the past few years. It's a difficult concept to discuss. I always liked Josh Marshall's short tag, "up-is-downism," but nothing has seemed truly sufficient to explain this strange amorphous thing until now. Finally, someone with writing chops and serious brain power has definitively observed this phenomenon. Behold, The Editors:

Far away, in the magical country of Epistomolia, there live two peoples. One people, called the Seers, believed that Truth is, that to know Truth requires Knowledge, and Knowledge is gained from observation, and from the application of reason. The Truth is the Truth is pretty much the Truth, the Seers believed, and the only trick was knowing how to see it. These people are, in many ways, much like you and me.

The other people, the Makers, believed that a tribe can create knowledge through the incantation of belief, and, either by overwhelming withvolume or harmonizing with the incantations of other tribes, truth becomes. When choosing to harmonize, ancient custom dictates that for something given, something must also be taken away, for the exchange must be fair - always “a lie for a lie, and a truth for a truth” as their ancient saying goes. At first blush this might seem a more generous way of that of the Seers, and in many ways it was. But the deals the Makers made were not meant to last - after you had agreed to meet them half-way, it wasn’t long before they came back a bit stronger and declared you had to meet them half-way to half-way, and then half-way to that, and so on until, after a while, it always seemed like one tribe had exactly what it wanted, and the other tribe had nothing. These people are, in many ways, much like certain people who shall remain nameless.

Read on. It only gets better...

I love The Editors. In a purely platonic way, of course. (I think)



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digby 6/09/2006 10:33:00 AM |

 
They Call The Windbag Pariah

by digby


Steve Benen wonders if Ann Coulter has finally reached pariah status. I doubt it very seriously. She entertains the media and that is what they like above all. And I suspect she says many things with which they agree --- or , at least, find funny. She appeals to their puerile sense of humor.

This new controversy is just going to help her sell books. Conservatives love it when the alleged liberal media go after one of their flamethrowers. It validates everything they believe in. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if Brian Williams' little scold the other night wasn't designed for that very purpose. Has anyone done any research on what interests they might have in common? I'm serious. This "controversy" is simply not believable in light of the kind of things this shrieking harpy has been saying for years.

It's ok for her to say:

"Liberals hate America, they hate flagwavers, they hate abortion opponents. They hate all religions except Islam post 9/11. Even Islamic terrorists don't hate America like liberals do."

But somehow, her saying that the 9/11 widows are exploiting their husbands' death is beyond the pale? C'mon. The political media are very well aware of her schtick and know exactly what they have in this heinous bitch.

I have personally never heard anyone say something like this:

"Conservatives hate America, they hate blacks and they hate women. They hate all religions except Christianity. Even Islamic terrorists don't hate America like conservatives do."

Has Michael Moore ever said anything like that? I don't think so. Indeed, I don't think there's any equivalent on the left to the kind of blanket condemnation of "liberalism" that the bully faction of the RWNM engages in with such relish. Coulter and her ilk don't just attack liberal political leaders or the Democratic party. They go out of their way to attack their fellow Americans. They bring the fight to the dining room table and say, "If you, cousin Sally, don't agree with me you hate America."

Now, I'm willing to get down in the gutter if that's what she wants. We can start calling out "conservatives" in general instead of Bush or Republicans. In fact, I suspect this may be where this ends up, unfortunately. And I'm prepared for the mainstream media go completely crazy decrying the "angry left" and it's purveyors of uncivil discourse while Ann Coulter and her buddies lie on the fainting couch hiding their smug smiles behind their fluttering fans.

I. Don't. Care. Ann Coulter is never going to be a pariah. Her nasty style appeals to the media. They enjoy it. Sadly, I suspect that her downfall will come when she loses her sexual appeal, as everyone does past a certain age. There can be no doubt that being the attractive rightwing dominatrix is a huge part of her appeal for many in the press corps. It goes right to their twisted little lizard brains.


Update: Nice post on the Coulter gaffe at FDL, here.


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digby 6/09/2006 09:36:00 AM |

 
It's Now or Never

by digby


Most of you have probably seen this one by Glenn Greenwald today. It seems that Arlen Specter has introduced a bill that will give give blanket amnesty to the president and his cohorts for the wireless wiretapping:I

The idea that the President's allies in Congress would enact legislation which expressly shields government officials, including the President, from criminal liability for past lawbreaking is so reprehensible that it is difficult to describe. To my knowledge, none of the other proposed bills -- including those from the most loyal Bush followers in the Senate -- contained this protective provision. And without knowing anywhere near as much as I would need to know in order to form a definitive opinion, the legality of this provision seems questionable at best. It's really the equivalent of a pardon, a power which the Constitutional preserves for the President. Can Congress act as a court and simply exonerate citizens from criminal conduct?

I have two thoughts about this. The first is that this completely takes the wind out the wingnuts' sails about amnesty for undocumented workers.

Specter's bill, introduced yesterday at a committee meeting, was a compromise worked out with Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) and designed to gather enough Republican support so it can be taken to the floor for a vote. During a conversation with Cheney yesterday afternoon first disclosed by an administration official, Specter (R-Pa.) said he arranged to have Justice Department officials begin reviewing his proposal.

Let Cheney sign on. Debate it on the merits. Let the committee vote on it. And when the Republicans like Kyl, a harsh anti-immigration guy, vote for it, spring link a jungle cat on these hypocritical scumbags.

Amnesty for Bush and Cheney but not for some poor Mexican who's only crime was working in this country for years to make a better life??? It would be a gift.

This will, of course, require that Democratic senators have some discipline. I'm not holding my breath.

My second thought about this is on the politics of accountability. As those of you who read this blog regularly know, I believe that we desperately need to hold this Bush administration accountable for this power grab or this country will come to regret it. Back when I was very young, we had another president who attempted to create an elected dictatorship. Some of those at the very top in this administration learned at the knee of that man and admit that they came into office looking to restore the doctrine of presidential power that that disgraced president had instituted.

CHENEY: All right. But in 34 years, I have repeatedly seen an erosion of the powers and the ability of the president of the United States to do his job. We saw it in the War Powers Act. We saw it in the Budget Anti-Impoundment Act. We've seen it in cases like this before, where it's demanded that presidents cough up and compromise on important principles.

ROBERTS: And they always do.

CHENEY: Exactly, and that's wrong.

ROBERTS: So in the end, it always comes out anyway, so why...

CHENEY: It's wrong. And--well, but the...

ROBERTS: ... go through this agony?

CHENEY: Because the net result of that is to weaken the presidency and the vice presidency.

And one of the things that I feel an obligation, and I know the president does too, because we talked about it, is to pass on our offices in better shape than we found them to our successors. We are weaker today as an institution because of the unwise compromises that have been made over the last 30 to 35 years.

Back in those days, I was in favor of pardoning Richard Nixon for his crimes. I thought it would be bad for the country to go through any more upheaval. I was wrong. As you can see from Cheney's statement above, it never sunk in, despite the Church Committee, much legislation, the elections of 74,76 and 78 that the country had rejected this imperial presidency. Iran-Contra didn't do it either. There is absolutely no reason to believe that this younger "revolutionary" generation of Republicans will not be even more adamant about restoring the ancien regime than Cheney and Rumsfeld.

It looks more and more to me as if installing Bush was a conscious decision to do this by these now grey eminences of Nixon's administration. Cheney was, after all, a highly influential money man as CEO of Halliburton who was in charge of searching for the VP. Even more interestingly, he was the guy who put together the administration during the transition:

...Cheney was put in charge of the presidential transition (the period between the election in November and the accession to office in January). Cheney used this opportunity to stack the administration with his hardline allies. Instead of becoming the de facto president in foreign policy, as many had expected, Secretary of State Powell found himself boxed in by Cheney's right-wing network, including Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Bolton and Libby.

In the short term, I think that we are going to have a hard time winning elections if we don't finally stand up to these people and force some accountability. We don't have to go through their underwear drawers or impeach them for private behavior. Their unconstitutional power grab is quite enough to justify thorough investigations.

I believe the public expects it. The right is mau-mauing this because they know that after they umpeached a president for his private sexual behavior they lowered the bar so low that the public will not see this as outrageous. Indeed, they know that if they can successfully intimidate the Democrats into NOT holding them accountable at the first opportunity, they will have sealed the reputation of Dems as being cowards for another generation.

I know it's fashionable to think that the Democratic party has been losing steadily for the last 35 years because they have been too liberal and the GOP has therefore been able to portray them as soft in all the manly virtues. I would suggest that the Democrats have been losing for the last 35 years because they have failed to beat the shit out of the Republicans when they pull this crap. The GOP smells weakness and the public loses their respect for us. We're long past the "fool me twice" phase.

In the long term, this is important because we need to save the country. This has now been going on in one form or another during my entire adult lifetime. And I'm not young anymore. There is every reason to believe that the next time they gain power, these spawn of Nixon's will do exactly the same thing. They are stubbornly determined to change the way our system works and undermine the constitution. They did it 35 years ago and they are doing it again today. And God knows how many of these little creatures have been born in this godforsaken administration and GOP congress. We must stop this now. It's both good policy and good politics.


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digby 6/09/2006 08:23:00 AM |

Thursday, June 08, 2006

 

Hit Me Baby One More Time

by digby


I am attempting to post this by e-mail, which has not worked for me the past few days, but who knows? Maybe I'll get lucky tonight. (Not quite the same as some of my fellow bloggers "getting lucky" tonight in Las Vegas, but at this point it would actually be a bigger thrill to be able to post...)

Blogger's latest excuse is this:

Down for Maintenance
We are migrating databases to make Blogger stronger and better.
Hahahahahaha...



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digby 6/08/2006 09:42:00 PM |

 
Polipapparazzi

by digby

This is fun. Politics TV is filming bloggers at the convention. Check it out over the course of the convention this week-end.

Politics TV
digby 6/08/2006 09:00:00 PM |

 
The Theme

by digby

I cannot say that I'm entirely surprised by the Busby results in CA-50 on Tuesday. The minute I heard her gaffe, I knew it would become an iconic symbol of the Republican's meme for this mid-term --- Democrats are stealing elections by having illegal aliens vote. They can piggyback on the Democratic drumbeat of the last few years about stolen elections and rile up their racist base all at the same time. It's tailor made for them.

The Republicans have figured out something that the Democrats refuse to understand. All political messages can be useful, no matter which side has created it. You use them all situationally. The Republicans have been adopting our slogans and memes for years. They get that the way people hear this stuff often is not in a particularly partisan sense. They just hear it, in a sort of disembodied way. Over time thye become comfortable with it and it can be exploited for all sorts of different reasons.

