Hullabaloo

Tuesday, November 09, 2004

 
It Won't Work

This is more of the same, but I think it's important so I'm going to keep writing about it. The Democratic party has tried valiantly to move to the center in an attempt to convince "middle America" that they are not hostile to their values. After the electoral debacle of the 80's it seemed like a good idea and it gave Clinton the opportunity to slip in under the wire in 1992 under very opportune circumstances. But, this was all contingent upon the idea of a "new South" born of modern ideas and a dynamic economy. Those conditions seem to have manifested themselves differently than forecasted (mostly, in my view, because of the rise of talk radio) and I think it's time that we made some adjustments.

We are beginning to look like Charlie Brown with the football. We need to recognise what these people really want from us.


Kevin Drum wonders why we don't tweak the abortion and porn issues to peel away some of the values voters from the Republicans. Linking to Matt Yglesias's piece today in which he elaborates on his red state "chump" thesis in which he points out that the Republicans never deliver much to the conservative Christians, Kevin says:

There's a germ of an idea here, but it needs to be teased out. The abortion point is a good one, for example. Liberals are in favor of choice, not in favor of abortion per se, so why shouldn't we talk more often about policies that reduce the need for abortions while continuing to defend the right of choice itself? This won't impress the hardcore evangelicals, of course, but it might appeal to some of their more moderate neighbors. Ditto for porn.

Gay rights and feminisim are another thing entirely. Liberals are just fundamentally in favor of this stuff, and we shouldn't even think about trying to talk our way around it. If we lose votes for it, we lose votes for it.

Basically, then, I think Matt has a point worth thinking about, but we have to figure out which issues it applies to. Abortion and porn are good examples, and that's why master politician Bill Clinton talked about making abortion "safe, legal, and rare" and supported anti-porn measures like the V-chip. Neither of these things infringed on any liberal principles, but they did address some of the real-world concerns of those ordinary heartland voters we hear so much about.

The fundamental problem is that the super Christians won't compromise on principle and the rest of these "values voters" are hypocrites. Nobody bought the v-chip in red state America or anywhere else. They don't want to take responsibility for what comes into their TV's, they want to hector people for "forcing" them to watch these horrible things while they pass the popcorn. These same people listen to Rush refer to Abu Ghraib as "blowing off steam" and think that Bill O'Reilly is a salt of the earth regular guy despite his little obsession with porn stars. There's your heartland values for you and they look surprisingly like the values you see on your television set. That's because they are.

"Heartland values" is just another world for tribal identity. And this division is about crying Uncle.

Here's a passage from Lincoln's speech at the Cooper Union (thanks CRL) in 1860. Tell me if this doesn't strike a chord:

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 what else is new? We are dealing with an absolutist culture that demands total capitulation or nothing. Compromise will not work and it certainly will not work on these "values" issues. (Indeed, I think it's part of what makes us look weak to some other factions who might be willing to vote for us.) This is the same old shit over and over and over again. We backed off on the death penalty, gun control, welfare, affirmative action and here we are with a new slate of issues about gays. Tomorrow it will be creationism. Until we realize that their condition is that we FULLY EMBRACE their cultural dominance in both word and deed, they will not be satisfied.

It is not enough that they be left alone to do what they choose. We must join them and do it thoroughly and with fervor. No amount of tweaking will work. Their real beef is psychological and tribal. Issues are fungible.




digby 11/09/2004 02:48:00 PM |

 
Another Winning Issue For The Future

As you know, now that the real Americans have spoken, I think it's important that we take on the moral issue head on if we hope to win in Real America. Creationism will be our flagship, but there are many other topics we explore, like making sure that all textbooks reflect the fact that marriage is between a man and a woman as Texas just did. The books had used the words "marriage partners" but the school board luckily saw through it:

Terri Leo, a Republican, said she was pleased with the publishers' changes. She had led the effort to get the publishers to change the texts, objecting to what she called "asexual stealth phrases" like "individuals who marry."

It's those stealth phrases that we have to fight against if we want to get the respect of the fine salt of the earth Real Americans. It's not so much the positions we take, it's the sneakiness they can't abide.

Neither publisher made all the changes that Ms. Leo initially sought. For instance, one passage that was proposed to be added to the teacher's editions read: "Opinions vary on why homosexuals, lesbians and bisexuals as a group are more prone to self-destructive behaviors like depression, illegal drug use and suicide."

digby 11/09/2004 01:59:00 PM |

 
Watch What You Say

Via Avedon Carol, here's a creepy story of a blogger who got turned into the FBI by a reader and was visited by the Secret Service.

A WRITER on popular blog-site LiveJournal has posted of her nightmare ordeal with the US Secret Service, an event spurred by a posting she made to her blog criticising George Bush prior to the Presidential Election earlier this week.
Whilst the offending post has been removed - to spare other users further Federal interference, according to author 'anniesj' - you can see her account of events in full, which has been left as a word to the wise.

The post in question is gone, so I have no way of evaluating what it said. However, this combined with the fun story we heard the other day about the romance novelist who got her computer and books confiscated because she was researching terrorism in Cambodia, I think it's safe to say that four more years with a Justice Department that considers torture justified is not exactly comforting to those of us who write mean things about Republicans or use red flagged research terms on the internet.




digby 11/09/2004 11:16:00 AM |

 
Our New Issue

This could be the one, folks, where we prove our bona fides to the red states:

A suburban American school board found itself in court Monday after it tried to placate Christian fundamentalist parents by placing a sticker on its science textbooks saying evolution was "a theory, not a fact."

Atlanta's Cobb County School Board, the second largest board in Georgia, added the sticker two years ago after a 2,300-strong petition attacked the presentation of "Darwinism unchallenged." Some parents wanted creationism -- the theory that God created humans as related in the Bible -- to be taught alongside evolution.

[...]

The board says the stickers were motivated by a desire to establish a greater understanding of different viewpoints. "They improve the curriculum, while also promoting an attitude of tolerance for those with different religious beliefs," said Linwood Gunn, a lawyer for Cobb County schools.

The controversy began when the school board's textbook selection committee ordered $8 million worth of the science books in March 2002. Marjorie Rogers, a parent who does not believe in evolution, protested and petitioned the board to add a sticker and an insert setting out other explanations for the origins of life. "It is unconstitutional to teach only evolution," she said. "The school board must allow the teaching of both theories of origin."

Her efforts galvanized the fundamentalist community. "God created earth and man in his image," another parent, Patricia Fuller, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "Leave this garbage out of the textbooks. I don't want anybody taking care of me in a nursing home some day to think I came from a monkey."

Wendi Hill, one of the parents who signed the petition, said: "We believe the Bible is correct in that God created man. I don't expect the public school system to teach only creationism, but I think it should be given its fair share."

Liberals bi-coastal elites once again show that they don't have proper respect for middle America by insisting that science and religion are two different subjects. Until we learn to stop condescending and quit showing this kind of contempt for heartland beliefs we will lose.

Again, I say this should be OUR issue. Let's run on a national pro-creationism ticket in 2006. Then maybe they will let us back into America.




digby 11/09/2004 09:16:00 AM |

 
Illegitimacy

Atrios has written a post about our new obsession with the voting irregularities and as a member of the reality based community he is rightly concerned that we not make assumptions without actual proof.

I've been grappling with how to handle this story as well. I've not been flogging it mostly because I think that the electoral college is a crock and that the popular vote should determine who wins elections. Since Bush won by three million or so, it's hard for me not to see him as legitimate. I haven't seen any voting anomolies on that kind of scale. If I'm judging by whether the will of the people was observed, then I think it's likely that more people truly wanted Bush than wanted Kerry. To me, that is the spirit of Democracy and I can't discount that reality.

On the other hand, the exit poll question is a real one. The explanations by Mitofsky and company are simply not adequate --- that Kerry voters were so much more anxious to talk to the pollsters that they actively sought them out. Nonsense. Something else happened here and they need to figure out what it was. If vote fraud on a scale large enough to encompass millions and millions of votes took place then we are deep, deep shit. Unfortunately, I've seen nothing that could account for that except an extremely broad conspiracy in many states with different kinds of voting machines and there is no proof of that. (Yes, I know about the states with paper ballot vs electronic machines study, but it doesn't prove anything, either.)

Do I think the vote in Ohio might have been manipulated? Sure. But as Atrios says, we haven't yet seen any evidence of large scale fraud, although there is a lot of evidence that our voting systems are terribly fucked up. I have no doubt that the vote could have been fixed in the state with a partisan in charge who wanted to disallow registrations because of the paper stock they were printed on and a vote machine mamufacturer who promised to deliver the state for Republicans. But proof of a conspiracy has not emerged, nor have the numbers in any way added up to the numbers that might have changed the election. There could have been fraud, the lines were absurdly long, intimidation and vote suppression certainly took place on some level. And until we fix these problems with our voting system we will always wonder from now on if elections are rigged.

This is where the real problem is and why I've been reluctant to push this story. Many Democrats are coming close to believing that our elections are broadly illegitimate. Except for Florida in 2000 I have not yet seen proof of that although I'm certainly suspicious. What I fear is that if we continue down this path of doubting election results --- as opposed to mounting a serious effort to revamp voting procedures in order to ensure fairness --- then I think we will begin to lose voters. People have to believe their vote counts in order to participate. If we push this illegitimacy issue beyond situations like Florida in 2000, where the machinations are proven and observable, I think it will hurt us in the long run.

I am absolutely in favor of insisting on an audit trail for vote counts. (And it seems to me that as with any accounting procedure we should audit some portion of the vote on a regular basis to make sure that hanky panky isn't happening.) If we don't, then stealing millions of votes really will no longer require a vast right wing conspiracy but merely Roger Stone and a laptop. But, I think we need to be careful to frame this issue in a way that doesn't give people the excuse to drop out because they "know" the vote is rigged. Once that happens, it might as well be.


Update: I don't mean in any way to demean those who are pursuing this story. I think it's vital to find out what happened and pursue remedies. I hope the Democratic party makes it a top priority. It's clear that our voting system is unreliable. But, I haven't yet seen evidence that would overturn these election results, so I'm not prepared at this point to say it was stolen. I'm worried that doing that might just make it harder for us in the future.

Update II: A commenter makes the good point that the blogs are the very vehicle by which this story should be flogged, just as talk radio flogged Vince Foster and the like. To be clear, I have no real moral or ethical problem with pushing this story. Idon't see much evidence that Bush didn't win the popular vote, but after watching the GOP operate these last dozen years, I have absolutely no loyalty to those sort of lofty ideals anymore. If the vote was stolen in Ohio or Florida, then the election was stolen, period.

But, as I said, my problem with flogging the idea that the election was stolen on the basis of what we know now is that I think it might end up lowering voter participation on our side if people feel the system is rigged and we can't prove it. I just don't think it works in our favor to push this kind of electoral impotence two elections in a row. If we keep our powder dry proof may emerge and maybe we can make a serious case to the public. Otherwise, I think it's best to frame this not as a stolen election but rather as a hideously run election system that must be fixed or we may be cutting off our nose to spite our face.

For the best round-up of these election stories, I would recommend the Sideshow and Bradblog. They have the most comprehensive overviews of all the stories and analysis that I've seen.




digby 11/09/2004 07:57:00 AM |

Monday, November 08, 2004

 
So, Whaddo We Do Now

The Progress Report asked readers to tell them what they thought the Party should do now in light of this loss. They had thousands of responses and picked forty of them to post.

It's quite and interesting array of ideas. Sadly, nobody sent in my idea that we desperately need to put on a better "campaign show" with solid gold dancers, sky divers and lion tamers (metaphrically speaking) in order to get people's attention in this raucous, disjointed post modern world. We are such an earnest bunch. Oh well. Maybe somebody will at least think to hire away Bush's sound guy. The sound compression on the cheers at his rallies was masterful.

And, nobody recognized that negative, ugly, hateful campaigning was what worked. It seems that we all feel that if we had just reached out and touched people we could have made a difference. We don't "connect," which may be true, but let's face facts --- Bush doesn't "connect" with people's better natures, he "connects" directly to their id. And, I'm afraid that the id trumps finer feelings in many, many people. Yet a large number of these suggestions have to do with sincere appeals to try harder to empathise and relate to those who didn't vote for us. Hey, maybe it'll work. We are the "nurturant parent," after all.

On a practical level, I have no problem with voting for southerners or westerners, never have. Contrary to the new myth emerging about the godless heathens on the coasts, we elitists have quite happily voted for Texans and southern, gospel preaching Democrats quite often in the last 40 years. The fact that we voted in huge numbers for Johnson, Carter, Clinton and Gore would seem to put the lie to this belief that we hold southerners in contempt, but what do I know? It certainly does appear that we heathen blue staters quite willingly vote for people outside of our alleged latte-liberal bicoastal culture, yet those heartland middle American red states who are complaining about our condescension refuse to ever vote for someone outside their own region. (Except, of course, those rock-ribbed Hollywood movie stars.) Just who holds who in contempt again?

Anyway, read all the suggestions. They are all good hearted and sincere and many contain good ideas. Only cynics like me subscribe to the dazzle 'em with bullshit school and that's probably a good thing.

Ronnie, Junior and Arnie tell me that it's not about anything more than a certain macho style that gets these people. None of those guys have the remotest relationship to salt of the earth middle America, but they play the archetypal leadership role of All American manly man very well.




digby 11/08/2004 03:49:00 PM |

 
Whose Coalition Is It Anyway?

Xan over at corrente has a very interesting post up about "The Prosperity Project." I wrote a long piece about it last year and blogger ate it (before I learned to save my posts.) I didn't have the heart to re-write it and the moment passed.

But, Xan has researched this very interesting and (so far) underreported story of a soft intimidation project on the part of Republican businessmen.This is a very sophisticated operation under the auspices of BIPAC, a long time Republican business organization. I don't know how many of you have had a boss who was a vociferous Republican, but I have. They couldn't tell me for whom to vote, but they sure made it clear that if I spoke out it wouldn't be looked upon kindly. And plenty of others, who normally wouldn't care a bit about politics, suddenly found that they were favored employees by going out of their way to push the bosses political agenda. This Prosperity Project works on the assumption that managers will perform to their bosses orders and recommended Prosperity Project materials (particularly its marvelously misleading web site) to "educate" workers on issues of concern to them. It looks like they pulled out the stops in this election:

Managers at more than 50,000 companies in Ohio urged employees to vote, while trying to coax them in e-mails to look at customized internal Web sites rating politicians' votes on business issues, a project leader said. One rating gave Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry a zero last year on votes affecting manufacturers.

Greg Casey, a former U.S. Senate sergeant-at-arms who headed what he calls business' "below-the-radar" national effort, said it resulted in 30 million electronic contacts with workers, about 700,000 the day before the election.

Casey believes that the "Prosperity Project" had a big impact in Ohio, citing research suggesting that for every 10 employees who scanned company Web sites, one was motivated to vote. He said Ohio companies made 1.3 million employee contacts, more than nine times Bush's 136,483-vote victory margin in the state.

Prosperity Project officials, however, say they are "respectful" to employees and merely offer them access to information affecting their companies' prospects in a tough global economy.

I think that we are beginning to get the outlines of an election that had a number of under the radar GOP "grassroots" campaigns with little overt national direction. The Republicans seem to have been successful by presenting a candidate who wasn't specific, but rather presented an image of leadership that people felt comfortable with. Various groups then ran a series of campaigns aimed at specific constituencies that applied their particular policy preference to this vague agenda.

But the untold story of the 2004 election, according to national religious leaders and grass-roots activists, is that evangelical Christian groups were often more aggressive and sometimes better organized on the ground than the Bush campaign. The White House struggled to stay abreast of the Christian right and consulted with the movement's leaders in weekly conference calls. But in many respects, Christian activists led the charge that GOP operatives followed and capitalized upon.

This was particularly true of the same-sex marriage issue. One of the most successful tactics of social conservatives -- the ballot referendums against same-sex marriage in 13 states -- bubbled up from below and initially met resistance from White House aides, Christian leaders said.

In dozens of interviews since the election, grass-roots activists in Ohio, Michigan and Florida credited President Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, with setting a clear goal that became a mantra among conservatives: To win, Bush had to draw 4 million more evangelicals to the polls than he did in 2000. But they also described a mobilization of evangelical Protestants and conservative Roman Catholics that took off under its own power.

This is interesting because it's exactly what the Democrats have been criticized for all these years --- being a coalition of single issue consituencies developing their own agendas, not working well with others and creating havoc on the ability to govern when the party is in power. When each group thinks they are the single reason the party won an election, they tend to think they have priority and it's a big headache. The Republicans have been pretty good at keeping their coalition together with appeals to patriotism and fear of the other. We'll see how long that works for them. Trying to keep the New Deal coalition together was very difficult --- and that was with a very impressive record of achievement that materially changed peoples lives and brought the country through a depression and WWII to a period of unprecedented prosperity.

Meanwhile, for the first time in memory, the Democrats put away their differences and worked together. And much to my surprise and delight, I'm not seeing the circular firing squad nearly as vicious as it usually is after a loss. Perhaps we can hang tough long enough for the Republicans to get a taste of governing with single issue constituencies for a while. Good luck with that.




digby 11/08/2004 02:05:00 PM |

 
Tribal Confusion

May I just point out that if you are not reading James Wolcott every day you are missing out on life. Today, he takes Lil' Andy to task for his strange appearance on Bill Maher in which he seemed terribly confused about who he is now that he's voted for a losing Democrat in a time of right wing ascendancy. It's not easy being a conservative gay catholic in this big old Red State monolith.

Wolcott says:

Like an infant banging his spoon on the high-chair tray, Sullivan threw quite a tantrum last night after Maher had the GALL to interview Noam Chomsky. Sullivan sputtered that Chomsky made "millions" going around the world telling audiences America was "evil." Now I don't pretend to have read or heard all of the millions of words Chomsky has written and spoken, but "evil" doesn't seem to be a prominent word in his vocabulary, being so theological; he tends to talk in terms of brutal realpolitick and self-interest. And it's highly unlikely he's raking in "millions"--if he is, he isn't splurging on wardrobe and pimpmobiles.

Since every war criminal in the current Bush administration will be able to command huge honoraria on the lecture circuit and lucrative positions on corporate boards once they leave the bloodshed behind, working up ire over a professor's speaking fees seems a bit much.

Unable to impart the red depths of Chomsky's villainy to host and panel, Sullivan attacked Chomsky for being symptomatic of an America-hating elitist left. "That's why you lost this week!" Sullivan said.*

"You said you voted for Kerry!" Maher shot back. "You lost too!"

As Wolcott says, Maher was particularly good this show. (Last week's freakish appearance by what seemed to be a brain damaged Kevin Costner still hasn't quite worked its way through my system yet.) Andrew Sullivan's outburst about Chomsky was uncomfortably out of sync with what Chomsky had said. I'm no particular fan (or student) of Chomsky, but his actual influence on lives here and around the world is somewhat less real and palpable than that of the people who just voted to enshrine Sullivan's second class citizen status into their state constitutions. I can't help but feel that this enraged reaction may have been just a bit of desperate psychological misdirection --- not a pretty thing to watch on a Friday night with a couple of glasses of wine in you. Ugh.

Wolcott also noted the strange fact that Sullivan turned his back to the audience and gave himself a thorough butt massage right on camera at the end of the show. I noticed it, but I chalked it up to the wine and the long sleepless week I'd just had. Now I'm really freaked out.

Update: It was no drunken hallucination. Here's the video courtesy of One Good Move




digby 11/08/2004 11:03:00 AM |

 
The Casio

Atrios mentioned last week that interesting things are going to happen here in the blogosphere and I have heard some of the same rumblings. I don't know how it will shake out, but it's clear that the nascent media infrastructure that we see is not going to fold tent but rather be expanded and grow, both from individual effort and institutional support.

This election was a heartbreaker, and the country is in for a very bumpy four years I'm afraid. But I don't get the sense that Democrats are seriously thinking of dropping out or folding up tent. Indeed, I see the opposite.

One of the great lessons of history is that magnanimity in victory is a much wiser path to peace than rubbing the losers nose in their defeat. From what I'm seeing and hearing, some people haven't learned that lesson very well. I suspect they will come to regret it.




digby 11/08/2004 07:32:00 AM |

Sunday, November 07, 2004

 
A Very Old Story

I think support for Bush is about not wanting to be led by East-coast pretensions. It is about not wanting to be led by people who are forever trying to force their twisted sense of morality onto us, which is a non-morality. That is constantly done, and there is real resentment. Support for Bush is about resentment in the so-called 'red states' — a confusing term to Guardian readers, I agree — which here means, literally, middle America. Tom Wolfe

This is certainly true. But, that resentment wasn't created by Michael Moore or Hillary Clinton or Tom DeLay and Pat Robertson.

I was being facetious in the post below, but I do think that it's important to recognise something about the phony debate that's taking place right now about the liberal bi-coastal elites and how they allegedly force their lack of morality on the heartland.

Before I get into it, this map, which I'm sure you have all seen by now, is a good place to start this discussion.

Why do I bring this up? Because it's important to remember that one of the main reasons for the civil war was that the southerners believed that the north was trying to impose their "values" upon them and they deeply resented it.

From the earliest days of the republic this was a problem. A different culture grew up around slavery in the south as did the tension surrounding the issue. The mere act of rejecting it was cause for insult and the south withdrew into a cultural identity based largely upon its difference from the north. Indeed, this was one of the defining rationales for slavery --- the exceptionalism of the southern culture.

The north did condescend. Many believed that slavery was a barbaric and primitive institution and that those who condoned it were, therefore, primitive and barbaric. They did not keep their opinions to themselves. From the very beginning this tension created a huge amount of resentment among southerners.

The resentment didn't come from political powerlessness or disenfranchisement. During the first 70 years of the country, the south dominated the national government. It didn't help.

From a speech given at the centennial of the civil war by historian Stephen Z. Starr

...it is tragic to think that for two generations, the mental energies of the South were devoted to elaborating justifications of slavery - perhaps to appease its own feelings of guilt - to the exclusion of every other form of cultural activity.

[...]

The second basic issue between the sections lay in the area of politics; necessarily so, for it was in the political arena that the problems between the sections were fought out until the South decided that political solutions, reached by a process of give and take, were no longer adequate to protect its "honor and self-respect.”

Bear in mind that middle and upper class Southerners were politicians by birthright. Active participation in politics was, in the South, a way of life. One would expect, therefore, to find a much greater degree of political skill and acumen there than in the North. What one finds there instead is demagogy, bombast, irresponsibility, incompetence, a childish refusal to come to grips with realities, and a habitual substitution of slogans, symbols and bogeymen for facts. These are strong statements, but hardly strong enough to fit the situation.

The South had an almost unbroken control of the Federal Government from 1789 until secession. The presidents were either Southerners., or Northerners like Pierce and Buchanan, who were mere puppets in the hands of Southern senators and cabinet members. For seventy years, the Supreme Court had a majority of Southern justices. With the aid of its Northern allies and the three-fifths rule, the South controlled one or both houses of Congress. The fifteen Slave States, with a white population of not quite eight million, had 30 senators, 90 representatives, and 120 electoral votes, whereas the State of New York, with a population of four million had two senators, 33 representatives, and 35 electoral votes. Even the election of 1860 left the South in control of both houses of Congress, and until at least 1863, Lincoln and the Republicans would have been powerless to pass legislation hostile to the South, and through its control of the Senate, the South could have blocked the confirmation of every Lincoln appointee whom it considered unfriendly. In spite of this, and notwithstanding Lincoln's repeated assurances that he would not, directly or indirectly, interfere with slavery where it already existed, the South chose to secede.

Starr goes on to show that this irrational behavior was not due to the south not getting most of the the legislation it wanted, because it did. But it became an emotional issue in which it was important to "crack the whip over the heads of the northern men" and they began to make enemies of their allies in the territories. As Starr says, "this tale of political ineptitude, the habitual misreading of the minds of opponents, the misjudging of the practical possibilities of a given situation, the purposeless striving for effect, the substitution of arrogance and threats for rational discussion, could be expanded many fold."

Oh my.


Starr's view is that the south behaved irrationally prior to the civil war because of it's defensiveness about its culture of slavery. He grants that there other differences, some exaggerated and some quite real, but notes that most people of both regions were farmers and had more in common than not. The record suggests one very important difference, however, and that was that the south had a much inferior educational system,

...in 1850, 20.3% of white Southerners over the age of twenty were illiterate, as against less than one-half of one percent of New Englanders.

But it is important to point out that lack of educational opportunities was a significant factor in preventing the rise of a class of intelligent, educated farmers and artisans in the South. Only two Southern states, North Carolina and Kentucky, had respectable public school systems before 1860, and this had much to do with the failure of Southern whites to understand that their "peculiar institution" was out of tune with the moral, social, and even economic sentiment of the times, and with their readiness to follow the Pied Pipers who thought that a nation and a state could be founded on the enslavement of four million human beings. These are among the dangers of a closed society and of an iron curtain.

Granting the existence of cultural differences between the North and South, can we assume that they would necessarily lead to a Civil War? Obviously not. Such differences lead to animosity and war only if one side develops a national inferiority complex, begins to blame all its shortcomings on the other side, enforces a rigid conformity on its own people, and tries to make up for its own sins of omission and commission by name-calling, by nursing an exaggerated pride and sensitiveness, and by cultivating a reckless aggressiveness as a substitute for reason. And this was the refuge of the South. For ten years before secession, Northerners were commonly referred to as “mongrels and hirelings." The North was described as "a conglomeration of greasy mechanics filthy operatives, small-fisted farmers, and moonstruck theorists ... hardly fit for association with a southern gentleman's body servant." And, most fatal delusion of all, Southerners began to credit themselves with fighting ability equal to that of nine, five, or more conservatively, three Northerners. Once a nation or a section begins to speak and think in such terms, reason has gone out the window and emotion has taken over. This is precisely what happened in the South, and this is why the Cotton States seceded before Lincoln was even inaugurated and before his administration had committed, or had a chance to commit, any act of egression against them. Such behavior is fundamentally irrational, and cannot be explained in rational terms.

Interesting, yes?

The civil war, of course, made everything worse. Reconstruction was a nightmare and the north never had even the slightest idea what to do about the race problem once they dealt with the slavery problem. (Indeed, when it comes to racism, the north shared most of the same beliefs. They just didn't live among many blacks so they didn't have to deal with those problems until much later.) But, the ignominy of reconstruction gave birth to the Lost Cause mythology and that only reinforced the already outsized sense of wounded pride.

The south today has forty percent that votes with the blue states in national elections. They are white progressive modern people who share the southern cultural identity but have avoided the 200 year old baggage that makes it impossible to identify with people not of their own tribe and african-americans who were excluded except as scapegoats and second class citizens. (I'm sure nonetheless that some of what I've written sticks in the craw of many of you and you may feel that old resentment. It appears to me as if this is an ingrained reaction to discussions of this sort. It certainly has been around forever.)

I'm not going to take a stand against "heartland values" or "southern culture" whatever it's defined as this week. It seems to me that it would be worthless, because this battle is obviously tribal, not specific to any particular issue. Slavery and Jim Crow are long gone. Now it's religion and gays. The lines are drawn as they've always been and there will be no reconciliation through politics. Even a bloody civil war couldn't do that.

History suggests that the southern culture has always been as defined by it's resentment toward the rest of the country as much as anything else. The so-called bi-coastal liberal elites certainly don't think of themselves as having a lot in common with each other, other than being Americans. People from Los Angeles and Vermont call themselves Californians and New Englanders, respectively. I don't think they believe they share a "culture." People in Seattle call themselves pacific northwesterners. People in New York call themselves New Yorkers --- Chicagoans midwesterners. They identify themselves by their specific region and a broader identity as Americans, not by this alleged Bi-coastal cultural alliance. This notion of two easily identifiable cultures is only held by the people who used to call themselves the confederacy and now call themselves "the heartland." That alone should be reason to stop and question what is really going on here.

One thing this little historical trip should show everyone is that it is nonsense to think that this cultural resentment and cultural contempt was created by Hollywood movie stars and limosine liberals from New York City. Indeed, this has been a problem since the dawn of the republic. And it isn't a problem that will be solved by the Red States gaining and maintaining power. They have held power many times throughout our history and they were still filled with resentment toward "the north" (now "the liberal elites.") And, it won't be solved by adopting different stances on "moral issues," or telling the current Democratic southern constituencies to suck it up. Maybe it's time we looked a little bit deeper and realized that this tribal problem isn't going to be solved by politics at all.

The "liberal elites" will no doubt be making more compromises in the direction of heartland values for pragmatic reasons. But, judging by history, it won't change a thing. Neither will Republican political dominance. So, maybe it's time for the heartland to take a good hard look at itself and ask when they are going to adopt the culture of responsibility they profess with such fervor. It sure looks to me as if they've been nursing a case of historical pique for more than 200 years and that resentment no longer has any more meaning than a somewhat self-destructive insistence on maintaining a cultural identity that's really defined by it's anger toward the rest of the country. They are talking themselves into a theocratic police state in order to "crack the whip over the heads of the northern men" and it's not likely to work out for them any better this time than it did the first time. The real elites in the church, the government and the corporations will take them down right along with us when that comes to pass.


Note: Of you don't believe me, check out this excerpt from Michael Graham's strange Redneck Nation. According to him, everything's changed. The south is more cultured, the north is more coarse, the south is smarter, the north is stupider. The stereotypes have been turned on their head. At the end of the day, however, the grievance is always there no matter the circumstances. The south still gets no respect.




digby 11/07/2004 03:51:00 PM |

 
Who's Your Daddy?

Nicolas Kristof's column is exactly right.

As moderates from the heartland, like Tom Daschle, are picked off by the Republicans, the party's image risks being defined even more by bicoastal, tree-hugging, gun-banning, French-speaking, Bordeaux-sipping, Times-toting liberals, whose solution is to veer left and galvanize the base. But firing up the base means turning off swing voters. Gov. Mike Johanns, a Nebraska Republican, told me that each time Michael Moore spoke up for John Kerry, Mr. Kerry's support in Nebraska took a dive.

Mobilizing the base would mean nominating Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2008 and losing yet again.

The last thing we want is the support of the base. They, after all, are the problem. We need Americans, my friends. Rock ribbed, Real Americans, not a bunch of latte swilling bicoastals (even the ones in San Antonio and Minneapolis.) Thankfully, I hear they are all moving to Canada or France where they belong.

He says that we need to support faith based programs, tell blacks in the south that the confederate flag is their problem, forget guns (I thought we had) and help George W. Bush advance his agenda as much as possible.

He's right, but it's not enough. After all, we've already capitulated entirely on the death penalty, welfare and gun control issues and we put thousands of cops on the street, balanced the budget and told both blacks and gays in the military to zip their lips since '92, but those were obviously not adequate to prove that we are Real Americans. (How could we have thought that killing one retarded black man or a whole passle of Vietnamese would compete with George W. Bush's 158 confirmed kills?) There is much more "compromising" to do before anyone will believe that we mean it.

Some Democrats are way behind the curve by inching to the conclusion that ditching Roe vs. Wade is the way to go. That's a big duh. Of course we will. And everyone agrees that it's ixnay on the gay arriagemay. We won't be making that mistake again.

Public money for religious education is obviously on the agenda and we can easily embrace it with everything we've got. I don't think that endorsing faith based programs is enough. All secular social programs should immediately be outsourced to Charles Colson and Jerry Falwell with Dianne Feinstein and Hillary Clinton's blessing. But, even with all that I just have a sneaking suspicion that it might not be enough to persuade Real Americans to let us back into the country in 2008. It's going to take something much bolder than that --- and rightly so because they did, after all, win 51% of the vote.

Therefore, I propose that after we outlaw abortion, turn over huge amounts of public money to evangelical churches and enshrine discrimination against gays into the US Constitution, we fully and publicly endorse creationism. This is an issue that hasn't worked its way up to the forefront of a national election yet and we could actually outflank the Republicans if we get on the bandwagon right now. This could be our issue in 2008.

First though, we have to put a muzzle on people who write things likethis. Michael Kinsley strikes exactly the right apologetic tone, but still fails to realize that the very point of his article is exactly the kind of liberal elitism that is oppressing the heartland:

So yes, OK, fine. I'm a terrible person — barely a person at all, really, and certainly not a real American — because I voted for the losing candidate on Tuesday. If you insist — and you do — I will rethink my fundamental beliefs from scratch because they are shared by only 47% of the electorate.

And please let me, or any other liberal, know if there is anything else we can do to abase ourselves. Abandon our core values? Pander to yours? Not a problem. Happy to do it. Anything, anything at all, to stop this shower of helpful advice.

There's just one little request I have. If it's not too much trouble, of course. Call me profoundly misguided if you want. Call me immoral if you must. But could you please stop calling me arrogant and elitist?

I mean, look at it this way. (If you don't mind, that is.) It's true that people on my side of the divide want to live in a society where women are free to choose and where gay relationships have civil equality with straight ones. And you want to live in a society where the opposite is true. These are some of those conflicting values everyone is talking about. But at least my values — as deplorable as I'm sure they are — don't involve any direct imposition on you. We don't want to force you to have an abortion or to marry someone of the same sex, whereas you do want to close out those possibilities for us. Which is more arrogant?

We on my side of the great divide don't, for the most part, believe that our values are direct orders from God. We don't claim that they are immutable and beyond argument. We are, if anything, crippled by reason and open-mindedness, by a desire to persuade rather than insist. Which philosophy is more elitist? Which is more contemptuous of people who disagree?

As many conservative voices have noted, American society suffers from a cult of grievance. To put it crudely, everyone wants some of the things blacks got from the civil rights movement: sympathy, publicity, occasional preferential treatment and a general ability to put everybody else on the defensive. No doubt liberals are responsible for this deplorable situation, and I apologize. Again. As a softheaded liberal, I even like the idea that our competitive culture has a built-in consolation prize.

But be fair! (A liberal whine, I know. Sorry.) Conservatives shouldn't assert the prerogatives of victory and then claim the compensations of defeat as well. You can't oppress us and simultaneously complain that we are oppressing you.

Well, of course you can do this, if you want. Who's to stop you? I just kinda wish you wouldn't. If you don't mind my asking. Thanks. Sorry.

Sorry. There is no reason for Real Americans to listen to this until we have proved to them and to the wholesome heartland media voices of Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh that we are worthy of making such a request.

Getting out in front on the creationism issue is the perfect way to make these people see that we understand them. And jettisoning our outmoded fealty to reason and science will have the salutory effect of freeing us from all sorts of other inconvenient moral issues like tolerance, fairness and equality. This is how we will convince Real Americans that we are the kind of principled people they can respect.

Update: I see that the "New"James Wolcott agrees with me.

Wolcott says:

Democrats could campaign to rescind the Martin Luther King holiday, but I fear this would backfire, since everyone likes an excuse to take a day off from work and would resent having to drag themselves that particularly Monday.

No, something ballsier is needed for a turnaround in perception. A taboo or two needs to be smashed.

Therefore I am proposing that the official Democratic slogan for 2008 be "Shoot a Fag for Jesus."

It's a simple, catchy slogan that will look good on a bumperstickers, yet carry a multilateral strike: pro-guns, anti-gay, and unashamedly Christian.

Since abortion is so problematic for Democrats, "Shoot a Babykiller for Jesus" might do the trick in some of the battleground states as a supplemental bumpersticker.

Obviously this is all still in the brainstorming stage, and will need to be focus-grouped, but I believe it nudges us further along the path to success gently lit by Kristof's lamp of wisdom.

I like it. With a pro-creationism candidate, I think we might just pull it off. Maybe. If not, there's always mandatory church attendance and rolling back the right to vote for women and blacks. We've got plenty of cards left to play. We'll get there.





digby 11/07/2004 10:19:00 AM |

Friday, November 05, 2004

 
Wait A Minute

This is interesting and if it's true then we are all barking up the wrong tree with this discussion of "values." The Gay Marriage Myth - Terrorism, not values, drove Bush's re-election.

Much has been made of the fact that "moral values" topped the list of voters' concerns, mentioned by more than a fifth (22 percent) of all exit-poll respondents as the "most important issue" of the election. It's true that by four percentage points, people in states where gay marriage was on the ballot were more likely than people elsewhere to mention moral issues as a top priority (25.0 vs. 20.9 percent). But again, the causality is unclear. Did people in these states mention moral issues because gay marriage was on the ballot? Or was it on the ballot in places where people were already more likely to be concerned about morality?

More to the point, the morality gap didn't decide the election. Voters who cited moral issues as most important did give their votes overwhelmingly to Bush (80 percent to 18 percent), and states where voters saw moral issues as important were more likely to be red ones. But these differences were no greater in 2004 than in 2000. If you're trying to explain why the president's vote share in 2004 is bigger than his vote share in 2000, values don't help.

If the morality gap doesn't explain Bush's re-election, what does? A good part of the answer lies in the terrorism gap. Nationally, 49 percent of voters said they trusted Bush but not Kerry to handle terrorism; only 31 percent trusted Kerry but not Bush. This 18-point gap is particularly significant in that terrorism is strongly tied to vote choice: 99 percent of those who trusted only Kerry on the issue voted for him, and 97 percent of those who trusted only Bush voted for him. Terrorism was cited by 19 percent of voters as the most important issue, and these citizens gave their votes to the president by an even larger margin than morality voters: 86 percent for Bush, 14 percent for Kerry.

These differences hold up at the state level even when each state's past Bush vote is taken into account. When you control for that variable, a 10-point increase in the percentage of voters citing terrorism as the most important problem translates into a 3-point Bush gain. A 10-point increase in morality voters, on the other hand, has no effect. Nor does putting an anti-gay-marriage measure on the ballot. So, if you want to understand why Bush was re-elected, stop obsessing about the morality gap and start looking at the terrorism gap.

I had always had my suspicions that the real problem for us was the terrorism issue. Kerry's anti-war past and the mere fact that he was a Democrat fit into an image of weakness that is almost impossible to break. That's why he rightly emphasized his war hero status and why Rove called in the swift boat liars to tear it down. What they wanted to do was get that image of Kerry the hero out of people's minds and the image of Kerry the effete liberal planted firmly in its place.

Kerry did a better job of overcoming that obstacle, and the more intractable obstacle of being a Democrat during a national security crisis, than anyone had a right to expect. He almost pulled it off. If he had he would have been able to banish the image of the Democratic weakling as effectively as Clinton banished the fiscal irresponsibility label. Too bad.

On the other hand, as Tom Schaller points out in this post on Daily Kos, there is a silver lining:

[Ralph]Reed, you see, wanted to not merely deliver the social conservatives' "values" votes this year, but to ensure that their pivotal role be made noted and respected -- broadcast and trumpeted, loudly and quite publicly. They didn't want to just win; they want credit and plaudits for scoring the decisive touchdown.

Awesome. The fact that this election - the first post-9/11 election, with a war in Iraq abroad and a changing economic situation at home - will be remembered by the we-need-it-simplified media as the "values" election, is Reed's great gift to us.

Why? Because I suspect that right now that the Wall Street wing, and the small business wing, and the defense industry wing, and the tax reform wings of the party are shuddering at the thought that Americans are being told that Bush got to 51 percent based on "values" voting. Would not the better "take-away" storyline from this election be that Bush won because the nation believes in Republicans' fiscal and defense policies, their steadfastness and leadership abilities? I'm meeting a lot Republicans (both conservatives and moderates) who do not want this election to be framed as the Ralph Reed Rout.

[...]

And thus, the biggest silver lining of this election is how the GOP's victory is thus far being claimed, framed and explained. To that I say, "Let us join that chorus." And we should do so now, because there is immediacy in the post-election window of opportunity.

I think this may be right. We should spread it far and wide that this election was won by fringe fundamentalist first time voters who now feel empowered to force their views on everyone else, including mainstream Christians. It looks like Bush owes this small bloc of religious extremists big time. Gay marriage is just the beginning. Abortion, birth control, women's rights the whole enchilada is now up for grabs.

That has to freak out the money and military types who are the real backbone of the party. After all, Bush didn't run on "values," he ran on being Commander Codpiece. This thing could be a boogeyman around their neck.

Divide and conquer. It's tried and true.




digby 11/05/2004 06:05:00 PM |

 
Goalposts

Kevin Drum thinks that if Democrats dial back the liberal hectoring, we will get more votes from Middle Americans who aren't extremists but who feel that we are too extreme:

They're the ones who are uncomfortable with homosexuality, but understand that a steadily increasing acceptance of gay rights is probably inevitable. They don't want to ban abortion, but feel like it's common sense to require parental notification. And they're ready to agree that we need to do something about global warming, but that doesn't mean they take kindly to thinly veiled accusations that they're personally responsible for it just because they drive an SUV or eat a Big Mac.

I can't help but point out that the president just ran an entire campaign portraying Massachusetts as being some kind of foreign country so perhaps this cultural discomfort might be laid at the feet of the Republicans as much as the Democrats. I'm not exactly feeling the love from people who insist that Democrats aren't Americans or that we are all traitors or that we are now "neutered" by this election and should be a lot more docile, like farm animals. That stuff isn't coming from religious extremists, it's coming from the mainstream leadership of the Republican party.

I'm not sure who these hectoring liberals are who get under the heartland's skin with accusations about Big Macs, but I don't think it was John Kerry. John Kerry didn't run on disallowing parental notification laws or gay marriage. In fact, he specifically endorsed the former and ruled out the latter. He jettisoned gun control from the debate altogether. He went to church, talked about faith, and from all acounts he really is a sincere Catholic. The party had long since abandoned prison rehabilitation, the death penalty and welfare. Partial birth abortion has been outlawed. I'm not sure where we can go with this global warming issue if people aren't willing to hear that driving an SUV is contributing to the problem unless we can talk about international agreements, which seems to be out also. Maybe the Dems should just let that one go too.

Be that as it may, the Republicans just won 51% and they say it's because they don't like our values, so we have no choice but to recognise that and talk about it. It's not the first time. This is what the DLC acknowledged back in the 1980's and changing position on the death penalty and welfare is what helped get Clinton elected (with a big assist from Ross Perot and a painful recession.)

Unfortunately, Clinton never got 50% in either election. And once in office he was tortured endlessly by the GOP, and lost the congress long before Monica bared her thong. He was an effective president anyway and I don't quarrel with his legacy. His political skills, however, didn't have as much to do with his ability to attract a majority, which he never did, but rather his ability to survive a constant political assault once in office.

This values debate has shown itself to be extremely useful to the GOP for decades and they are very adept at moving the goalposts when it's necessary. (Remember, they were the ones who kept saying "you can't legislate morality" during the civil rights era.) No matter how much we move to the right or adapt our positions on things like parental notification and gay marriage and the rest, there will always be another wedge issue there to exploit and convince the heartland that we liberals are trying to shove our immorality into their lives against their will. And that's because it isn't about values at all. It's about politics. The Republicans have identified themselves as the party of the heartland tribe very effectively by pitting themselves against the enemy tribe ---the Democratic liberal elite, as they define it. And they have a very effective machine that spreads that word.

Last time Gore allegedly lost because he was in the pocket of the liberal elites in the cities who want to ban guns. This time Kerry spent half the campaign toting a shotgun and allegedly lost because the liberal elite wants to legalize gay marriage. In years gone by it was gays in the millitary or welfare queens or draft dodgers or bra burners or whatever. It's always something. Always.

The reason the heartland rejected John Kerry has absolutely nothing to do with what he actually believed or said. He could have adopted George W. Bush's platform in its entirety and he would have been portrayed and believed to be some kind of an alien being descending upon the heartland like an invader from an enemy land. This has been one of the great successes of a 30 year political realignment that is settling into what can only be seen as a cold civil war. We won't resolve it by continually trying to adjust piecemeal on values issues. We aren't winning by doing that any more than we were winning by running on social issues or the nuclear freeze in the 1980's.

That has been tried. We need a new, more modern approach altogether.

I might suggest that one of the things we begin to do is expose the hypocrisies of the Republican party. These decent, reasonable heartlanders might not be able to see liberals as being decent and reasonable but perhaps they could have their eyes opened by the cosmopolitan decadence of their own political leaders. Sometimes people have to be shaken out of their secure assumptions about their own tribe before they can see the merits of another.

Instead of running lukewarm values campaigns within their frame of social conservatism, perhaps we could run competing values campaigns on all-American libertarian beliefs like "mind your own business" and aim it at government, corporations and religious fanatics alike. Maybe we could shake free some of those western states from their coalition. Talk up the environment as stewardship of the land for hunting and fishing as well as conservation for the future.

But, frankly I believe that the problem will be solved through something much different. The world has changed even if the political bludgeon of values hasn't. I really think politics has morphed into a post modern epistomological relativism that can only be dealt with through sensation and spectacle, not reason --- the subject of many future posts, I imagine.

Update: Here's an interesting article from the Texas Observer about Lakoff and Luntz that touches on what I wrote in the last paragraph:

As long as liberals and progressives insist that having the facts on their side is all that matters, they are doomed to impotence. The next move for the left in the frame war is to accept that it’s okay to cherry-pick reality as long as it conforms to a frame that’s morally acceptable. According to Lakoff, we already do it every day.

digby 11/05/2004 03:26:00 PM |

 
Guest Post

Blog commenter Thumb has decided to make the switch to the Republican Party and he'd like to share with you his reasons. I find them very convincing and I will be joining him. My life's about to become a whole lot easier:

If you can't beat ‘em, join ‘em.

So the people voting for Bush told exit pollers that moral values are their #1 issue.

Because the Republicans are obviously superior in both numbers and cause, and their values oriented agenda should no doubt be a boon to human kind, there's obviously only one thing left to do at this point. Convert. Therefor, in an act of supreme solidarity to our new national conservative alliance and their emphasis on values, I would just like to say, they’re right. I’m ready to sign up.

But first I need to declare that I too no longer care about losing millions of American jobs. I too no longer care about health care. Or social security. I also no longer care about education. I no longer care what happens to the poor, the elderly or the millions of American children growing up in poverty, despair and hopelessness. I no longer care that the US ranks a lowly 41st in infant mortality. I no longer care that the gap between rich and poor is approaching third world levels. I no longer care that Fortune 500 corporations can avoid paying taxes by opening an offshore mailbox and I no longer care that the working class will be forced pick up the difference. I no longer care that we've taken a record fiscal surplus and in three years turned it into the largest debt in the history of our country or that it will be our children, and their children, that will have to pay it back. I also no longer care how many Americans die at the hands of terrorists (as long as they're dying over there and not here at home) or how many thousands of foreign civilians die in the course of our projecting American global hegemony. I no longer care what the rest of the world thinks of America, as long as they know to fear us. I no longer care about the science of potential medical breakthroughs nor do I care about slowing the spread of AIDS nor whether we have sufficient supplies of safe vaccines. I no longer care that the number of abortions is on the rise (though I’ll pound my chest and pretend that I do) because I no longer care about birth control, sex education or family planning. I no longer care about our environment and whether we're allowing industries to poison our water, our air and ultimately our food supply, and I no longer care about the consequences of releasing massive amounts of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere and its likelihood of accelerating global warming. I no longer care that our Bill of Rights, once enshrined to protect our personal freedoms and liberty, is being stripped down or that our 200 year old Constitutional protections are being traded for a false sense of security.

So what do I share with our new majority as my #1 concern? Values. I care about moral values.

Now that I’ve completed the switch to the other side moral values is all that matters to me. Moral values. Yes sir, I care enough that sufficient numbers of people share these moral values to make sure that we elect politicians that will put these moral values into law (even if it takes rigging the new electronic voting machines) and that those politicians in turn appoint judges guaranteed to ensure that everyone else is forced to live by these same moral values. Now some of you remaining Unbelievers may ask, "But if everything you no longer care about isn’t a moral value, what are your moral values?" Easy. The single most important moral value, overriding all other concerns, is that two people of the same sex are blocked from achieving secular legal recognitions that could in any way be similar to that enjoyed by heterosexual couples. Health and survivor benefits? Forget it. Employment protection? Come on. Inheritance rights? No way. Hospital visitation? Get real. Adoption? GOD FORBID!

You few, final remaining Democrats, moderates, greens and libertarians really need to get onboard the bandwagon. This new stripped down moral value is so easy I don’t know why I didn’t think of this myself earlier. Effortless morality. That’s the ticket. It’s like a gift from God. Now let’s jam it down everyone’s throat.

And God bless the New American Morality.




digby 11/05/2004 03:18:00 PM |

 
Schmucks

Matt Yglesias hits the nail on the head:

"I've got some serious disagreements with Thomas Frank's take on this whole phenomenon, but he's very right to argue in his book and elsewhere that the politics of cultural populism depends crucially on the Republicans never delivering the goods on any of the really big issues. Meanwhile, social conservatives have gotten treated this way for years -- decades, really -- and while they always complain about it, they always show up when it's time to vote. I would suggest that insofar as liberals sometimes condescend to these people (which we do) the issue is less a condescending attitude toward religion, than a condescending attitude toward a voting bloc that doesn't seem capable of figuring out that it's being scammed no matter how many times it happens"

I'm fine with people's religion as long as they don't force me to practice it. Live and let live, I say. I like freedom and that includes freedom of religion. My problem with these people is that they are fools to continually be taken in by a group of rich plutocrats who've been running things for quite some time now and who have never substantially delivered anything they've promised to the social conservatives. They put on a good show, with lots of razzle dazzle, but they are not sincere. The social conservatives are like greyhounds chasing the mechanical rabbit. And the big money boyz are laughing all the way to the bank. Take pornography, for instance:

What companies are involved? Spencer's investigators and reports from market research firms indicate that pornography is a $10 billion industry in the US alone, according to Forrester Research of Cambridge, Massachusetts. The largest company is not even known for pornography, but for selling cars. General Motors Corp.'s DirecTV subsidiary sells nearly $200 million a year of pay-per-view sex films, according to industry estimates not disputed by GM.

Other companies involved, including EchoStar Communications, the No.2 satellite provider, AT&T Corp., by offering the HotNetwork service through its cable service, Liberty Media, Marriott International, the Hilton, On Command, LodgeNet Entertainment and News Corp., all have major stakes in pornography, but these stakes are not mentioned in annual reports, except in the vaguest ways. An AT&T executive explains, "How can we? It's the crazy aunt in the attic. Everyone knows she's there, but you can't say anything about it."

Do the social conservatives know that George W. Bush himself served on the board of a Hollywood production company, run by his best friend Roland Betts? They weren't making Bambi, they were making movies like The Hitcher, which featured a woman being ripped in two. He made quite a nice little profit from that work (1983 to 1994.) Yet he forgot to mention his connection to the decadent world of Hollywood when he said:

"There needs to be a kind of sense of urgency in our society about the pervasiveness of violence"

It's hard to respect people who are willing dupes year after year and deliver power to a party that is merely using them for electoral gains and has absolutely no intention of delivering on its promises. There's just too much money involved in selling the culture that these people find so objectionable. And the ones who are selling it own the Republican party lock stock and falafel.

Like I said. Schmucks.



digby 11/05/2004 01:11:00 PM |

 
The New Untermenschen

I'm really enjoying this dialog over at Slate called "Why America Hates Democrats."

The question answers itself, though, doesn't it? Democrats obviously aren't Americans. We are enemies of the state.

You won, Rush, Ann, Sean, Grover, Karl. Congratulations. Democrats are now officially expelled from the body politic. And with a bare 51% majority, too. Wow. That's a hell of an achievement. Even the liberal Slate agrees with you now. (I'll be looking forward to the articles that endorse teaching creationism in the schools because it's a "value" that Americans hold dear .)

The good news is that Rush always said he wanted to keep one of us alive and put us in a museum someplace so that Americans would never forget what we looked like. Maybe we could have an election among ourselves and nominate the best representation of the hated Democrat. I'm pretty sure that they aren't going to accept 99.9 % of us. In fact, the only one they are likely to accept would be someone who looks like Michael Jackson. Otherwise the person might just be mistaken for a relative or a neighbor and then everyone would get confused.

The question as to why we are hated by Americans is an interesting one that cannot be answered by a bunch of liberals trying to distance themselves from this hated subgroup. if you want the real answer, you'll ask an real American why he hates democrats. Luckily, right in the LA Times it's not hard to find the answer:

Christians, in politics as in evangelism, are not against people or the world. But we are against false ideas that hold good people captive. On Tuesday, this nation rejected liberalism, primarily because liberalism has been taken captive by the left. Since 1968, the left has taken millions captive, and we must help those Democrats who truly want to be free to actually break free of this evil ideology.

In the weeks and months to come, we will hear the voices of well-meaning people beseeching the victor to compromise with the vanquished. This would be a mistake. Conservatives must not compromise with the left. Good people holding false ideas are won over only if we defeat what is false with the truth.

The left must be defeated in the realm of ideas, just as it was on Tuesday at the ballot box. The left hates the ballot box and loves its courtrooms, which is why it hopes to continue to advance its agenda through the courts. This must end.

The left bewitches with its potions and elixirs, served daily in its strongholds of academe, Hollywood and old media. It vomits upon the morals, values and traditions we hold sacred: God, family and country. As we learned Tuesday, it is clear the left holds the majority of Americans, the majority of us, in contempt.

Simply, a majority of Americans have rejected John Kerry and John Edwards and the left because they are wrong. They are wrong because there are not two Americas. We are one nation under a God they reject. We remain indivisible despite their attempts to divide Americans through their relentless warfare against class, ethnic and religious unity.

We still believe that liberty and justice is for all. In 1946, there were those on the left who believed the Germans and the Japanese were incapable of democracy and liberty. Today, many doubt democracy can be birthed in Iraq or Afghanistan. Like their forebears, they too will be proved wrong.

The nation has now resoundingly rejected the left and its agenda. We do not want to become European. We do not want to become socialist. We do not want to become secular. We are exceptional. We are unique. And we are the greatest force for good in the world, despite what the left, the terrorists or the United Nations may claim. It is for these reasons that we remain the last great hope in the world for freedom.

We continue to be that shining city set on a hill. And we fully accept the responsibility; we are proud to be the envy of the world.

Die Liberale sind unserer Unglück




digby 11/05/2004 12:15:00 PM |

Thursday, November 04, 2004

 
Electoral Arithmetic For Dummies

Kevin Drum is sick of this exceedingly STUPID mantra about how the Democrats face terrible arithmetic in the electoral college because of our inability to carry the south. He says:

No kidding. But try this on for size instead:

"Republicans face this terrible arithmetic in the Electoral College where if they don't carry any of the 13 Northeastern states they need to win two-thirds of everything else," says Kevin Drum, an expert on simplistic arithmetic at the Washington Monthly.

Note to the media: it was a close election, just like it was four years ago. There were only a dozen swing states, and Republicans had no more chance of winning in California, New York, and Illinois than Democrats did in Georgia, Alabama, and Wyoming. A trivial swing of a hundred thousand votes in half a dozen states and you'd be writing pretentious thumbsuckers about how cultural issues were losing their ability to attract votes for Republicans. So knock it off, OK?

I agree. I think that this arithmetic epitaph is perhaps the most annoying post election spin of all. You can argue about whether "moral values" as a top reason for voting this election means that the country is awash in religious fervor, but you simply cannot spin these numbers as a huge sea change. This was a squeaker only marginally more comfortable for Bush than 2000, not a blow out. Somebody has to win and the GOP machine has pulled it out the last two elections, but it could very easily have gone the other way. Red is redder and blue is bluer, that's all.




digby 11/04/2004 05:35:00 PM |

 
Media Meltdown

I'm starting to get a little bit punchy from lack of sleep these last few days so I don't have the energy tonight to write anything about this very interesting PressThink post by Jay Rosen about where the press is headed after this election.

I urge you all to read it. This may be where the real action is these next couple of years. It's likely to be as fundamental to our future as the carnage that Bush is going to wreak.




digby 11/04/2004 05:29:00 PM |

 
Ashcroft Likely to Leave AG Post

I heard some woman on ABC saying that this is not what it seems. According to her, the president never wanted Ashcroft but he was forced on him by the religious right. This rumor is being pushed by those in the bush administration who want him out right away before some shit hits the fan (Plame? Kenny Boy?)

Whatever. It occurred to me that if we had a good message machine we would immediately seize upon this to sow divisions between Bush and his newly empowered evangelical base. They love Johnny. Isn't it a slap in the face that their beloved Bush is pushing him out of office the day after the election?

Divide and conquer, baby. It's just one of many hardball tactics we must begin to use to break the stranglehold in advance of the 2006 elections. It could be our '94.




digby 11/04/2004 02:37:00 PM |

 
Who Are We?

I noticed that there seems to be a lot of discussion around the left blogosphere about the Democratic party not knowing what it stands for. This has been picked up by Howard Fineman who is busy telling everyone who'll listen that we stand for nothing. I'm a little bit stunned by this and so is The Poor Man.

Obviously, I have no objection to people coming up with new ideas, but I hardly think this is really a problem of the Democratic Party. It is absolutely clear what the Democrats stood for in this election - a generally conservative set of principles based on sixty-plus years of Democratic and bipartisan American thought and action. Respect for the importance of time-tested international alliances, and for the system for resolving global issues through the UN and other international bodies which has evolved over the last century. A measured approach to dealing with foreign relations, a recognition that there are always many crises to be juggled at once, and a disinclination to overextend or rely on 'magic bullet' or utopian solutions. Striking a balance between business and labor which benefits both, and judicious use of the state to resolve problems for which the private sector is poorly suited. Fiscal responsibility. A tolerence of difference, a respect for ability and expertise, and a dedication to the ideals of the woman's rights, civil rights, and labor movements. An America like the America we grew up in and believed in, only maybe a bit better, which stands for and gains its strengths from these common values which are our heritage.

There you go. In a piece from the primaries some months back, I wrote that any Democrat would run basically on the following platform:

To protect and defend the citizens of the United States.

To preserve the separation of church and state

To safeguard the right to choose.

To provide a decent safety net

To preserve progressive taxation

To protect the environment

To advance civil liberties and civil rights

To govern transparently

To provide opportunity

To promote equality

To advance progress

To preserve the American way of life

I don't think there is all that much question about what we stand for. However, as The Poor Man points out, that has almost nothing to do with how we are perceived by millions of Americans who tune in the Mighty Wurlitzer for their "news." There has been a decades long attack on liberalism that has demonized us into a party of stoned slackers and caffeinated porno consumers. (More projection. They don't call Delay "Hot Tub Tom" for nothing.) This character assasination made it possible for a president to be elected with a totally incoherent set of "values" that could only have been designed by someone cobbling together a governing coalition of deaf, dumb and blind people who cannot read.

They didn't win the campaign because they have a coherent ideology and we didn't. Rupert Murdock and Jerry Falwell are not pursuing the same goals. "Democracy" and Ilyiad Allawi do not belong in the same sentence. Radical tax cutting and running wars to the tune of a billion a day is not fiscal responsibility. Bigotry is not compassionate and destroying the safety net we've depended on for more than half a century is not conservative.

These people aren't united by a common ideology or set of values. They are united by a common hatred of Democrats, fueled by a massive propaganda machine. They won this campaign by putting on a trash talking spectacle starring George W. Bush as Commander Codpiece. (Those who wanted to ban gay marriage got in two for the price of one.) The problem is that show biz conservatism has become the default channel for more Americans. It's about identity, not ideology.




digby 11/04/2004 01:51:00 PM |

 
Heartland Values

In the grand tradition of knee jerk analysis, I am hearing all over the television and the blogosphere that we need to reach out to the religious people who voted for George W. Bush in order to win in the future. We must reject our "Hollywood values" and learn to embrace the real, American heartland values that George W. Bush personifies and which won him the election. One Democrat named Dave Strother just said that the Democrats have to purge themselves of the coasts or risk oblivion.

I wish that just once we would recognise when we are being played. The reason Bush won is because he eked out a victory in Ohio, period. That is the only number that matters in this presidential election and it doesn't represent a gigantic sea change in America. Bush won that small victory in Ohio because an unprecedented number of conservative evangelicals came out to vote. And, the "American Heartland value" that energized them was an amendment to the state constitution that not only defined marriage as between a man and a woman but also barred public institutions, such as universities, from providing health insurance and other benefits to domestic partners.

"This was the issue that delivered Ohio for President Bush,'' said Phil Burress, who spearheaded the Issue 1 campaign. ``We mailed out 2.5 million bulletins to 17,000 churches. We called 2.9 million homes and identified 850,000 supporters. We called every one of those supporters on Monday and urged them to vote Yes on 1."

(I guess we now know why they panicked about Mary Cheney, don't we? )

My question is this. Is there any combination of issues upon which we Democrats could accomodate these people that doesn't include backing anti-gay measures like that? In other words, as long as the Democratic party believes in equal rights for gay people is there a snowball's chance in hell that we will be able to tear the religious vote away from the party that doesn't with outreach to "heartland values?"

I doubt it. In fact, I think that we are talking about a wedge issue that is insurmountable. Civil rights are a fundamental matter of principle, not a position on specific programs or tax cut legislation. And I don't see any possibility that we will be able to make inroads with people who believe that homosexuality is a sin as a matter of bedrock religious belief. We can field a candidate who runs a campaign like a tent revival, but this is one of those issues that can't be finessed. As long as we believe in the separation of church and state and back civil rights for gays we are not going to get the conservative Christian vote. We just aren't.

If gay rights is the deciding factor for the forseeable future, then I think we may lose for a while. But, it won't be. It's really not a matter of law as much a matter of society getting used to the idea and it is happening very quickly. Gay marriage wasn't even on the radar screen ten years ago --- until the last couple of years, everybody had been growing used to the idea of civil unions, which even Junior has endorsed. My guess is that they won't be able to find an anti-gay measure to put on the ballot every election and as a result they won't be able to repeat this turn-out in the crucial states where they need it. This was a unique combination of Junior's phony born again image and the gay rights issue converging.

Pinning this election defeat on an alleged lack of "moral values" is short sighted and it plays right into Republican hands. The Republicans consistently use that club to beat us over the head again and again while they fervently watch the Falafel Factor and listen to Rush as he pops little blue babies between attacks on the Democratic party's hedonism. They only believe in strict moral values when it's somebody they don't like. This is political posturing and we are fools to let them use it to marginalize our 50% of the population.

There are competing values in this world and you can't be all things to all people. The election was won with 130,000 or so conservative evangelical votes in one state. That is decisive enough to declare victory in the election, but it is far too slim a margin to make the sweeping decision that the Democratic party needs to shelve its values of tolerance and civil rights to accomodate certain religious beliefs that are incompatible with them. The religious people are welcome to their beliefs, of course, but it's something on which we cannot compromise and have any of our own values left. (Oddly, I think that the truly religious people, as opposed to the poseur majority of republicans, might just understand that.)

I maintain that many people simply want a president whose image fits the role of president. Most of them vote on the basis of how the person makes them feel. They may like a little religion talk because it's code for a certain cultural ID and leadership archetype they feel comfortable with. And they want some personality in their leader, professionally presented as if it's authentic. Many of them are religious, (and they may have voted to ban gay marriage) but they are not driven to the polls on the conservative values agenda. Their motivation is not issues, although they tend to assign their preferred issues and solutions to their preferred candidate regardless of the reality. What they care about is style. Some of these people voted happily for Reagan, Clinton, Perot and Junior and see nothing remotely inconsistent in that. Those people we can reach with message, presentation and the right candidate.

The truly committed religious right,however, said to be 22 percent of this last electorate, is simply not obtainable. To even contemplate jettisoning our deeply held values to pander to them is useless and immoral.

But, get ready. The media are lazy and love the storyline of the wicked, hedonistic liberals being ignominiously defeated by the righteous salt of the earth Republicans. They are going to flog this until we are all convinced that the entire country is made up of conservative Christian Republicans and the rest of us are a bunch of freaks --- even the moderate and liberal Christians. Everyone will agree that the hope of the party is to abandon the coasts (with all their electoral votes, presumably.) But, just because they like a narrative it doesn't make it true. If we have learned anything over the years I would hope that at least we have learned that.




digby 11/04/2004 10:55:00 AM |

 
Reaching Out

Grover Norquist:

Once the minority of House and Senate are comfortable in their minority status, they will have no problem socializing with the Republicans. Any farmer will tell you that certain animals run around and are unpleasant, but when they've been fixed, then they are happy and sedate. They are contented and cheerful. They don't go around peeing on the furniture and such.

I was listening to Sean Hannity gloat yesterday as we were driving back from Nevada. His guest was Zell Miller. They both agreed that Democrats were completely out of step with nation and that's why Bush was given this huge mandate. Dems refused to see that you cannot raise taxes, that you must fight evil abroad where ever you see it and that people have the right to practice their religion anywhere and everywhere they see fit. Perhaps, most egregiously, Democrats didn't understand that you cannot be vicious and angry and expect the real Americans to sit back and take it.

They were both very hopeful that Democrats would learn civility (or was that servility, I couldn't tell) and reach across the aisle and behave in a bipartisan manner by adopting the Republican agenda.

I screamed, "fuck you,assholes" into the vast emptiness of the high desert. I don't think anyone heard me.




digby 11/04/2004 08:48:00 AM |

Wednesday, November 03, 2004

 
TV With The Sound Turned Off

Like so many things in life, huge disappointment doesn't come as such a shock when you stop and think about it. There are always signs.