In this instance, there has been a steady underground rumbling about stolen elections since 2000. Now we know that it's the Republicans who have been doing the stealing ---- and the complaining has been coming from our side. But all most people hear is "stolen election" and they are just as likely to paste that charge onto us as they are onto them. It's like an ear worm. You don't know the song its from, necessarily, but you can't get it out of your head.

We have created an ear worm that the Republicans are going to appropriate --- and they will use it much more aggressively and effectively than our side did. They are already gearing up for it. As I mentioned a month or so ago, Karl Rove was at the Republican Lawyers Association talking about how the Democrats are stealing elections. I can't find an exact transcript of his talk, but it exists on C-SPAN for 30 bucks if anyone wants to watch it. Raw Story caught a few excerpts although not the ones I recall about about the dirty elections in the "state of Washington and around the country."

I want to thank you for your work on clean elections," Rove said. "I know a lot of you spent time in the 2004 election, the 2002, election, the 2000 election in your communities or in strange counties in Florida, helping make it certain that we had the fair and legitimate outcome of the election."

Rove then suggested that some elections in America were similiar to third world dictatorships.

"We have, as you know, an enormous and growing problem with elections in certain parts of America today," Rove said. "We are, in some parts of the country, I'm afraid to say, beginning to look like we have elections like those run in countries where they guys in charge are, you know, colonels in mirrored sunglasses. I mean, it's a real problem, and I appreciate that all that you're doing in those hot spots around the country to ensure that the ballot -- the integrity of the ballot is protected, because it's important to our democracy."

Nobody can ever accuse these Republicans of not having balls. It's really breathtaking sometimes. This is not an isolated remark. Here's an excerpt from yesterday's Chris Matthews show:

MATTHEWS: ... What did you make—we just showed the tape, David Shuster just showed that tape of a woman candidate in the United States openly advising people in this country illegally to vote illegally.

MEHLMAN: It sounds like she may have been an adviser to that Washington state candidate for governor or some other places around the country where this has happened in other cases with Democrats.

But the fact is, one thing we know, the American people believe that legal voters should vote and they believe that their right to vote ought to be protected from people that don‘t have the right to vote.

That is almost verbatim what Rove said at that lawyers conference. He also singled out one very special "voting rights" Republican lawyer named Thor Hearne, about whom Brad Friedman did a great deal of investigation last year. (Links here.):

Karl Rove spoke to Republican lawyers this weekend (carried on C-SPAN) and thanked them for their work ensuring "clean elections" in 2000 and 2004.

He singled out Mark F. "Thor" Hearne by name. Hearne was the National General Counsel for Bush/Cheney '04 Inc. who, along with RNC Communications Director Jim Dyke, created the so-called non-partisan "American Center for Voting Rights" (ACVR) just three days before being called to testify before Rep. Bob Ney's (R-OH) U.S. House Administrative Committee hearing in March of 2005 on the Ohio Election. The front group, which declared tax-exempt 501(c)3 status, has still failed, to our knowledge, to disclose any information of it's funders or proof of their 501(c)3 non-profit, non-partisan status. They operate out of a PO Box in Houston, TX, though neither of their founders live in Texas.

ACVR was the only "Voting Rights" group called by Ney to testify at the hearings, and identified himself only as a "longtime advocate of voter rights" in his testimony. He failed to mention his connections to Bush/Cheney '04 Inc.

Hearne and ACVR have done little more since they opened shop beyond creating propaganda reports to suggest that their is an epidemic of Democratic voter fraud in the country to encourage state legislatures around the country to implement Democratic voter disenfranchising "Photo ID requirements" at the polls. Their charges of a voter fraud epidemic has been roundly disproven in various court cases around the country. (Though it does appear that at least one voter, Ann Coulter, seems to have engaged in voter fraud lately.)

They have been gearing up for this for some time. However, Rove had wanted to use this against African Americans, not Hispanics. He knows that alienating the Latino vote is the kiss of death for the party long term. But it's out of his hands now. Immigration has a life of its own and I suspect it will be quite easy to adjust the plan and the machinery to try to 1) get out the base, 2) suppress the Latino vote which is now heavily leaning democratic and 3) serve as a rallying cry and cause when they lose seats and possibly their majority. This will be immediately played for 08 with a whole bunch of "voter integrity" legislation. They will be screaming to high heaven. Lou Dobbs will have his aneurysm removed on live television.

The Democrats could have innoculated against this when the Republicans stole the 2000 election, but they didn't. Had they been screaming bloody murder for six solid years about Republican vote fraud, it would be much more difficult for the GOP to suddenly glom onto this issue. Instead, it was a mere underground drumbeat that was heard, but only in the vaguest way. Now the CW about stolen elections is going to be turned on us --- and we will be on the defensive fighting both the charge of electoral fraud and being soft on criminal Mexicans because we need illegal aliens to stuff the ballot boxes for us.

Francine Busby couldn't have done anything more helpful to the Republicans than saying what she said. (I know she was misquoted and taken out of context. That means nothing when dealing with the RWNM.) She gave them a test run on their November plan and it worked out perfectly. Here's Robert Parry on how this works:

At dinner a few weeks ago, a well-placed Republican political operative was oozing confidence about GOP prospects in the November elections, not because the voters were enamored of George W. Bush but because the Democrats and liberals had done so little to improve their ability to reach the public with their message.

By contrast, he described to me a highly sophisticated Republican system for pouncing on Democratic “bad votes” and verbal gaffes and distributing the information instantaneously to a network of pro-Republican media outlets that now operates down to the state, district and local levels.

This huge conservative media advantage has now contributed to dooming Democratic hopes for snaring the vulnerable suburban San Diego seat of imprisoned Republican congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham.

In the June 6 special election, Republicans reported a last-minute surge of support after conservative media outlets trumpeted a verbal blunder by Democrat Francine Busby, propelling Republican lobbyist Brian Bilbray to victory by about four percentage points.

If we allow the Republicans to define this next election as they usually do, it will be about immigration and voter fraud. If I were in Vegas I'd be placing a bet on it. And it won't take a gaffe like Busby's. They will attempt to create a national story, which will be exploited in the last days of the campaign in various individual ways through their media infrastructure. If they lose it will be blamed on dishonest vote stealing Democrats and illegal aliens. If they win it will be be because they fought back against the dishonest vote stealing Democrats and illegal aliens. Unless the Democratic party wakes up and figures out a way to both define the election to our advantage and counter this move, it's going to be much harder to dislodge those GOP incumbents than we think.

I think this election is going to be all about turn-out and Democrats are stupidly resting on their laurels on that count. More on that in the next post. (If I can access Blogger...)


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digby 6/08/2006 02:46:00 PM |

 


Blogging from Hell

by digby


No, I'm not in Las Vegas. I was actually hoping to be the official "not at Yearly Kos" liberal blogger. (Think of me as that one member of the cabinet who doesn't attend the State of The Union in case somebody bombs the Capitol.) I figured there needed to be at least one of us out here who is not hungover, busy being feted by the Democratic party poohbahs or making time with some previously unknown blog-hottie and so would have the time to do serious blogging about serious things while everyone else was having too much fun to document the ongoing atrocities. Alas, I began to suspect last night that all the coolest bloggers in the world gathered in Vegas and conspired with BlogSpot to make me entirely irrelevant.

Unless, of course, I have managed to finally foil their dastardly plan and can blog throughout the week-end from my undisclosed location. I promise to give it my all, Blogger willing.

So, what's been happening? Anything?

I heard that Zarqawi is dead. Again. Awesome. I'm hoping they lay out his corpse like they did Uday and Qusay because that goes over so well in Muslim culture. They love it when the infidel messes around with dead bodies and displays them publicly.

I shed no tears for the bastard, of course. But he's just a convenient symbol the Bush administration glommed onto to "Al Qaeda-ize" Iraq. In fact, they had ample opportunities to take him out before the war started, but they declined for political reasons. (I wouldn't even be surprised if there were actual deals made --- these guys are nothing if not savvy marketers.)

And heck, if it weren't for the fact that the war is actually a homegrown insurgency and civil war, taking out a satellite al Qaeda cell leader might make a difference. Unfortunately, the war the Bush likes to think he's fighting and the one those poor schmucks over there actually are fighting are very different things. You don't have to be a military expert to know that even if Zarqawi were the mastermind the administration portrayed him as, the war is a lot more complicated than the cheap Chuck Norris movie the Bushies have tried to market to the masses. (Think "Syriana.")


So, the beat goes on. Bush is still incredibly unpopular, especially about the war. Which is a really good reason for Democrats to steer clear of criticizing him for it. It simply wouldn't be sporting of them to take political advantage of the fact that Bush and his Republican lackeys in congress insisted that we invade a country for no good reason. The Marquess of Queensbury would give them all a damned good thrashing for even thinking such a thing.

More on that in the next post.


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digby 6/08/2006 09:33:00 AM |

Wednesday, June 07, 2006

 
Aieeee!

by digby

Jesus H Christ on a muffin top --- Blogger has been down all fucking day again.

Your regular programming will return in a moment.



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digby 6/07/2006 04:46:00 PM |

Tuesday, June 06, 2006

 
Job Description

by digby

Oh for Christ's sake. Via Americablog I see the WaPo published this ridiculous nonsense from George Will:

By 1987, when President Ronald Reagan gave his first speech on the subject, 20,798 Americans had died, and his speech, not surprisingly, did not mention any connection to the gay community. No president considers it part of his job description to tell the country that the human rectum, with its delicate and absorptive lining, makes anal-receptive sexual intercourse dangerous when HIV is prevalent.

I don't know why. The whole country discussed the president's own personal rectum for weeks, in great detail, two years before. People couldn't stop talking about it. I don't know why he needed to be so polite about it when it came to AIDS.

In July 1985, Reagan underwent surgery to remove a suspicious polyp from his colon. Two feet of the intestine was removed, and tests days later revealed that the growth was cancerous but had not spread far. Doctors were confident that they had removed all the disease, and tests during the rest of Reagan's presidency showed no sign of cancer.

Doctors quoted Reagan as saying after the surgery, "Well, I'm glad that that's all out."

This picture shows Reagan showing the whole country how the procedure was done:




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digby 6/06/2006 08:58:00 PM |

 
Kennedy And Manjoo

by tristero

Kennedy responds, as he had to, and Manjoo responds to Kennedy.

The least compelling arguments:

Kennedy pulls a bait and switch close to the beginning on the 3 percent/2 percent who were "disenfranchised by the long lines in Ohio":

Manjoo seizes on one line in the 204-page report and then attempts to play a clumsy game of gotcha. But if he had read more carefully he would have understood that the 129,543 votes he refers to were only a subset of those disenfranchised by the long lines. Had Manjoo read a mere paragraph further in the report, he would have seen that it identifies a second group, comprising roughly 48,000 citizens, or 0.83 percent of Ohio's electorate, whose votes were also suppressed because of the lines and other factors [Emphasis added.].