First, let me make one small point. Bush's large margin in the popular vote is probably too big. They are still counting absentee ballots in the west and there are tons of them. In California there were almost five million mailed out. Al Gore, if you recall, was not secure as the winner of the popular vote for several days when all of these far west absentee votes started to trickle in from California, Oregon and washington.

Here's a little trip down memory lane from november 9th of 2000, two days after the election:

There are 1.1 million outstanding in California, absentees that haven't been counted, (and) 900,000 that haven't been counted in Washington," said Curtis Gans, director of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate. Gans added that another 400,000 remain untallied in New York.

In addition, because Oregon attempted an all-mail voting system, about 300,000 votes remained out Thursday, Gans said.

"And then there are scatterings of votes in other places, including Alaska, whose votes are highly incomplete," he said. "There are more than enough votes to close a 200,000 vote gap."

Gore does lead in the unofficial tally of the popular vote -- but by a narrow and changing margin. On Election Night, he was running behind by half a million votes. By the next day, he led by about 250,000 votes.

By Thursday afternoon his lead over Bush had shrunk to less than 200,000 votes -- out of more than a 100 million counted for all candidates.

To be sure, Bush will maintain his lead in the popular vote, but it may not be by the large margin that has all the gasbags breathlessly proclaiming his glorious mandate. A lot more people voted absentee this year than in the past. The fact is that Bush's popular vote lead mostly comes from a higher turnout in red states. That does not exactly make for a broad mandate. Not that it makes any difference in how Bush will govern. We already learned that the hard way.

This nation is essentially where we were four years ago, the people frozen in position like those horrible scenes from Pompeii. It was deja vu all over again, only this time Florida was Ohio and Bush got a bigger turn-out in the south. Other than the shift of New Hampshire and New Mexico, the red and blue map remains as it has been. The coasts, the midwest and the northeast are one America. The rest of the country is another. More precisely, we now have Democratic city states in the midst of a Republican nation state, each equal in population and diametrically opposed politically. It's very interesting and highly unusual.

This was always going to be very close because it was always going to be very hard in wartime to prevail against the CW that Republicans are stronger on national security. We were right to believe fervently in the cause and put everything we had into it. It was clearly possible for us to win. But, the reality is that we were scaling a very high wall.

Bush has one of the most effective political machines in history behind him and, more importantly, the full power and majesty of the presidency to help him win. In the last days of the campaign he was landing in football stadiums on the Marine 1 helicopter with fireworks exploding to the tune of "Danger Zone." That's a wartime image that's hard to beat --- particularly if your adoring audience is predisposed to love that kind of faux military spectacle.

It's never easy to unseat an incumbent president and it usually only happens when the country is in palpable economic distress. This was a partisan election and we simply didn't have quite enough votes (whether to overcome his authetic lead or his rigged machines, either one) despite a valiant effort and plenty of money.

I'm too weary and dispirited right now to get into the inevitable fight that's gearing up within the party, but suffice to say I don't agree that we lost because we weren't liberal enough. But, neither was it because we weren't culturally conservative enough or populist enough.

I believe it was simply because we weren't entertaining enough and that's the sad truth. I think that Democrats are serious, earnest and substantive people. We are the reality-based community. And I think we top out at about forty eight percent of the population.

For everybody else politics is show business, whether in religious, political or media terms. Image trumps substance,charisma and personality trump everything. I don't find George W. Bush appealing in any way because my vision of an attractive politician is that he be smart, competent and rhetorically talented. But, to many people, politics is interesting because of the spectacle and the tribal competition and they just aren't interested in any other aspects of it. (See the PEW poll.) Oh, they mouth all the right platitudes about values and all, but this is not about governing for them because they have been taught that government is only relevant to their lives in that it houses their enemies --- liberals who want to take things from them and force things on them. This is a reality TV show and they want to vote someone off the island.

It's clear that a small majority of the country buy Junior's "Top-Gun" act. His youthful failures are seen as acts of anti-hero rebelliousness. His smart ass attitude is the sign of a macho rogue. He isn't the smartest guy in the class and he's often in trouble, but he's a fearless warrior when it counts. His image is of a fun loving rascal who found himself in an extraordinary position and rose to the occasion. I know it's bullshit, but that's the archetype that his handlers have laid upon him and it's a role he plays with relish.

We have always chosen leaders for superficial as well as substantive reasons. It's not fair to say that Democrats aren't seduced by their own archetypal dreamboats. But, Bush is a new paradigm and we need to study him and recognize its power. He is a character created out of whole cloth by marketing and political people for the single purpose of appealing to a specific portion of the population that can guarantee a small political majority without having to compromise in any way with the opposition to enact an agenda. He's the first gerrymandered president.

Will Saletan gets to the nub of one of the qualities that seem to be required to make this work:

Bush is a very simple man. You may think that makes him a bad president, as I do, but lots of people don't - and there are more of them than there are of us. If you don't believe me, take a look at those numbers on your TV screen.

Think about the simplicity of everything Bush says and does. He gives the same speech every time. His sentences are short and clear. "Government must do a few things and do them well," he says. True to his word, he has spent his political capital on a few big ideas: tax cuts, terrorism, Iraq. Even his electoral strategy tonight was powerfully simple: Win Florida, win Ohio, and nothing else matters. All those lesser states- Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, New Hampshire- don't matter if Bush reels in the big ones.

This is what so many people like about Bush's approach to terrorism. They forgive his marginal and not-so-marginal screw-ups, because they can see that fundamentally, he "gets it." They forgive his mismanagement of Iraq, because they see that his heart and will are in the right place. And while they may be unhappy about their economic circumstances, they don't hold that against him. What you and I see as unreflectiveness, they see as transparency. They trust him.

Schwarzenneger is another example. He comes with the movie star appeal, of course, but his political talent is to speak like a cartoon character and entertain the audience as if he is at a film junket in Cannes. It doesn't matter one iota what he actually does as long as he says things like this:

This is what I love about election day, because when the people flex their muscles, then the state gets much stronger.

Tha-tha-tha-tha-that's entertainment folks. The Republicans have clearly figured out that they can get a thin majority by fielding charismatic candidates who speak like children. They don't even have to make sense.

We know from the polling that most of Bush's supporters are misinformed about his positions on the issues, so it's not a matter of backing his agenda. They don't know what it really is. And his religious base may believe that moral values are their highest priority, but since they are so very forgiving of their right wing brethren (Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Bennet,Gingrich, Swaggert, Bakker) when they stray from the straight and narrow, it's pretty clear that their high moral standards are extremely selective. I heard over and over again this election, people who said, "he looks you in the eye," as a reason for voting for him. That's not character. That's performance.

If, as the gasbags pontificating about all day, the Democrats decide that our "problem" is that we aren't appealing to the heartland conservative values, they need to think again. It's not about the substance of Republican appeals to values, it's about the style with which they do it and the level of pure, primitive tribal identification they provide. It would be a grave mistake to misunderstand this slim electoral majority as a comment on real values. It's a comment on production values. The Republicans have 'em and we don't.

I've bever been a big believer in the ground game as the be all and end all of politics even in close races. I certainly think it is essential, but I don't think knocking on doors and talking to earnest neighbors is the way people make political decisions in this day and age. I think people pretty much live in a media constructed reality and that's where the votes are gathered.

We have a nascent infrastructure in place with a bunch of smart and dedicated people who must be called upon to sustain the momentum and make it grow. We didn't lose by very much. Let's not throw the baby out with the bath water.

The battle begins anew today. Our agenda is more popular. The substance of our message is what people say they want, (except they credit the republicans with giving it to them.) It's our politicians' image and style that aren't making the grade in the new post modern politics. It's not because they wouldn't be terrific at actually doing the job. But that is substantially different and apart from special effects campaigning, image management and public relations, all of which supercede all other necessary qualities to get elected today.

John Kerry is the most qualified man to be president in my lifetime. And he might have won except for one thing. He couldn't fill the role that certain voters require in a president in this era --- he just wasn't enough of an archetypal TV hero. That's no knock on him, it's a knock on America. I know it's not politic to say it, but a majority of this country are obviously dumb as posts. Still, it's the only country we've got and we are going to have to come to terms with this.

Whatever the reasons, I'm devastated about this outcome, of course. But there is a silver lining. We here in the reality based community know full well that Bush and his minions have been dancing as fast as they can to get through this election. They have been desperate to avoid setting off an array of landmines with hair triggers. I am going to enjoy watching him try to deal with them as they begin to blow up in his face one by one. In many ways it is poetic justice that he is going to have to attempt to clean up the huge fetid, stinking mess he's foisted on this country.

Too bad about the human carnage though.

And I take heart in remembering Richard Nixon. Junior is his true heir and I suspect he will have the same fate. This much corruption cannot be contained. Keep your eyes on purged members of the CIA and the State department. He may have won, but I have a feeling that Commander Codpiece may come to regret it.

There us much to recommend being the angry opposition. Watching our hated enemy squirm is one them.




digby 11/03/2004 04:23:00 PM |

Tuesday, November 02, 2004

 
Dumbasses

Quick note. This nonsense with the robocalls is just another example of the Republicans drowning in their own kool-aid. They apparently think that minorities are as deluded and dumb as their own idiot base is so they think they can fool them like children.

Fat chance. This isn't rural georgia in 1950. The urban minorities in this country have more political sophistication in their little fingers than the entire rural red state vote. They value the franchise and they pay attention. It is a testament to the GOP's continued racism that they play these games, but it is also a testament to how little they understand this country in 2004. They can continue with this insulting crap and lose as this country becomes more and more diverse or they can wise up and stop the Jim Crow games.

This bullshit will not deter minority voters. They are way too smart to fall for it.




digby 11/02/2004 11:23:00 AM |

 
Boots On The Ground

Hello, everyone. I'm out here in Sin City helping do the earnest work of getting people out to vote. Ok,ok. I may have done a teeny tiny bit of gambling when I arrived late last night, but that's just because I was feeling lucky. Very lucky.

Blogger is bloggered as usual, so I don't know how much I'll be able to post. I'll try to check in several times today.

Las Vegas is Kerry country, that's for sure. There is a much bigger presence of signs and buttons in the environs around here than Bush signs. There's lots of public talk among strangers and it's intense but doesn't seem to be particularly acrimonious.

Yesterday ACT had some star power in --- Sean Penn and others were walking the precincts. I'm not sure anybody gives a damn, but all citizens have a right to participate so I'm for it.

As you know, Nevada has been a hotbed of voter suppression activity. The Sproul lawsuit was denied by the Nevada Supreme Court yesterday so the people who's votes were thrown in the trash are out of luck:

The Nevada Supreme Court refused Monday to grant an order to allow a Sparks couple that suspects their registrations were discarded by a company hired by the Republican Party to vote in today's election.

The court ruled 5-0 that Eric Amberson and Traci Amberson should have first taken their case to a District Court. The justices ruled against the couple, although the Ambersons had copies of receipts for the voter registration forms they filled out last month. The Ambersons are Democrats, according to their lawyers.

"This court is ill-equipped to resolve factual issues, such as whether petitioners are qualified electors and whether they submitted properly completed voter registration forms," the court stated in a brief decision.

The Ambersons registered on Oct. 2 with a canvasser outside a Reno Wal-Mart, according to court documents. When they didn't get sample ballots by mail they became alarmed and contacted the Washoe County registrar's office. They learned they were not registered.

The couple has receipts for the registrations that indicate their forms were among the batch given to Voter Outreach of America, a firm operated by Sproul & Associates of Chandler, Ariz. Sproul was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters..

The company is under investigation in Nevada and Oregon over allegations that workers destroyed Democrats' voter registration forms.

Former state Supreme Court Justice Charles Springer, who represented the Ambersons, said he asked the court late Monday to rehear its decision. He said there is still a remote chance the court could reconsider and allow the couple to vote today.

"There are no questions of fact," Springer said. "They got receipts. No one has ever denied that. They should be entitled to vote. But it may be futile now."

Springer said it would be irresponsible to deny the couple the right to vote unless it can be shown they are lying.

According to Springer, Voter Outreach was given 4,000 voter registration forms in Clark County and 1,500 in Washoe County.

There are recent reports of bogus phone calls telling people their polling places have ben changed, for instance. Jim Crow crap in Nevada in 2004.

However, the observations of most people here is that it hasn't deterred turn-out one iota. Most of the poeple I've talked to are on to this bullshit and it's just made them more inclined to do whatever it takes to cast their vote. I'm not seing a lot of shrinking violet Democrats. The voters here are extremely well informed and they are very motivated. I'd like to see the flaccid GOP doughboy who tried to prevent these people from voting.

Wearing my Kerry button in the hotel last night (where the employees are obviously discouraged from talking politics with the paying customers) I got winks, high fives and whispers in my ears from several people --- a bellman, a cocktail waitress and the desk clerk who just pointed at my button and winked. One guy just gave me a hard look and said "I feel it." These are working people and they are engaged.

So, far I haven't heard of any serious delays, but my knowledge is extremely limited. However, even if there are, these voters will stand in line as long as it takes. Las Vegas in the fall is just grea --- clear, cool and sunny. It's not a hardship to wait in line. Indeed, the ones I've observed so far seem downright jovial. There's a bit of a party atmosphere --- not surprising in the party capital of the world.

My coffee is cold and it's time to get back out there. I'll try to catch up on the national scene in detail later today. But, from what I'm hearing, it's looking good. Let's just say you couldn't feel a lot of magic watching FOX News this morning.

They know.




digby 11/02/2004 09:21:00 AM |

Monday, November 01, 2004

 
Into The Purple Haze

We're about to head out to Nevada to try to help those fine union, ACT and DNC people get those four electoral votes in our column. After all, Sin City will do much better under an economically successful Democratic administration when the rubes and the rich alike have enough disposable income that they can afford to throw large amounts of it away.

I'll be blogging, documenting the massive Democratic turnout and monitoring the media atrocities. Check back frequently.




digby 11/01/2004 11:18:00 AM |

 
The Man

Ezra Klein has written a beautiful piece making the affirmative case for John Kerry. There is much in it that is original and thought-provoking, but I particularly like the following reflection on the merits of flexibility in a good leader:

Righteousness, as a habit, rejects certainty; in fact, the angels have a troubling predisposition to wander around issues, which makes sticking in their camp a matter of ideological flexibility as much as judgment. There's no chasm greater than the one Kerry bridged to go from Vietnam war hero to the war's most prominent opponent, but he was right to serve his country and right to fight for an end to the misguided slaughter. It's a lesson he's refused to unlearn, and one he's spent a lifetime applying. And we need it.

I also am enthusiastic about Kerry. It's not an ABB thing for me and never has been. Kerry is the right man at the right historical moment. He's uniquely equipped by temperament and experience to lead in this world at this time.

Back when he won the primaries and I was still smarting from the defeat of my chosen candidate, I spent on evening reflecting and reading about John Kerry, trying to see what it was that so many of my fellow Democrats seemed to get about this guy that I hadn't seen until he was already half way there. After all, I'd once voted for the man and had plenty of respect for him. Indeed, by the time his nomination was clinched, I thought he was a gift in many ways. A liberal in the White House seemed almost too good to be true in this day and age.

I discovered that what the Democrats in places like Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina saw was a man who was tough enough to win and tough enough to take the slings and arrows of what was going to happen to him afterwards. That flinty, Yankee determination is an all-American trait more authentic than all the faux folksiness and phony posturing that two-faced cowpoke from Kennebunkport could ever hope to conjure. And it's a trait that people understood was vital as we deal with threats to our democracy from abroad and from within.

That night I wrote an affirmative case for Kerry, more prosaic certainly than Ezra's fine piece, but from the heart nonetheless.

Obviously, there are many reasons any person runs for president having to do with ego and accident. After observing him for a while, I think John Kerry is responding to the call in the 30 year political civil war with the Republicans. He understands that they have become dangerously radical and that it's time to break their hold on power. He knows this territory.

In that sense, I confess I'm surprised that liberals aren't taking more heart in the fact that John Kerry is a card carrying fighting Massachusetts liberal. We should be thrilled that somebody as liberal as Kerry has got a chance to be president. Because let's not kid ourselves, anybody more liberal than John Kerry is unelectable...

He's not a crook, he's not lazy, he's not stupid. He's very accomplished, he's highly experienced and he's got good instincts. But, I'm convinced that the most important character traits in a successful President at this point in history are resiliance and cunning; even if we win the election, politics are going to remain a bloodsport. The Republicans aren't going to fade away. This battle is ongoing and we must have someone who can withstand a punch and come back. It is going to be very, very difficult to govern. I think Kerry is running not because he's "electable," but because he's one of the few Democrats of his generation who has spent his life preparing to govern in the face of a radical political opposition. The job is not for the fainthearted...

I believe that right now the Democrats are essentially the conservative party, which means as great an emphasis on preservation as progress. This comes as a result of the two party system that places us in contrast to the radical Republican party which seeks to overturn the New Deal and dissolve the international order of the last 50 years. By necessity, our candidates are not going to be able to run on as progressive a platform as many of us might wish. One has to take into consideration the nature of the opposition and the character of the body politic when framing a case.

Kerry is not a reformer as Dean was perceived to be, nor is he a champion of a particular constituency as Gephardt was. But, perhaps at a time like this it is more helpful to judge the candidate by the quality of his enemies than his friends. His career has been about fighting bad guys, from Vietnam to Dick Nixon to BCCI.

In light of that, I believe Kerry is running for the simple reason that this time and place requires somebody who has the experience and character to keep the country secure while fighting back a rabid political opposition at home and a series of difficult threats overseas. His life has uniquely prepared him for this political moment.

He is the man called by history to bring America from the brink of radicalism from within and without. I'm grateful that he's willing to take on this thankless task. That's real patriotism.




digby 11/01/2004 10:23:00 AM |

 


E-mail your friends and family this link so they can watch the video, too:

http://www.johnkerry.com/video/110104_your_stories.html
digby 11/01/2004 09:18:00 AM |

 
Notes on Turn-Out

George Stephanopoulos said earlier this morning that he had two veteran political operative sources, one from each party, who he trusts. He claimed that each were "eerily calm" about their candidates' prospects tomorrow but each had entirely different beliefs about what would win it for them.

The Democrat believed that there was going to be a record turn-out that would sweep Kerry to victory. The Republican believed that there wouldn't be a record turn out and that Bush's base would win it for him.

The Democrat is right.

On NBC, Tom Brokaw just said that he'd talked to Rove who told him that he didn't think that more than 110 million would vote and repeated his oft-repeated CYA trope about how two million evangelicals stayed home in 2000 because they were shocked that Junior the reformed drunk had once been caught driving while under the influence. He feels confident that they are back in the fold.

It ain't gonna be enough. If Rove and the boyz are "eerily calm" it's because they are either delusional, they are good actors or they feel confident that Diebold can steal it with voting machines because it's already clear that the turnout is going to be phenomenal.

I also heard Tucker Carlson on the Chris Matthews week-end show say that he thought Kerry would win because people don't stand in line for hours in the Florida sun to vote because they like a politician. People are willing to stand in line for hours because they are angry.

Tucker's right, too.

There is a lot of handwringing among the gasbags about the fact that people allegedly aren't voting "for " Kerry but against Bush, as if the underlying reason for voter intensity matters. It doesn't. If the Democrats come out in droves tomorrow because they loathe and despise President asterisk more than they love Kerry it doesn't matter one iota. The result is the same.

The underlying fact that cannot be ignored by Democrats and moderates of all stripes is that they stole the goddam election last time and then governed like they'd won in a landslide. They rubbed our noses in it for four long years with a far right agenda, treating us like shit every single step of the way. Apparently, they believed their own ridiculous hype and convinced themselves that we would just roll over and take it. They were wrong.

It didn't have to be this way. 9/11 could have wiped the whole thing out if Junior had behaved even slightly as the president of the entire country instead of just his base. They made their bed.

And, despite all the polarization and bad feelings I don't actually think there is going to be a lot of disruption at the polls because there are just too many of us and we are organized and working together. For instance, in this story of predictably shameless (and ineffectual) GOP agit-prop (Via Atrios) we see the signs of an energetic, cooperative progressive movement at work to help people exercize their right to vote:

We followed the congregants of the Mt. Hermon AME to vote after their Sunday service. The Pastor gave a rousing speech that shook the walls about exercising one’s “God given right to vote.” Outside, there were vans waiting to take people over to an early voting station in Ft. Lauderdale at the African American Research Library, where many thousands of people have already voted in the past two weeks. This day was no different; the line stretched across the parking lot and off the grounds on the sidewalk on Sistrunk. It was 1pm, and as hot as the day was gonna get, which was burning. 85 degrees, a slight breeze but not enough to overcome the moisture — typical fall in Florida. People carried umbrellas, and fanned themselves with Kerry/Edwards paddles.

At first glance, it looked like the scene outside a stadium before an AC/DC show: too many cars trying to park; confusion in the line; people handing out water; everyone clutching their ID’s.

But the place was stamped with politics. Distributing the cold bottles of Zephyrhills were about dozen NAACP Voter Fund volunteers in yellow shirts. Others distributed folding chairs for people who wanted to sit in the line. An Election Protection corps in black uniforms passed out flyers printed with voting rights. A couple of Kerry/Edwards people handed out candy from plastic pumpkins.

As Harold Myerson wrote in this wonderful piece from the LA Weekly this week:

I have spent the past week observing the official Democratic Party and unofficial 527 field operations in the battleground states of Ohio and Florida. And I have found something I’ve never before seen in my 36 or so years as a progressive activist and later as a journalist: an effective, fully functioning American left.

If it is fear and loathing of George W. Bush that made that happen, so be it. The modern Republican Party will rue the day they pushed us to our limit. Their hubristic dreams of a permanent majority are dead. We are going to crush them with our numbers.




digby 11/01/2004 08:46:00 AM |

 
Here's Johnnie!

Reason number 5,769,438 not to vote for George W. Bush:

They have already used the Justice Department in the pre-election legal challenges for partisan purposes.

CINCINNATI — As two federal judges in Ohio prepared to rule on lawsuits contending that the state's procedure for challenging an individual's right to vote is unconstitutional, the Justice Department weighed in with an unusual letter brief supporting the statute.

Assistant Atty. Gen. R. Alexander Acosta sent a brief during the weekend to U.S. District Judge Susan J. Dlott, who held a rare Sunday night hearing in one of the cases, a lawsuit filed late last week by Donald and Marian Spencer. The Spencers, an elderly African American couple, are longtime civil rights activists in Cincinnati.

The Spencers' lawsuit contends that the Ohio procedure, which was enacted in 1886 and permits individuals to challenge the legitimacy of a voter at the polling place, is a vestige of "Jim Crow" laws and creates the possibility of disenfranchising a voter without due process of law.

[...]

Acosta's letter urged the judge to heed the Help America Vote Act, or HAVA, which was passed in 2002 to help remedy some of the problems in the 2000 presidential election. In particular, the letter said HAVA permitted a voter whose "eligibility to vote is called into question" to cast a provisional ballot.

"We bring this provision to the court's attention because HAVA's provisional ballot requirement is relevant to the balance between ballot access and ballot integrity," Acosta wrote.

"Challenge statutes, such as those at issue in Ohio, are part of this balance," he added. "They are intended to allow citizens and election officials, who have information pertinent to the crucial determination of whether an individual possesses all of the necessary qualifiers to being able to vote, to place that information before the officials charged with making such determinations."

Acosta's letter also stated that "nothing" in the Voting Rights Act barred challenge statutes. Consequently, Acosta concluded, "a challenge statute permitting objections based on United States citizenship, residency, precinct residency, and legal voting age like those at issue here are not subject" to a challenge based on the language of the law alone, because those criteria are "not tied to race."

Alphonse A. Gerhardstein, a veteran civil rights lawyer who represents the plaintiffs in the Cincinnati case, said he thought "the letter was highly irregular."

"The Justice Department is not a party to the case. They have not filed a motion to intervene in the case or filed an amicus brief," Gerhardstein said.

"They volunteered information that goes beyond any federal interest. It's startling to say that challengers can bring information to [the official] poll watchers. That presumes they will bring in outside information. If you are a poll watcher, how are you going to evaluate that information on the spot?" Gerhardstein wondered.

Nice. John Ashcroft's Justice Department inappropriately injects itself into a case on the side of the Republican Party.

They don't even slightly care about appearances anymore. Here's the good news:

A federal judge issued an order about 1:30 a.m. today barring political party challengers from polling places throughout Ohio during Tuesday's election.

U.S. District Judge Susan Dlott found that the application of Ohio's statute allowing challengers at polling places is unconstitutional. She said the presence of challengers inexperienced in the electoral process questioning voters about their eligibility would impede voting.

What you and I call common sense, the Republicans are calling a ruling by an "activist liberal judge." Fuck 'em.




digby 11/01/2004 07:54:00 AM |

Sunday, October 31, 2004

 
Loose Lips

From Salon.com:

Secretary of State Colin Powell has privately confided to friends in recent weeks that the Iraqi insurgents are winning the war, according to Newsweek. The insurgents have succeeded in infiltrating Iraqi forces "from top to bottom," a senior Iraqi official tells Newsweek in tomorrow’s issue of the magazine, "from decision making to the lower levels."

This is a particularly troubling development for the U.S. military, as it prepares to launch an all-out assault on the insurgent strongholds of Fallujah and Ramadi, since U.S. Marines were counting on the newly trained Iraqi forces to assist in the assault. Newsweek reports that "American military trainers have been frantically trying to assemble sufficient Iraqi troops" to fight alongside them and that they are "praying that the soldiers perform better than last April, when two battalions of poorly trained Iraqi Army soldiers refused to fight."

If the Fallujah offensive fails, Newsweek grimly predicts, "then the American president will find himself in a deepening quagmire on Inauguration Day."

It's too late for Powell to redeem his reputation and it's pathetic to watch him try. But, he's probably right. When insurgents and terrorists are executing Iraqi soldiers fifty at a time it's hard to expect the army to be loyal to an occupying force. I'll be very surprised if they are able to maintain even a slightly cohesive force.




digby 10/31/2004 10:01:00 AM |

 
Baby It's Cold Outside

For those of you who found my post from yesterday about Bush's failure to understand the terrorist threat interesting, check out the transcript of the BBC show The Power Of Nightmares over on Silt:

In the past, politicians promised to create a better world. They had different ways of achieving this. But their power and authority came from the optimistic visions they offered to their people. Those dreams failed. And today, people have lost faith in ideologies. Increasingly, politicians are seen simply as managers of public life. But now, they have discovered a new role that restores their power and authority. Instead of delivering dreams, politicians now promise to protect us from nightmares. They say that they will rescue us from dreadful dangers that we cannot see and do not understand. And the greatest danger of all is international terrorism. A powerful and sinister network, with sleeper cells in countries across the world. A threat that needs to be fought via a war on terror. But much of this threat is a fantasy, which has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians. It’s a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned through governments around the world, the security services, and the international media.

This is a series of films about how and why that fantasy was created, and who it benefits. At the heart of the story are two groups: the American neoconservatives, and the radical Islamists. Both were idealists who were born out of the failure of the liberal dream to build a better world. And both had a very similar explanation for what caused that failure. These two groups have changed the world, but not in the way that either intended. Together, they created today’s nightmare vision of a secret, organized evil that threatens the world. A fantasy that politicians then found restored their power and authority in a disillusioned age. And those with the darkest fears became the most powerful.

Wow.




digby 10/31/2004 09:33:00 AM |

 
Ground Game The Day After

At a prayer meeting here Wednesday night, Mr. Kulp led a dozen parishioners in thinly veiled prayers for President Bush's re-election. He prayed that God might do "whatever it takes on Election Day," including keeping some voters away while "bringing certain people to the polls."

The Lord helps those who help themselves, doesn't he?

An Observer investigation in the United States has uncovered widespread allegations of electoral abuse, many of them going uninvestigated despite complaints of what would appear to be criminal attempts to manipulate voter lists.

[...]

Although allegations of misconduct have been levelled at both parties recently, the majority of complaints that have been identified in The Observer' s investigation involved claims against local Republicans.

The claims, made by the BBC's Newsnight, follow alleged attempts by Republicans to illegally suppress the votes in key states. Republican spokesmen deny these allegations.

Check out eripost's Vote Watch 2004 for dozens and dozens of stories that show the pattern all over the battleground states. There has been a campaign to send election literature to people's homes and if it is returned it is used as a reason to remove the person from the rolls. In at least one case, the literature was consciously returned by Democrats in protest and in others it appears that merely failing to retrive an RNC registered letter from the post-office lands a Democrat in the fraudulent voter column.

It is now crystal clear that we are seeing a nationally coordinated vote suppression effort by the GOP. In many cases they have waited until the last possible moment to mount challenges such as trying to get voters removed from the lists for spurious reasons like not having an apartment number listed on their address. Much of this is designed to throw the electoral process into chaos in the days just before the election. Mostly, they are trying to set the stage to make voting so difficult that busy working people will not be able to stand in long tedious lines to vote.

The stories are all very similar. This is obviously coordinated at the national level.

So, ok, what do we do about it? The press is covering it in the local papers. And, if we win decisively, this whole thing may be moot.

However, if this election is as close as 2000 and legal challenges become necessary, we are going to have to be prepared with a coordinated media response. You can bet they've already got theirs planned out. And they have a problem, just like they had in 2000:

Baker spoke to the press loudly and often, and his message was Bush had won on November 7. Any further inspection would result only in "mischief." Privately, however, he knew that at the start he was on shaky political ground. "We're getting killed on "count all the votes," he told his team. "Who the hell could be against that?"

They got around that when Gore was forced to follow Florida law and show cause in specific counties to request a recount. Then they were able to reframe that argument to "he wants to count only some of the votes."

I think that the key for the Democrats is to find legitimate voters ready to go on camera on Wednesday and tell their stories of denial, intimidation, and waiting. I sincerely hope that they have a list of those who've had to defend their voting rights already and that they are prepared to line up all the voters who will be forced to stand in lines for hours because some RNC operative is holding up the line with challenges. And then there are the voters who have been challenged because of ridiculous technicalities. (This college professor is a good start.)

I hope they are prepared to write the same narrative in all the swing states where this coordinated attack occurs and will stick with their charges no matter how many times the other side dredges up Mary Poppins and Mickey Mouse. Indeed, we should point out that neither "Mary" or "Mickey" showed up to vote, since anybody can see that it was a joke, not an attempt at voter fraud.

Hopefully, none of this will be necessary. But, if we find ourselves in legal limbo, the key will be to show over and over again that legitimate voters were illegally denied the right to vote and many, many others had ridiculous roadblocks put in their way as part of a coordinated plan to slow down the voting process in highly populated areas.

Our response must be aggressive and coordinated and ready to go on Wednesday morning. You know the Republicans will be.




digby 10/31/2004 09:11:00 AM |

Saturday, October 30, 2004

 
Poll Dancers

I just heard a world weary journalist ask whether it is reasonable to think that Kerry can win when all the polls show Bush with a slight lead. If anybody seriously believes that, they really need to go have a talk with ace reporter Wolf Blitzer. Via Kos here's Wolfie on the day before the 2000 election:

BLITZER: And now, let's take a look at the latest poll numbers. The new CNN/"USA Today" Gallup Tracking Poll results are being released at this hour. It shows George W. Bush with 48 percent, Al Gore 43 percent, Ralph Nader with 4 percent, Pat Buchanan with 1 percent.

And those numbers are similar to other tracking polls. Take a look: ABC's poll has Bush at 49 percent, Gore at 45 percent; The Washington Post, Bush at 48 percent, Gore at 46 percent; the NBC-Wall Street Journal tracking poll, Bush at 47 percent, Gore 44 percent. And both the CBS and MSNBC-Reuters-Zogby tracking polls have Bush at 46, Gore at 44 percent.

It's clear that when a race is this close you cannot precisely poll the election. The press corpse should understand this but apparently they don't. Either that or they are listening to RNC spin which I'm sure they would never do. Right?




digby 10/30/2004 02:41:00 PM |

 
Bush's Big Endorsement

This is getting ridiculous. The wing-nuts are going crazy with the idea that this tape means that bin Laden wants Bush to lose when it is obvious to any sentient being that the opposite is true.

Look, bin Laden is obviously very well connected to the American zeitgeist. He may be a nihilistic monster but he isn't stupid. His little speech made it clear that he is quite aware of the various rhetorical tentacles in the election and even quoted some of them. He knows that he is a feared and hated figure in America and he knows that anything he says will be taken with a grain of salt.

But, he also knows that the conventional wisdom of the American media is that his mere appearance on the scene accrues to Junior's benefit. There is nary a wingnut or gasbag who hasn't said in the last few months that any kind of terrorist attack would automatically benefit Bush in the election. Only those who are comotose have failed to notice that his approval rating rises at least a couple of points with a heightened terror warning. Bin Laden knows nothing has to blow up. All he has to do is show up.

It is obvious that if bin Laden was trying to influence the election --- and it's hard to see by the timing that he wasn't --- then it is also obvious that his intent is to help elect Crusader Codpiece, the most hated man in the world.

George W. Bush is the single best recruiting tool that Islamic terrorism has ever had. The American media may be too dumb or too insular to know this, but he certainly does.

Don't take my word for it though. Here's a guy with a few years of expertise on the subject under his belt, Richard Clarke. He agrees with me:

AHMED: If president bush is re-elected, it helps osama bin laden. It helps president musharraf, the two enemies in that. It helps both of them. Because it secures musharraf in pakistan it secures osama bin laden, his base. He needs an america that is on the war path against him, to be able to say america's attacking islam, in fact, so he's twisting what is happening from america.

KOPPEL: Do you agree, Richard?

CLARKE: I do. I think it's obvious he's trying to affect the u.S. Election. This is the second audio/visual tape we've received in the last week from al qaeda, addressed to the american people. And he attacked the president in the way that, i think, is designed to get the american people to move to bush's side. He's a smart guy, osama bin laden, and he knows if he attacks bush that will strengthen bush. Why does he want bush as president? Because Bush, as president, gives him the symbol that gets all these people joining al qaeda. Bush is the symbol that has increased recruitment for al qaeda, and has increased money flow for al qaeda. Bush is the symbol for all of the jihadists throughout the muslim world who hate america.

Uncle Osama Wants You, Junior.


Update: Atrios is skeptical that bin Laden's intention can be divined. I'm with Richard Clarke. I think it's clear that he knows Bush is better for the terrorist business. And he's right.




digby 10/30/2004 01:23:00 PM |

 
Bush Is Completely Wrong On Terrorism

There are so many reasons not to elect George W. Bush that it's difficult to catalog them all. From the encroaching authoritarianism of its Justice department to the fiscal madness that has taken us from a record surplus to a record deficit in three short years due to immense tax cuts for the rich. But surely, the single most important reason to fire George W. Bush is his abject failure to properly comprehend the nature of the islamic fundamentalist threat. The re-emergence of Osama bin Laden is a stark reminder of why this is so.

Many people have been writing recently, and some of us quite some time ago, about the fact that the Bush administration, instead of seeing the assymetrical threat of terrorism for what it was, simply applied their cold war tenets of nation state rollback to the new threat. It is an intellectual failure of huge magnitude and it will haunt us for many years to come.

If you look back at the PNAC manifestos of the late 90's that served as the guiding documents of Bush's policy you will see that terrorism per se was not perceived as a threat. Indeed, it was hardly mentioned. Richard Clarke and others have verified that the Bush administration did not take it seriously. But, what is most distressing is that they refused to let go of their erroneous notions of state sponsored terrorism even after 9/11 which led to the mistaken belief that the key to defeating al Qaeda was to overthrow the Taliban, (thus freeing them to go after what they perceived to be a real threat, the totalitarian dictator Saddam Hussein.)

There has been a lot of discussion about the "faith based" nature of this presidency, drawing parallels to unquestioning fundamentalist religion and cults of personality. There are obviously elements of all of this in explaining why the Bush administration has made so many huge strategic errors that were entirely predictable before any action was taken. However, it's more than that. You cannot explain neocon intellectuals like Wolfowitz away with fundamentalist religion and there is no reason to believe that men like Rumsfeld and Cheney are subject to any Bush cult of personality. But, they all have one thing in common that is demostrable throughout their public careers --- their relentless adherence to their beliefs, no matter what the facts may seem to show. Going all the way back to TEAM B and the Committee for the Present Danger, these people have been proven wrong --- proven, mind you --- again and again and yet they maintain their bedrock belief that the threat of totalitarian nations is the singular overwhelming threat to our country and they must be defeated militarily wherever they occur. These people are stuck in a fringe cold war mindset that nothing can shake. 9/11, it seems, did not change anything.

For instance, their beliefs about Iraq sponsored terrorism were not solely fometed by Laurie Mylroie. She neatly piggybacked her theory that Saddam the Stalinist was the root of all mid-east terrorism onto an earlier theory promoted by Claire Sterling which posited that all terrorism was sponsored by the Soviet Union. Her book, The Terror Network from back in 1980 made the case that terrorism could not exist without the support of a state sponsor and that idea has guided the Republican foreign policy establishment even until this day. Just as it is said that Wolfowitz and Feith encouraged everyone in the DOD to read Mylroie's book, William Casey responded to his analysts assertion that there was no Soviet terrorist conspiracy by saying,"Read Claire Sterling's book and forget this mush. I paid $13.95 for this and it told me more than you bastards whom I pay $50,000 a year." This is, then, an old story.

This is why we didn't take out bin Laden. This is why we didn't take out Al-Zarqawi. In the administration's view, they were simple actors on behalf of totalitarian governments. Their idea of draining the swamp was to invade and occupy the source of their funding, which many of them convinced themselves had to be Saddam Hussein. Richard Clarke, in Against All Enemies quotes Wolfowitz as saying: "You give Bin Laden too much credit. He could not do all these things like the 1993 attack on New York, not without a state sponsor. Just because FBI and CIA have failed to find the linkages does not mean they don't exist."

The Bush policy on terrorism is based upon a false premise and nothing that has happened throughout this crisis has led them to reevaluate that premise and change direction. This is what they call "resolute" and "strong." What it is, in fact, is a dangerous delusion born of outmoded cold war thinking that was wrong when it was conceived and remains wrong today.

This is really what this election is about. The administration made the wrong choices on 9/11. That is why bin Laden still runs free, able to make propaganda videos showing him healthy and robust three years after the devastating attacks on the World Trade Center. This is why Al Zarqahi is killing vast numbers of Iraqis and Americans even today. (That this enormous error is seen as George W. Bush's primary strength is such a depressing comment on our media and my countrymen that I can't even contemplate it.)They fit their threat assessment into the mold of anti-communism, fatally misunderstanding the nature of what we are facing. If they are given the chance to continue on this deluded path (and they have never changed course in more than 40 years, no matter what the facts present) then we can expect this situation to hurtle ever more out of control.




digby 10/30/2004 01:03:00 PM |

Friday, October 29, 2004

 
Bring On The Smelling Salts

This is interesting. The State Department Tried to Stop Airing of Bin Laden Tape.

Bush knew about this tape for a while and they obviously were not sure quite how to deal with it. They know that it can break either way for them.

It appears that they have decided on a modified "Mary Cheney" --- shock and outrage that Kerry allegedly politicized the issue, when he actually didn't. They are claiming that he brought up Tora Bora when he was talking to a Wisconsin repoter and that this is a crude and reprehensible act of opportunism. There's only one problem. When he spoke to the Wisconsin reporter he had only been told that a tape existed and had no idea what it said or whether it was even real. It was only after the interview that he was briefed about it, at which point he made his statesmanlike comment.

The Bush campaign is going to try to wrap Kerry in a straightjacket with one of their phony, sanctimonious coordinated fits of the vapors. Kerry is a bad, bad man. They will hide behind their dainty white hankies and shake their heads in sadness at Democratic vulgarity.

Frankly, I think there is so much white noise that nothing is going to penetrate this week-end. I'm having trouble keeping everything straight and I think that most voters at this point are a little bit befuddled and a little bit weary of all of this. If anything, this bin Laden tape just looks like another Bush fuck-up to those who are paying attention and those who aren't probably aren't really computing the relevance either way.

The country has been polarized for four years. This race has been tighter than tight for months and nothing's going to change that in these next few days. It is as it's always been. We have to get our vote out. That's what it's all about.




digby 10/29/2004 08:26:00 PM |

 
From The You Can't Make This Shit Up Files

Raw Story has the story of the Republicans filing a complaint against a radio show for urging voters to defeat David Drier.

The General Counsel to the National Republican Congressional Committee has filed a complaint against a California radio show for advocating the defeat of Republican Rep. David Dreier, saying the show’s advocacy is illegal and goes beyond their first amendment rights.

RushSeanMichealLauraNeiletc., however, are perfectly within their rights in trashing John Kerry and every other Democrat --- and making a tidy profit at it.






digby 10/29/2004 07:34:00 PM |

 
Mediawhorgy

The media narrative is gelling that this bin Laden tape totally benefits Bush. Chris Matthews and the bunch have that glassy eyed, pre-orgasmic, reach-for-the-codpiece look and they are very excited about the prospect of Bush doing another metaphorical landing on the carrier. The security moms are panting with barely leashed desire. My gorge rises with every minute of this.

Chris Jansen quoted Karl Rove saying that John Kerry "trashing" Bush about Tora-Bora made this issue fair game. Jansen inexplicably claimed this means that Bush won't politicize it, but that makes no sense. Indeed, Bush just brought up the Tora Bora issue in Columbus as I write.

Bush just threw down the gauntlet. I say throw it right back in his face.

Bin Laden isn't stupid. He knows who the media will say this tape benefits. Perhaps Americans need to ask themselves why he would help the man he supposedly fears?

Update: Ask and ye shall receive.

Kerry Campaign Response to Bush in Columbus

Washington, DC – Kerry-Edwards spokesperson Phil Singer issued the following statement tonight in response to George Bush’s remarks in Columbus, OH:

“This is a serious issue, and it’s disturbing that the White House seems intent on making it a political issue. The president was briefed on the tape before he delivered one of his most negative and divisive attacks of this campaign.

“America deserves a national security debate on the merits rather, than a president who desperately resorts to distortions, falsehoods and untruths on a regular basis.

“John Kerry was very clear tonight that we will stop at nothing to hunt down and kill the terrorists and that all Americans - Republicans and Democrats - are united in the war on terror. George Bush wasted no time in dividing us again.”

digby 10/29/2004 04:49:00 PM |

 
Dickie Fills The Void

Atrios and Josh are amazed that Danielle Pletka accused Michael Moore of giving aid and comfort to bin Laden with fahrenheit 9/11 (presumably because of the My Pet Goat reference.)

FYI, this is a Dick Morris talking point. I watched him spew it extemporaneously to John Gibson and Gibson even commented that he was surprised that the "operatives" (Racicot and Devine) who appeared previous to Dickie had been so non-committal by comparison. Dickie said they hadn't received their talking points yet.

Pletka came on shortly thereafter evidently after feverishly taking notes in the green room. I agree with Atrios that we should hope these talking points really gain currency. If Morris is behind it, it will guarantee Kerry's win.

Pletka, btw, is one of the leading neocon Iraq "intellectuals" over at AEI. It says a lot, doesn't it?




digby 10/29/2004 03:56:00 PM |

 
PAX Americana

I'm a little bit surprised there hasn't been an outcry about this. It seems that PAX TV is pulling a Sinclair in the swing states this week-end. They are showing a propaganda hit piece "Unfit For Command" starring Scumbag For Truth John O'Neill at five in the afternoon and 11:30 at night on Saturday and Sunday in various battleground markets, particularly Florida:

“Unfit for Command”: hosted by John E. O’Neill

Hosted by Unfit for Command’s best-selling author, John E. O’Neill, this program picks up where the book leaves off and brings to the screen the faces and real stories of the eyewitnesses that served with John Kerry in Viet Nam, and as a result, strongly oppose him.

Far from the “war hero” image of his carefully crafted public campaign, these men consider him a fraud, a liar, and a coward in battle. In fact, most Americans do not know that three of John Kerry’s fellow officers asked him to leave Viet Nam because they considered him a liability.

Never before has a former member of the Armed Forces been so adamantly opposed by his fellow sailors and officers – Why?

As you probably know, PAX is that nice wholesome Christian network (partly owned by GE/NBC) that set out to counter the hedonistic, immoral mainstream media:

"Sure there are skeptics out of Hollywood and the TV industry: no sex, no violence, no ratings," Paxson says. "But I have no doubt that mainstream media will recognize that talking about God is a good thing and can make you money."

And allowing lying scumbags to spew unrebutted character assassination on your network the week-end before an election is sending you straight to hell, "Bud."

It's too late to preempt this, but it sure wouldn't hurt to make these guys pay after the fact. This is another example of a wingnut media mogul using public airwaves to help the Republican party. We are very foolish to let this pass in any instance. They will only take it as encouragement.

Republicans very smartly fight every single time, even if they know they are going to lose. They do it to make us have to fight for everything too. We need to do some of that. These media guys especially have to be schooled hard or by the time anybody really notices, it will be too late.

Update: FYI, with the exception of Pennsylvania, these are all broadcast stations. This isn't cable.


digby 10/29/2004 02:54:00 PM |

 
Morris's Law

Dick Morris just told John Gibson that bin Laden can't actually explode a bomb so he's reduced to sending a tape. This is because Junior has made America safe.

And bin Laden was much harder on Bush than Kerry which means that he favors Kerry. He used the My Pet Goat anecdote which proves that the far left is helping terrorists. Therefore, bin Laden just won the election for Bush.

Morris' Law states that whatever he says means the opposite is surely true. Therefore, the tape is a scathing indictment of Bush and will help Kerry.




digby 10/29/2004 02:32:00 PM |

 
We've Heard From Him Now

Q (March 13, 2002): Mr. President, in your speeches now you rarely talk or mention Osama bin Laden. Why is that? . . .

Bush: So I don't know where he is. You know, I just don't spend that much time on him , Kelly, to be honest with you. . . .

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

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

Maybe if he'd been a little bit more concerned about bin Laden and a little less obsessed with "takin' out" Saddam, he might not be threatening us still today.

Is there any better reason to fire this asshole than this?




digby 10/29/2004 01:32:00 PM |

 
Codpiece Dysfunction

As Bush introduced the mother of a New York Port Authority police officer killed at the World Trade Center, a machine that was to blast confetti into the air at the end of the event went off prematurely with a loud, startling bang.


Bush flinched and paused, then resumed his speech as the confetti fell around him.


Bush had planned to campaign here with Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling, a World Series hero with Kerry's hometown team. Schilling's presence was canceled at the last minute for what was described as an ankle problem.

Looking like a Loserman more and more each day.


digby 10/29/2004 01:15:00 PM |

 
Busted

again

Salon.com interviews a physicist who is an expert on imaging. It's not good news for the Codpiece.

George W. Bush tried to laugh off the bulge. "I don't know what that is," he said on "Good Morning America" on Wednesday, referring to the infamous protrusion beneath his jacket during the presidential debates. "I'm embarrassed to say it's a poorly tailored shirt."

Dr. Robert M. Nelson, however, was not laughing. He knew the president was not telling the truth. And Nelson is neither conspiracy theorist nor midnight blogger. He's a senior research scientist for NASA and for Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and an international authority on image analysis. Currently he's engrossed in analyzing digital photos of Saturn's moon Titan, determining its shape, whether it contains craters or canyons.

For the past week, while at home, using his own computers, and off the clock at Caltech and NASA, Nelson has been analyzing images of the president's back during the debates. A professional physicist and photo analyst for more than 30 years, he speaks earnestly and thoughtfully about his subject. "I am willing to stake my scientific reputation to the statement that Bush was wearing something under his jacket during the debate," he says. "This is not about a bad suit. And there's no way the bulge can be described as a wrinkled shirt."

digby 10/29/2004 11:47:00 AM |

 
Being A Republican Means Never Having To Say You're Sorry

Atrios is mighty angry about this story and so should we all be. As I read it I got more and more enraged and I had toask myself why it was. After all, we've been hearing about this nationwide scheme to suppress the vote through dirty tricks and intimidation for the last month. What is it about this particular story that is so inflammatory?

After taking a few deep breaths I think I have figured it out. It's that the Republican Party's corruption has extended far into the grassroots. It's not longer just the Nixonian Roger Stones or the Rovian Nathan Sproul's, it's average, everyday, pillars of the community who have joined in doing the sickening dirty work of a party that cannot win a majority legitimately. These weren't operative sharpies. They were older Republicans willing to do the bidding of their corrupt party and they didn't seem to care even when confronted with proof that their scheme was entirely unethical.

Of course, this little drama was really republican vs republican. There were decent republicans on the board who were disgusted by this underhanded plot and they did the right thing. But, they were few and far between. The state GOP was only sorry that they hadn't sent in better lawyers to defend the miscreants.

I suppose that I thought that most average Republican voters were honest citizens with whom I disagree. I've always blamed the leadership for the modern party's Nixonian reliance on dirty tricks and corrupt election practices. Once again I've been proven wrong. The sickness has flowed all the way down to the grassroots.

How long can the decent people like those two on the board hold out against a machine like this? I doubt they will. They will either go over to the dark side or leave the party. When average citizens are willing to be fronts for a dirty tricks operation there is no room left for decency.




digby 10/29/2004 09:48:00 AM |

 
Oh Ahmad!

We should have known:

Al Qaqaa was on a classified list of Iraqi weapons facilities that the CIA provided to Pentagon and military officials before the invasion, said the U.S. intelligence official.

But when the Pentagon and U.S. Central Command produced their own list of sites that a limited number of U.S. "exploitation teams" should search, priority was given to those identified by exiled Iraqi opposition groups, he said. Al Qaqaa wasn't one of them.

All roads lead to Chalabi.


digby 10/29/2004 09:17:00 AM |

Thursday, October 28, 2004

 
Update: Haha. According to Atrios, Fox jumped the gun and aired the video already. And for some bizarre reason the freepers think the scary Halloween terrorist is gay. WTF?


Halloween Terror

How likely is it do you suppose, that FOX will run with the American Al Qaeda boogeyman tape before the week-end is out?

Ross and other ABC staffers say they believe that a Bush administration official leaked the story to Internet gossip Matt Drudge as a way of pressuring the network into airing the tape, which would heighten concerns about terrorism in the final week of the president's reelection campaign. They note that whoever gave the information to Drudge had a transcript of the tape.

[...]

The debate may not be over. The officials say a source with access to the tape, apparently impatient with ABC, has offered it to another broadcast news organization, which has called the government for guidance.

Drudge said yesterday that a political motivation behind the leak was "possible," but put the onus on ABC. "They haven't authenticated previous al Qaeda tapes before airing them," he said. "Why are they waiting to authenticate this? It's election week."

But Isham noted that previous videotapes featured Osama bin Laden or other al Qaeda leaders who could be verified by sight.

"It's either a well-done hoax or a tremendous news story," Ross said. "We're not going to get stampeded."

I love the fact that Drudge is lecturing the network on journalistic practices.

And, there's only one network that would "call the government for guidance."

I'm thinking Sunday morning.




digby 10/28/2004 04:23:00 PM |

 
Are They All Corporate Lawyers?

I've mentioned this before, but I am still hungering for an explanation. Why is it that when Bush utters the words "tort reform" and "frivolous lawsuits" that the crowd reacts with an orgasmic roar that eclipses even the speaking in tongues they do over "tax cuts." I'm assuming that this is just some kind of reflexive conditioning, but it consistently seems to get the biggest responses at Bush's rallies.

Can someone explain to me why average citizens surge to their feet screaming and frothing at the mouth at the words "tort reform?" Is this really a code word for some underground fascist movement? It kind of freaks me out.






digby 10/28/2004 03:59:00 PM |

 
Interplanetary Reality

According to Carl Cameron, Kerry is on the run because the Al qaqaa story is hurting him badly. They even found a picture of a truck in the desert that is supposed to prove something, I'm not sure what.

But, back here on planet Earth, MYDD has the full compendium of Bush fuck-ups and nasty surprises --- from just this week:

• The doctored photo in the Bush ad is getting press, and will probably get more.

  
  

• Republicans are on the defensive when it comes to explosion gate.

  
  

• Eminem's "Mosh" is the hottest video on MTV.

  
  

• FBI opens an investigation into Haliburton contracts.

  
  

• Guliani and others blame troops for failures in Iraq.

  
  

• The Big Dog rises to fight, draws largest campaign crowd in decades.

  
  

• Civilian death toll in Iraq is revealed to be over 100,000.

  
  

• Endorsements up the yin-yang, bucking all historical patterns.

  
  

• Bush blunders again and again and again.

  
  

• Red Sox win World Series (OK, I don't know if this one counts)

It counts.

In other news, FOX is flogging a story about preparation for a "major offensive" in Fallujah. I'm sure the boys are happy to give up their lives (and the lives of many Iraqis) to help their Codpiece in Chief change the story line.








digby 10/28/2004 03:14:00 PM |

 
Oh Sure, Now When It's Safe To Be Shrill

It seems that my favorite bucket of lukewarm spit has finally received the memo saying that supporting Commander Codpiece's manly manliness is no longer de riguer in DC salons. How refreshing.

Check out this post by Yglesias to see what a long strange trip it's been.




digby 10/28/2004 02:28:00 PM |

 
Playing The Game Of Risk

Via Atrios I see that Wes Clark is a little bit miffed with everybody's favorite GOPHo, Rudy Giuliani:

For President Bush to send Rudolph Giuliani out on television to say that the 'actual responsibility' for the failure to secure explosives lies with the troops is insulting and cowardly.

The President approved the mission and the priorities. Civilian leaders tell military leaders what to do. The military follows those orders and gets the job done. This was a failure of civilian leadership, first in not telling the troops to secure explosives and other dangerous materials, and second for not providing sufficient troops and sufficient equipment for troops to do the job.

President Bush sent our troops to war without sufficient body armor, without a sound plan and without sufficient forces to accomplish the mission. Our troops are performing a difficult mission with skill, bravery and determination. They deserve a commander in chief who supports them and understands that the buck stops in the Oval Office, not one who gets weak knees and shifts blame for his mistakes.

Dana Bash on CNN just said that the Bush campaign told her that Giuliani may not have used the most "elegant" or "eloquent" terms but he just meant to say that it's not the president fault. That doesn't really pass the smell test since William Kristol on FOX News Live and Laura Ingraham all echoed this reprehensible line: They seem to be implying that this was a call by the officers on the ground and therefore, out of the hands of the civilian leadership.

KRISTOL: ... [President] George [W.] Bush didn't decide, you know, "skip that dump" [the Al Qaqaa military installation, where the missing explosives were supposedly housed]. That was 101st [Airborne Division] or the 3rd ID [Infantry Division], "skip that arms dump." That's not a decision made by the president, that's made on the ground...

AND

STEVE MURPHY (FORMER MANAGER OF REP. DICK GEPHARDT'S (D-MO) PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN): Laura, Laura, John Kerry did not question the troops. John Kerry questioned the leadership of --

INGRAHAM: Oh, really? Who was looking for those weapons, Steve?

MURPHY: He questioned the leadership of George [W.] Bush. George Bush did not send enough soldiers.

[CROSSTALK]

INGRAHAM: Was George Bush on the ground there? The military commanders were on the ground there, Steve.

Man, we've sure come a long way from "the buck stops here." Indeed, we've come a long way from the "responsibility era" that Junior has been hectoring us about for the last four years.

This Al Qaqaa disaster is 100% the fault of the civilian leadership of the Bush administration. One thing that has to be remembered about these early days was the insistence that the army push through to Baghdad at record speed, stopping not even for rest or refueling. Do you remember the embeds hanging on to the back of jeeps and humvees by their fingernails, looking like hell, as they raced through the desert to get to Baghdad (and then found that Baghdad was wide open?)

These lethal explosives are missing because Rumsfeld was using Iraq as an experiment for certain aspects of his Revolution in Military Affairs wet dream. He managed an impressive dash across the desert with a relatively small force but because he was trying to prove a theory rather than deal with a very real situation on the ground, his refusal to commit enough troops to the operation as a whole meant that they could not spare the manpower or the time to secure these weapons dumps.

I wrote about this crazy stuff back in March of 2003, when it was revealed that none other than Newtie Gingrich was advising the Pentagon, and had been doing so for a long time, with some very questionable new-age theories that his soul mate Rumsfeld was more than happy to put into practice. It's not that there aren't some aspects of this RMA that are very useful, it's that like everything else in this administration they let their faith and their ideology overrule reality. Talking about Afghanistan, Newtie told the Hoover institute:

…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.

We now know that this "high tech horseback" plan was the one that let bin Laden escape. And it unfortunately informed the choices that were made in Iraq. The International Herald Tribune wrote this in the fall of 2002 about the Iraq invasion:

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 was the mind-set that sent the troops barreling across the desert. It was a macho show of hi-tech modern strength designed to "send a message" not actually accomplish the task of securing the nation of Iraq. Relying on rose colored cakewalks, the civilian policy makers simply didn't look any further than the images they wanted to see --- the statue falling, Bush in his flyboy costume. And, that is actually the crux of Gingrich and Rumsfeld's "third wave information warfare" scheme --- you don't have to actually fight wars, you just have to be seen to be winning them.

Clearly, this little experiment in faith-based warfare has been a disaster. The looting of Al Qaqaa is just the most recent example of reality raising its ugly head and biting these starry eyed, ivory tower neocons right in the ass.

And, let's not forget that not one single member of that civilian leadership has been called to account for the disaster in Iraq. Since the boss won't do his job, the only thing Americans can do is fire the boss.


Great minds and all that update: I see that Josh marshall makes much the same point here. And, Yglesias has some other thoughts along this line as well.

It's always interesting trying to unravel the reasoning behind Bush's decisions. Every single time you find that it is opaque and unknowable because there are so many compting and complimentary philosophies that led to the same catastrophic result. Historians are going to have a field day with this administration.




digby 10/28/2004 01:27:00 PM |

 
Time Machine

I had a very spirited conversation this morning in which I had to convince a number of Kerry supporters that polls this close don't mean shit. They were feeling frustrated that the horserace consistently shows Bush slightly ahead and their gut says that it must mean he is going to win. I wish I had had the following post from DonkeyRising handy, which is pointed at those same nervous Democrats. I'm printing it out for future reference:

It's time to revisit the thrilling polls of yesteryear to get a sense of just how much the polls in 2000 tended to overestimate Bush's strength and underestimate Gore's. I believe, for reasons I have discussed at length, the polls are likely overestimating Bush's strength this year as well. But this year, Kerry is doing better in the polls than Gore did at the equivalent point in the 2000 race. Therefore, if current polls are overestimating Bush's strength by the same amount as in 2000, Kerry should wind up doing better than Gore on election day--and Gore won the popular vote by half a point. And that's not even factoring in the likelihood that, with Bush as the incumbent, Kerry will receive the bulk of undecided voters' support on election day.

So let's take that stroll down memory lane.

Start with this nugget from Alan Abramowitz:

During the final week of the 2000 campaign, 43 national polls were released, including multiple releases by several polling organizations such as Gallup. George Bush led in 39 polls, Al Gore in 2. Bush's average lead in the polls was 3.6 percent. Something to keep in mind when people complain that so far (two days) in this final week Kerry has "only" had small leads in the DCorps poll, the Harris Poll and the WP/ABC tracking poll twice (LVs and RVs)!

And here are some readings from specific 2000 polls:

1. The ABC tracking poll averaged a 4 point Bush lead in the last week and its final poll had a 3 point Bush lead.

2. Bloomberg News final poll (October 29) had a 3 point Bush lead.

3. Final Time poll (October 26) had a 6 point Bush lead.

4. Gallup's tracking poll had Bush ahead by an average of 4 points in the final week and by 2 points in its final poll.

5. Marist College's final poll (November 2) gave Bush a 5 point lead.

6. Final NBC/WSJ poll (November 5) had Bush up by 3 and their mid-October poll had him up by 6.

7. Final Newsweek poll (November 2) had Bush up by 2 and their October 27 poll had him up by 8.

8. Final Pew Research poll had Bush up by 2.

9. A November 4 CBS/NYT poll had Bush up by 5 (though the final CBS poll was dead-on, with a 1 point Gore lead).

10. Final ICR poll had Bush up by 2.

11. Voter.com Battleground survey (this year called GWU Battleground) averaged an 8 point Bush lead in the final week and its final poll gave Bush a 5 point lead.

12. TIPP tracking poll gave Bush a average 6 point lead in the final week and a final poll lead of 2 points.

13. Prior to its well-known final reading of a 2 point Gore lead, Zogby's tracking poll gave Bush an average 3 point lead in the final week.

14. Final Hotline poll (November 5) gave Bush a 3 point lead.

If anyone thinks that Democrats are less enthusiastic and motivated than they were in 2000, they are kidding themselves. As 2000 showed, polling is an imprecise science. When they're this close you just put your head down and get out the vote.




digby 10/28/2004 11:28:00 AM |

 
No Surrender

I don't know how many of you have ABC News Now, but if you do, tune it in. They are showing the entire Kerry rally in Madison. Springsteen is singing No Surrender as we speak. Kerry's about to come on. It's one of those rare hair on the back of your neck political moments.

It's happening.




digby 10/28/2004 11:04:00 AM |

 
Spin On This

I just saw Marc Racicot babble like a two year old on ABC News Now when confronted with Rudy Giuliani's footage blaming the troops for the looting of munitions on Good Morning America. They really need to work on those talking points. This didn't look good.

Sam Donaldson wryly noted that nobody is really blaming the troops. As it was in Vietnam, the blame lies with the policy makers. hah.




digby 10/28/2004 10:37:00 AM |

 
Who's Your Daddy

Finally we have an explanation for Dick Morris.

On an isolated Indonesian island, scientists have discovered skeletons of a previously unknown human species — tiny, Hobbit-sized figures who lived among dwarf elephants and giant lizards as recently as 12,000 years ago.

digby 10/28/2004 08:34:00 AM |

Wednesday, October 27, 2004

 
The Mojo

There must be something in the water this year in Beantown. The Yankee machine had the Sox down and they battled their way back and back and back to get into the series. And then they won with authority, dammit!

That righteous Boston mojo took them all the way and it's going to take John Kerry right through next Tuesday. And he's going to win with the same decisiveness that the Red Sox won the series. No bullshit and no question about who won.

And a certain faux Texan is going to get a chance to run for the office he always wanted --- baseball commissioner.




digby 10/27/2004 08:51:00 PM |

 
I'm Joining The Republic Party

With an appeal like this, who can resist?

Listen, before I want to say something, I'm traveling with a guest and a friend who represents thousands of people all across this country who are affiliated with the Democrat Party.

In fact, I believe my opponent is running away from some of the great traditions of the Democrat Party.

The Democrat Party has also a great tradition of defending the defenseless.

If you're a Democrat, and your dreams and goals are not found in the far left wing of the Democrat Party, I'd be honored to have your vote.

Those Republics sure know how to reach across the aisle.




digby 10/27/2004 05:06:00 PM |

 
Because One Must

Today, I would like to join my online brethren over at Slate in endorsing John Kerry, as distasteful as that particular chore is. Sadly, one doesn't have much choice considering what we have to deal with. I only wish that the nominees could be more like, well... me. But that would be too much to ask so I will hold my aristocratic nose and vote for the lesser of two losers. Again.

You see, I am a beltway "independent" which allows me to criticize everyone and take responsibility for nothing at all. I would never actually vote for a Republican mind you --- how could I align myself with all that tacky Nascar and gay bashing business? But, neither can I associate myself with the Democratic party what with its stubborn insistence on not being exactly like me in every way.

As a beltway independent, then, I can safely vote against the Republicans without ever having to compromise even one of my pet issues in order that anything actually gets accomplished. And, there's no need to sully my clean hands with those tawdry fights against the opposition. Whatever I don't like I blame on Democratic weakness and perfidy, thereby proving to the Republicans that I am independent enough to agree with them on a least that one issue if nothing else.

John Kerry, sadly, does certain things with which I disagree and I find that unacceptable in a politician. And even worse, instead of being as dazzlingly exciting as say...me, he is serious and plodding as are so many of these lowly politicians who cater to the unwashed hoi polloi. Frankly, it's just a bit stomach churning to see a brahmin behaving as if he cares about what they want and need when we know that he couldn't possibly.

Still, what choice to we really have? George W. Bush has made a hash out everything so even someone uninspiring and thick will just have to do.

Vote for John Kerry. He's slightly better than that cretin George W. Bush but not nearly as perfect as I am.




digby 10/27/2004 02:15:00 PM |

 
FYI: Blogger is very bloggered so posting is by the grace of the goddess

Trick Or Treat

FAUX News is having a baby over Drudge's screaming headline:

ABCNEWS HOLDS TERROR WARNING VIDEO

The terrorist claims on tape the next attack will dwarf 9/11... 'The streets will run with blood,' and 'America will mourn in silence'... America has brought this on itself for electing George Bush... ABCNEWS strongly denies holding back from broadcast over political concerns during last days of election...."We have been working 24 hours a day trying to authenticate'... Developing...

Run for your lives!!!