I haven't worked through the details of Kennedy's argument to gauge the extent to which the "other factors" affect his point about the size of the group of voters disenfranchised by the long lines. At the least, it's a bit - not a lot, but a bit - sloppy on Kennedy's part.

Manjoo, however, seems on very shaky ground in his attempt to salvage his rebuttal of the "Connally Anomaly." He found one ignoramus who didn't know how "liberal" Connally was. No doubt he can find a second (that Ignoramus 1 has a rep as an Ohio voting expert would seem to say more about his qualifications than anything else; he's certainly a rotten witness for Manjoo's point in this context). Barring confounding factors (eg, party affiliation wasn't printed on the voting ballots), it seems highly unlikely, however, that ignorance played a large role in the discrepancy between Connally's tallies and Kerry's, although like any other halfway reasonable factor, it had some.*

And Kennedy's rebuttal of the Black and Resnick results from 2000 seem very plausible. Yes, Kucinich was wrong, twice before, down-ticket candidates outperformed presidential candidates. The relevant number is how often does that occur? Neither Kennedy nor Manjoo say here (nor do I recall their saying so in the original article). I suspect, however, it is quite rare. Otherwise, Manjoo would have cited more examples than just these two.

Bottom line: I'll anger a lot of you, but based on the information in Kennedy's first article, Manjoo's response and this new article, I believe it is a seriously open question as to what actually happened in Ohio in 2004. Without further, extensive investigation honest people will disagree on whether it was stolen or whether Bush would have won anyway. If the latter, it seems it would have been a squeaker.

What is beyond dispute either by Kennedy or Manjoo are two points. First, what happened in Ohio (if not elsewhere) stinks to high heaven. Agreed. Second, if America is still a democracy, then election form is what the president of the United States should be using his bully pulpit to advocate, not ways to use the Constitution to empower gay bashing. Agreed.

*Dan Tokaji, the voting expert who didn't know the politics of Connally, says, "So inferring election fraud in 12 counties based on Connally's vote total is, in my view, quite a stretch." Correct me if I"m wrong here, but the discrepancy between Connally's and Kerry's vote totals was one of several factors that led Kennedy to infer voting fraud in 12 counties. The convergence of highly smelly data, all trending clearly in one direction, is what leads to the inference, not one single piece of trash.
tristero 6/06/2006 09:08:00 AM |

 
Introduction To Malmedy

by tristero

Here are some links to get you started with understanding exactly what Bill O'Reilly is playing around with.

A History of the Malmedy Massacre. You'll get details on the SS slaughter of surrendered American troops. Further investigations confirmed this account. As an aside, note the fate of the last Nazi participant in the massacre:

In December of 1956, the last prisoner, Peiper, was released from Landsberg. He eventually settled in eastern France. On July 14, 1976, Bastille Day in France, Peiper was killed when a fire of mysterious origin destroyed his home. Firefighters responding to the blaze found their water hoses had been cut.

Another source fills in some details about this death:

On December 22, 1956, SS Sturmbannführer Peiper was released. He settled in the small village of Traves in northern France in 1972 and four years later, on the eve of Bastille Day, he was murdered and his house burned down by a French communist group.

Communists. Interesting.

So is this, from a negative Wall Street Journal review of Ann Coulter's "Treason":

Ms. Coulter's work includes an admiring if brief biography of McCarthy's political career. One that for some reason excludes the senator's remarkable efforts on behalf of the members of the SS battle group who executed 86 American POWs in the Ardennes campaign in December 1944; otherwise known as the Malmedy Massacre. In his impassioned efforts on behalf of the accused--one never to be repeated in his investigative career--the senator charged that the U.S. Army had cruelly mistreated the former SS men.

And here, from a site called "Original Dissent," which bills itself as "Traditional, American Conservatism for and from the Common Man" and to which I will not link, are the racist lies about Malmedy. It is impossible to unpack the full extent of overlapping lies, distortions, etc without going into detailed investigations that the charges simply don't deserve, but which they received due to the relentless pressure from the lunatic American right including McCarthy:

After the war, Germans who had taken part in the fighting at Malmedy were turned over to U.S. Army Colonel A.H. Rosenfeld and his Jewish underlings for "interrogation." The prisoners were arbitrarily reduced to civilian status so that they would not be protected by the Geneva Convention, and brutal torture was used to extract confessions. When 18-year-old prisoner Arvid Freimuth hanged himself after repeated beatings rather than sign a "confession," the prosecutors were permitted to use as "evidence" the unsigned statement which they themselves had contrived.

McCarthy dared to speak against this officially sanctioned lynching, when almost no one else had the courage to do so. By fearlessly championing the underdogs, the defeated and vilified Germans, and speaking out against the actual atrocities committed by self-righteous aliens in American uniform, the Senator demonstrated the rare moral courage that later propelled him into the forefront of the struggle against Communism.

The Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Senator Raymond Baldwin, Republican of Connecticut, was assigned to investigate the charges of torture, but whitewashed them instead. On July 26, 1949, Senator McCarthy withdrew in disgust from the hearings and announced in a speech on the Senate floor that two members of the Committee, Senator Baldwin and Senator Estes Kefauver, Democrat of Tennessee, had law partners among the Army interrogators they were supposedly investigating. This was in several ways a preview of things to come.

The Jews showed instant hostility toward anyone who interfered with their campaign of vengeance against the conquered Germans, and so they began turning their big guns in the media against McCarthy: a December 1949 poll of news correspondents covering the United States Senate already had reporters branding McCarthy "the worst Senator" — a high honor indeed.

[UPDATE: Incredibly, according to this synopsis of a book on Malmedy, the man who pushed for the vindication of the Nazis was an anti-semite who, as a Southerner, identified with and felt sympathy for the humiliation the defeated Nazis suffered.

Communists murdered the last Nazi implicated in the massacre. The "plight" of the Nazis, so similar to the "plight" of the white South in 1865. O'Reilly knew exactly what he was tapping into. Boy, did he ever.]
tristero 6/06/2006 05:23:00 AM |

 
Memo To Bill O'Reilly: The Nazis Were The Bad Guys.

by tristero

Click and watch it all.

Bill O'Reilly's outrageous attempt to paint the Nazis as victims of an American atrocity at Malmedy when in fact Nazis slaughtered American troops should have led to his immediate firing and ostracism from American airwaves. What did Fox do? They tried to scrub the transcript, but were caught and restored it.

But that's not all. Watch and marvel at the sordid history of rightwing denial of the Malmedy atrocity, complete with genuinely ugly eruptions of American homegrown anti-semitism. And don't miss a cameo appearance by Joe McCarthy, which should thoroughly discredit anyone malicious enough to try to whitewash that scoundrel's reputation.

And you know what's the worst part of this? No one really cares that much, no one that matters. "Oh, that's just Fox News, that's just O'Reilly, whaddya expect?" The level of bullshit, ignorance, bigotry, and malicious stupidity is so high we don't even notice it anymore. Worse, the stench is so bad and is so far over our heads already, we don't even notice when it's reached a new height.

But we're not done yet. If O'Reilly can keep his job - and he can and will - after smearing American WW II soldiers (as well as sending covert signals of support to all the David Irvings in America), then he will feel compelled to top that. Anyone care to predict the next O'Reilly outrage?

I don't. If you had told me that Bill O'Reilly could get away with rewriting Malmedy, I would have said you were mad. But what we do know is that the goal posts have moved and rightwing extremism is just a little less extreme than it was.

Let's call it the Neiwert Effect, in honor of the expert in how extreme rightwing memes get mainstreamed. Last week's racist anti-immigrant remarks seem downright moderate compared to re-casting Nazis as innocents when they were cold-blooded murderers. And since there were no consequences for him doing so, O'Reilly now has permission to be as publicly bigoted against Mexicans and Hispanics as Stephen Douglas was against African Americans.

Hey, it's just his opinion!
tristero 6/06/2006 03:37:00 AM |

Monday, June 05, 2006

 
The Vessel Intuition

by digby


Taking a trip through neglected posts from last week when my blog imploded, I find (via Yglesias) that the Wall Street Journal has finally reviewed Ramesh Ponnuru's pathetic flop "The Party Of Death" and surprisingly wrote this:

"It doesn't matter to Mr. Ponnuru that this argument flies in the face of a complex intuition that seems to underlie the American ambivalence: Invisible to the naked eye, lacking body or brain, feeling neither pleasure nor pain, radically dependent for life support, the early embryo, though surely part of the human family, is distant and different enough from a flesh-and-blood newborn that when the early embryo's life comes into conflict with other precious human goods or claims, the embryo's life may need to give way."

Whoa. That, like, makes sense and everything. Yglesias adds:

Ponnuru responds with what amounts to an effort at burden shifting, pointing out that this kind of vague appeal to intuition isn't an argument per se. This is a point I'm sympathetic to as a general matter. But to the best of my knowledge, though abortion rules have varied widely no society has actually considered the deliberate destruction of an early-stage embryo as on a par with deliberate murder of a human being, nor the accidental death of such an embryo (which is very common) as on a par with the accidental death of a human being. Thus, it seems reasonable to me to say that the burden here lies with Ponnuru, and that Berkowitz is merely observing that Ponnuru's argument seemed unpersuasive in light of its wildly counterintuitive consequences.

No kidding. Call me crazy, but it seems to me that one of the main reasons humans have this complex intuition about the beginning of life is because this "life" happens to exist INSIDE THE BODY OF A FULLY FORMED HUMAN BEING!!! It would seem fairly obvious to me this unique circumstance in human experience requires a little more sophisticated thinking than just "ugh life, good." But that does necessitate that one admits that the fully formed "vessel" that houses that life has more rights than a blastocyst. That seems to be the real sticking point for some people.


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digby 6/05/2006 05:54:00 PM |

 
Bought And Paid For

by digby

Sebastian Mallaby and Paul Krugman both have columns today excoriating the Senate for what it's about to do on behalf of useless parasites like Paris Hilton and Brandon Davis. It is infuriating that some Democrats are signing on to this bullshit.

Mallaby:

For most of the past century, the case for the estate tax was regarded as self-evident. People understood that government has to be paid for, and that it makes sense to raise part of the money from a tax on "fortunes swollen beyond all healthy limits," as Theodore Roosevelt put it. The United States is supposed to be a country that values individuals for their inherent worth, not for their inherited worth. The estate tax, like a cigarette tax or a carbon tax, is a tool for reducing a socially damaging phenomenon -- the emergence of a hereditary upper class -- as well as a way of raising money.