I love this part, though:

The terrorist's face is concealed by a headdress, and he speaks in an American accent, making it difficult to identify the individual.

Golly, I don't know why ABC might be skeptical of such a tape. It's clear that this alleged terrorist is simply a member of the Kerry campaign who's joined al Qaeda.




digby 10/27/2004 02:10:00 PM |

Tuesday, October 26, 2004

 
Setting Up The Fall

James Wolcott documents some more FAUX news atrocities. "Liberal bias" definitely made it into Moody's memo this morning since virtually every anchor has opined on it today. This is definitely a preview of the new and improved wingnut whine and pout. It's almost sweetly nostalgic, like a gauzy trip back ten or twelve years in time. I remember it well...

As Wolcott says:

I'm not saying Fox News is anticipating a Bush loss, only that they seem to be laying the ground work for the blame game should he cough it up on November 2nd. They are taking the first baby steps to denying the legitimacy of a Kerry win, preparing the first batch of sour grapes.

It's all of a piece with the preemptive screeching about voter fraud and Democratic dirty tricks. They are cataloging reasons to explain why the asterisk couldn't pull it off. They will whine and fret and stomp their tiny little feet in a frenzy, earnestly claiming that Kerry didn't legitimately win. And they will do it without even the slightest trace of irony.

Try to imagine how little I care.





digby 10/26/2004 06:43:00 PM |

 
Stench Of Panic

Amy Sullivan at The Washington Monthly post a very disconcerting piece about the Junta making a recess appointment to the Supreme Court.

Just when you thought the various post-election legal nightmare scenarios couldn't get worse. U.S. News & World Report is emailing around some reporting that indicates the Bush White House may be considering a recess appointment (requiring no Senate approval, remember) to replace Chief Justice Rehnquist if he steps down for health reasons:

"Even though the U.S. Supreme Court has said Chief Justice William Rehnquist will return to the bench following cancer surgery, administration officials are quietly considering candidates to replace him and even the possibility of making a recess appointment. The officials said that they do not want to talk about the process publicly in the last week of the presidential campaign. However, one insider said that the West Wing is considering what would happen if the judge left the bench soon and if a close election next Tuesday meant an evenly split 4-4 court was to decide the winner. Such a situation would likely mean that a lower court's ruling on an outcome would be final and officials are worried that it would go against the President."

I have serious doubts that they could get away with this, but it doesn't surprise me that they would consider it. They circumvent the letter of the law at every opportunity. To think they would observe the spirit of the law and our democratic system is laughable.




digby 10/26/2004 05:47:00 PM |

 
Family Fetish

Dear gawd. Via Media Matters I see that Dick Morris's wife is making a pathetic living hanging on to Lil' Dickie's coattails:

McGANN: People have heart surgery all the time. They don't have to go into hiding. He has been in hiding for the last six weeks.

And I think that it's part of their plan to build up and hype him -- at the end of the election, and for the opening of his [presidential] library. So, we have once again for -- I don't know what time, the 10th, 15th, 20th time -- the new Bill Clinton. And I think it's also what Dick [Morris] likes to call his ADD [attention deficit disorder] problem. That when he doesn't get attention he's disordered. And on the one hand, he I don't think really wants to help the Kerry campaign because if Kerry wins, Hillary has less of a shot, if any, at ever running for president and becoming president. [...] You know, there was no reason for him to be holed up. My uncle had the same operation two weeks before he did. And he [McGann's uncle] called me yesterday as he and his wife were driving to Florida. And he's 71 years old. People recover from this surgery and they can do other things. You don't have to just sit in a chair. They have created this. This is -- you know -- just like the sensation he created when he walked into the [Democratic National] Convention, with the camera showing him in 2000. They have to do something -- he has to do something dramatic or he's not happy.

Jayzuz. A man spends six weeks recovering from quadruple bypass surgery and he's "in hiding." (There seems to be a lot of speculation about all this on the wingnutladies lunch bunch circuit because I heard Mrs. Alan Greenspan say that there was word that Clinton's recovery wasn't going well.)

The next time some GOP harpy brings up the fact that Hillary is a big lesbian or a self hating feminist because she didn't drop Bill like a hot potato after he got a few furtive blow jobs, ask them how Eileen McCann can respect herself after having her dachshound-like husband splashed all over The Star as a connoisseur of prostitute toe-sucking.

From Howie Kurtz in 1998:

"He is deeply angry and resentful of the Clintons," says one Clinton supporter who knows Morris well. "He feels they basically walked away from him at a time he was in need and in trouble." Yet friends say Morris retains a psychological attachment to Clinton – a need to be needed by him – while reserving his strongest fury for Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Two and a half years ago, Morris was a national punch line. While serving as chief strategist for Clinton's 1996 campaign, Morris was fired after the Star tabloid revealed his longtime relationship with prostitute Sherry Rowlands. His marriage to attorney Eileen McGann broke up, and his $2.5 million book on policy-making in the White House was a commercial flop.

But the suddenly famous Morris refused to go into hiding. Determined to launch a punditry career, he explored different venues – trying out for a New York radio show, for example – before landing high-profile gigs with Rupert Murdoch's Fox TV network and Post newspaper. Now Morris is back with his wife – the most important thing in his life, he says – and gaining new prominence as an expert on Clinton and sex.

Eileen apparently took the (pedi) cure and voted with her feet.

They sure have some kinky family values on FAUX News --- you'd think the falafels and foot fetishes alone would make it distinctly spicy for the Gary Bauer set. Has anybody asked the fundies about this...uh...inconsistency?




digby 10/26/2004 04:21:00 PM |

 
Dancing As fast As They Can

On FAUX News, Hume just tried to make the argument that the missing explosives proves that Saddam had WMD. Kondrake and Liasson politely point out that while this is undoubtedly true, these weapons actually don't fit the traditional definition of WMD. Hume appears to roll his eyes derisively. Krauthamer adds that it's all the IAEA's fault for not destroying the stuff as they were required to do in 1991. (They weren't.)

Everyone agrees that it's all a dirty trick by the New York Times, and they should have had "all the facts" before they put this on the front page. If only they'd sourced it to Ahmad Chalabi as they usually do, the Beltway Boyz would have had no room to complain.

Update: I missed the first part of the broadcast so I didn't know what had made the panel look so sour and unhappy:

Fox News' "Special Report" with Brit Hume

Brit Hume: As you saw earlier, when the 101st airborne division stopped overnight at that weapons facility south of Baghdad, there was an NBC news embedded reporting team with them, including correspondent Dana Lewis, who is now with fox news in Moscow, where he joins me now. Dana, tell me what happened. Now, this was the day after Baghdad had fallen. You were with the 101st. You were making your way up the spine of Iraq toward Baghdad. How did you come to stop there, and what happened?

Dana Lewis: Well, Britt, I mean, you know, put it into context of what was going on at that moment. The fighting wasn't over. There was chaos everywhere on the roads, and we were with the 101st as it was pushing north to take the southern suburbs of Baghdad. And as we were driving up the road I can remember seeing this amazing wall that just seemed to go on forever. This thing was about 10 feet tall and it went on for at least a mile or two. I've never seen such a big compound in Iraq since I've been there for two years now. It was a tremendous compound. The 101st was ordered to go into the compound and spend the night there. They were not ordered to search that compound there. They simply used it as a pit stop so that they could then continue their mission on to Baghdad. In fact, I can tell you I was with the colonel of the strike brigade, the second brigade, Colonel Joe Anderson. He was frustrated they had to spend the night there because they wanted to get on to their mission in Baghdad.

BH: So you got inside this facility. I suppose some members of the unit might have heard of the place. What did you see when you got in there?

DL: Sure, they may have had information on what may have been in there, because they generally had that kind of information. It was a tremendously large facility. You got in and saw all sorts of bunkers inside. And, Britt, because we spent 24 hours there, I had the chance to walk that facility and I took it. It was a long walk as we went from bunker to bunker with me and my camera man. Most of the bunkers were locked at that point. You could not get inside. Some of them, though, appeared to have been hit by air strikes and we were told by some of the soldiers on the ground that they had been hit by bombs. So some of the concrete was split open and you could see munitions in a few of the bunkers. And then at one end of the facility I can remember seeing hangars full of rockets. I've never seen so many rockets in one place. It looked like that facility had also been bombed from the air and most of those rockets were bent out of shape and inoperable.

BH: Right. Now, we have seen pictures of these seals that the international atomic energy agency and the weapons inspectors used to
identify and to close off the bunkers where some of these heavy explosives were believed to have been kept. Did you see any of those seals on any of the facilities as you were walking through there?

DL: I've had those seals described to me, and I can tell you that as we went from the bunkers, certainly there were wires and there were locks. But I don't recall ever seeing an IAEA stamp on any of them. It doesn't mean that there weren't any of them.

BH: I got you. Now, in addition to -- you saw evidence of bombing, obviously. Was there any sign that this facility had been looted that
you could see?

DL: I would say at that point, no, Brit. I mean, as we went north, you could certainly see looting in Baghdad. And I know what looting looks like. Hundreds of kids and hundreds of people everywhere. This facility was basically abandoned at that point. There were lots of Russian tanks that had abandoned on the road around it. But it looked like it had been well guarded right up until the point that the army got in there. But I don't know what happened between the point that the Iraqi army left that facility and then the US Army came in there. There would have been a gap. And who knows what would have gone on in there? But when I was there, we didn't see any looting. And that's not to say there couldn't have been looting after we left, either.


BH: Right. Well, after you left, describe if you can - I mean obviously, we're talking about a fairly large amount of explosives. The IAEA says it was 380 tons, that would be, we estimate, about 38 truckloads. That's quite a lot. Was the situation that you witnessed around the facility such that it would have been easy for somebody to spirit 38 tons of explosives, or 38 tons of anything else out there, undetected by US Forces in the area?

DL: I think it would have been pretty tough. I mean, the roads for the most part were closed down. Not very many people were driving those roads, because there was still some shooting going on and people were worried about getting caught in the crossfire. It would have been hard to move trucks in there right under the army's nose. But at the same time certainly there were vehicles moving on the roads as we got closer to Baghdad. But at that moment I certainly didn't see any lines of trucks heading for that facility. And remember, who would have been ordering those trucks down there? For all intents and purposes, the regime had fled.

BH: So it would have taken an operation of some size, if the stuff was still there, to get it out of there. And you didn't see, at least any
indications at the time you were there, that such a thing could easily have been done.

DL: We didn't see any sign of that when we were there, no.

BH: Dana Lewis, glad to have you. Thanks very much for staying up late in Moscow to be with me. Thank you very much.

Oooops.

Here's the video






digby 10/26/2004 04:04:00 PM |

 
Marshalling The Youth Vote

Kevin at Catch has all the info on Eminem's new video (and a bunch of links if you want to see it.) It would appear that Marshall has pulled no punches and it also appears that MTV is airing it this afternoon. That in itself is amazing.

From Salon's review:

...the just-released video for his new anti-Bush song "Mosh," makes "Fahrenheit 9/11" look like a GOP campaign spot, and it will almost certainly reach an audience that wouldn't think of shelling out for a documentary.

The beautifully animated video, which is directed by Ian Inaba, opens with a classroom. At the front is a man in a blue suit, his face buried in an upside down children's book that says "My Pet," with a picture of a bush. Just as the man is revealed to be Eminem, the scene changes, and we see the singer taping up newspaper stories to a wall -- "Sick Wounded Troops Held in Squalor," says one. "Civil Liberties at Stake," says another. "Bush Knew," says a third.

In five minutes, Eminem manages a furious indictment of the administration that will likely resonate among many troops in Iraq as well as disaffected kids here at home. In one scene, a smiling soldier returns home from Baghdad, only to be handed a notice announcing that he has to go back. As Eminem sings, "fuck Bush," the soldier mouths the words.

Then we see a woman walking home in the rain, carrying groceries and an envelope. Inside is an eviction notice. As she reads it, we hear Eminem saying, "Maybe this is God just saying we're responsible for this monster, this coward that we have empowered." The woman looks at her TV, where Bush is speaking over a banner that says "Tax Cuts." She looks at her terrified children, then back at the screen, which says, "Breaking News…Terror Alert."

It all ends amazingly earnestly, with Eminem leading a black-clad army to the voting booth. Once again, Bush proves he really does have wonder working powers -- by behaving even more callously and irresponsibly than the most outrageous rapper, he's turned music's foremost enfant terrible into a role model of civic engagement.

I don't know how much impact something like this has, but it's a big mistake to underestimate the pull of popular culture. Eminem is an icon for a large swathe of young disaffected men, some of whom, as the review mentions, are in Iraq getting shot at as we speak.

One of the reasons that we may expect a nice uptick in voters this year, particularly young voters, is the extent to which the election has found its way into the cultural zeitgeist. It's not confined to its usual little corner of the media universe --- it's everywhere. It is culturally significant to people who are usually uninterested (meaning non-fundies) and it has insinuated itself into the media in such a way as to take on Big Event proportions.

We've had high hopes before in this regard and were sorely disappointed. 1972 is a compelling example. However, the media did not have the kind of pervasive influence it now has and people were not connected the way they are now. It was a political time, to be sure, but the strongest energy among young people went to cultural and lifestyle revolution. Politics was as much a matter of style as substance. Indeed, one of the stongest strains in American youth culture encouraged people to drop out entirely. There is nothing like that happening now.

The current culture war is not generational, it's mostly urban vs rural. And popular culture is omnipresent and dominating --- the internet bringing an entirely unprecedented new wrinkle. The conditions for a high turnout among people who don't usually tune in to politics but who've been drawn by the buzz into the conversation has never been higher. This could be the election that merges the general "audience" with the electorate and makes it one.

From the way it looks a week out, we may actually have the culture warriors a little bit on the run for the first time in many years. I may have my problems with Eminem, but I've got to be honest. I consider him to be far less dangerous than the leadership of the modern Republican Party. If he can help get out new voters, I welcome his help.




digby 10/26/2004 03:00:00 PM |

 
A Votre Sante!

Dr. Vino has compiled the all important electoral guide for wine lovers.

Not exactly a surprise --- Kerry wins.

Reading about the politics of wine reminded me of a legendary appearance on Crossfire by Justin Vaisse, during the pathetic "freedom-fries" era:

CARLSON: But just, honestly, just correct the misperception here. This is not simply an effort by the administration to beat up on France. This is coming -- there's a deep wellspring of anti-French feeling in this country, and it's going to have consequences. This is a bottle of French wine. This is a bottom [sic] of American wine.

(SCORNFUL SILENCE)

VAISSE: It is bigger.

CARLSON: And it's bigger. That's exactly right. More forceful. There will be Americans who boycott French products. This in the end is really going to hurt France, isn't it?

VAISSE: No, I think it is going hurt wine lovers.

Wine lovers have long memories. We will vote en masse for a fromage and pate-loving, Chardonnay-swilling liberal. Fuck that PB&J 'n milk bullshit. Voting, like so many good things in life, is for adults.




digby 10/26/2004 02:12:00 PM |

 
Forgive Us, World

Via TBOGG I see that the amount of lead in our environment has finally reached critical mass.

Kimberly Parmer, 33, who works as a human resources manager in western Michigan, said the emphasis on national security issues had distorted the campaign.

"I don't think terrorism is as big a threat as everyone is making it out to be," Ms. Parmer said. "Yes, we have had a couple of incidents, but other countries have hundreds every year. Iraq is important, but so are things like Social Security and Medicare. Neither one has really touched on those subjects because no one is going to be happy, no matter what you do."

Ms. Parmer, who said she is firmly planted in "the very low middle class," also saw the Bush tax cut as poorly timed. She normally votes for Democrats, she said, but is not sure this time.

"One is too polished; the other one, I think to be honest, I don't know how he ever got to be president," Ms. Parmer said. "I am really surprised he has gotten as far as he has in life. I do think he's honest."

Even so, Ms. Parmer said, she thought she might vote for Mr. Bush. "If you actually look at him, and he stands up next to Kerry, you just kind of feel sorry for him," she said. "I feel he's more of an underdog, he's had a hard go of it in the last four years."

As we all sit here pondering how it can possibly be that Commander Codpiece is even in the running, this explains it. I think that what gets me the most about people like this is that they obviously pay a certain amount of attention, they know what the issues are yet they see the world as if it's a TV soap opera.

I'll bet this woman will vote for Bush. Here's why. According to the LA Times Poll today:

In its final days, the race is blurring some of the electorate's familiar divides but emphatically deepening others, according to the poll.

Much smaller than in recent presidential elections is the gender gap, in which the majority of men usually vote Republican, and women usually lean Democratic.

Bush's message, which stresses his national security record and his commitment to conservative cultural values, is helping him gain ground among lower middle-income and less-educated voters ambivalent about his economic record. Conversely, the message is costing him with more affluent and better-educated families that have historically supported Republicans.

Strikingly, Bush leads Kerry in the poll among lower- and middle-income white voters, but trails his rival among whites earning at least $100,000 per year.

Bush also runs best among voters without college degrees, whereas Kerry leads not only among college-educated women (a traditional Democratic constituency), but among college-educated men — usually one of the electorate's most reliably Republican groups in the electorate.

This tracks with the PIPA Survey which said:

As the nation prepares to watch the presidential candidates debate foreign policy issues, a new PIPA-Knowledge Networks poll finds that Americans who plan to vote for President Bush have many incorrect assumptions about his foreign policy positions. Kerry supporters, on the other hand, are largely accurate in their assessments. The uncommitted also tend to misperceive Bush’s positions, though to a smaller extent than Bush supporters, and to perceive Kerry’s positions correctly. Steven Kull, director of PIPA, comments: “What is striking is that even after nearly four years President Bush’s foreign policy positions are so widely misread, while Senator Kerry, who is relatively new to the public and reputed to be unclear about his positions, is read correctly.”

When the inevitable forums and roundtables of beltway "intellectuals" chewing over the election coverage and results take place over the next few months, I would very much like to see somebody ask William Kristol and his buds over at the Weakly Standard and AEI how they square their grand global vision with the fact that the vast number of their followers are total morons. Indeed, the country seems to have divided up rather neatly into the dumbshits vs. everybody else and they represent the dumbshits. Do the cosmopolitan neocon elite believe that a country run on behalf of people like this can actually run the world? If they do, then all the hoo-hah about their Straussian allegiance was true.




digby 10/26/2004 01:14:00 PM |

 
Explosive Mistake

Ok, folks. Here's what Jim Miklaszewski said yesterday:

"April 10, 2003, only three weeks into the war, NBC News was embedded with troops from the Army's 101st Airborne as they temporarily take over the Al Qaqaa weapons installation south of Baghdad. But these troops never found the nearly 380 tons of some of the most powerful conventional explosives, called HMX and RDX, which is now missing."

"The U.S. troops did find large stockpiles of more conventional weapons, but no HMX or RDX, so powerful less than a pound brought down Pan Am 103 in 1988, and can be used to trigger a nuclear weapon."

He has now been contradicted by the NBC embed herself:

Here's the video. And, here's the relevant transcript:

Amy Robach: And it's still unclear exactly when those explosives disappeared. Here to help shed some light on that question is Lai Ling. She was part of an NBC news crew that traveled to that facility with the 101st Airborne Division back in April of 2003. Lai Ling, can you set the stage for us? What was the situation like when you went into the area?

Lai Ling Jew: When we went into the area, we were actually leaving Karbala and we were initially heading to Baghdad with the 101st Airborne, Second Brigade. The situation in Baghdad, the Third Infantry Division had taken over Baghdad and so they were trying to carve up the area that the 101st Airborne Division would be in charge of. As a result, they had trouble figuring out who was going to take up what piece of Baghdad. They sent us over to this area in Iskanderia. We didn't know it as the Qaqaa facility at that point but when they did bring us over there we stayed there for quite a while. We stayed overnight, almost 24 hours. And we walked around, we saw the bunkers that had been bombed, and that exposed all of the ordinances that just lied dormant on the desert.

AR: Was there a search at all underway or did a search ensue for explosives once you got there during that 24-hour period?

LLJ: No. There wasn't a search. The mission that the brigade had was to get to Baghdad. That was more of a pit stop there for us. And, you know, the searching, I mean certainly some of the soldiers head off on their own, looked through the bunkers just to look at the vast amount of ordnance lying around. But as far as we could tell, there was no move to secure the weapons, nothing to keep looters away. But there was -- at that point the roads were shut off. So it would have been very difficult, I believe, for the looters to get there.

AR: And there was no talk of securing the area after you left. There was no discussion of that?

LLJ: Not for the 101st Airborne, Second Brigade. They were -- once they were in Baghdad, it was all about Baghdad, you know, and then they ended up moving north to Mosul. Once we left the area, that was the last that the brigade had anything to do with the area.

AR: Well, Lai Ling Jew, thank you so much for shedding some light into that situation. We appreciate it.

LLJ: Thank you.

NBC has cleared up this little "misunderstanding" but we need to ensure that they emphasize their clarification on the evening news and on all the gasbag shows on MSNBC.

Once again, I think that the Rove machine has lost a ball bearing or two. It is not in their interest to be fighting this story with such fervor in the waning days of the campaign, particularly relying on a news organization's preliminary reporting to justify its position. They would have been far better off using one of those infuriating Codpiece tautologies and called it a day --- "of course we didn't know anything about this because if we had we would have done something about it. Since we didn't do anything about it, we couldn't have known." Instead they've called in the full force of the mighty Wurlitzer which gets the mainstream press all quivering with excitement --- and forces NBC to work the story even harder since they are now part of it.

Still, it might just be helpful to ensure that NBC knows that you are aware of the Lai Ling Jew clarification and also that you are aware that Drudge and the wing-nuts are using their story to pass on bad information to the voters. Karl Rove is said to have thought so highly of the NBC story that he planned to use it in a mass e-mail.

If NBC and MSNBC have any journalistic integrity they might want to take extra measures to ensure that they don't get used as Karl's love slave this close to an election.

MSNBC

www.msnbc.com
world@msnbc.com

One MSNBC Plaza
Secaucus, NJ 07094
Phone: (201) 583-5000
Fax: (201) 583-5453

NBC News

www.nbc.com

30 Rockefeller Plaza
New York, NY 10112
Phone: (212) 664-5900
Fax: (212) 664-2914

Nightly@NBC.com
viewerservices@msnbc.com
hardball@msnbc.com
countdown@msnbc.com
abramsreport@msnbc.com
norville@msnbc.com
Lesterholt@msnbc.com
joe@msnbc.com
MTP@NBC.com

JMiklaszewski @NBC.com
DShuster@msnbc.com
JTrippi@msnbc.com
DBellone@msnbc.com (Hardball producer)
AMitchell@msnbc.com

For the full backround on this story, Josh Marshall is the resident blogospheric expert.

Update: Marshall has posted a subsequent clarification by Miklaszewski. I just heard even CNN finally drop the earlier NBC version of events and also reveal that the wing-nuts have been inundating them with e-mail flogging the NBC story.





digby 10/26/2004 11:37:00 AM |

 
The Dinner Guest From Hell

Apparently, David Brooks just went to a family gathering somewhere on his home planet where he bored the living shit out of every single person in the room. In fact, there is little doubt in my mind that there was at least one suicide, right there at the dinner table.

I used to think that at least he was an interesting guy, but it's clear that even his imaginary friends are pompous bores.




digby 10/26/2004 10:32:00 AM |

Monday, October 25, 2004

 
This Land Is Your Land

Ezra pointed me to this Paul Waldman piece in The Gadflyer that hits on something that's been getting me angrier and angrier during the last few years --- the constant refrain by Republicans (and accepted without comment by the mediawhores) that blue state America is somehow unamerican. It's offensive and I'm tired of it:

Fantasyland, October 25, 2004 – Today John Kerry opened up a new line of attack on President Bush, charging that his policies and positions are a product of Texas, a state whose political culture lies far outside the American mainstream. "The former governor of Texas has governed like, well, like a former governor of Texas," said Kerry to the laughs and hoots of the crowd. "He's so far out on the right wing, he fell off the plane."

Kerry also brought up Tom DeLay, the ultra-conservative congressman from the Lone Star state. "George Bush makes Tom DeLay look like a Texas moderate!"

The new line of attack came as an independent liberal group began airing a new ad in which an elderly couple says, "George Bush should take his NASCAR-loving, tobacco-chewing, trailer-park-living, redneck freak show back to Texas, where it belongs."

Of course, we've never seen a story like this one – like all Democrats, John Kerry knows that if he criticized one state or one region of the country, the press and the Republicans would come down on him like a ton of bricks, charging him with being a Northeastern elitist who doesn't want to be the president of all Americans.

But the rules are different on the other side of the aisle. In today's politics, it is acceptable for Republicans to traffic in ugly stereotypes and assert outright that people who come from some areas of America are not really American. Some might remember the ad to which I referred, aired by the conservative Club for Growth, which said, "Howard Dean should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs."

[...]

Bush is hardly the first Republican to use this attack; when the DNC decided to hold its convention in Boston, former House Majority Leader Dick Armey said, "If I were a Democrat, I suspect I'd feel a heck of a lot more comfortable in Boston than, say, America."


[...]

Why does Bush get away with this? Because the press corps buys the Republican argument that the areas of the country where there are lots of Republicans are "really" American, and the areas of the country where there are lots of Democrats aren't. So they never asked whether the fact that Bush was a "Texas conservative" would hurt him, while they constantly wonder about how damaging it is that Kerry is a "Massachusetts liberal." Disparage Texas – or Alabama, or Mississippi, or Kansas – and you're in for a heap of trouble. Throw insults at Massachusetts or California or New York, and the press will laugh right along.

If Kerry wins this election, it is highly likely it will be without the South. And maybe then people are going to realize that catering entirely to one regional culture and insulting the others may not be the way to build a permanent majority. If that happens it's not going to be us blue-staters from Taxachusetts or Hollywood who have the problem.




digby 10/25/2004 08:18:00 PM |

 
Great News!

Dick Morris just said on FAUX that Bush is "surging in the polls" and it's because of the puppies ad. In fact, he believes that ad is going to go down as one of the greatest political ads in history.

The rule of thumb for everything in life is that if Dick Morris says it, the opposite must be true. Therefore, Bush is slipping and the puppies ad is going down as the biggest political joke in history.

I feel good!




digby 10/25/2004 07:01:00 PM |

Sunday, October 24, 2004

 
What Is News?

Here's a little quiz for everyone. Which of these two stories will dominate the news tomorrow?:

To review the essential facts, prior to the war, Iraq's Al Qa Qaa bunker and weapons complex had roughly 350 tons of high explosives under IAEA seal. After the war, for whatever reason, the complex was either not guarded at all or inadequately guarded. And all those explosives (primarily RDX and HMX) were carted away.

What we're talking about here isn't just a bunch of dynamite. This encyclopedia entry says RDX "is considered the most powerful and brisant of the military high explosives." And not 350 pounds, 350 tons.

It is apparently widely believed within the US government that those looted explosives are what in many, perhaps most, cases is being used in car bombs and suicide attacks against US troops. That is, according to TPM sources and sources quoted in this evening's Nelson Report, where the story first broke.

One administration official told Nelson, "This is the stuff the bad guys have been using to kill our troops, so you can’t ignore the political implications of this, and you would be correct to suspect that politics, or the fear of politics, played a major role in delaying the release of this information."

or this one:

U.N. ambassadors from several nations are disputing assertions by Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry that he met for hours with all members of the U.N. Security Council just a week before voting in October 2002 to authorize the use of force in Iraq.

An investigation by The Washington Times reveals that while the candidate did talk for an unspecified period to at least a few members of the panel, no such meeting, as described by Mr. Kerry on a number of occasions over the past year, ever occurred.

FAUX News will be flogging the latter like crazy. But, the former is above the fold on the front page of the NY Times.

Anybody want to lay down a bet?




digby 10/24/2004 08:46:00 PM |

 
Now's The Time

Memo to the press corpse: In light of this new information about Junior's lies regarding Project P.U.L.L., it's now perfectly legitimate to ask that One Simple Question.

In fact, it's your job. Consider the bounty your bonus.






digby 10/24/2004 08:04:00 PM |

 
Another Pratfall

Junior isn't the most coordinated fellow in the world and he has a lot of trouble staying upright in the best of circumstances. It's probably not a good idea to put him in platform shoes. He falls down. Again:



President Bush is helped after tripping on a step after speaking at the Canton Palace Theatre about medical liability reform Friday, Oct. 22, 2004 in Canton, Ohio. (AP Photo/Tony Dejak)




digby 10/24/2004 06:00:00 PM |

 
Haven't They Seen Enough Horror?

Wayne Newton Entertains Troops in Iraq

Newton, along with special guests that included actor Rob Schneider and country singer Neal McCoy, spent nearly three hours at a 1st Cavalry division camp in the capital on Tuesday.

Wasn't the mutiny in the 1st Cavalry? I'm just saying...


Via tristero




digby 10/24/2004 05:11:00 PM |

 
Up In The Air

HANNITY: “Do you or when you think of, for example, what happened in Spain prior to their last election there was an article recently that showed that you were presented with the possibility by your CIA director and others that -- I think September 15th they presented this to you - it was written up recently - that this is a potential threat here but we still have area vulnerabilities so we -- is that always going to be the case? Is that something we are always going to have to live with?

BUSH: Yes because we have to be right 100 percent of the time in disrupting any plot and they have to be right once. We’re better. Much better. As a matter of fact the 9/11 commission reports that America is safer under the course of action we’ve taken but not yet safe. Whether or not we can be ever fully safe is up -- you know, is up in the air.”

Whoopsie. I think Junior's faith based reality may have slipped a little bit there. I'd call it a gaffe except that he's also said that he doesn't care about bin laden and he doesn't think America can win the GWOT. If this guy is so iffy about our ability to deal with the terrorist threat, I'm not sure he has a rationale for his presidency. If he isn't the codpiece cowboy then what's the point?

I think it's only fair to wrap these comments around his neck so tight that he can hardly breathe. It would be downright disrespectful to treat him any differently than he would treat us --- ruthlessly and without mercy.




digby 10/24/2004 03:15:00 PM |

 
Premeditated Theft

Can someone explain to me why, when crap like this is going on, that all I'm hearing about today is alleged Democratic intimidation of Republican voters?

Republican Party officials in Ohio took formal steps yesterday to place thousands of recruits inside polling places on Election Day to challenge the qualifications of voters they suspect are not eligible to cast ballots.

Party officials say their effort is necessary to guard against fraud arising from aggressive moves by the Democrats to register tens of thousands of new voters in Ohio, seen as one of the most pivotal battlegrounds in the Nov. 2 elections.

Election officials in other swing states, from Arizona to Wisconsin and Florida, say they are bracing for similar efforts by Republicans to challenge new voters at polling places, reflecting months of disputes over voting procedures and the anticipation of an election as close as the one in 2000.

Ohio election officials said they had never seen so large a drive to prepare for Election Day challenges. They said they were scrambling yesterday to be ready for disruptions in the voting process as well as alarm and complaints among voters. Some officials said they worried that the challenges could discourage or even frighten others waiting to vote.

Ohio Democrats were struggling to match the Republicans' move, which had been rumored for weeks. Both parties had until 4 p.m. to register people they had recruited to monitor the election. Republicans said they had enlisted 3,600 by the deadline, many in heavily Democratic urban neighborhoods of Cleveland, Dayton and other cities. Each recruit was to be paid $100.

The Democrats, who tend to benefit more than Republicans from large turnouts, said they had registered more than 2,000 recruits to try to protect legitimate voters rather than weed out ineligible ones.

Republican officials said they had no intention of disrupting voting but were concerned about the possibility of fraud involving thousands of newly registered Democrats.

"The organized left's efforts to, quote unquote, register voters - I call them ringers - have created these problems," said James P. Trakas, a Republican co-chairman in Cuyahoga County.

Both parties have waged huge campaigns in the battleground states to register millions of new voters, and the developments in Ohio provided an early glimpse of how those efforts may play out on Election Day.

Ohio election officials said that by state law, the parties' challengers would have to show "reasonable" justification for doubting the qualifications of a voter before asking a poll worker to question that person. And, the officials said, challenges could be made on four main grounds: whether the voter is a citizen, is at least 18, is a resident of the county and has lived in Ohio for the previous 30 days.

Elections officials in Ohio said they hoped the criteria would minimize the potential for disruption. But Democrats worry that the challenges will inevitably delay the process and frustrate the voters.

"Our concern is Republicans will be challenging in large numbers for the purpose of slowing down voting, because challenging takes a long time,'' said David Sullivan, the voter protection coordinator for the national Democratic Party in Ohio. "And creating long lines causes our people to leave without voting.''

[...]

Among the main swing states, only Ohio, Florida and Missouri require the parties to register poll watchers before Election Day; elsewhere, party observers can register on the day itself. In several states officials have alerted poll workers to expect a heightened interest by the parties in challenging voters. In some cases, poll workers, many of them elderly, have been given training to deal with any abusive challenging.

If anyone wonders why the Bush campaign doesn't feel the need to do much campaigning in the essential state of Ohio, you don't need to look any further than this. They haveplans in place to ensure he wins no matter what.

This tactic is based upon the same one by which they "won" the election in 2000. They are using it not so much to intimidate voters, although I'm sure they will do that also. The main purpose, as it was when the Republican "challengers" in the recount questioned many more ballots than necessary, is simply to run out the clock. And if anyone tries to hold the polls open longer to accomodate long lines as they did in St Louis last time, they will scream bloody murder about the Democrats "changing the rules" after the game has been played.

This is a big deal. If anyone can get to the swing states for election day, they should do it. Check out ACT for Victory for instructions on how you can help. The Republicans have put together an organized effort to suppress the vote. The only thing that will stop it a huge turn-out and people willing to help at the polling places and report the atrocities.


Update: Check out ISOU for some coming attractions.


digby 10/24/2004 02:17:00 PM |

 
Where To Go

Here's a very helpful service:

My Polling Place.com

It got mine and a couple of friends' right so I assume this data base is correct. On election day, if anyone you know or hear of says they don't know where they are supposed to vote, this site not only gives them an address, you can even get a map.

Pass the word.
digby 10/24/2004 11:59:00 AM |

 
Writers Are Terrorists

Talk about misdirection. I know some of the love scenes get pretty steamy, but I didn't think even John Ashcroft would conclude that a romance novelist doing research on the internet was a potential terrorist. (Via Talk Left.)

This is some scary stuff for people like bloggers who spend a lot of time poking their noses into issues that might be considered sensitive:

If you think that as women’s fiction writers, we’re immune from scrutiny under the Patriot Act, think again. Last fall, the home of a multi-published author for an RWA-recognized publisher was raided and her writing in materials confiscated. The writer, an RWA and PAN member who asked to be referred to as Dilyn, agreed to he interviewed for this column to alert RWA members of potential risks when conducting research.

SB: What type of story were you researching?

Dilyn: Mainstream women’s fiction adventure. It was set in Cambodia, all about the theft of antiquities. In my research I learned, about the atrocities that still go on there even today, much of it coming from one of the Al Qaeda-linked groups. I actually went back though my book and deleted those specific terrorist references after 9/11 and changed the ter­rorists to a rogue band of thieves because of 9/11 and terrorist sensitivity.

SB: What types of books did you buy/check out of the library?

Dilyn: I bought and checked out books on Cambodia-- its history, its present struggles, its antiquities and anything I could get my hands on concerning the terrorism going on there...landmines, in particular. And those were the kinds of Web sites I surfed too.

SB: Did you share your reasons for checking out the books with your librarian?


Dilyn: No. My library is huge and highly impersonal. I did the library book search on-line and simply went there to check them out. I also kept those books checked out for well over a year during the writing of my book. Plus, I purchased all my research books online--about six. As far as my Web surfing, I went dozens of places.

Many were for non-terrorist aspects of my book, but a few were for gathering specific terrorist information. To be honest, I was surprised to find the Al Qaeda linked to Cambodia. I was only going after the landmine atrocities because they played a huge part in my story.


SB: Did you have any reason to suspect you were being targeted for a raid, any advance notice?

Dilyn: No. Not a clue. Although, for a while prior to the raid, I thought I was being stalked. Mail was missing from my box, I caught someone searching my trash, I saw a prowler in nit yard and actually called the police. One of my neighbors saw someone watching from across the street--she wasn’t sure if it was my house or hers. She called the police, too--turns out they taking surveillance photos.


SB: When did the raid take place, how long did it last, and what items were con­fiscated? What agency conducted the raid?


Dilyn: The raid took place last fall, pre-dawn, and it lasted three hours. They banged at my front door first, damaged it coming in, displayed weapons and threat­ened to kill my dogs. After that, imagine everything you’ve seen on TV, only worse. There were six male agents. One was in the "bad cop" mode the entire time, trying to intimidate me, yelling at me, threatening me. When I had to go to the restroom, he sent an agent along to the bathroom with me. It was a multi-agency raid: Postal Inspectors (for the Web site/email end of it), FBI, and three officers who would only identify themselves as Federal Police. They took so much--com­puters, photocopier, files, books, discs, computer programs, CDs of the music by which I write, contracts, absolutely everything I had connected to the writing world. They took pictures off my walls, my office television, pens, a case of paper, postage stamps -- even now, after all these months, 1 still so to get something only to discover it missing.

SB: Have you had any success in retrieving items that were taken?

Dilvn: They brought my computers back within a couple of months--bugged. I have this great computer guy who couldn’t wait to get inside to take a look, sure enough, they had a program in there to monitor me. I got my discs back, too, all ruined. They still have everything else.

Does anyone else get the sneaking suspicion that the Justice department under John Ashcroft is completely nuts? This is a Hollywood script, notlaw enforcement. In fact, I think they got this idea from a movie called "Romancing The Stone" in which a Romance writer unwittingly gets involved in Latin American smuggling and drug running. It was a comedy.

I can understand why they might have had a conversation with the woman based upon her web surfing. A little investigation was probably warranted to find out that she was a FICTION WRITER who often researches unusual practices. But a raid of her house and seizure of her property is the mark of an out of control incipient police state.

It is the lack of common sense that has me so scared for this country --- this underreaction to real threats and the overreaction to non-threats. We can't seem to strike any balance anywhere and it's getting us further and further into trouble.

I am very curiuus as to who President Kerry will appoint as AG. It's going to be a hell of a job trying to straighten out the unholy mess that Ashcroft has made of the place.




digby 10/24/2004 10:50:00 AM |

 
Useless Eggheads

My favorite new Republican talking point is the appalled outrage that a member of Kerry's staff referred to the War on Terror as a...gasp...metaphor. Can you believe these sissified Democrats living in their pre 9/11 dreamworlds? A metaphor?

Obviously, this is just another example of the reality based community clinging to outmoded notions of the literal meaning of words. And America is weaker for it.

We will defeat terror. It shall not stand. Terror will be vanquished from the earth. Anyone who doesn't agree is a loser. Let freedom rain. And I mean that literally.




digby 10/24/2004 09:59:00 AM |

 
He Takes My Breath Away

He's strutting, he's swaggering, he's building up to a full-on Village People extravaganza during these last few days:

President Bush turned his Marine One chopper into a campaign prop Saturday and used it to drop in on huge crowds at three stadiums around Florida, at a time of concern in his campaign about his failure to gain a decisive lead in the most crucial battlegrounds.

[...]

The commander in chief landed at the ballparks to the strains of the "Top Gun" theme, his most dramatic use of a military asset since he rode a fighter jet onto an aircraft carrier 17 months ago to declare the end of major combat operations in Iraq.

[...]

During Bush's chopper swing, a huge banner in the outfield of City of Palms Park, in Fort Myers, showed an image of the military helicopter with the slogan "Soaring to Victory." His departing chopper flew over the crowd of 11,000, so close that the president and Laura Bush could be seen waving.

[...]

The other chopper rallies were in Lakeland and Melbourne. Bush's finale was a rally for 25,000 or more at Alltel Stadium, home of the National Football League's Jacksonville Jaguars and site of next February's Super Bowl. Bush spoke from a lectern on the 50-yard line. He arrived amid rock-concert-style smoke and departed to fireworks.

Here's why they seem to have called in Bruckheimer to stage the campaign stops (in an apparent homage to Coppolla's seminal Playboy bunny scene in Apocalypse Now):

GOP officials who talked to Bush-Cheney campaign leaders said the leaders have grown more worried about Ohio, Florida and other key states where Bush lacks a lead with just 10 days until the election. A poll by Ohio University's Scripps Survey Research Center, completed Thursday night, found Kerry leading 49 percent to 43 percent among registered voters, with a margin of error of five percentage points.

[...]

The Republican official said polling for Bush showed him in a weaker position than some published polls have indicated, both nationally and in battlegrounds. In many of the key states, the official said, Bush is below 50 percent, and he is ahead or behind within the margin of sampling error -- a statistical tie.

"There's just no place where they're polling outside the margin of error so they can say, 'We have this state,' " the official said. "And they know that an incumbent needs to be outside the margin of error."

Look for leather chaps, tight sailor bells, maybe even a great big tool belt these next two days. He's in the Danger Zone, allright.

Update: Check out The Talent Show for Bush's Halloween Surprise.




digby 10/24/2004 09:23:00 AM |

Saturday, October 23, 2004

 
They Can Dish It Out

I've never seen Lawrence O'Donnell get even slightly overwrought, but that lying, piece of shit scumbag John O'Neill with his preturnaturally calm psychopath act pushed him over the edge.

I can't tell you how many times I have stood in front of my television saying exactly those words, ineffectually waving my fist and kicking my poor oft-bruised foot into the wall. It's a real pleasure to watch someone express my personal frustration right in that lying asshole's face.

The freepers are writing nasty letters. O'Donnell could probably use some support.

viewerservices@msnbc.com
joe@msnbc.com

MSNBC TV
One MSNBC Plaza
Secaucus, N.J. 07094

Apparently he unloaded on Jabba The Blankley on Mclaughlin, too. He's just righteously pissed at the endless lying. I know the feeling. They aren't even trying to hide it anymore. It's like these people are spitting in your face and daring you to do something about it.




digby 10/23/2004 09:06:00 PM |

 
Political Platforms

I hear Gene Simmons is a Republican. Maybe he whispered a little something about height-enhancing footwear in Junior's ear:






digby 10/23/2004 08:26:00 PM |

 
The Youth Vote

When I was in the third grade my mother dressed me up in a bunch of Goldwater gear and sent me off to school on election day. I was the only kid in my class who wasn't dressed up for Johnson. Maybe that's the real reason I became a Democrat when my parents are hard core Republicans --- the early childhood trauma of being a political minority. (Little did I know...)

But, it does illustrate the fact that little kids "vote" like their parents when they are polled. And that has been shown to be true for years. Matt Stoller on MYDD sez that the Nickelodeon poll has some good news for us:

Kids Choose Wisely

A strong majority of American children support Democratic White House hopeful John Kerry over President George W. Bush in the election less than two weeks away, according to an online poll released Wednesday by Nickelodeon cable channel.

Children have always picked the winner since the popular channel aimed at kids began conducted the poll in 1988. In 2000, they backed Bush with 55 percent.

Some 400,000 children responded to the poll, and 57 percent backed Kerry against 43 percent for Bush.

"The `Kids' Vote' seems to work as a good barometer of the actual presidential vote because, deve­lopmentally, kids between the ages of 2 and 11 share the same opinions and outlooks as their parents," said Cyma Zarghami, president of the television channel, part of Viacom International.

I don't see any reason why children would choose Bush over Gore in 2000 and then Kerry over Bush in 2004 except that their parents' preferences have changed. It's not like Nickelodeon has gone on an anti-Bush tear.

I don't know about that, Matt. SpongeBob Squarepants is a total freak for Michael Moore.




digby 10/23/2004 07:47:00 PM |

 
The Lost Years

Does the man just reflexively lie about everything or does he have so much to hide that it's just smarter to lie first and ask questions later?

"I was working full time for an inner-city poverty program known as Project P.U.L.L.," Bush said in his 1999 autobiography, "A Charge to Keep." "My friend John White ... asked me to come help him run the program. ... I was intrigued by John's offer. ... Now I had a chance to help people."


But White's administrative assistant and others associated with P.U.L.L., speaking on the record for the first time, say Bush was not helping to run the program and White had not asked Bush to come aboard. Instead, the associates said, White told them he agreed to take Bush on as a favor to Bush's father, who was honorary co-chairman of the program at the time, and Bush was unpaid. They say White told them Bush had gotten into some kind of trouble but White never gave them specifics.


"We didn't know what kind of trouble he'd been in, only that he'd done something that required him to put in the time," said Althia Turner, White's administrative assistant.


"John said he was doing a favor for George's father because an arrangement had to be made for the son to be there," said Willie Frazier, also a former player for the Houston Oilers and a P.U.L.L. summer volunteer in 1973.


Fred Maura, a close friend of White, refers to Bush as "43," for 43rd president, and his father as "41," for the 41st president.


"John didn't say what kind of trouble 43 was in - just that he had done something and he (John) made a deal to take him in as a favor to 41 to get some funding," Maura said.


"He didn't help run the program. I was in charge of him and I wouldn't say I helped run the program, either," said David Anderson, a recreational director at P.U.L.L.

It's long been strongly suspected that he did his "volunteer" work at Operation Pull as some kind of alternative punishment, whether for criminal or familial reasons. Working with inner city kids during that irrational time in his life is so out of character it never passed the *sniff* test.

We know that his family was fit to be tied with him during that time, and for good reason:

Leaving the election-night "celebration," Allison remembers encountering George W. Bush in the parking lot, urinating on a car, and hearing later about how he'd yelled obscenities at police officers that night. Bush left a house he'd rented in Montgomery trashed -- the furniture broken, walls damaged and a chandelier destroyed, the Birmingham News reported in February. "He was just a rich kid who had no respect for other people's possessions," Mary Smith, a member of the family who rented the house, told the newspaper, adding that a bill sent to Bush for repairs was never paid. And a month later, in December, during a visit to his parents' home in Washington, Bush drunkenly challenged his father to go "mano a mano," as has often been reported.

Around the same time, for the 1972 Christmas holiday, the Allisons met up with the Bushes on vacation in Hobe Sound, Fla. Tension was still evident between Bush and his parents. Linda was a passenger in a car driven by Barbara Bush as they headed to lunch at the local beach club. Bush, who was 26 years old, got on a bicycle and rode in front of the car in a slow, serpentine manner, forcing his mother to crawl along. "He rode so slowly that he kept having to put his foot down to get his balance, and he kept in a weaving pattern so we couldn't get past," Allison recalled. "He was obviously furious with his mother about something, and she was furious at him, too."

It's certainly possible that Dad pulled strings because he wanted to teach his miscreant son a lesson. But, it doesn't seem as if he had much control over Junior's behavior during that time, so it's a bit of a stretch to believe that he could have forced him to do this thing. After all, this was the same period that Junior was refusing to fulfill his commitment to the US government. It is much more likely that Bush had been arrested for drugs or drunk driving and that Poppy intervened --- as he continued to do for more than a decade of decadence and hedonism.

It was in 1985, around the time of his 39th birthday, George W. Bush says, that his life took a sharp turn toward salvation. At that point he was drinking, his marriage was on the rocks, his career was listless. Several accounts have emerged from those close to Bush about a faith ''intervention'' of sorts at the Kennebunkport family compound that year. Details vary, but here's the gist of what I understand took place. George W., drunk at a party, crudely insulted a friend of his mother's. George senior and Barbara blew up. Words were exchanged along the lines of something having to be done. George senior, then the vice president, dialed up his friend, Billy Graham, who came to the compound and spent several days with George W. in probing exchanges and walks on the beach.

For all of his hectoring and lecturing about "the responsibility era" and ending the ethos of "if it feels good, do it," he has never taken even the tiniest bit of responsibility for what he did. He even lied about his "born again" experience --- not mentioning that it was the result of yet another intervention by his frustrated parents

Lying in the most craven way about this Operation PULL episode, by claiming that he "helped run the program" when it's obvious to any sentient being that he was forced to be there, is the kind of thing that continues to stoke interest in the 40 odd lost years of George W. Bush. Nobody would care if he didn't constantly behave like a man with something to hide.




digby 10/23/2004 04:46:00 PM |

Friday, October 22, 2004

 
Below The Belt

I knew the Bush campaign was ruthless and I knew they were cruel. I expected them to play dirty.

But, I never dreamed they would sink this low.







If Karl Rove is willing to play the cute puppy card, we are truly doomed...




digby 10/22/2004 03:55:00 PM |

Thursday, October 21, 2004

 
They'll Believe Anything


I thought you might enjoy this wingnut e-mail that's been going around:

Almost half of the nation's flu vaccine will not be delivered this year. Chiron, a major manufacturer of flu vaccine, will not be distributing any influenza vaccine this flu season. Chiron was to make 46-48 million doses vaccine for the United States. Chiron is a British company. Recently British health officials stopped Chiron from distributing and making the vaccine when inspectors found unsanitary conditions in the labs. Some lots of the vaccine were recalled and destroyed.Why is our vaccine made in the UK and not the US? The major pharmaceutical companies in the US provided almost 90% of the nations flu vaccine at one time. They did this despite a very low profit margin for the product. Basically, they were doing us a favor.

In the late 80's a man from North Carolina who had received the vaccine got the flu. The strain he caught was one of the strains in that years Vaccine made by a US company. What did he do? He sued and he won. He was awarded almost $5 million! After that case was appealed and lost, most US pharmaceutical companies stopped making the vaccine. The liability out weighed the profit margin. Since UK and Canadian laws prohibit such frivolous law suits UK and Canadian companies began selling the vaccine in the US.

By the way...the lawyer that represented the man in the flu shot lawsuit was a young ambulance chaser by the name of John Edwards.

Mighty decent of the Bush campaign not to use this bombshell in the last two weeks of the campaign, don't you think? John Edwards is personally responsible for the flu vaccine crisis and they refrain from using that information in ads and speeches. Wow. To think that some people say they are tough guys who will pull out all the stops to win when they are really just a bunch of softies who don't want to embarrass their rivals.

On second thought, this can't be yet another completely unbelievable lie to fool Republican morons, can it? My gawd. I hope these people aren't allowed to operate heavy machinery or drive without supervision. People that dumb are a public health hazard in and of themselves.




digby 10/21/2004 05:08:00 PM |

 
Under Pressure

One of the hallmarks of the modern Republican party has been the efficacy of its communication infrastructure and its commitment to the long term. Over time it has become a sophisticated national political machine. Now, Sinclair Advertiser Boycott has shown that our side truly has the beginnings of a strong and vital counter force if we devote ourselves to long term thinking. The battle is just beginning whether we win or lose this election.

The immediate necessity, however, is to not let up on Sinclair. They have not capitulated. They merely changed their strategy. They are committed to the extreme right wing and will continue to evangelize in various ways for the cause with no sense of fairness or journalistic ethics. This little gambit has personally cost the family more than 40 million dollars and yet they continue. It seems that they have not yet learned their lesson and perhaps they never will. But, there is an object lesson for others out there who might try something like this, so whatever happens we must take this all the way to the end.

We must not let up on the pressure until the propagandists understands that there will be a serious price to pay economically for ignoring their responsibilities to the nation as a guardian of democracy. They are allowed to use the airwaves as a public trust. If they continue to abuse that trust they should be relieved of it.

Via the Sinclair Boycott blog, I see that an unnamed Sinclair employee (and stockholder) is exhorting us to keep the pressure on the company to try to stop them from broadcasting the comedy and keep them from repeating it throughout the week-end. They have not learned their lesson:

You have today and tomorrow to prevent A POW Story from airing. Now is not the time to stop. If SBG is prevented from airing A POW Story, they will be forced to air regularly scheduled programming, and generate regularly scheduled ad revenue. This will have the effect of forcing SBG to accept money against their apparent will.

What you and others are doing here is very much like having an intervention with a drug addict. You don't give him the benefit of the doubt. You don't let him dictate terms. You don't allow yourself to be dazzled by his arguments. And you don't leave him alone so he can "go to the bathroom." You are trying to save this company from itself. The Smith brothers took actions that caused their company stock to rapidly lose $90 million in value, of which $40 million came right out of their hides, and they still didn't want to stop. There is no reason to beleive that they have come to their senses. They said what everyone wanted to hear, and now they are going to do what they wanted to do in the first place. They will do what Fox News does, and pay lip service to offering "both sides". There will be some liberal lightweight phoning in a perfomance that will make Alan Colmes seem like Kenneth Galbraith by comparison.

.... SBG may use this weekend to get this program on the air more than once. The SBG press release mentions only what affiliates will be airing on Friday night. SBG may chose to air the program any number of times on any number of their affiliates after Friday. Should they do this, the company will likely bleed money like a stuck pig. If Glickenhaus and Media Matters don't like what they see at 9 pm, what are they going to do? Wait til Monday morning to take legal action?

We are running promotional announcements for A POW Story as of today. So, my company believes this is a done deal. Prove them wrong.

Read the whole letter, it's quite interesting. Keep sending all those calls and letters folks.

According to Atrios, there is also a mass protest scheduled for 8pm on Friday night at all the Sinclair affiliates. He's got all the info.

If anyone you know lives in one of those towns, send them an e-mail and tell them to head down there at 8pm. Local news is important and if we make enough noise, Sinclair's competitors will be more than happy to report these actions. The decline of the company, the protests and the boycott, unlike "A POW Story", actually are news.




digby 10/21/2004 02:37:00 PM |

 
Trouble In Paradise?

I have to agree with the Bull Moose that Unka Karl indicating that Pat Robertson is a bald faced liar is quite the risky step to take in the waneing days of a very close election.

Now, what primarily disturbs the Moose are not the President’s comments nor does he doubt that Pat is on the Lord’s speed dial. Rather, the Moose is in a lather over the fact that Karl Rove is apparently calling Pat a liar. The Washington Post reports, “White House political adviser Karl Rove told reporters that Bush never said he did not expect casualties. "I was right there," Rove said of the president's conversation with Robertson."

My, my, is there no gratitude from Karl for all the good works that Pat has performed for the President? And surely, it is not smart to call into question the credibility of a man who has a direct line to God merely days before a national election!

Or a man who just a couple of weeks ago threatened to take his flock and form a third party if he didn't get his way:

Influential American evangelist Pat Robertson said Monday that Evangelical Christians feel so deeply about Jerusalem, that if President George W. Bush were to "touch" Jerusalem, Evangelicals would abandon their traditional Republican leanings and form a third party.

Evangelical Christians - estimated at tens of millions of Americans - overwhelmingly support Bush for his pro-Israel policies, Robertson told a Jerusalem news conference Monday.

But if Bush shifted his position toward support for Jerusalem as a capital for both Israel and a Palestinian state, his Evangelical backing would disappear, Robertson indicated.

"The President has backed away from [the road map], but if he were to touch Jerusalem, he'd lose all Evangelical support," Robertson said. "Evangelicals would form a third party" because, though people "don't know about" Gaza, Jerusalem is an entirely different matter.

The article goes on to quote him raving about Satan and Islam and all kinds of other crazy shit, but his naked threat wasn't exactly subtle.

Can this marriage be saved?




digby 10/21/2004 01:01:00 PM |

 
Oh Please

So, I see (via Atrios) that Junior is taking a day off on Saturday.

Sure he is. In the fight of his life, ten days before the election, he's taking a precious day away from the campaign trail.

How much do you want to bet he's being measured for a new military costume as we speak?

My only question is whether it will be Kabul or Baghdad.

And if the braindead press corpse handle this as anything but a cheap, taxpayer financed stunt we should raise holy hell. In fact, it wouldn't hurt to let them know now that any October Surprise like this is not a "surprise" it's an act of sheer desperation and if they don't cover this with the skepticism and derision it deserves they can never call themselves anything but whores.

It's called working the refs folks. If this thing happens, the press needs to have our take on it firmly implanted in their minds before they start their bizarre, erotic fantasizing about the manly preznit.




digby 10/21/2004 09:58:00 AM |

Tuesday, October 19, 2004

 
Obscene?





digby 10/19/2004 01:15:00 PM |

 
Cult of the Codpiece

I have been sort of half heartedly working on a piece about the Susskind article this week-end but I may just give it up since Ezra has already eloquently laid out a good part of my thesis:

And the Iraqis will greet us with flowers and shiatsu massages, the tax cuts will result in more revenue entering government coffers while stimulating the economy, the Northern Alliance will do an excellent job securing Tora Bora, we know Putin is good because his soul said so, Ariel Sharon is a "man of peace", our allies are materially unimportant because a small and maneuverable fighting force can easily carry out the mission in Iraq, simply requesting that companies consider the environment will be more effective than actual regulation...

Time and again, the Bush administration has placed their trust and crafted their policy based on a dubious or unproven assertion, and time and again they've found their faith misplaced, though not before the situation spun out of control to the country's great harm. This Administration's problem isn't that they're optimistic, it's that they're certain the world is similarly sunny. People are grabbing on to Suskind's "reality-based community" quote, as well they should. But they're missing its point. The Bush aide is arguing that the Administration operates off the idea that they shape their reality, that they are history's forces, not victims. That's why, presumably, they only plan for what they believe will happen. The parallels to New Age spirituality would be funny, if they weren't so scary, and the idea would be admirable if reality didn't keep proving it wrong.

This "don't worry be happy" philosophy has gotten these guys into trouble over and over and over again. I'm a Los Angeleno like Ezra so I should have made the connection to New Age spirituality before, but I didn't. Bush isn't a bible-based, messianic fundamentalist. His "crusade fer freedom" is really much more in the mode of a New Agey Kumbaaya cult leader than an Armageddonist. (Maybe Ariana could give us some insight on how this works. This is her guy, John-Roger.)

He doesn't know the bible except in the most rudimentary way. He doesn't attend church. He doesn't follow any of the most basic tenets of Christianity. He is simply the leader of the republican cult whose members believe that anything he says is the word of God --- hence the bizarre screams of orgasmic fervor when he say words that one would not usually associate with deep emotional beliefs, like "tort reform." It doesn't matter what he says, it's how he says them.

This is why he doesn't have to make any sense and this is why his followers are so blind to reality. As with all cults they are willing to give up their money and their free will and turn it over to the leader. It has nothing to do with any traditional religion.

He's the leader of the Cult of the Codpiece and as far as his followers are concerned, anything he says and does is divine.




digby 10/19/2004 01:00:00 PM |

 
Fabulous Flyboy

Paul Lukasiak has uncovered evidence that Bush was discharged from the TANG:

for failing “to possess the required military qualifications for his grade or specialty, or does not meet the mental, moral, professional or physical standards of the Air Force.”

It's likely because he was either dumb, gay, drunk, high, insubordinate or cowardly. That's what "mental, moral, professional or physical" means in military speak.

Looking across the entire landscape of his life, I'm thinking it just screams repressed gayness.

The Chippendales costumes alone...









digby 10/19/2004 11:34:00 AM |

 
Reality-Based Torture

I know that we are all obsessed at this point with the immediate needs of getting out the vote and making sure that Kerry wins two weeks from today, but I didn't want to let this article slip past without comment. The NY Times reported over the week-end that people are beginning to speak out about the torture at Guantanamo.

Many detainees at Guantánamo Bay were regularly subjected to harsh and coercive treatment, several people who worked in the prison said in recent interviews, despite longstanding assertions by military officials that such treatment had not occurred except in some isolated cases.

The people, military guards, intelligence agents and others, described in interviews with The New York Times a range of procedures that included treatment they said was highly abusive occurring over a long period of time, as well as rewards for prisoners who cooperated with interrogators.

One regular procedure that was described by people who worked at Camp Delta, the main prison facility at the naval base in Cuba, was making uncooperative prisoners strip to their underwear, having them sit in a chair while shackled hand and foot to a bolt in the floor, and forcing them to endure strobe lights and screamingly loud rock and rap music played through two close loudspeakers, while the air-conditioning was turned up to maximum levels, said one military official who witnessed the procedure. The official said that was intended to make the detainees uncomfortable, as they were accustomed to high temperatures both in their native countries and their cells.

Such sessions could last up to 14 hours with breaks, said the official, who described the treatment after being contacted by The Times.

I wrote several pieces about this a couple of months back and I remain shocked and stunned that we have done what it now appears clearly that we did. We created a high tech concentration camp in Cuba that evolved into primarily a training camp for interrogators --- the training of whom is bound to be inferior because of the suspect methods employed. This was done because of a hysterical overreaction to 9/11 combined with a truly cynical opportunism that allowed certain people in the administration to act upon some dark compulsion to "show strength" through cruelty.

Many of the prisoners had no affiliation with al Qaeda or the Taliban and those that did were very low level and useless for intelligence. Indeed, the top level al Qaeda who have been captured are being held and tortured elsewhere. The military tribunals are a joke and it is said that most of the prisoners, like Yousaf Hamdi, will be set free having served their PR purposes in a failed strategy to project US strength. Gitmo is a show prison camp.

Back in August, I summed it up like this:

Here's the nut. Prisoners in Guantanamo were taken into custody under extremely questionable circumstances and assumed to be terrorists with no further recourse. This was done (again via VF) because:

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says Gitmo plays not one but three vital roles in what the Pentagon calls the gwot, or global war on terror. First, it keeps terrorists "off the streets," until death if necessary. Second, it turns them into sources of intelligence. Finally, with the first special "military commission" tribunals set to begin at Gitmo early in 2004, it lets America bring the perpetrators of terrible crimes to justice-in accordance, says Rumsfeld, "with the traditions of fairness and justice under law, on which this nation was founded, the very principles that the terrorists seek to attack and destroy."

We know that in the first case, many of these people were not terrorists yet they are being subjected to horrifyingly inhumane treatment indefinitely. The three Britons being the ones most able to tell their stories to westerners, confirm this. There have been more than 60 others released back to their home countries after having been through this. We don't know how many more are still inside.

In the second case, there has been little intelligence value in their interrogations, not just because they aren't actually terrorists, but because even if they were, they've been out of the loop now for years. In fact, we know that there have been no high value terrorists ever held in Guantanamo. They are being water-boarded at discreet facilities elsewhere in the gulag.

In the third case, these sham military tribunals, the nature of which military lawyers themselves are appalled at, really mean that hundreds of innocent men could spend the rest of their lives in prison and for the forseeable future undergo mental torture that can only be described as criminal. At the least, the administration is intent upon dragging its feet for years, if necessary, to keep them from ever seeing the light of a real courtroom.

I don't know what the Kerry admnistration will do about this, but I think it's fair to say that they are going to be under tremendous pressure to appear "tough" on terrorism by the enraged firebreathers on the right who are already gearing up to engage in their own special form of political torture should they lose. Counter pressure is going to be needed.

We are going to have to be prepared to support the Kerry administration as it tries to do the right here while keeping the mediawhores from lapping up the inevitable Wurlitzer feeding frenzy with cries of treason and appeasement. This is going to be a very tough issue for a Democrat to deal with in this political environment and I think all of us need to be prepared to help the administration do what needs to be done. (Along with a million other things over which the wingnuts are going to lose their tiny little minds ...)







digby 10/19/2004 09:59:00 AM |

Monday, October 18, 2004

 
Will The Media Be Rove's Patsy Again?

Atrios has a list of potential October Surprises that we might look for and I'm wondering if he may actually try the hail mary of a trip to Iraq. I had heard some rumblings elsewhere that he might try to put on some kind of a uniform again (hopefully sparing us the codpiece this time) and drop in on the troops.

I wrote sometime back about the possibility of Bush parachuting into Baghdad on the eve of the election, but it was, you know, a joke. If he tries a stunt like that this time, I have a feeling that it will be remembered as the most desperate act an incumbent president has ever taken. The press corpse, unfortunately, would probably enjoy the theatre of the thing. They like nothing more than pretending that the lil' preznit is some kind of action hero.

They cannot be allowed at this point to go along with such a thing. If they have even the tiniest shred of self-respect left, they would have to reject such a blatant ploy. To that end, I might think of sending this hilarious link to various members of the press corpse to remind them of what dewy eyed little debutantes they were at the sight of Commander Codpiece in that oh-so-snug jumpsuit:

MATTHEWS: Let's go to this sub--what happened to this week, which was to me was astounding as a student of politics, like all of us. Lights, camera, action. This week the president landed the best photo of in a very long time. Other great visuals: Ronald Reagan at the D-Day cemetery in Normandy, Bill Clinton on horseback in Wyoming. Nothing compared to this, I've got to say.

Katty, for visual, the president of the United States arriving in an F-18, looking like he flew it in himself. The GIs, the women on--onboard that ship loved this guy.

Ms. KAY: He looked great. Look, I'm not a Bush man. I mean, he doesn't do it for me personally, especially not when he's in a suit, but he arrived there...

MATTHEWS: No one would call you a Bush man, by the way.

Ms. KAY: ...he arrived there in his flight suit, in a jumpsuit. He should wear that all the time. Why doesn't he do all his campaign speeches in that jumpsuit? He just looks so great.

MATTHEWS: I want him to wa--I want to see him debate somebody like John Kerry or Lieberman or somebody wearing that jumpsuit.

Mr. DOBBS: Well, it was just--I can't think of any, any stunt by the White House--and I'll call it a stunt--that has come close. I mean, this is not only a home run; the ball is still flying out beyond the park.