But now the House has voted to repeal the estate tax, and the Senate may do the same this week. Republicans are picking up support from renegade Democrats, such as Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, Bill Nelson of Florida, Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Max Baucus of Montana. Several more may go over to the dark side if a "compromise" bill, which would achieve nearly everything that abolitionists dream of, is introduced in the Senate. President Bush, who has already muscled a temporary repeal of the estate tax into law, would be delighted to sign a bill making abolition permanent.

So much for the "populism" of these Red State hypocrites. There can be no reason for doing this other than to pay off contributors. If a Democrat from Nebraska can't make the argument that he or she refuses to give tax breaks to movie stars then he or she needs to get into another line of business.

Krugman writes:

The campaign for estate tax repeal has largely been financed by just 18 powerful business dynasties, including the family that owns Wal-Mart.

You may have heard tales of family farms and small businesses broken up to pay taxes, but those stories are pure propaganda without any basis in fact. In particular, advocates of estate tax repeal have never been able to provide a single real example of a family farm sold to pay estate taxes.

Nonetheless, the estate tax is up for a vote this week. First, Republicans will try to repeal the estate tax altogether. If that fails, they'll offer a compromise that isn't really a compromise, like a plan suggested by Senator Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona, that would cost almost as much as full repeal, or a plan suggested by Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, that is only slightly cheaper.

In each case, the crucial vote will be procedural: if 60 senators vote to close off debate, estate tax repeal or something close to it will surely pass. Any senator who votes for cloture but against estate tax repeal — which I'm told is what John McCain may do — is simply a hypocrite, trying to have it both ways.

But will the Senate vote for cloture? The answer depends on two groups of senators: Democrats like Mr. Baucus who habitually stake out "centrist" positions that give Republicans almost everything they want, and moderate Republicans like Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island who consistently cave in to their party's right wing. Will these senators show more spine than they have in the past?

In the interest of stiffening those spines, let me remind senators that this isn't just a fiscal issue, it's also a moral issue. Congress has already declared that the budget deficit is serious enough to warrant depriving children of health care; how can it now say that it's worth enlarging the deficit to give Paris Hilton a tax break?

I also think it's important to not that an active duty Army captain with two years experience makes $38,656 a year. A private first class makes $15,282. God forbid that Paris should be asked to kick in a piece of her inheritance to pay the bills this country owes --- bills which include those salaries. What's this country ever done for her? (And anyway, the price of a mojito at Club Butter is just ridiculous these days.)

And, by the way, if John "I'm Teddy Roosevelt reincarnated" McCain does do some shenanigans with this vote, I think we should hire a skinny blond in huge sunglasses to follow him around blowing kisses and thanking him profusely. (It sounds like a job for the Billionaires.)



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digby 6/05/2006 04:50:00 PM |

 
Did They?

by digby

Atrios links to this from Evan Bayh:

Bayh calmly answered that “I wouldn’t cast the same vote today as I did then.” He noted that “the French believed that (there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq), the Germans believed that, the Russians believed that, everybody believed he [Saddam Hussein] had weapons of mass destruction.”

Yes, we've heard that. Apparently, it's supposed to excuse the fact that the administration ignored its own government, but whatever. This trope about France, Russia and Germany is dragged out with such frequency it's become a matter of faith. But is it true?

I honestly don't know. There are reports on the internet that France did not believe it. The Guardian published a story in the fall of 2002 featuring Pootie-Poot saying this:

Specifically targeting the CIA report, Putin said, "Fears are one thing, hard facts are another." He goes on to say, "Russia does not have in its possession any trustworthy data that supports the existence of nuclear weapons or any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and we have not received any such information from our partners yet. This fact has also been supported by the information sent by the CIA to the US Congress."

Putin, like everyone else, then endorsed sending the inspectors back in for obvious reasons --- to prove the case one way or the other. But the only thing I've ever seen that indicated the French and the Germans had independent knowledge of what has turned out to be a non-existent arsenal, came from David Kay, who testified to that effect before congress. But I suspect that to the extent they might have said they believed it, it was because we told them we had evidence, not that they had independently verified it. I just have a sneaking suspicion that we would have heard what it was by now.

You'll recall that the security council in the run up to the war was in a frenzy of activity trying to stop this stupid war. The resolution to allow inspectors back in was not based upon a set of facts that that everyone agreed to. It was based upon a desire to stop the US from plunging headlong into war. And the history of that rush to war shows this:

March 18 2003

The United States told UN arms inspectors to pack their bags and leave Iraq, with last-ditch talks at the United Nations Security Council looking unlikely to break a diplomatic deadlock amid unswerving French and Russian opposition to war.

The Security Council was set to meet in what US President George Bush said would be "a moment of truth for the world", while the United States and Britain told their nationals to leave Kuwait immediately, with London warning of the threat of chemical and biological attack from neighbouring Iraq.

With war looking increasingly imminent - British commentators have spoken of a 24-hour pause for weapons inspectors, diplomats and others to leave Iraq before war begins - Security Council members China, Russia, France and Germany all appealed for Bush to give diplomacy more time.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said the United States would be making a mistake with the most serious consequences if it went to war without UN backing, in his first direct comments on the Iraq crisis for weeks, Interfax news agency reported.

[...]

Yesterday, he said, "is the day that we will determine whether or not diplomacy can work", adding that Saddam would have to disarm or would be disarmed by force.

Asked whether that meant the diplomatic window would now close for a vote on a draft UN resolution brought by the US, Britain and Spain that is widely seen as paving the way for war, he replied: "That's what I'm saying."

Baghdad responded that Washington and London had "drowned the world with lies".

France, whose opposition to the resolution has led to a diplomatic deadlock at the UN, insisted it would veto the resolution, despite appeals from Mr Bush and Mr Blair for international unity.

"France cannot accept the resolution on the table that lays down an ultimatum," Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin told Europe 1 radio, reiterating a pledge by President Jacques Chirac to torpedo the motion.

Moscow added its opposition, saying there was "no chance" of the Security Council approving the resolution, Interfax reported.

"We do not believe that any new resolutions are necessary," said Deputy Foreign Minister Yury Fedotov.

In Beijing, Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing insisted the issue should be solved through dialogue within the United Nations, while German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder rejected the rush to war and said UN weapons inspections in Iraq were proving effective.

With Paris and Moscow lining up to veto the resolution, speculation rose that London and Washington would withdraw the text and launch strikes.

[...]

Mr Blair had given Paris until yesterday to change its mind, saying: "People have got to decide whether they are going to allow any second resolution (on Iraq) to have teeth, to make it clear that there is a real ultimatum in it.

"If their positions do not change ... it is very difficult to see how you can move this diplomatic process forward," he said. "This is the impasse."

A government official said the ball was in France's and Russia's court: "It's a decision for France and Russia whether they would sign up to an ultimatum."

None of that proves that France, Germany and Russia believed that Iraq had WMD. But let's not pretend that they had jumped on the bandwagon with our plans either. If they "knew" independently that Saddam had WMD, they certainly didn't seem to think it required an invasion. You'd think that fact would have given Evan and his buds in the congress some pause at the time. You'd certainly think it would embarrass the shit out of them now.



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digby 6/05/2006 03:19:00 PM |

 
Punked

by digby

The excellent Steve Benen, pinch hitting over at Washington Monthly, highlights this rather stunning story from the LA Times in which we learn that the Army is eliminating the prohibition against "humiliating and degrading" treatment from the new edition of the field manual:

The Pentagon has decided to omit from new detainee policies a key tenet of the Geneva Convention that explicitly bans "humiliating and degrading treatment," according to knowledgeable military officials, a step that would mark a further, potentially permanent, shift away from strict adherence to international human rights standards.

The decision could culminate a lengthy debate within the Defense Department but will not become final until the Pentagon makes new guidelines public, a step that has been delayed. However, the State Department fiercely opposes the military's decision to exclude Geneva Convention protections and has been pushing for the Pentagon and White House to reconsider, the Defense Department officials acknowledged.

Benen says:

I can't help but wonder if Bush administration officials know or care about how this undermines our standing and credibility in the world. It's simply breathtaking. As Kevin put it a while back, "It's simply impossible to persuade the rest of the world that we're the good guys as long as we persist in plainly repugnant behavior."

The problem is that they, and I assume many in the pentagon, believe the exact opposite. They think that "being tough" and "sending the right message" will make the enemy put its tail between its legs and run for the hills. That's the simple truth of it. And that idea is what's permeated into the military ranks in Iraq and elsewhere. When Cheney said "take the gloves off" he meant it. And people believed it. And that led us directly to Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and now the horror of Haditha.

Newsweek's story on the subject this week doesn't really shed any new light on the story, but it ends with one hell of a speculation:

MacGregor also faulted U.S. generals for not accompanying platoon and squad leaders as they patrolled—to better understand their environment and what they needed to survive in it. Had the generals done so, writes MacGregor, they would have known what a sergeant on patrol in Ramadi meant when he told a journalist, "You can have my job. It's easy. You just have to drive around all day and wait for someone to bomb you. Thing is, you have to hate Arabs."

Left to their own devices, grunts sometimes improvise. It is possible that Kilo Company was determined to "leave a calling card," which is to say, to warn Haditha that IEDs would be met with heavy retribution. It's an old and primitive counter-insurgency tactic. Long ago, the Romans used it against barbarians.

Romans and conservatives are very big on "sending messages." They like to make examples of people; it's one of their favorite authoritarian tactics. And executing children sends a hell of a message, no doubt about it. No gloves anywhere to be seen in that operation. The "humiliating and degrading" treatment at Abu Ghraib, the torture at Bagram and Gitmo and god knows where else, the kidnapping and renditions, and yes, the massacre of civilians including children, is not a matter of incompetence or misunderstanding or the fog of war. It's the plan.

In this famous essay called "World War IV," neocon king Norman Podhoretz spells it all out. The US has been soft for more than thirty years. Even St Ronnie doesn't get a pass (for "cutting and running" after the barracks bombing in Lebanon.) We have invited this malevolent threat to attack us because we have been weak. After recounting American failures to "get tough" over the course of the last thirty years, he concludes:

The sheer audacity of what bin Laden went on to do on September 11 was unquestionably a product of his contempt for American power. Our persistent refusal for so long to use that power against him and his terrorist brethren—or to do so effectively whenever we tried—reinforced his conviction that we were a nation on the way down, destined to be defeated by the resurgence of the same Islamic militancy that had once conquered and converted large parts of the world by the sword.

As bin Laden saw it, thousands or even millions of his followers and sympathizers all over the Muslim world were willing, and even eager, to die a martyr’s death in the jihad, the holy war, against the "Great Satan," as the Ayatollah Khomeini had called us. But, in bin Laden’s view, we in the West, and especially in America, were all so afraid to die that we lacked the will even to stand up for ourselves and defend our degenerate way of life.