MATTHEWS: Well, you know what, it was like throwing that strike in Yankee Stadium a while back after 9/11. It's not a stunt if it works and it's real. And I felt the faces of those guys--I thought most of our guys were looking up like they were looking at Bob Hope and John Wayne combined on that ship.

Mr. GIGOT: The reason it works is because of--the reason it works is because Bush looks authentic and he felt that he--you could feel the connection with the troops. He looked like he was sincere. People trust him. That's what he has going for him.

MATTHEWS: Fareed, you're watching that from--say you were over in the Middle East watching the president of the United States on this humongous aircraft carrier. It looks like it could take down Syria just one boat, right, and the president of the United States is pointing a finger and saying, `You people with the weapons of mass destruction, you people backing terrorism, look out. We're coming.' Do you think that picture mattered over there?

Mr. ZAKARIA: Oh yeah. Look, this is a part of the war where we have not--we've allowed a lot of states to do some very nasty stuff, traffic with nasty people and nasty material, and I think it's time to tell them, you know what, `You're going to be help accountable for this.'

MATTHEWS: Well, it was a powerful statement and picture as well.

Here's how CNN reported it "straight" at the time (when they weren't featuring Kyra Phillips pretending to be TopGun herself.)They spent theentire afternoon breathlessly "reporting" the harroiwing landing and lovingly featuring the pictures of the phony flyboy on a loop:

Moments after the landing, the president, wearing a green flight suit and holding a white helmet, got off the plane, saluted those on the flight deck and shook hands with them. Above him, the tower was adorned with a big sign that read, "Mission Accomplished."

Bush said he did take a turn at piloting the craft.

"Yes, I flew it. Yeah, of course, I liked it," said Bush, who was an F-102 fighter pilot in the Texas Air National Guard after graduating from Yale University in 1968.

"Great job," said Bush, a wide smile stretched across his face as he posed for photographs with crew members who gathered to get their pictures with the president. He draped his arms around some, slapped the backs of others and shook hands with many.

"Yes I flew it!" Liar. And the media ate up this ridiculous cartoon version of reality with a spoon. Slowly but surely,however, the absurdity of the pageant became obvious. Even Matthews later called it a stunt.

And then, as if they hadn't already been played like a violin, they fell for it yet again with the ridiculous Thanksgiving stunt. Check out Fox's bizarre interpretation of events. First he played a fighter pilot president. Then, a few months later, he pretended to be a super duper secret agent:

CRAWFORD, Texas — Under cover of night as well as baseball caps, President Bush pulled off a Thanksgiving Day bait-and-switch that James Bond would have been proud of.

The president even stunned himself with the success of his trip to Iraq Thursday to visit troops for the holiday, saying if word of the dangerous mission had leaked out, he would have turned Air Force One (search) around and headed back to Crawford to spend the day with his family.

"I was fully prepared to turn this baby around, come home," Bush said late Thursday as he returned from his two hour visit to Baghdad airport, where he served dinner to the troops and personally delivered his Thanksgiving message of appreciation to the nation's servicemen and women.

But even Bush's twin daughters and parents, who all headed to the president's ranch for the holiday, were not informed in advance of the plan, and the overwhelming secrecy helped make the plan a success.

Feigning to be an "ordinary couple," Bush and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice snuck away from the ranch and endured the street traffic to get to the airport where Air Force One was parked. In a departure from the usual perks of being president, the unmarked motorcade had to obey all the traffic rules, stopping at lights and following the speed limit. During those pauses, Bush said he and Rice pulled their baseball caps down low so people could not see their faces.

Please. "I was fully prepared to turn this baby around." I guess we are supposed to believe he flies Air Force One in his spare time, too. (And, I don't even want to know why he kept saying "couple" about himself and Condi.)

I sincerely cannot believe that the media will let Rove and company get away with another of their cheap little cons, but it's hard to have any faith in their ability to know when they are being played. They have, after all, been duped by this phony showboat team over and over and over again.

Update: I see that DU is on to this too.




digby 10/18/2004 04:10:00 PM |

 
Inoculation Priorities

This shortage of flu vaccine is ironic in light of the fact that the vice president himself spearheaded a (luckily) failed effort to force every American to get vaccinated against smallpox which would have cost billions upon billions and killed at least a thousand people. He was said to have been messianic in his zeal to make vaccinations mandatory because of Saddam's alleged stockpile of smallpox that, needless to say, never turned up.

And, he didn't care any more about the potential deaths from the vaccine that he cares about all the deaths that have taken place in Iraq.

MR. RUSSERT: One of your many tasks in the administration, the point person on bioterrorism; you’ve been spending some time at the Center for Disease Control. Do you believe that all Americans should eventually be vaccinated against smallpox?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: We’re in the middle of improving our capability to do that. A year ago, we had enough vaccine for maybe 15 million people. We’re now well on the way to producing enough vaccine for 350 million people. There is serious consideration now being given to what kind of vaccination program we want. You go to first responders, people who have to deal with this when it first arises. Do you do a broader group than that? Do you do it on a voluntary basis for anybody who would like to have it? These are issues under active discussion, deliberation. Tommy Thompson over at HHS has been actively involved in it as well, too. It’s not a zero sum kind of proposition; that is, it’s not a cost-free operation. There are side effects and consequences for most vaccines. And you have to weigh those against the benefits that would be derived by protecting the population.

MR. RUSSERT: If you vaccinated 300 million Americans, a thousand would die from side effects.

VICE PRES. CHENEY: I don’t remember the exact numbers, but clearly there would be some people who would be harmed as a result of the vaccination.

MR. RUSSERT: But the risk may be such we may come to that.

VICE PRES. CHENEY: That’s entirely possible.

It was only because the medical community put it's collective foot down that Cheney was stopped from forcing everybody to get innoculated against a disease that's been wiped out and to which Saddam had absolutely no access.

More than 80 hospitals from every region in the USA, including leading teaching hospitals and large, urban public hospitals, are forgoing the vaccinations. The dissenters are a tiny fraction of the 3,000 hospitals recruited by state health officials to vaccinate doctors, nurses and other hospital staff members who are most likely to care for smallpox patients.

But their numbers are growing as doctors and administrators at hospitals around the USA are concluding that the known health risks from the vaccine, which can cause illness and even death, outweigh the unquantifiable risks of smallpox being used as a terrorist weapon.

The refusal to vaccinate raises new questions about the president's plan just as the first phase is expected to begin this week. And some health care experts and government officials fear that any reluctance to participate in the first phase could lessen the willingness of others to participate in the second phase -- and undermine the administration's goal of eliminating smallpox as a viable option for terrorists.

Richard Wenzel, chairman of internal medicine at Medical College of Virginia Hospitals of Virginia Commonwealth University, finds the resistance neither surprising nor unwarranted.

"This is not an issue that should be framed in terms of patriotism," he says. "This is an issue that's medical risk-benefit. We haven't seen this disease for more than 25 years. We are reacting to a perceived threat that's not well defined."

The hospitals are reaching their decisions individually after their own in-house infectious diseasesspecialists study the Bush plan.

Almost as a rule, hospital administrators say they are reluctant to make some of their employees sick to protect them from a disease that no longer exists and would reappear only in the chance of a terrorist act.

The administration did all of this at the very same time that the public health officials were warning of a shortage of the flu vaccine.

"The thing that stops you from doing this is the complexity of the smallpox vaccine, which is not a safe vaccine," says William Schaffner, head of the preventive medicine department at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, one of the hospitals that is opting out. "There's a real disease that kills people unnecessarily: the flu. Mr. President, I would love to see you endorse a national flu vaccine campaign with the same vigor."

Cheney never did learn his lesson from that. They spent millions and millions to get a stockpile of vaccine for which there is absolutely no use and ignored the professionals who warned that the flu vaccine was in short supply. And, a pouting Dick Cheney obviously still harbors resentment about that:

Q: Are there any lessons for you in the way the smallpox vaccine program sort of ran into public opposition? Is that an example of where the public is less aware of the dangers than they ought to be?

CHENEY: Well, we — I'm trying to be careful here so I don't start another wave of concern out there about smallpox. People clearly were concerned about the side effects of the vaccine. I think there was a certain amount of complacency in terms of people not being willing to take it as seriously as we thought it should be taken. And so far we've been fortunate. Hopefully we will continue to be fortunate. It's to some extent the responsibility, though, of those of us in government to think about the what-ifs, to worry about the worst case, to look at the evidence that's out there and connect the dots.

And we were criticized, the government was criticized generally prior to 9/11 for, "you didn't connect the dots." I think we did, but that charge is made. Here you're in a situation where you clearly want to make certain that you take all the intelligence available, you look at the capabilities of your adversaries, you draw reasonable conclusions, and you act on those conclusions. And that's what we did with respect to smallpox.

And the main effort there, the focus was to try to get enough people in the medical community, first responders, inoculated, so that if we did get hit, we could move aggressively to implement a national immunization program. We're better off now than we were before we started, but clearly we fell short of what we had originally anticipated, in terms of the numbers of people we would like to have seen inoculated.

Yes. And luckily they fell short of killing about a thousand people that wouldn't have had to die because of a threat that didn't exist. Smallpox is a disease that has been eradicated. There is a very remote possibility that a small amount could escape from the controlled storage facility, but we have absolutely no evidence that it has happened. Dick Cheney tried to strongarm the CDC into demanding that every person in American be vaccinated because he was trying to scare the country into supporting a war with Iraq and as with everything else in that run-up he was willing to say anything to make that happen. It is unconscionable that he actively fought against the prevailing medical opinions that this country could deal with a real smallpox outbreak without a full scale innoculation scheme in order to advance his paranoid vision. (That it might have benefitted a certain vaccine manufacturer is something we might also ponder...)

After 9/11, the administration, Dick Cheney among the most hysterical, with their friends the lapdog media were in the throes of a delusional fit busily chasing phantom threats and science fiction scenarios instead of showing adult leadership. The disaster in Iraq and the shortage of flu vaccine of a piece. They are the result of the leadership of this country falling to pieces after 9/11 and losing sight of the nation's priorities. They have proved that they cannot be depended upon to keep their heads when all around them are losing theirs.





digby 10/18/2004 02:01:00 PM |

 
Family Tradition

Check out this little trip down memory lane on Consortiumnews. We know that the Bush family has a penchant for dirty tricks in the last month or so of a campaign, particularly when they are fighting for their lives. In 1992, they got so desperate that they tried to paint Bill Clinton as a communist agent and they used the executive branch to do it.

We laugh at Ann Coulter and think of her as a clown. But, the truth is that there are a rather large number of Americans who agree with her that Democrats/liberals are routinely traitorous. And, the Bush family is always ready to exploit that paranoid style whenever they need to.




digby 10/18/2004 01:31:00 PM |

 
Again???

I can hardly wait to see Kerry's stump speech in its entirely today on CNN, MSBNC and FOX. Certainly, since they've all been willingly bamboozled into giving Bush another free hour of television to give a "major policy speech" on terrorism that is actually his standard character attack stump speech punctuated by wild cheering and booing from his brainwashed rubes, they will feel bound by journalistic ethics to give Kerry equal time. Right?

Perhaps a little phone call might help to remind them.

CNN

www.cnn.com

1 CNN Center
POB 105366
Atlanta, GA 30348
Phone: (404) 827-1500
Fax: (404) 827-1593, (404) 827-1784

Fox News

www.foxnews.com
Speakout@foxnews.com
Viewerservices@foxnews.com

1211 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10036
Phone: (212) 301-3000
Fax: (212) 301-4224

MSNBC

www.msnbc.com
world@msnbc.com

One MSNBC Plaza
Secaucus, NJ 07094
Phone: (201) 583-5000
Fax: (201) 583-5453



digby 10/18/2004 10:56:00 AM |

Sunday, October 17, 2004

 
Fox Paradox

Brit Hume and the Gang pretty much agreed this morning that "Stolen Honor" is news and that Sinclair has a right to broadcast it as long as they have at least one ineffectual Democrat on afterwards to rebut the charges (if they can find one.)

The question I have, is this. If it is news, then why isn't the news media as a whole, and FoxNews network in particular, broadcasting it?




digby 10/17/2004 09:34:00 AM |

Saturday, October 16, 2004

 
The Simple Strategy

NewDonkey.com says:

It's bizarre, to say the least: at precisely the moment when the Bush-Cheney campaign has fully committed itself to an 18-day drive to demonize John Kerry as a Massachusetts Liberal, BC04 and its conservative media echo chamber are suddenly focused on a different L-word: Lesbian, as in the sexual orientation of Mary Cheney.

Kerry's reference to the veep's daughter, in response to a debate question about each candidate's views on the nature or nurture origins of homosexuality, is now the obsessive preoccupation of the entire pro-Bush talking points network.

Their motivation is not 100% clear. In part, Bush partisans are simply trying to find something in the last debate that will change the public perception that Kerry won that one, and the whole three-game series. In part, Bushies want to dent the more positive impressions of Kerry's character by suggesting he's playing dirty politics. And finally, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that BC04 is simply freaking out at Kerry's exposure, deliberate or inadvertant, of a vulnerability in their base-first strategy, which depends heavily on piggy-backing battleground state referenda on gay marriage. Mary Cheney's father, after all, has conspicuously declined to support his boss in demanding a constitutional amendment to defend the "sanctity of marriage" against the alleged assault from those demanding gay marriage rights. This is not something conservatives want to be reminded of.

The morning news on Fox just spent half an hour talking about it and came to the conclusion that this was a bigger issue than taxes and the war in Iraq. Then one of the hideous dough boys wondered if the question had been on obesity, if it would have been appropriate for President Bush to bring up Elizabeth Edwards's "problems." I sure wish that all those moms and kids had heard that one.

I think this is simply the opportunistic opening salvo in a full-on character attack on John Kerry as a "hit below the belt" dirty campaigner. Typical GOP projection. In between will be more of the Rove patented ratfucking that they will pin on the Democrats.

At this point I don't think that Rove has anything too sophisticated up his sleeve. We are going to see simple, crude attacks on Kerry's character in the hopes that it will stimulate the neanderthals to vote and to swing a few simple minded undecideds.

And, of course, this is an innoculation against a Kerry win. They are setting it up to say he stole it.




digby 10/16/2004 06:25:00 AM |

Friday, October 15, 2004

 
Hell Froze Over

CNN.com

WILLIAM SCHNEIDER, CNN SR. POLITICAL ANALYST: That's right. This week there was an issue that hit home with voters and forced the candidates to rethink their scripts. It even walked off with the political play of the week.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) SCHNEIDER (voice-over): They're standing in line in Florida and Michigan, in New Jersey. The line goes around the block. Eager swing state residents lining up to vote? Not exactly. They're lining up for flu shots.

DR. CHARLES GONZALEZ, INFECTIOUS DISEASE SPECIALIST: It's incredibly serious. We have half as much vaccine as we should have.

SCHNEIDER: How did that happen?

BUSH: We relied upon a company out of England to provide about half of the flu vaccines for the United States citizens.

SCHNEIDER: Uh-oh. Sounds like outsourcing. The president had a solution.

BUSH: We're working with Canada, hopefully they will produce a -- help us realize the vaccine necessary.

SCHNEIDER: But hasn't Bush expressed problems with drug imports from Canada?

BUSH: My worry is, it looks like it's from Canada, it might be from a third world. We have to make sure before somebody thinks they're buying a product, that it works.

SCHNEIDER: President Bush made a plea to the public.

BUSH: If you're healthy, if you're younger, don't get a flu shot this year.

SCHNEIDER: Sounds like rationing, something the president said would result from Kerry's health care plan.

BUSH: Government sponsored health care would lead to rationing.

SCHNEIDER: The government has the situation under control the president says.

BUSH: The CDC responsible for health in the United States is setting those priorities and allocating the flu vaccine accordingly.

SCHNEIDER: Isn't that government control?

BUSH: My opponent wants the government to run the health care.

SCHNEIDER: Maybe the answer is legal reform.

BUSH: Vaccine manufacturers are worried about getting sued, and so therefore they have backed off from providing this kind of vaccine.

SCHNEIDER: Kerry says the issue is the whole health care system.

KERRY: There still aren't enough flu vaccinations. What's the president's solution? He says, don't get one if you're healthy. That sounds just like his health care plan to me, hope and pray you don't get sick.

SCHNEIDER: The flu bug has infected the campaign. The side effect was the political play of the week.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

SCHNEIDER: What President Bush warns could happen under the Kerry health care plan, shortages, rationing, that's exactly what is happening now. So the issue is whether the Kerry health care plan would solve the problem, or as Republicans charge, make it worse.

WOODRUFF: Is there any evidence yet how this issue is playing out politically? Do we see polls? Do we pick up what people are saying?

SCHNEIDER: We don't have any direct evidence that it's having a political impact yet. We know it is a very big issue on voters' minds. They're very dissatisfied with the fact that there is a shortage and frankly many are looking for somebody to blame. When the administration is the incumbent administration, they're likely to take some hits.

WOODRUFF: You know it's serious when you read that some states will fine or jail doctors and nurses who give flu shots to people who are not at high risk.

SCHNEIDER: Right, and that sounds a lot like rationing.

digby 10/15/2004 07:30:00 PM |

 
He's Naked And We're Sick Of Looking At It

Richard Cohen does it again:

For months now I've dropped bets on the presidential election like Hansel (of "Hansel and Gretel") dropped pebbles. For honor and money, I've wagered on George Bush, not because I wanted him to win but rather because I thought he would. Now I'm changing my mind. It's not the tightening polls that have done it -- I knew that would happen -- but rather something I could not have predicted. The president is missing.


The president I have in mind is the funny, good-natured regular guy I once saw on the campaign trail -- a man of surprisingly quick wit and just plain likeability. I contrasted this man to John Kerry, who is as light and as funny as a mud wall, and I thought, "There goes the election."

Where it has mattered most -- the three debates -- Bush has been wooden, ill at ease and downright spooky. He makes bad jokes, cackles at them in the manner of a cinematic serial killer and has lacked the warmth that he not only once had but that I thought would compensate for a disastrous presidency and give him a second -- God help us -- term. In short, he could take over the Bates Motel in an instant.

The missing president must be Richard Cohen's imaginary friend because the man I saw in the debates was absolutely no different than he has ever been.

He has always been an arrogant, cold, testy little asshole. It's just that people like Cohen built some image in their minds --- probably based upon some frat house fantasy that we don't even want to think about --- and they have foisted their little wetdream on us for the last four years.

Here is one of my favorite examples of Bush's warmth and likeability that Cohen believed in so fervently. Here you see the guy who really believes that the country would be a lot better off with a dictator --- as long as he's the dictator:

The American people must understand when I said that we need to be patient, that I meant it. And we're going to be there for a while. I don't know the exact moment when we leave, David, but it's not until the mission is complete. The world must know that this administration will not blink in the face of danger and will not tire when it comes to completing the missions that we said we would do. The world will learn that when the United States is harmed, we will follow through. The world will see that when we put a coalition together that says "Join us," I mean it. And when I ask others to participate, I mean it.

And when the world told him to stick it where the sun don't shine, they meant it too. Strangely, they didn't seem too impressed with his macho threats.

Go to the link and listen to the audio to get the full effect of this phony jerk lecturing the entire world about what they had to do. You'll see that the entire diatribe was spoken as if he were an angry father punishing his children. It was disgusting. And it was way back in 2001. It's not like this creepy, aggressive personality is anything new.

I don't consider myself to be any more persipicacious than others. I generally don't have superior insight into the hidden psychology of people I see on television. But, it has been clear to me and to millions of others that George W. Bush is a prick from the moment we laid eyes on him back in 2000 and nothing he has done since ever made me change my mind.

Richard Cohen, the emperor has no clothes you silly twit, and most of us have known it for a long, long time. In typical Democratic pundit fashion you waited until the very last minute to admit it. Very impressive performance as always.




digby 10/15/2004 05:00:00 PM |

 
Fighting The Narrative

Jonathan Chait has an interesting article in TNR in which he makes a good case that it's Kerry's to lose. He chalks it up to a better Democratic ground game and obvious Bush weakness.

But he says something at the end which I find kind of amusing:

The biggest mystery may be why most pundits haven't noted how bad things look for Bush right now. Maybe the reason is that he's built an aura of inevitability, starting with his 2000 victory and continuing through his legislative triumphs. The man just doesn't seem to lose very often. And his campaign firmly believes in projecting an air of confidence in the belief that it's self-fulfilling. (Remember Bush in late fall 2000, in an effort to show he was so confident that he could play for a landslide victory, devoting time and money to California?) The day before the 2000 election, a front-page headline in The Washington Times read, "Bush campaign says it's in the bag; Top strategist sees 320 votes." In retrospect, we now know that Bush's victory was not exactly inevitable. So maybe it's just hard to believe that Bush will lose, even if the data suggest he will.

Could Bush still win? Of course. I can think of three things that could intervene. First, Kerry is highly gaffe-prone. Roughly once a week he utters a statement--global test, terrorism as a nuisance--that plays right into his opponent's hands and forces him to explain himself. Any day, he could utter a gaffe big enough to change the dynamics of the campaign. Second, whenever the terrorism threat level rises, Bush's ratings go up. What are the odds we don't have an elevated threat between now and election day? Right--pretty slim. And third, a terrorist attack within the United States would probably cause a major rallying effect for Bush. On top of all that, there are limits to our predictive ability. Elections can't be forecast with perfect accuracy. It's possible that there are other important variables that we don't or can't know right now that could swing the race toward Bush. But what we do know says a lot, and what it says is that Kerry looks like a good bet to win.

With the exception of a terrorist attack, every single point that Chait makes is a result of a flaccid, ineffectual and in-the-tank news media.

Why does Bush have an "air of inevitability?" Why, it's because they have pretended in plain sight and the news media have either been too lazy or stupid to challenge it, despite the fact that in the paragraphs preceding this one, Chait just laid out a devastating case against Bush's electability. The fact that an incumbent wartime president is in this much trouble two weeks before the election is a powerful story that the media just can't be bothered to report. They are going to wake up on November 3rd scratching their heads and saying wtf because they aren't paying attention to what is really going on. And then they'll do it all again.

Furthermore, the idea that Kerry is "gaffe prone," at least in comparison to the most inarticulate president in the history of the United States, is ridiculous. It's not that Kerry is gaffe prone, it's that the media are addicted to snotty GOP talking points and the GOP is quite adept in knowing how to frame these little gaffes and scandals in ways that appeal to their puerile worldview. They play willingly into the GOP's hands by pimping stories they know very well are full of shit but thrill them in some way.

The terrorist alerts are a national joke and the mainstream media have done virtually no reporting on how this came to be. They behave as if these stupid color coded charts are some sort of third rail and as a result they have allowed the administration to manipulate the electorate over and over again. If they allow the administration to cry wolf again, they have no one to blame but themselves if it nobody pays attention and something horrible actually happens.

So, maybe it's true that it's Kerry's to lose. But he is forced to anticipate the moves of a very powerful and dishonest GOP machine (and likely controversial election result) and at the same time he has to battle the silliest and most ineffectual political media in the world in order to win. Talk about a challenge.

I think we'll do it anyway. But it's a testament to Kerry's skill as a politician, a great organization and more than half the country just getting sick and tired of this bullshit and coming out to vote. It really shouldn't be this hard.




digby 10/15/2004 03:47:00 PM |

 
The Falafel Factor

Just in case you'd like to send Bill O'Reilly a sandwich or a nice little gift.




digby 10/15/2004 02:56:00 PM |

 
Dumboys

I don't know how many of you are watching Crossfire, but Jon Stewart is on and he's making both Tuckie and Paul a tad uncomfortable.

They seem to be unaware that The Daily Show is a parody of the news and that its mission is to make fun of them. And that's because they are so insular and self-referential that they have no idea how the country really sees them.

They don't like it. Especially the Tuckster who is plainly wants to scratch his eyes out.

Stewart is trying to make the point that they are contributing to the dumbing down of the discourse by presenting this fake news, or political theatre, that they pretend is news. He isn't being funny and he isn't doing the usual celebrity circle jerk and they are finding it very discomfiting.

Good.




digby 10/15/2004 02:01:00 PM |

 
Reward The Good Guys

Hey everybody. If you need some glasses, or order contacts on-line, get them from these guys:

Dear Customer,

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thanks to reader Gail S.

digby 10/15/2004 01:41:00 PM |

 
Anybody Got A Problem With This?


Via Josh Marshall:

As we told you a few days ago, six Republican party staffers and campaign workers in South Dakota resigned over a burgeoning voter fraud scandal. Chief among them was Larry Russell, head of the South Dakota GOP's get-out-the-vote operation, the Republican Victory Program.

To date, no criminal charges have been filed. But the state Attorney General says the investigation is "continuing."

Today comes news, however, that Russell -- still under investigation in South Dakota -- has been reassigned to run President Bush's get-out-the-vote operation in Ohio. Russell will now "lead the ground operations" for Bush in Ohio, according to an internal Republican party memo obtained by the Sioux Falls Argus Leader.

And Russell's bringing along with him to Ohio three of the five other GOP staffers who had to resign in South Dakota and are similarly under investigation in that state.

I can see that they are going to try to overwhelm us with dirty tricks all over the country and make it difficult to concentrate on any single thing. It's clear that they are embarking on a concentrated battleground ratfucking effort on top of full-on voter intimidation combined with misdirection about vote fraud.

Is there anything to be done about this? Perhaps e-mailing the local media with the story and asking them to keep an eye on it? Maybe it's time for some push polling on our side. "Would you be more or less inclined to vote for president Bush if you knew that his campaign brought in suspected criminals from South Dakota to run his get out the vote effort in Ohio?"






digby 10/15/2004 01:22:00 PM |

 
Semen Found On Karl Rove's Tie!

Not really, but I thought it might get the mediawhores' attention. There is some news but it doesn't have anything to do with semen so it likely won't require the Republicans to answer unwanted questions during the waning days of the presidential campaign about the president's chief political strategist being called before a grand jury to testify in the matter of exposing an undercover CIA agent.

Still, you'd think Judy Blitzer and the gang might at least mention it...

Rove Testifies in CIA Leak Investigations


WASHINGTON - President Bush's top political adviser, Karl Rove, testified Friday before a federal grand jury trying to determine who leaked the name of an undercover CIA officer.

Rove spent more than two hours testifying before the panel, according to an administration official who spoke only on condition of anonymity because such proceedings are secret.

Before testifying, Rove was interviewed at least once by investigators probing the leak. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell also have been interviewed, though none has appeared before the grand jury.

Try to imagine this circumstance happening in the Clinton, Gore or Kerry campaigns. Close your eyes and visualize the spitting, drooling GOP talking heads like Bay "of Pigs" Buchanan and Sean "pom pom boy" Hannity. Just think of what a thrilling final two weeks we'd have...

This seems like it might just be worth the Democrats making a bit of a fuss over. Bush's brain just spent two hours in front of the grand jury in a criminal matter. Today.




digby 10/15/2004 01:10:00 PM |

 
Family Values

Apparently, the kewl kidz in the press tent all "gasped" when Kerry used the word "lesbian" the other night. And like their emotional role models, Beavis and Butthead, the mere mention of any word they associate with sex excited them a little bit. Because it did, and the Bush campaign sensed it, it's become one of those faux outrage dances that the media and the Republicans perform so well together.

I just had the misfortune to see Mickey Kaus on Fox (playing the conservative, for once) discussing the Mary Cheney incident. He claims that Kerry and Edwards were making an "ugly" cynical outreach to homophobes. (The fact that gay people don't see it that way should be telling, but no matter.) According to Kaus it's clear that Kerry and Edwards are trying to pry the homophobes away from the Bush campaign.

This is such patent nonsense. If he outed Mary Cheney perhaps it would be worth a fuss, but the woman (who is 35 years old) has been out for years working explicitly on gay and lesbian issues. She's the third most famous lesbian in America, fergawdsake. If Kaus thinks that Kerry is hoping to pry the homophobes away from the Republican party by outing an already famous lesbian he needs to think a little bit about how that might work.

On the other hand, it is perfectly fair to out the personal hypocrisy within an admininstration that, at the behest of its bigoted base, wants to enshrine discrimination against gay people into the constitution yet are quite tolerant of homosexuality in their personal lives.

This isn't just a little game. It is a serious matter of equal rights under the constitution. And, the Cheneys' behavior can be directly compared to the type of behavior that used to be tolerated from white men like Strom Thurmond who agitated for decades for Jim Crow and discrimination against african americans while privately being quite fond of his african american daughter. That goes beyond hypocrisy. For any enlightened person, it is intellectually and emotionally incoherent.

We, as citizens, are not in a position to pass judgment on how people deal with such issues in their personal lives. But those like Thurmond and Cheney publicly promote laws that discriminate against selected people in our society and in their own families. That is such a counterintuitive concept to most Americans that it deserves to be exposed and openly discussed.

I can certainly understand that the Cheneys are uncomfortable with this situation and are trying mightily to distract public attention from the fact that they are behaving in an incomprehensible manner. In their case, it is very confusing because they not only seem to tolerate their daughter's orientation, they have welcomed her partner into the family on equal terms with other spouses and employ her in a public role in the campaign. It is not unreasonable to wonder how they square this with the Republican party's open hostility to gay people, even to the extent that the Log Cabin Republicans made a very public break with the party in this campaign. What led them, and her, to accept the ignominy of not appearing on the stage with the entire family at the GOP convention?

It's not surprising that Republicans would try to portray this as a Kerry campaign dirty trick, because it feels like that to them. The hypocrisy of the Cheneys is something they'd very much like to keep under wraps. And when they heard the gasp of arousal from the press corpse when Kerry said a "sex-word" they knew just what to do --- launch one of their faux outrage campaigns that would allow the media to talk about "dirty" things all day while expressing their shock and awe at how terrible the Democrats are for bringing it up. Republicans never lose by tickling the pre-adolescent libidos of the political media.

Cheney and his erotically imaginative better half are really the ones on the hot seat with this but have successfully spun the press these last couple of days. However, as a very stupid man once said, they can run but they can't hide. At some point, maybe not until they are on their deathbeds, they will have to face the fact that they betrayed their beloved daughter countless times by refusing to use their power for good and stand up for what they knew in their hearts to be right. It may not be on their gravestone, but that will be their true epitaph.



digby 10/15/2004 10:51:00 AM |

 
Guerilla Blogging

Check out all the Freeway Blogger pictures.

Good Work!




digby 10/15/2004 08:59:00 AM |

Thursday, October 14, 2004

 
Inner Lives

Riffle found some rather surprising similarities between O'Reilly's alleged phone porn and a hot and steamy shower scene in his hot and steamy novel:

Here are some snippets of O'Reilly's [alleged] phone sex technique from the (real) lawsuit

O'Reilly: Well, if I took you down there I'd want to take a shower with you right away, that would be the first thing Id do... yeah, we'd check into the room, and we would order some room service and uh [....]

You would basically be in the shower and then I would come in and I'd join you and you would have your back to me and I would take that little loofa thing and kinda' soap up your back.. rub it all over you, get you to relax, hot water [....]

[....] and then with my other hand I would start to massage your boobs, get your nipples really hard ... 'cuz I like that and you have really spectacular boobs....

So anyway I'd be rubbing your big boobs and getting your nipples really hard, kinda kissing your neck from behind ....

And here's a bit from O'Reilly's novel, Those Who Trespass:

The spray felt great against her skin as she ducked her head underneath the nozzle. Closing her eyes she concentrated on the tingling sensation of water flowing against her body. Suddenly another sensation entered, Ashley felt two large hands wrap themselves around her breasts and hot breathe on the back of her neck. She opened her eyes wide and giggled, "I thought you drowned out there snorkel man."

Tommy O'Malley was naked and at attention. "Drowning is not an option", he said, "unless of course you beg me to perform unnatural acts – right here in this shower."

Who knew that Big Bill was so obsessed with erotic fantasy? (And, furthermore, who ever wanted to?)

Speaking of bodice ripping soft core fiction, considering the events of today, perhaps it's time to revisit Lynne Cheney's 1981 paeon to the love that dare not speak its name:

The women who embraced in the wagon were Adam and Eve crossing a dark cathedral stage -- no, Eve and Eve, loving one another as they would not be able to once they ate of the fruit and knew themselves as they truly were. She felt curiously moved, curiously envious of them. She had never to this moment thought Eden a particularly attractive paradise, based as it was on naiveté, but she saw that the women in the cart had a passionate, loving intimacy forever closed to her. How strong it made them. What comfort it gave.

The young woman was heavily powdered, but quite attractive, a curvesome creature, rounded at bosom and cheek. When she smiled, even her teeth seemed puffed and rounded, like tiny ivory pillows.