Bin Laden was never reticent or coy in laying out this assessment of the United States. In an interview on CNN in 1997, he declared that "the myth of the superpower was destroyed not only in my mind but also in the minds of all Muslims" when the Soviet Union was defeated in Afghanistan. That the Muslim fighters in Afghanistan would almost certainly have failed if not for the arms supplied to them by the United States did not seem to enter into the lesson he drew from the Soviet defeat. In fact, in an interview a year earlier he had belittled the United States as compared with the Soviet Union. "The Russian soldier is more courageous and patient than the U.S. soldier," he said then. Hence, "Our battle with the United States is easy compared with the battles in which we engaged in Afghanistan."

Becoming still more explicit, bin Laden wrote off the Americans as cowards. Had Reagan not taken to his heels in Lebanon after the bombing of the Marine barracks in 1983? And had not Clinton done the same a decade later when only a few American Rangers were killed in Somalia, where they had been sent to participate in a "peacekeeping" mission? Bin Laden did not boast of this as one of his victories, but a State Department dossier charged that al Qaeda had trained the terrorists who ambushed the American servicemen. (The ugly story of what happened to us in Somalia was told in the film version of Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down, which reportedly became Saddam Hussein’s favorite movie.)

Bin Laden summed it all up in a third interview he gave in 1998:

After leaving Afghanistan the Muslim fighters headed for Somalia and prepared for a long battle thinking that the Americans were like the Russians. The youth were surprised at the low morale of the American soldiers and realized, more than before, that the American soldier was a paper tiger and after a few blows ran in defeat.

Naturally, they believed him. He wouldn't lie would he? So America simply had to respond to bin Laden's trash talk by showing the world that we are one tough mofo of a superpower that would invade any country that looked at us sideways. Never mind that bin Laden was full of shit about everything and that 9/11 would only succeed if we did exactly what we ended up doing. Incensed by his taunts, the administration rose up like an angry giant and began to flail about incoherently. That'll show him who's boss.

And after everything that's happened since, Bush still believes it. From March of 2006:

Ours is an enemy which has embraced an ideology -- an ideology of hatred, an ideology that is totalitarian in nature: they decide if you can worship and how you worship; they decide whether or not your children can go to school; they decide this, they decide that. They stand exactly the opposite of the United States of America. They have expressed their tactics for the world to see. They believe that those of us living in democracies are weak, and flaccid. It's just a matter of time, they believe, if they continue to exert pressure that we will retreat from the world. That's what they want.

The vaunted neo-conservative intellectuals have a simplistic, shoolyard view of the world based on what appears to be a very simplistic, schoolyard psychology that very much appealed to the boy-man that had been installed in the white house when bin Laden struck on 9/11. What serendipity! It is this puerile psychological misfire that united them with the feverish one handed typists of the 101st keyboarders --- all threats, no matter how small or insignificant at the time, must be met with crude brute force lest someone taunt you about your small cojones. The real threat is the appearance of weakness.

The interesting thing about this, of course, is that very few of these people have ever put any of that into practice in their own lives --- this belief exists in an abstract realm of fantasy --- a pageant to be performed by others. (When you read Podhoretz's piece you can't help but be struck by all the vainglorious pride he takes in the physical courage of others.) Yet they also need to maintain a sort of religious fiction about themselves as being purveyors of democracy and freedom --- concepts that don't ordinarily lend themselves to barbaric message sending.

And that is how we found ourselves invading and occupying (and killing and torturing) to prove we are good and they are evil. And it's why with every failure, every misstep, every hypocrisy and war crime, this braindead macho policy makes America far more vulnerable today than we were on 9/11. This mistaken belief that bin Laden attacked us because he thought we were weak --- has made us weak. Virtually the entire American political establishment got punked by Osama bin Laden's trash talking and they still don't get it. With every impotent "message" of toughness we send, the more we play into his hands.



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digby 6/05/2006 10:11:00 AM |

Sunday, June 04, 2006

 
Laughin' With Yo Homies

by digby


I write a lot about tribal identity, specifically conservative tribal identity, and I think it's an issue we need to think about in order to understand how our politics really work. Mostly, I have felt throughout my adult life, since Reagan anyway, that I didn't have much of a tribe, certainly not a political tribe. The left has been defined for so many years by the exaggerated cartoon image created by the wingnuts that it's often been difficult to even admit you are a liberal, much less publicly identify and congregate with others explicitly on that basis. You'd pick an issue or a candidate, maybe. You'd speak in a sort of code. But you rarely gathered in one place as liberals or revel joyously in calling yourself one.

That's changing. Last night I saw Laughing Liberally here in LA and I now think that for the first time in a long time people are willing to assume the mantle and be proud liberals for its own sake. This virtual bloggy thing of ours is translating into actual human interaction. And that means we can change our politics.

Granted, LA is a liberal town so it's not shocking that you could gather an auditorium full of people for political comedy. But there was more to it than that. There was a celebratory vibe in the air --- and a very nice feeling of explicit liberal solidarity based on our shared worldview.

A couple of observations:

Lieberman is tremendously unpopular but Dem bashing in general is not as popular as it used to be among liberals. We're starting to take ownership of the party, I think. Good for us.

People are far more aware of the details of current political intrigue than I realized. I'm assuming this is because of the blogosphere and Air America (the LA station that carries it heavily promoted this event.) Also good for us.

If I have one request of the comedians on this tour, all of whom were great, it would be that they start thinking right now about some John McCain jokes. It's never to early to start the political ridicule. Indeed, we need to get going on all the potential GOP candidates. The Republicans are probably funding an entire think tank study on how to ritually humiliate ours.

Laughing Liberally is great fun. I hope they are able to expand this tour and take it to some places where it liberals really need the laughs. But I have to say that I'm grateful to them for bringing it here and offering all of us Hollywood Libs (who, along with Boston and San Francisco, all the red state conservatives blame for the destruction of civilization as we know it) a chance to congregate and laugh our asses off about politics. Everybody needs to get together with their tribe once in a while, see each other face to face and share the same space. It feels good. We should do it more often.

Laughing Liberally will be at Yearly Kos in Vegas and then in Boston. Go see it if you can.


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digby 6/04/2006 02:13:00 PM |

 
Documentary Evidence


NB: The following was transcribed verbatim from an actual videotape found in the tape library of Heather Donahue, the noted documentary filmmaker. Hullabaloo regrets the occasionally coarse language, but we've decided to retain it so that the full extent of the unfortunate condition into which one of our regular correspondents seems to have sunk will become clear.

All too clear, alas.

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

Tristero, s'up?

I'm feeling a little weird right now. I don't feel so good.

What's the matter? You drop that tab of Sunshine I know you've been bogartin' since '67? (laughs)

Har de har har. Here's what got me so freaked. Barring some miraculous infusion of spine, character, and principle from the Flying Spaghetti Monster, tomorrow George W. Bush will once more heap enormous shame on my country.

Yup. Looks like he's actually gonna get on tv and propose a constitutional ban on marriages because he doesn't like the biology of the people getting married.

Doesn't that strike you as completely, like utterly, in-fucking-sane????

No, tristero, it doesn't. Oh, it's not like I don't support gay marriage or something. "Course I do, 'course I do. Everyone does. I mean everyone, except Bush and those idiots. It's just that there are entirely rational reasons why Bush is doing this.

What??? Don't you get it? The day after tomorrow, Fred Phelps will be officially no longer half the kook that any member of Lamda will suddenly be. Sure Phelps's is clearly clinically manic, no one likes him (at least not publicly) but don't you see, his delusions are closer to the unambiguously expressed direction the president of the United States wants for America than anyone interested in providing gays with civil rights.

And don't you see what's gonna happen?? After tomorrow, it's duck season on gays, lesbians, and the transgendered. People will die, people are gonna die! Good people will die, smart people, people who are loved, and who are raising great familes, all because tomorrow the president of the United States is gonna endorse writing into the Constitution, the Constitution! for crissakes, that gays, lesbians, and transgenders can't legally marry. That is absolutely insane! Do you realize what would happen if they passed that abomination?

Okay, tristero, hold on, calm down, okay, calm do...

I can't calm down! Look, you know the right just as well as I do. They're unbelievably sneaky bastards. They pretend they're anti-abortion, but they're really anti-contraception, and that's not even it - they're really anti-sex except with a government license. But that's not all of it, either. Look at Santorum, he thinks he can tell even a married couple how to fuck in their own bedroom. These people are flat out crazy perverts.

So y'gotta wonder, what are they hiding? What aren't they talking about when it comes to this amendment? You think this is just about gays? Well yes it is, my God, the violence. And think how'd they suffer if this thing passed!

Dude, shut up! I'm trying t' tell you...

No, wait, these people, these rightwingers oh, they got lotsa "biological criteria," and not just gender fetishes, over what makes a proper marriage. This don't stop with homosexuality.

A while back, Atrios caught the Washington Times expressing "concern" or "distress" over blacks and whites having sex. And you know about Bob Jones' University notorious policy to prohibit "interracial" dating, like they'll ever permit it even it's no longer an official ban. Oh yeah, there's a lot of people on the right, the very same folks deeply worried about women having sex with each other, who are also deeply concerned about the numerous cultural problems flowing from the spreading practice of "miscegenation." After all, until quite recently, black/white marriages weren't recognized everywhere in the US. So, there will be no reason why the US can't revisit the reasoning behind the ban and extend the purview of the anti-marriage amendment.

But tristero, will you just shut u...

But that isn't all. Many people seriously worried about gay marriage are also majorly upset about the moral issues around abortion. The question of the woman's culpability is a wrenching one for them, and most of them won't talk about what they really think about it. But other groups will. The "christian" Reconstructionists - some of the friendly folks behind intelligent design Creationism- theyll talk about it. A woman who has had an abortion is a murderer.

Should murderers in a Christian society be permitted to marry? Why? Marriage is a holy sacrament, y'know, it's not just a fucking piece of paper giving you and your spouse legal rights. You befoul the sanctity of marriage when you permit murderers to marry! The question for these people is not whether a murderer should marry but whether a woman who murders her own child should be permitted to live. The Bible says you don't suffer a witch to live. Ditto baby killers.

Okay, this isn't funny anymore, you're starting to seriously scare me. Let me explain...

Not yet. America is, as Dobson and his ilk are always so eager to remind us, a Christian country from the beginning. And Christian it must stay. No more Jewish/Christian marriages. Just as important, it's becoming time to address the serious problems that Christians have with so-called Catholics...

And what about sluts and whores? Seriously, should non-virgin women marry? Other cultures have problems with that, why should the US condone second-rate marriages? The anti-marriage amendment gives us a chance at keeping marriage only between virgins.

Oh, crissakes, that's silly, it could never happen in the US.

You're right, it can't, because we don't have an anti-marriage amendment yet. That's why it can't happen here - it's not because we're "more sensible" people than the Afghans under the Taliban and wouldn't permit it - we're the most religious First World country in the world, y'know. It's simply because legally it is impossible and that's the only reason why it can't happen here. But if there is an anti-marriage amendment, it can happen here and, if history is any guide, it will.

Okay, tristero, you done for now? Good! It's time to get back to Planet Reality, my friend. Look, I am as worried as you are, but let's just think about what's actually gonna happen, not what could maybe happen. Everyone, but everyone agrees on this, that the chances of Congress passing a constitutional amendment that bans marriages are exactly zero. You're hallucinating if you think this will lead to wholesale, violent oppression of the Jews. Oh, sorry, I meant, gays, just ignore the slip.

Are you serious?? That's supposed to make me feel better? Has 5 years of Bush so warped your sense of the truly bizarre that you don't see this as flat out surreal, as in Dali Persistence of Memory surreal? The fact that the amendment has no chance of passing, THAT'S supposed to make me feel that what's gonna happen is LESS psychotic? What's he doin it for then? Huh? That just makes it even more insane, not less. What the hell is going on? Has everyone lost their mind?

Tristero, you know very well what's going on. Bush is proposing the anti-marriage amendment, even though he knows it won't pass, simply to help elect Republicans in the fall.

Ahhh! My God, my head, my head! Did I hear that right. Are you telling me, let me get this straight...

Are you telling me, and this is not a joke, man, tell the truth, I'm starting to lose it big time here... You're saying the reason Bush is gonna do his best to act like the Man From Fucking La Mancha tomorrow is because he desperately needs to make sure every modern-day witchburner and every American Nazi comes out and votes Republican in the fall elections or the party falls from power? I don't believe I heard you say that.

Is that really what GOP power depends on, the white supremacists and religious fanatics? That can't be, that just can't be...this can't be happenin...

Wait a minute...y'know, come to think of it, that's it. This really is all too crazy to be real, y'know, mebbe, I really did eat that Sunshine after all, haven't seen it in a while...

Yup, that's it! I'm tripping! This is just a bad trip! None of it's real, none of it, the anti-marriage amendment, and your crazy reasoning, why you're just a hallucination, a hologram of my imagination. You're gone, I can't see you anymore! Oh, thank God.

(laughs with relief) A bad trip, just a verrrrrrrrrry bad trip. Thank you, thank you, thank you. It's just a bad trip. It's not gonna happen.

Whew! Now I can face tomorrow.

[VIDEO ENDS. TRANSCRIPT ENDS]
tristero 6/04/2006 01:38:00 PM |

 
Here We Are Now. Entertain Us!

by tristero

As I was about to start writing this, I became distracted by the latest atrocity in the Bush/Iraq war, 21 people dying in an attack on a bus, including 12 high school students. It may seem pointless, perhaps to the point of being obscene, to focus instead on an extremely subtle issue of presentation and rhetoric and do so at extreme length. But I'm trying to understand how the US got taken over by such an incompetent band of extremists and I want to find ways to prevent them from retaining power. I have some sort of sensitivity to rhetorical devices and techniques, and since I think that is an important part of the answer and of the solution, I'll go on and write what I intended to. For I know that if the far right continues to have influence far in excess either to their popular support or their woeful talent, today's massacre, and our horror-filled reaction to it, will look like the good old days to our kids.


There's a rather listless article by Elizabeth Drew about the bipartisan alarm over Bush's signing statements in the current New York Review of Books - dull, because there is nothing added to the story, not that the story itself is anything other than infuriating and ominous (btw, Drew has written extremely well on Bush in the past; this one is an exception among the ones I've read). But a striking conjunction of quotes caught my interest towards the end of Drew's essay:

People with very disparate political views, such as Grover Norquist and Dianne Feinstein, worry about the long-term implications of Bush's power grab. Norquist said, "These are all the powers that you don't want Hillary Clinton to have." Feinstein says, "I think it's very dangerous because other presidents will come along and this sets a precedent for them." Therefore, she says, "it's very important that Congress grapple with and make decisions about what our policies should be on torture, rendition, detainees, and wiretapping lest Bush's claimed right to set the policies, or his policies themselves, become a precedent for future presidents."

To cut directly to the point, this is a perfect illustration both of the problem with mainstream Democratic rhetoric, and the dangerous effectiveness of far-right Republican operatives. It's almost as of they're speaking two different dialects. I don't wanna make two much of the dialect conceit, but it may be useful as a rule of thumb to start us off.

Norquist speaks what I'll call TeeVee, the dialect we hear on television, not only on the news, but in nearly every commercial, every sitcom, the Simpsons, late night comedy shows, and so on. Like everything else you hear in TeeVee, Norquist's statement is concise and all-but-exclusively monosyllabic: the vocabulary is more restricted than a 6 year-old's. But that is noted not so much to disparage it as to describe it. Because Norquist's statement is also crudely witty - it will certainly get an appreciative snort from many Hillary-bashers, a calculated kind of we're-all-vulgar-together kind of wit. But there's even more to it than that.

Norquist also uses, and to great effect, two levels of personalization, a prime feature of TeeVee dialect. First of all, the audience is directly addressed - "you" - and almost instinctively you - we - snap to attention. ("You deserve a break to today;" "You-you're the one -" why, I bet you (heh) can make a whole career in advertising and pop music out of that word...)

And then Clinton's name is mentioned, personalizing, embodying, and exemplifying the existential alarm triggered by "you don't want." Norquist doesn't bother going into detail about what "all the powers you don't want Hillary Clinton to have" could be. Why should he? After all, it's patently obvious that he and his audience want Clinton to have no power at all. Nor is it necessary to go into any kind of detail about what's the big deal if Clinton has "all the powers." If someone even dares to ask such a question in an atmosphere so rhetorically slanted, it could easily be sloughed off with a snarky laugh and a snotty joke. For a long time in the MSM, Hillary Clinton has been thoroughly demonized past rational dispute; giving her, of all people, illegal wiretapping powers, is literally unthinkable.

But the personalization serves a much more specific set of purposes for Norquist than simply the present issue of deploring increased presidential power. It is, of course, a highly partisan statement. By implication through omission, Norquist tacitly endorses Bush's desire to have all the powers. These are powers you don't want Clinton to have but what about the present day or furture Republican president? Well, that's easily deflected. It's simply not the question. The question is what if these awesome powers fell into the hands of a Democrat and not just any Democrat but Hillary Clinton? (And let's not forget that the Republicans, being the generous, giving souls that they are, have already nominated and selected Hillary Clinton as the Democratic Party's nominee for president in 2008, saving Democrats an enormous amount of bother deciding for themselves who they want.)

Existential alarm, demonization, personalization, simplification. It's all there compacted, compressed, and finely tuned in the Norquist quote (there's more, but that's enough for now). And that's TeeVee, the prime candidate, el numero uno (say it in English!) for the defining dialect of US English. It transcends the country's regions, subcultures, religions, ethnic groups, and class. And political persuasions. Need examples? Look at tv commercials. Need less trivial examples? Look at the evening news, inevitably leading off a story on how Medicare's drug policy affects a specific family (personalization). Look at how the choices for action and thought are automatically simplified, for which demonization really helps - invade Iraq or you will condone the actions of a monstrous monster!! Further examples?

Nah, you get the idea. Let's turn to what Feinstein said. She's not speaking TeeVee or any other dialect. Hell, she's not even speaking. She's just talking: no brain is engaged. Hers isn't the language of persuasion. Nor is it evasive. It's just rambling, boring, dull, and extremely unpleasant. It's mediocrity arrogantly worrying over a moral principle - three serious taboos for native TeeVee speakers. Like us.

Consider her immediate resort to a strangled, masturbatory use of personalization. The first word is "I" and she "thinks it's dangerous." Yeah, big deal, that's her (solo, egotistical) opinion, but Norquist speaks for our opinions. Worse, Feinstein sets up an instantly arrogant opposition and a hierarchy - I am the expert, you're not, I think it's dangerous, and you're wrong if you don't. In contrast, Norquist works the empathy angle - you think Hillary is dangerous.

Feinstein's use of the first person also admits doubt where Norquist strictly limits doubt in an important way. Only Feinstein thinks it's dangerous, and let's face it, that's just her opinion. But Norquist addresses us, a lot of us, and that many people really can't be wrong. And for us to be wrong, that wouldn't feel good, would it? Norquist knows we're right. Feinstein just knows that she's right.

Now, look - if you dare, it's horrible, horrible - at Feinstein's incoherent use of alliteration. Just thinking about it makes me wince.

Folks, really. If you're gonna use "president" and "precedent" in the same sentence, you really need to be aware of it. And y'gotta do it with intent. Feinstein is just plain tone deaf. And the effect is revolting. Muffing her chance for a little clever verbal pizzazz, "precedent" becomes just an annoying big word - three whole syllables! - we really gotta struggle to parse. It merely intimidates, harking back to the arrogant "I" from whence she began. And then she repeats it at the end and it's still not even close to funny, interesting, or illuminating.

Feinstein's profound indifference to what she is saying - not the meaning, but the actual words and phrases she uses to convey meaning - is everywhere apparent throughout the quote. Yes, indeed, Bush certainly is a bumbling fool whenever he speaks, but even he rarely approaches the transcendent idiocy of calling on Congress to "grapple" with "our policies on torture."

For crissakes, "grapple"?? Who knew that the legislatures took not only a tortuous route to making our laws, but a torturous one, too? Grapple, shee-it, let's just use the rack.

And unlike Norquist, who compresses all the evil of the world into one Clinton, Feinstein makes the spectacular mistake of listing all of America's sins. What on earth wash she thinking??? Y'know, I've read a lot about torture, rendition, detainees, and wiretapping since 2000. And every time I start to do so, I have to fight the desire to avoid hearing anymore about this stuff. It's not fun, it's a duty, espeically if my taxes are funding it, but don't think for a second I want to hear about it. No one does (well, except maybe Don Rumsfeld, he's so weird it just may set his putter straight, as the saying goes).

So If you're gonna bring all these truly awful things up in this context, where it's a side issue to the main one - the usurpation of powers by a power-mad executive - you better do it in such a fashion that we want to endure hearing about it. Otherwise, you'll lose your audience. But for Feinstein, my God, these horrors actually become "our" horrors. Meaning not ony her and the Congress's, but worse, yours and mine - policies. Wha? Diane, these are Bush's policies, don't tell me they're ours!! I feel guilty enought already just having to pay for him, dig? And I've spoken out against them, marched, petioned, etc etc, from day one!

One last thing, no reason to prolong the agony but I can't resist pointing out this flatulent rhetorical impropriety. Admit it: didn't you just want to fucking hurl when you read "lest?" Oh, my! No scones for me, Major, I'm off to play the Grand Pee-a-know!.

I'm sorry, one last, last thing, and this is it. "lest[!] Bush's claimed right to set the policies, or his policies themselves." What is this, the Marx Brothers crazy legal contract skit? Can we just skip the sanity clause and watch the stateroom scene again? Please?

The point should be obvious but let's spell it out anyway. Nobody's saying to imitate Norquist's style. The guy's crazy and obnoxious and his style - irrationally hostile and obsessively nasty down to the microlevel - reflects that. But dear friends, you gotta have some rhetorical style. And unfortunately, even top Democratic politicians like Feinstein simply don't.

Look, we all know what Feinstein is trying to say, at least in part - "Bush is acting like a tinpot tyrannical dictator. for which the only precedent among American presidents is the disgraced and disgraceful Richard Nixon. And there is no reason for this president to set such an awful precedent for America's future leaders."

The thing is: that is what she has to say, only better. Because she's goddamm right. But her rhetorical incompetence tells us we're gonna learn nothing if we listen to her, and we're not gonna have fun, either. One or the other, preferably both - that's TeeVee. That's not just Teen Spirit anymore, dear Mr. Cobain. That's America.

[Update: Slightly revised after initial posting.]
tristero 6/04/2006 09:06:00 AM |

Saturday, June 03, 2006

 
Puppies

by digby


There are a bunch of posts today on the subject of media narrative that are very much worth reading as a series. I'm going to link them all below.

This discussion about media narratives is incredibly important. We must not forget that a great many people are infected with these media storylines (although according to this fascinating analysis by Stirling Newberry, they are less infected than we think.) But there is one group that is almost completely controlled by it and that's the political establishment. The blogosphere and other forms of alternative media provide some other voices, but in the main, the beltway's relationship to the people is almost entirely constructed by the media narrative. And it's killing Democrats.

I'm going to excerpt a little piece from each of these pieces:

Jamison Foser from Media Matters:

The recent media treatment of Sen. John P. Murtha (D-PA), Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) illustrate this point: No matter who emerges as a progressive leader, or a high-profile Democrat, they're in for the same flood of conservative misinformation in the media. Too many people chalk up outrageous media treatment of, say, Al Gore or John Kerry to the men's own flaws, pretending that if they were better candidates, they'd have gotten better press coverage. That's naïve. The Democratic Party could nominate Superman to be their next presidential candidate, and two things would happen: conservatives would smear him, and the media would join in. To illustrate this, we look back over the last dozen or so years.

This is very important. It is an American impulse to recoil from losers, but it's a Democratic weakness that they consistently belittle and degrade their politicians for the sins of the media. Foser's long post takes you on a trip through time that should convince anyone that there is more at work here than congenitally bad candidates. From Howard Dean to John Murtha to Hillary Clinton to Al Gore and everything in between, there is no such thing as a "normal" Democrat in the eyes of the political media.

Peter Daou, on the WaPo's revisiting today of Bush's manly certitude. Steve Benon on the same. Christy too.

Stirling Newberry on the two narrative streams, public and private.

TBOGG on the press's reluctance to call Republicans liars.

He excerpts this incredible paragraph from Eric Boehlert's incredible new book Lapdogs:

The MSM's unique brand of journalism, unveiled just for Bush, represented precisely the kind of clubby, get-along reporting that would have been roundly mocked by journalists themselves just a few years earlier. During the Clinton years, the D.C. newsroom sin was to be seen as soft on Democrats -- "a Clinton apologist" -- and journalists went to extraordinary lengths to prove their mettle by staying up late chasing Whitewater rumors and trying to prove the White House gave away weapons secrets to the Chinese in exchange for campaign contributions. The phrase "double standard" barely begins to describe the titanic shift that occurred in how Bush and his Republican administration were covered by the suddenly timorous press corps. It's hard to believe the Bush-era slumbering press was the same one that a decade earlier shifted into overdrive when bogus allegations flew that President Clinton caused commercial airplanes to back up at Los Angeles International Airport while he received a $200 haircut from a celebrity stylist aboard Air Force One in 1993. Federal Aviation Administration records later showed no such delays occurred, but that didn't stop the Washington Post from referencing the silly incident fifty-plus times in less than thirty days, treating the hoax as a serious political story. (The Post staff managed to squeeze in nearly one hundred Clinton haircut references during the 1993 calendar year.) Then again, just four months into his first term, the Post published a lengthy, mocking feature on Clinton's soft approval ratings. ("The Failed Clinton Presidency. It has a certain ring to it.") Yet in 2005 when Bush's job approval rating plunged into the 30s, the Post refused to print the phrase "failed presidency" to describe Bush's second term. To do so would simply invite conservative scorn; something the newsroom seemed to go to extraordinarily lengths to avoid.

After reading all of that the question is --- how do we fix this?



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digby 6/03/2006 03:17:00 PM |

 
Horse's Mouth

Is George W. Bush's comic book advisor Karl Zinsmeister padding his resume? Say it ain't so.



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digby 6/03/2006 02:26:00 PM |

 
The Mood of The Country

by digby

I read this series of posts over on TPM and got really depressed. A number of readers wrote in to either agree with or criticize Josh for taking the New Yorker to task for perpetuating the same old creaky political narrative that we've been hearing for the last 25 years.

This one, in particular, made me feel very, very tired:

I was holding back, but dude?!?

"The vast majority of Democrats totally understand that Dems running in reddish states can't have stereotypically liberal positions on hot-button social and cultural issues. I think everybody gets that."

No, no, no. THEY DON'T GET THAT AT ALL.

"Reddish"? Dems don't get that notion even when it comes to blood red states.

Come on. If Dems got it, the party would have never nominated Kerry, and Hillary would be consigned to the oblivion of a Senate committee chairmanship, at best.

In fact, I'm trying to conjure up any factual basis for thinking that the majority of Dems get that, let alone a "vast majority."

I lived in Louisiana when Dukakis ran. I lived in Missouri when Kerry (his fricking lt. gov.!) ran. They were jokes. Not just unelectable. Jokes. Howard Dean? Another joke. Hillary? God help us.

Do you have any idea how demoralizing it is having these folks wrecking the top of the ballot again and again? It not just that those of us in red states have to endure GOP presidencies, just like you blue staters. But we get the shit kicked out of us up and down the ballot. It's a disaster.

You tell me how it is that Dems managed to nominate two Massachusetts liberals for president during the greatest conservative movement in this country since--I don't know--prohibition? It sure ain't because a vast majority decided to accommodate the mood of the country.

With those two nominations as bookends to the last 18 years, I don't think the problem is that reporters like Goldberg keep repeating the same old tired cliches. So long as the Dems keep living those tired old cliches, you'd have to become a novelist to write a different storyline. Don't shoot the messenger.

I have heard this shit as long as I can remember. And yet, when moderate centrist southerner Bill Clinton was elected (with a mere plurality in both elections) --- and was tortured endlessly by the right wing --- I didn't hear any let-up of the narrative or get any sense that the red states were appeased. Indeed, Clinton was widely portrayed as being the poster boy for alleged blue state values. His crime was that he was a Democrat, period. His southern twang couldn't save him. And it didn't save Jimmy Carter either, who was a pillar of moral rectitude. It's always something.

There is no winning if we continue to play this game. And red state Democrats who have bought into this frame need to step back and consider the fact that this conservative era only exists in electoral politics. In every other way, this is one of the most liberal eras in history. Between the changes in marriage and women's rights alone, society is undergoing a massive shift. The conservative era he refers to is a piddly ass backlash against forces that are far stronger than anything Judge Roy Moore and James Dobson have put forth. And the agenda that has been enacted under this conservative GOP era has had almost nothing to do with any of those social issues --- it's a radical economic agenda that has hurt working people of all "cultures."

I've lived in both red and blue states for extended periods and frankly, never actually saw much of a difference; in my experience people are pretty much the same everywhere. But I respect the right to love your tribe and there are areas of the country in which regional identity is of paramount importance. It's part of being human.

That is why I'm getting sick to death of hearing this crap from people like Marshall's correspondent above. I'm not exactly feeling the same kind of love in return. It's not enough that I have enthusiastically voted for Carter, Clinton and Gore, all conservative southern Democrats to one degree or another, or that I would have backed Edwards, Clark or any other red state Dem in the last one. (Kerry won the southern Democratic primaries too, btw. He wasn't just annointed by a bunch of clueless latte sipping San Francisco fags. This guy needs to consult his fellow Democrats and ask why they did that.)

(In all my posts on this subject, this is, of course, the point where I dig out an obligatory excerpt of Lincoln's Cooper Union speech from an earlier post of mine and recycle it once more.) I think that until we grapple with the fact that this is the real nub of the problem we will get nowhere.

The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply this: We must not only let them alone, but we must somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. This, we know by experience, is no easy task. We have been so trying to convince them from the very beginning of our organization, but with no success. In all our platforms and speeches we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them. Alike unavailing to convince them, is the fact that they have never detected a man of us in any attempt to disturb them.

These natural, and apparently adequate means all failing, what will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly - done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated - we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Senator Douglas' new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our Free State constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us.

So too, today, we must ask the question, "what will satisfy them?" Will it be to ban gay marriage? Outlaw abortion? Destroy the public schools? Institute mandatory prayer? Deport all non-English speakers?

I don't think so. It certainly will not be enough to nominate a conservative, born again southern Democrat. We did that. His name was Jimmy Carter. Here's what they are still doing to him even 25 years later. We nominated a son of the "New South," modern, moderate and pro-business. They impeached his ass.

No, what must happen is that Democrats everywhere must place themselves avowedly with the most conservative red states in every way. They must openly reject their own tribal identity (whatever that may be) and become them. Nothing less will do.

"The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of [liberalism], before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us."

We are not going to win conservative red states simply by respecting the culture. There is no evidence that it will work. Carter almost lost to the guy who pardoned Nixon. Clinton never won a majority. Gore came the closest and they just cranked up the GOP machine in Florida and DC and stole it from him. A quirk of the constitution, the electoral college, forged in compromise over this very issue, means that this is going to be with us as long as we don't confront it head-on and stop thinking that we can appease this faction simply with pork rinds and country music. Republicans like Bush Sr. can do that because the GOP is the tribe's official party. Democrats can't. If we are to win some conservative red states we must find a persuasive argument and argue it. Short of a major catastrophe, I don't know if it will work. But it's obvious to me that these style points don't mean shit when it comes from a Dem. The red state cultural conservative insists that everyone, everywhere agrees with him.

But we aren't cultural conservatives! We can nominate nothing but born-again good old boys and girls for the rest of my life and that's ok with me. But we cannot be all things to all people. I will never be "avowedly with" red state cultural conservatism. It's on the wrong side of history and always has been. I can't become it. I don't believe in it. If I did, I would be a Republican.

I concluded that stale Lincoln post of mine with this:

Lincoln concluded the speech at the Cooper Union with this and I think it's relevant today to those of us who believe that our side is, as Lincoln thought then, the side of enlightened, moral progress:

Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves. LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT, AND IN THAT FAITH, LET US, TO THE END, DARE TO DO OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND IT.

This fight for the soul of America has been going on since the very beginning and it isn’t over yet. We can take heart in the fact that in every great battle thus far, the forces of equality and moral progress have won the day. It's never been easy.

Marshall's emailer says that the Democrats have been fools for not "accomodating the mood of the country." I say that's bullshit. The "mood of the country" is an extremely complex, ephemeral thing with many permutations, not all of them political. But if the the elite press and its GOP string pullers have decided that the political mood is conservative, the last thing I want to do is accomodate it. I want to change it.



Disclaimer: I am not talking about the vast majority of the 40+ of liberal red state voters. I feel nothing but solidarity with you, my friends, and I'm sorry that it's hard for you to be associated with me. Perhaps together we can begin to change that.

And I use the "red state/blue state" signifier as a simple shorthand. I realize that on a block by block basis or whatever, that we are all just one big purple family. But if you look at the election results of the last few elections, you will see that there is a solid block of states that votes for the Republican party. And it is regionally distinct. That is a simple reality whether we like it or not.
digby 6/03/2006 01:10:00 PM |

 
Salon Looks At the Kennedy Voter Fraud Article

by tristero

Without letting Kenneth Blackwell off the hook for major league unethical partisan behavior, Farhad Manjoo examines key points of the Kennedy voter fraud article in Rolling Stone mentioned here. He goes into detail as to why he thinks Kennedy failed to make a convincing case that Ohio '04 was stolen.

If you're willing to read Manjoo's article, I'd be curious to know what you folks think. It seems as if many of his points are quite valid regarding selective quoting of facts by Kennedy, etc.

Assuming Manjoo is, himself, quoting fairly, it doesn't exonerate the ugly behavior of Blackwell, or call into question the crucial necessity of election reforms in the US. But it would mean that RFKjr has been less than honest in presenting all the facts and in the drawing of conclusions.

If that is the case, that RFKjr was wrong or seriously misleading, then naturally I will withdraw my assertion in the previous post that Ohio '04 was stolen. Manjoo's objections to Kennedy seem substantive and require a response from those who are knowlegeable about this issue at a granular level. Kennedy himself should respond, of course.

[UPDATE: Outside The Beltway , after initially posting a purely ad hominem attack on Kennedy, updated his post to include a highly detailed rebuttal of many of Kennedy's points, including the problem with trusting exit polls, mentioned by Manjoo, et al. Again, either a substantive counter-response or an admission of error on Kennedy's part really is appropriate. ]
tristero 6/03/2006 08:57:00 AM |

 
The Insanity-Based Community

by tristero

The Times, in a review of a new documentary, "The War Tapes," describes one of the subjects:

Specialist Mike Moriarty, at 34 the oldest of them, describes himself as a super-patriot and says he was eager to go to Iraq to exact some payback for the 9/11 attacks.

Back from Iraq, Specialist Mike Moriarty signed up with FEMA. He was last seen wading into the Gulf of Mexico, shooting the waves in retaliation for Katrina.
tristero 6/03/2006 03:09:00 AM |

Thursday, June 01, 2006

 
Kenneth Blackwell Brings To Mind An All-But-Forgotten 70's Sci Fi Classic

by tristero

[Update 2: The Poor Man Institute is underwhelmed by the RFKJr article (in particular the accuracy of exit polls) and recc'ds this pdf instead.]


[Update: Kennedy's article is now online. Read it. Rolling Stone also has links to additional documentation. Kennedy's article makes serious charges in a deeply serious fashion. The ad hominem attacks from the rightwing trackbacks this post has received just ain't gonna cut it. The specifics have to be engaged.]

It's not online yet but Robert Kennedy, Jr. has a blistering article in the current Rolling Stone on what happened in Ohio in 2004. Plain and simple, the Republicans stole the presidential election and Kenneth Blackwell, who seems to be up to his eyeballs in the shenanigans, is quite an accomplished liar. (Confession: I have not been following this issue closely - no particular reason other than it's impossible to follow everything. The article may be old news for some of you, but it does collect a lot of creepy stuff in one place.)

The real question, of course, is what will be done about it and NO! I refuse to give into fashionable cyncism! So yes, dear friends, I really do believe the country will focus like a laserbeam on our corrupt election practices. I have no doubt the moment there's a squeaker and the Republicans lose a big one by 2% or less, the MSM will ensure that election reform becomes the only subject worth talking about, even more than the civil rights of 1 day-old fertilized eggs! (Unless there's a missing young white woman that week, but that goes without saying.)

In an editorial, Rolling Stone calls for an investigation of Diebold. Well, yes. And yes to a paper record of all ballots. And yes to open source software for the machines. But actually, I always thought that Canada's voting technology, as described by Robert Cringely made the most sense:

Forget touch screens and electronic voting. In Canadian Federal elections, two barely-paid representatives of each party, known as "scrutineers," are present all day at the voting place. If there are more political parties, there are more scrutineers. To vote, you write an "X" with a pencil in a one centimeter circle beside the candidate's name, fold the ballot up and stuff it into a box. Later, the scrutineers AND ANY VOTER WHO WANTS TO WATCH all sit at a table for about half an hour and count every ballot, keeping a tally for each candidate. If the counts agree at the end of the process, the results are phoned-in and everyone goes home. If they don't, you do it again. Fairness is achieved by balanced self-interest, not by technology. The population of Canada is about the same as California, so the elections are of comparable scale. In the last Canadian Federal election the entire vote was counted in four hours. Why does it take us 30 days or more?

The 2002-2003 budget for Elections Canada is just over $57 million U.S. dollars, or $1.81 per Canadian citizen. It is extremely hard to get an equivalent per-citizen figure for U.S. elections, but trust me, it is a LOT higher. This week [December 11, 2003], San Francisco held a runoff mayoral election that cost $2.5 million, or $3.27 per citizen of the city. And this was for just one election, not a whole year of them.

We are spending $3.9 billion or $10 per citizen for new voting machines. Canada just prints ballots.

No voting system is perfect. Elections have been stolen and voters disenfranchised with paper ballots, too. But our approach of throwing technology at a problem with a result that election reliability is not improved, that it may well be compromised in new and even scarier ways, and that this all costs billions that could be put to better use makes no sense at all.

On second thought, never mind. Looks like Canada's going Diebold as well:

A 2000 year-end report from Global Election Systems (now owned by US company Diebold and called Diebold Election Systems) states "Global reports add-on sales of 60 AccuVote systems to the City of Ottawa and 70 to the City of Hamilton as well as first-time sales of 60 AccuVote-TS systems to the City of Barrie".

Oh, well. There's no reason to think Diebold would purposely rig their own machines. That's silly. Let's go to the movies!

There's a sci-fi flick from the seventies called Logan's Run starring Michael York. In the 23rd Century, you're not allowed to live past 30, but you enter Carousel (misspelled on the site, nobody's purrfect) and try to fly to the top where, if you make it there, your body will be Renewed. People root for their pals to go the distance, but their friends fail and die. Strange...no one can actually remember anyone ever succeeding in getting Renewed. Very odd. But y'never know. Next time someone really could beat Carousel and live!

Pass the popcorn, friends.
tristero 6/01/2006 10:46:00 AM |

 
Yea!

by digby

Blogger is back. Sort of. I think. If I can get this to actually publish I will be back in business today. Thanks for hanging in.

Sadly, I have to go out for a bit. Until I get back, I thought I'd update you on the blue state country song comments from over the week-end. A lot of people suggested Springsteen or Dylan, which makes sense. There were also a number of commenters and emailers who suggested "The Man In Black" by Johnny Cash --- and Cash is always transcendently cool. Most impressively, there were a bunch of songs written by readers themselves that were great.

But I particularly liked this one, written by reader MJS:

Listen to the Wind

I'm living in the blue states
I'm living in the red
Somebody took the common man
And filled his common head
And poisoned all our brothers
And all our sisters too
Only one kind of person is happy
When I start to hate on you

I'm working in the factory
Working on the big combine
I can't afford a doctor
And the baby won't stop crying
Our sons and daughters fight a war
Our sons and daughters die
They want us blue and red ones
To never hear each other's cries

(chorus)
Listen to me brothers
Listen sisters too
Listen to the melody
That plays inside of you
Listen to the silence
And listen to your heart
Who gets to making money
Whenever fighting starts?
Listen to the wind
It carries all our songs
Listen to the wind
Everybody join along

I'm searching for the Jesus
Who aimed to help the sick
Who gave solace to the poor of us
Who knew love was not a trick
I'm searching for the Jesus
The man, the Prince of Peace
Teach me not to cast stones
Teach me to slay that beast

I'm searching for some honor
I'm searching for a life
Where I can feel compassion
Put an end to needless strife
I'm hoping that I'll find it
Right here inside of me
Forget about red and blue states
My country 'tis of thee
Sing it like you mean it
Turn a them into a we

(chorus)
Listen to me brothers
Listen sisters too
Listen to the melody
That plays inside of you
Listen to the silence
And listen to your heart
Who gets to making money
Whenever fighting starts?
Listen to the wind
It carries all our songs
Listen to the wind
Everybody join along
Sing it like you mean it
Everybody join along

I'm living in the blue states
I'm living in the red
Somebody took the common man
And filled his common head
And poisoned all our brothers
And all our sisters too
Only one kind of person is happy
When I start to hate on you

I'm working in the factory
Working on the big combine
I can't afford a doctor
And the baby won't stop crying
Our sons and daughters fight a war
Our sons and daughters die
They want us blue and red ones
To never hear each other's cries

(chorus)
Listen to me brothers
Listen sisters too
Listen to the melody
That plays inside of you
Listen to the silence
And listen to your heart
Who gets to making money
Whenever fighting starts?
Listen to the wind
It carries all our songs
Listen to the wind
Everybody join along

Poor Joe Klein's head will explode if populist sentiment like that catches on.



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digby 6/01/2006 07:33:00 AM |