Let us go away together, away from the anger and imperatives of men. We shall find ourselves a secluded bower where they dare not venture. There will be only the two of us, and we shall linger through long afternoons of sweet retirement. In the evenings I shall read to you while you work your cross-stitch in the firelight. And then we shall go to bed, our bed, my dearest girl.

You can understand why a younger, lubricious Lynne would have fantasized about getting away from the "anger and imperatives of men" and write adolescent novels about lovely young women. She was, after all, married to Dick Cheney. Sadly, she seems to have lost that adventurous turn of mind and decided to become an angry hypocrite instead. Too bad. She might have been worth knowing once.




digby 10/14/2004 07:56:00 PM |

 
Mud Wrestler

Well now. Just as I was basking in the glow of three successful debates and a nice sense of momentum, I finally got to read this seminal article about Karl Rove in The Atlantic, by Joshua Green and I realized that I was being far too complacent. I urge you to read the whole piece. Rove is not a magician and he is not omnipotent. But he is ruthless, particularly when he's in a corner.

First of all, Rove's history in tight races is very instructive. He will play very, very dirty, particularly in the last couple of weeks, and he will use some tactics that are extremely difficult to counter in a short period of time.

One of his favorites seems to be to smear his own candidate in order to make his opponent look like a dirty trickster. This is, of course, where the Rove/CBS memo theory comes from. But, Rove usually does this sort of thing very late in the game, so I would suspect that we will see something new in the next week or so if it's going to happen.

The most instructive anecdote in the article is the one in which the race was so close that Rove insisted on a recount. It would sound very familiar except that in this case, his client was the challenger. This is likely to be a primer for what will happen if Kerry wins narrowly. Hooper was Rove's Republican client. Hornsby was the Democrat:

Judicial races that no one had expected to be competitive suddenly narrowed, and media attention—especially to Hooper's race after the "dialing for dollars" ad—became widespread. Then Rove turned up the heat. "There was a whole barrage of negative attacks that came in the last two weeks of our campaign," says Joe Perkins, who managed Hornsby's campaign along with those of the other Democrats Rove was working against. "In our polling I sensed a movement and warned our clients."

Newspaper coverage on November 9, the morning after the election, focused on the Republican Fob James's upset of the Democratic Governor Jim Folsom. But another drama was rapidly unfolding. In the race for chief justice, which had been neck and neck the evening before, Hooper awoke to discover himself trailing by 698 votes. Throughout the day ballots trickled in from remote corners of the state, until at last an unofficial tally showed that Rove's client had lost—by 304 votes. Hornsby's campaign declared victory.

Rove had other plans, and immediately moved for a recount. "Karl called the next morning," says a former Rove staffer. "He said, 'We came real close. You guys did a great job. But now we really need to rally around Perry Hooper. We've got a real good shot at this, but we need to win over the people of Alabama.'" Rove explained how this was to be done. "Our role was to try to keep people motivated about Perry Hooper's election," the staffer continued, "and then to undermine the other side's support by casting them as liars, cheaters, stealers, immoral—all of that." (Rove did not respond to requests for an interview for this article.)

The campaign quickly obtained a restraining order to preserve the ballots. Then the tactical battle began. Rather than focus on a handful of Republican counties that might yield extra votes, Rove dispatched campaign staffers and hired investigators to every county to observe the counting and turn up evidence of fraud. In one county a probate judge was discovered to have erroneously excluded 100 votes for Hooper. Voting machines in two others had failed to count all the returns. Mindful of public opinion, according to staffers, the campaign spread tales of poll watchers threatened with arrest; probate judges locking themselves in their offices and refusing to admit campaign workers; votes being cast in absentia for comatose nursing-home patients; and Democrats caught in a cemetery writing down the names of the dead in order to put them on absentee ballots.

As the recount progressed, the margin continued to narrow. Three days after the election Hooper held a press conference to drive home the idea that the election was being stolen. He declared, "We have endured lies in this campaign, but I'll be damned if I will accept outright thievery." The recount stretched on, and Hooper's campaign continued to chip away at Hornsby's lead. By November 21 one tally had it at nine votes.

The race came down to a dispute over absentee ballots. Hornsby's campaign fought to include approximately 2,000 late-arriving ballots that had been excluded because they weren't notarized or witnessed, as required by law. Also mindful of public relations, the Hornsby campaign brought forward a man who claimed that the absentee ballot of his son, overseas in the military, was in danger of being disallowed. The matter wound up in court. "The last marching order we had from Karl," says a former employee, "was 'Make sure you continue to talk this up. The only way we're going to be successful is if the Alabama public continues to care about it.'"

Initially, things looked grim for Hooper. A circuit-court judge ruled that the absentee ballots should be counted, reasoning that voters' intent was the issue, and that by merely signing them, those who had cast them had "substantially complied" with the law. Hooper's lawyers appealed to a federal court. By Thanksgiving his campaign believed he was ahead—but also believed that the disputed absentee ballots, from heavily Democratic counties, would cost him the election. The campaign went so far as to sue every probate judge, circuit clerk, and sheriff in the state, alleging discrimination. Hooper continued to hold rallies throughout it all. On his behalf the business community bought ads in newspapers across the state that said, "They steal elections they don't like." Public opinion began tilting toward him.

The recount stretched into the following year. On Inauguration Day both candidates appeared for the ceremonies. By March the all-Democratic Alabama Supreme Court had ordered that the absentee ballots be counted. By April the matter was before the Eleventh Federal Circuit Court. The byzantine legal maneuvering continued for months. In mid-October a federal appeals-court judge finally ruled that the ballots could not be counted, and ordered the secretary of state to certify Hooper as the winner—only to have Hornsby's legal team appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which temporarily stayed the case. By now the recount had dragged on for almost a year.

When I went to visit Hooper, not long ago, we sat in the parlor of his Montgomery home as he described the denouement of Karl Rove's closest race. "On the afternoon of October the nineteenth," Hooper recalled, "I was in the back yard planting five hundred pink sweet Williams in my wife's garden, and she hollered out the back door, 'Your secretary just called—the Supreme Court just made a ruling that you're the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court!'" In the final tally he had prevailed by just 262 votes. Hooper smiled broadly and handed me a large photo of his swearing-in ceremony the next day. "That Karl Rove was a very impressive fellow," he said.

I had read a bit about this race, but until now it really hadn't hit home that Karl Rove had single handedly orchestrated the Bush recount strategy in 2000.

This is going to be a very, very difficult couple of weeks and if we don't win decisively, it's likely to continue for quite a while. We cannot count on Republican shame to keep them from requesting hand counts or trying to block absentee ballots or behaving in any other hypocritical manner based upon their arguments in 2000. They have no shame and hypocrisy means nothing to them. So, we will have to be prepared to slug it out.

In the meantime, the blogosphere is going to have to help the media see what is happening when Rove launches his next slime attack. I suspect that the Mary Cheney brouhaha may be the first shot --- it doesn't make a lot of sense by itself, but perhaps as an introduction to a new character smear it might. Whatever it's going to be it has something to do with Kerry being cruel and unfeeling.

Keep your eyes and ears open for signs in the next few days. When the going gets tough --- and the going is certainly tough --- Rove always resorts to ratfucking. As Josh Marshall says,

It'll be like a 'where's Waldo' thing: Karl Rove Dirty Trick's Watch. (For examples, see the Green piece.) Who will be able to spot Karl's dirty tricks first? Who has the sharpest eye? Sit back in your seat. Get out the popcorn.

digby 10/14/2004 07:15:00 PM |

 
Boyz Klub

Blitzer is framing the O'Reilly story as a brave man fighting back against a greedy employee. Guess those guys have to stick together.

Still, I'm looking forward to hearing about the kicking and biting among the networks for first dibs on the tapes. Solidarity amongs millionaire TV stars only goes so far. Nothing personal, Billy boy. It's strictly business.




digby 10/14/2004 02:49:00 PM |

 
Live Long And Prosper

When did Mary Matalin decide to reveal herself as a Vulcan?


digby 10/14/2004 02:35:00 PM |

 
Slow Learner

James Wolcott gets to the nub of Bush's problem:

Now that the three debates belong to history, furnishing boring anecdotes from Michael Beschloss and Doris Kearns Goodwin for years to come, I'm struck by a single defining element that permeated each encounter: Bush's cavalier lack of preparation. Forget the cosmetics for a moment: the menagerie of mannerisms Bush displayed. He simply didn't come loaded with ammo. I assumed that he'd have some killer line at the ready, some surprise dug up from Kerry's record to spring, a practiced bit of eloquence that would lift the debate at a dramatic moment out of the recitation of facts and figures. He not only didn't have the eloquence, he barely had the facts and figures. For some bizarre reason best left to future psychologists, Bush doesn't seem to have approached these debates seriously. He refused to acknowledge he couldn't get by with simply rehashing his stump speech. When I saw on the news that Bush has prepared for this final debate by rehearsing during his spare moments on the campaign trail in Air Force One and the limo drives, I thought: that's now true preparation, that's lazy last-minute cramming.

Read the rest here.

And what's really galling is that he was not any better prepared in the debates in 2000, it's just that the giggling schoolgirls in the media were so delighted with the political wedgie they were collectively administering to Al Gore that they overwhelmed the coverage and created an alternate reality (that Gore unfortunately acted upon instead of ignored.)

The problem for Bush is that he's never really studied and in order to learn it is said that he prefers that concepts and ideas be presented to him because he doesn't like to read. On top of that he's an egomaniac who doesn't LIKE to be told what to do:

There is to be no scowling this time, George Bush's counselors told him, even if John Kerry attacks your mom. Campaign officials say it took Karen Hughes a good while to convince the Commander in Chief after the first presidential debate that he had looked irritated. "I was not irritated," he told her, irritated. "Sir, you were," she said. Hughes is one of the few who can tell the President what he might not want to hear and show him what he might not be able to see for himself.

If there is any further question as to why we are in a mess in Iraq, I think that should put it to rest. He doesn't study on his own, he learns by listening but refuses to hear bad news.




digby 10/14/2004 01:40:00 PM |

 
Memorizing Their Lines

The indispensible Eric Boehlert writes in Salon:

The media reaction: Ho-hum, just a Kerry sweep

For Kerry, it's a rather startling and completely unforeseen achievement, considering Bush entered the final stretch season with an unblemished career debate record and had been given high marks by the press for his debate message discipline and ability to connect with voters. Yet he went O for 3.

Despite the consistent polling results, most of the assembled television pundits Wednesday night considered the debate to be a draw and suggested it would, in the end, have little impact on Election Day. Again, it's hard to imagine that the media response would have been so reserved if it were Bush completing a debate sweep.

Ain't it the truth. When you think about it, it's an amazing achievement that Kerry has been able to sidestep the simpleminded media narrative that had the triumphant King Junior astride his destrier riding to a devastating victory over the weak and silly Democrat. Kerry refused to play along and the American people haven't been foolish enough to swallow it, thank Gawd.

But, the punditocrisy and the press corpse have not been willing to shake their preferred storyline, even in the face of an obvious digression to a totally new plot. Sadly, I don't think that even a Kerry victory is going to change this derisive, condescending attitude toward Democrats until we confront the media with it head on and force them to see us differently.

This campaign, with the emergence of a rugged indefatigable candidate and a large, active grassroots with a mighty fundraising arm may just be the first step in proving to these insular elites that Democrats are fed up with this phony characterization of us and we're going to be fighting it from now on. The media are going to have to face themselves, at least in part, because their audience is no longer a shouting mob on one side and an incredulous group of onlookers on the other. We are now engaged. And while we may believe in the virtues of tolerance and diversity and cooperation, it is a grave mistake to assume that makes us weak or passive.

We're schooling them in this election about that and we'll keep on doing it until they wake up to the fact that they've been duped by the Mighty Wurlitzer into writing a work of fiction that fewer and fewer people are willing to accept as fact.




digby 10/14/2004 01:25:00 PM |

 
Losin' It

As I'm watching the mini frenzy over the trumped up "Mary Cheney" controversy, I am struck by how much the GOP is off its game.

Think about it. The morning after the final debate, they trotted out the wife of the vice president to attack John Kerry for being too mean ---- about their gay daughter. What's the plan? Are they trying to make a mad dash to the middle by portraying the "most liberal member of the senate" as being intolerant toward gays? Or is this supposed to enrage and energize the base --- all of whom think that we should actually change the constitution to permanently discriminate against gay people. It's weird and unfocused. It's very hard for me to believe that they want to spend the day with the words "vice president's gay daughter" being repeated over and over again on television.

Meanwhile, while Lynn Cheney is performing the role of rabid attack dog, the only sight we've seen of Commander Codpiece the Warrior King (looking even more dazed and confused than ever) was a brief uncomfortable interview on Air Force One where John McCain gave his best streetwalker impression and some woman (didn't catch who she is) brought up Bush's worst moment in the debate in which he said that the answer to those who had lost their jobs was to improve elementary school standards. "That's just common sense" she said.

These guys are way off message.




digby 10/14/2004 10:35:00 AM |

 
Right Wing Victimization Watch

Lynn Cheney is all over the TV saying "as a mom" that Kerry used a "cheap and tawdry political trick" by mentioning her gay daughter. "He's not a good man," she says.

Suburban Guerilla reminds us of another politician using Cheney's daughter as a --- cheap and tawdry political trick:

"Lynne and I have a gay daughter, so it's an issue that our family is very familiar with. ... With respect to the question of relationships, my general view is that freedom means freedom for everyone. People ought to be able to free -- ought to be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to."

Remember Schieffer's question?

Both of you are opposed to gay marriage. But to understand how you have come to that conclusion, I want to ask you a more basic question. Do you believe homosexuality is a choice?

Shocking for Kerry to bring up Cheney's daughter in that context, eh? As Andrew Sullivan says this morning:

I keep getting emails asserting that Kerry's mentioning of Mary Cheney is somehow offensive or gratuitous or a "low blow". Huh? Mary Cheney is out of the closet and a member, with her partner, of the vice-president's family. That's a public fact. No one's privacy is being invaded by mentioning this. When Kerry cites Bush's wife or daughters, no one says it's a "low blow." The double standards are entirely a function of people's lingering prejudice against gay people. And by mentioning it, Kerry showed something important. This issue is not an abstract one. It's a concrete, human and real one. It affects many families, and Bush has decided to use this cynically as a divisive weapon in an election campaign. He deserves to be held to account for this - and how much more effective than showing a real person whose relationship and dignity he has attacked and minimized? Does this makes Bush's base uncomfortable? Well, good. It's about time they were made uncomfortable in their acquiescence to discrimination. Does it make Bush uncomfortable? Even better. His decision to bar gay couples from having any protections for their relationships in the constitution is not just a direct attack on the family member of the vice-president. It's an attack on all families with gay members - and on the family as an institution. That's a central issue in this campaign, a key indictment of Bush's record and more than relevant to any debate. For four years, this president has tried to make gay people invisible, to avoid any mention of us, to pretend we don't exist. Well, we do. Right in front of him.

digby 10/14/2004 08:33:00 AM |

Wednesday, October 13, 2004

 
The General And The Sissy

I don't know if anyone saw Wes Clark "interviewed" by Sean Hannity just now, but it almost came to blows. Riveting exchange as Clark called Bush a cheerleader and Hannity said Kerry was a war criminal.

Hannity tried to say that Kerry voted against all the weapons systems and that Saddam would still be a threat if he had been president and all the usual blather and Clark was having none of it. Hannity was all red faced and stomping his tiny feet and on the verge of tears.

The control room had to step in and cut it off. Brilliant. I love Wes Clark.




digby 10/13/2004 08:44:00 PM |

 
Zen Master

Kos called Kerry that tonight and I think it's true. The guy just has a sense of inner confidence and centeredness that is very reassuring. He is a mature, fully realized human being. I think that peopole had forgotten that this is something we can expect in our leaders. It's with a strong sense of relief that I watch him in action and see him prevail.

I would bet that by Friday the conventional wisdom will be that Kerry won all three debates. And the CW, for once, will be right.

The next two weeks are going to be a wild ride, but the wind is at our backs.

I think it's time for Democrats to start giving our man Kerry a little bit of credit. He's a very impressive politician and a very impressive man. Cool under fire, smart as a whip and hard as nails. Some months back I wrote that Kerry has been fighting the right since he was a very young man and may be the best qualified man in America for these times. I think I was right. He's the right man at the right time to set this country back on course. I'm proud to be voting for him.

For the first time since 9/11, I am feeling a little bit zenlike myself. We're going to win.


Update: The soundbite and clip is Bush saying he doesn't care about catching bin Laden. It couldn't be better for us.




digby 10/13/2004 08:25:00 PM |

 
He was, I think, on the side, maybe with his pompoms?

No, he had a great big megaphone:



And cheerleading was serious business for Junior. It's the one thing he is trained for and the only thing he's ever been good at:









digby 10/13/2004 05:24:00 PM |

 
Paging William Bennett. Outrage Is Dyin' Over Here

We stand for a culture of responsibility in America. This culture of our country is changing from one that has said, if it feels good do it, and if you've got a problem blame somebody else, to a culture in which each of understands we're responsible for the decisions we make in life. George W. Bush August 10, 2004


A middle aged Democrat had a consensual affair with a young female employee.

A middle aged Republican crudely groped and humiliated numerous women for over twenty years on movie sets.

A middle aged radio superstar Republican bought hard drugs on the black market and threatened his housekeeper if she fails to help him score.

A middle aged TV gasbag Republican grossly sexually harrassed an employee and theatened her with terrible retaliation if she spoke up.


Which of these middle aged men was vilified, derided and degraded as an immoral misogynist who had soiled the very fabric of America?


Man, is this a great country to be a Republican or what? Par-tay down, Dough Boyz! Anything Goes!!! IOKYAR, baby!!!




digby 10/13/2004 04:56:00 PM |

 
Accidental Radical

Nicolas Lemann's article about Bush in this week's New Yorker is a must read for any number of reasons. (No More Mister Nice Blog highlights perfect illustrations of his adolescent bloodlust and his perfidious backstabbing, just to name two.)

I thought what was most interesting, however, is that Lemann seems to have concluded that Bush himself was a radical who persuaded Cheney and the other "grown-ups" that he was serious about governing in the most ideological way possible:

Clay Johnson ... [said] Bush had begun the Vice-Presidential selection process by offering the nomination to Cheney. "The now Vice-President declined the option, but did agree to head up the search committee," Johnson said. "And then came back some months later and said that in fact he’d changed his mind and he would be willing to run --- to be the President’s running mate." Johnson said he had a hunch about what had changed: "Lynne Cheney told some mutual friends of ours that she and Dick decided that in fact they did want to join the Bush ticket, because they came to really like George and Laura, and the Vice-President came to realize that the President wanted to come up here to really make a difference. He was not going to try to play it safe. Not try to extend an easy, moderately successful four years into an easy, moderately successful eight years. He was going to try to come up here and make dramatic changes to the issues he thought needed to be addressed. And the Vice-President got very, very energized and excited about doing that. And so now we have Dick Cheney as Vice-President."

In other words, the team that most people thought of as being made up of a moderate, conciliatory, relatively unambitious Presidential candidate and his bland, self-effacing, government technician of a running mate had thrown in together on the basis of a mutual decision to govern in pursuit of radical change. And they have done that.

Lemann goes on to predict that if Bush wins there is absolutely no reason to believe that he will be cowed by his failures or the impending disasters that await at every turn, but rather will use his power to enact the most sweeping revolutionary agenda in modern history --- including the privatization of social security. He shows that in this way, Bush is predictable. When it comes to the most radical elements of the conservative agenda --- creating a permanent GOP powerbase, foreign policy neoconservatism, tax cuts for the wealthy and starving the entitlement programs out of existence, he is perfectly serious. Bush has moved to the middle only as a feint to either buy time, appease certain constituencies or to placate a powerful insider like Powell (or maybe his father's inner circle.) But, at heart, he is as rigidly ideological as a Norquist or Gingrich and even more determined to follow through.

Lemann knows all these people and has met Bush, so it's probably wrong to second guess his interpretation. However, I find it very hard to believe that anecdote Clay Johnson tells about Lynn and Dick joining up to aid the cause, at least with respect to one important detail. I don't doubt that Cheney didn't particularly want to be involved in Bush II. Bush I was an ignominious failure for the true believers and he had no reason to believe that the sequel would be any better. But, I can't help but be a little bit skeptical that the Cheneys were so impressed by Junior's grand strategic vision and ideological committment to the cause that they couldn't help but sign on.

What they realized was that Junior was easily manipulated with flattery and appeals to his manly prowess in contrast to his father and they could successfully push him to enact their grand strategic vision. Seriously, George W. Bush was barely a fully formed adult in 2000 --- it is simply not believable that he was merely pretending to be this amiable doofus while hiding his secret plans to change American politics and the world.

None of that makes any difference in the results, however. They were able to persuade Bush to adopt their radical agenda without missing even a beat. Their most difficult challenge was dealing with institutional resistence from much of the governement (and even the GOP establishment) which was weak and ineffectual but still managed to muddy Bush's image as a CEO manager over time. And, of course, the abject failure of policies that have Bush in a perilous re-election fight that should have been easy after the gift (a trifecta!) of 9/11.

Like Atrios, I believe that there is absolutely no reason to buy the nonsense that the "good" Republicans are going to step up in the next term and make sure that Junior's little cabal is stripped of its power. They couldn't if they wanted to and I'm not sure they do. Junior has never shown even the slightest indication that he's displeased with his radical "achievments." Indeed, if he wins, he will perceive it as a sweeping mandate and validation of all he's done. That's how he thinks.

Let's hope that John Kerry will be able to penetrate Bush's folksy facade one more time tonight and reveal the abstruse radicalism of his powerful advisory cabal's true agenda. On these domestic issues, if people knew what they were truly planning, Bush would drop in the polls like a stone.







digby 10/13/2004 02:28:00 PM |

 
Brave Men

I don't know if everybody has seen this ad, but it's devastating. I was with a group of people when it came on a few minutes ago and it silenced the room.

Here's the rundown from Salon:

It's the obvious political ad that has just been waiting to be made -- a young Iraq war veteran, missing a body part, talking simply and directly to the camera about the sacrifice he made in the service of official lies. The idea didn't come from the Democratic Party, or MoveOn.org, or the Kerry campaign.

The new ad is the creation of a group of Iraq war veterans, most in their 20s, operating on a shoestring budget. Their organization, Operation Truth, a nonpartisan, nonprofit group of 150 members, is dedicated to elevating the perspective of soldiers and holding elected officials accountable for their policy decisions.

"I was called to serve in Iraq because the government said there were weapons of mass destruction -- but they weren't there," Spc. Robert Acosta, 21, who was an ammunitions specialist with the 1st Armored Division in Iraq, says in the thought-provoking ad. "They said Iraq had something to do with 9/11 -- but the connection wasn't there ... So when people ask me where my arm went, I try to find the words, but they're not there." The ad ends with a shot of Acosta removing his prosthesis, revealing a stub where his right hand should be.

If you have any left, send these guys some money. They are the bravest group of young people in America --- for what they are facing physically and for having the cojones to speak out politically. It's never easy for soldiers to face the truth when their government lies to them.

Bravo.




digby 10/13/2004 01:12:00 PM |

 
Sherwood Like To See Some Results

Kevin at Catch the earliest muckraker on the "Stolen Honor" ratfuck way last summer, notes a delicious little tid-bit on Carlton Sherwood, the king of protester-porno.

Everyone knows by now that he was tapped to run the government web-site firstresponder.com. What's interesting is that it is now seven months behind schedule. Maybe Carlton needs to concentrate on his day job for a while and put a hold on his dirty tricks fantasy life. Millions are being wasted. As Kevin says:

Apologies to the first responders (read: heros) for the delay (homeland security can wait, you whiners)

I know it's not as important as "travelgate," when Brit Hume and his pals fell into the vapors for months proclaiming that cronyism in the white house travel office was just short of satanic, but this still might deserve a tiny bit of attention.

Take a look at the web site. These are your tax dollars at work, folks.




digby 10/13/2004 11:23:00 AM |

 
I Won't Be Ignoooored, Charlie

According to Wolf Blitzer, that bastard John Kerry was "really, really nasty" to poor little Junior in last week's debate which is why he was so "anxious to respond."

Media Matters reports that Blitzer asked Schieffer what he planned to do if Kerry pulled such a stunt again.

Here's the really, really nasty debate exchange:

KERRY: Now, I'm going to add 40,000 active-duty forces to the military, and I'm going to make people feel good about being safe in our military, and not overextended, because I'm going to run a foreign policy that actually does what President Reagan did, President Eisenhower did, and others. We're going to build alliances. We're not going to go unilaterally. We're not going to go alone like this president did.

GIBSON: Mr. President, let's extend for a minute --

BUSH: Let me just -- I've got to answer this.

GIBSON: Exactly. And with reservists being held on duty --

[crosstalk]

BUSH: Let me answer what he just said, about around the world.

GIBSON: Well, I want to get into the issue of the back-door draft --

BUSH: You tell Tony Blair we're going alone. Tell Tony Blair we're going alone. Tell Silvio Berlusconi we're going alone. Tell Aleksander Kwasniewski of Poland we're going alone. There are 30 countries there. It denigrates an alliance to say we're going alone, to discount their sacrifices. You cannot lead an alliance if you say, you know, you're going alone. And people listen. They're sacrificing with us.

My goodness, the Cheerleader in Chief is awfully sensitive if he thinks that saying he "went it alone" is "really, really nasty." This, from John Edwards on The Tonight Show last night ought to send him into a complete tizzy:

"I run, I played a little football when I was in school. And the president, I think, was there at those football games too. He was, I think, on the side, maybe with his pompoms? Can you run fast with those cheerleading outfits on?"

Bada Bing.

As this piece in Rolling Stone pointed out, somebody has a very thin skin and somebody else is fully aware of it.




digby 10/13/2004 10:23:00 AM |

 
Talking In His Sleep?

Haaretz reports, "high-level terrorism suspects are being held in a top-secret detention facility in Jordan." Bush had been so concerned about keeping their location a secret, he told the CIA not to tell him where they were.

No wonder he doesn't know what's going on. Evidently, he can't trust himself not to blurt out top secret information.

Via The Progress Report




digby 10/13/2004 09:47:00 AM |

Tuesday, October 12, 2004

 
The Question No Reporter Dares Ask

Racicot, Mehlman, Eskew, Dyke, Bartlett:
We've always said it was going to be a close race.

Reporter With Balls:
Why is that, Mark, Tucker, Jim? President Bush had a ninety percent approval rating just a year and a half ago and you say the country still favors his policies. The president can't think of any decisions he might have made differently. Yet, today he is fighting for his political life. What happened? Why did the president fall so far in the polls and why is he having such a hard time putting this one away?




digby 10/12/2004 02:16:00 PM |

 
All In The Family

Via Atrios I see that Raw Story found another connection between Sinclair and the Bush administration --- a neat little company named Jadoo, that makes fuel cells and recently got a nice contract in the WOT.

It turns out that Jadoo has a close connection with another of Bush's close coporate friends --- Enron:

It wasn't long ago that Jadoo—which gets its name from the Hindi word for magic—was doing business in a three-car garage next to a chicken coop outside Sacramento. Jadoo's president, Larry Bawden, 45, learned about fuel-cell technology at Aerojet, based in Sacramento, where he worked as director of fuel-cell products. In 1995, Aerojet sold off his unit, and Bawden left with a golden parachute. Embarking on an around-the-world boat trip with his wife, he got as far as Australia before some former colleagues called. They persuaded him to return to become a vice president at a fuel-cell company they were starting called PowerTek. They'd soon lined up a huge customer—the energy giant Enron—but unfortunately it was about to collapse.

Good timing is everything in business. And fortunately for Bawden and two other colleagues at PowerTek, their point person at Enron, Jon [sic] Berger, was ready for a career move. They recruited him to join them in launching Jadoo in November 2001, just as he was starting at Harvard. After helping them write a business plan, Berger asked a classmate to critique it. The student was impressed enough to invest $200,000. The co-founders and four other employees put in more than $100,000. In the meantime Berger began approaching East Coast investors.

It didn't take long for Jadoo to attract interest from some major players. Among them was Sinclair Broadcasting Group, which owns 62 local news stations in the U.S.; it was the lead investor in a $5 million round of financing last year. But Jadoo's biggest coup came after President George W. Bush touted hydrogen as an alternative to foreign oil in his State of the Union speech last January. Jadoo, which had just released its first product—a long-lasting battery for the surveillance industry—was one of 22 fuel-cell companies invited to Washington to make a presentation to the White House. The others included giants like Ford and Motorola. Afterward, Jadoo was one of only seven firms invited to give one-on-one presentations to the President. The startup got some unexpected free publicity when Bush held a TV camera using one of Jadoo's lightweight fuel cells on his shoulder as media photographers captured the moment. Jadoo plans to begin selling such batteries to the broadcast market early next year.

Unexpected free publicity huh? Right.

And that fresh-faced kid Berger, the partner from Enron? Get a load of this:

Mr. Berger has over eight years of experience in the energy industry, during which he managed energy trading books for Enron Corporation and initiated development of the new Enron Premium Power Division. As a Manager, he made the previously unprofitable southeast short term trading operation for the Enron East Power Trading Division profitable by approximately $30 million over a two year period. Under his management, the southeast short term trading operation successfully administered the largest long-term customer deal in the industry, and increased the average daily volume in the southeast trading hub by ten times the former volume. Mr. Berger also managed the Enron Hourly Trading Desk, and operated a utility system in the southeastern United States. At Enron Energy Services he led and developed Enron's corporate strategy for new energy technologies and energy reliability financial products. In addition, Mr. Berger spearheaded development, investment, and partnership opportunities in fuel cell technologies.

During 2002 and 2003, Mr. Berger served as an advisor to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission where he drafted governance guidelines for the Regional Transmission Organizations and served as an advisor to the drafters of the Standard Market Design regulatory document that is currently before the United States Congress. He also advised the Commission on distributed generation, demand response, information gathering and application issues, investigations, and trade clearing/credit issues in the North American energy markets.

He's one of the assholes who worked in the "screwing Aunt Millie" Enron business, albeit in the southeast. And they immediately hired him to work on the FERC. Unbelievable.

He's quite the operator. When he was a Harvard, and also an executive with Jadoo, he organized the first Harvard Business School Energy Symposium. And waddaya know, guess who he invited?

Speaker Name: Larry Bawden
Speaker Title: CEO
Affiliation: Jadoo Power Systems


As the legend grew, Berger's "business plan" for Jadoo so impressed an unnamed classmate that he and some of his friends invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in the company. (If the business plan said that one of the principles was an insider Bushie on the FERC and they could guarantee five million coming from a staunch Bush supporter plus a personal audience with the president, I'd take that bet too.) And the next thing you know, Bush is on television personally demonstrating the product and they have a nice fat contract with the DOD. Sweet.

What a cozy little circle jerk.


Update: Sid's Fishbowl has the same story.

digby 10/12/2004 01:36:00 PM |

 
Dial It In

Kos has created a great database of Sinclair affiliate information so that you can conveniently call and write your local station and its advertisers. It's best is you are actually a local to make an impact on local businesses. Kos also has a convenient list of natinal advertisers for all of us to contact.

I would suggest calling instead of writing, although a snail mail letter is very powerful too. To that end I've prepared a couple of introductory talking points to get you started if you aren't comfortable with doing stuff like this.

First, don't get mad. These people are very far away from the corporate decision and it serves no purpose to take out our anger on them. Tell them what you think and what you plan to do. Don't get bogged down in talking about your feelings or how upset you are by this. Make sure you mention that you will not buy their product or patronize their business if they support this thing and tell them that you are planning to talk about this with others to spread the word.

Calling the station managers and telling them that you are going to call advertisers is a good first step. I imagine that they are no longer talking calls today, but you can leave a message. Then call your local advertisers and tell them what you think. Use words like "controversy", "cheating", "unfair","unbusinesslike", "scam", "fraud" --- words with which businesses don't like to be associated.

Stay calm and make your case. These businesses don't want to deal with this crap and there's no reason to preemptively punish them for the acts of Sinclair. Speak more in sorrow than in anger "that it's come to this."

Here are a few phrases you might find will help you get started. Write in more in the comments section if you think of them and I'll pick the best ones and put them up too.

Sales managers:

Broadcast television stations have a unique responsibility to be guardians of the democratic process. You will not watch, nor will you patronize businesses that do not respect the rules and the law when it comes to fairness in elections.

You are going to call local advertisers and tell them that as long as they support this station's controversial intention of showing a political advertisement as news, you are not going to buy their product or patronize their business. Sinclair is cheating and you don't think that's fair. This is too important.

Corporate headquarters coming in and telling local news departments what they have to call news is just wrong. You are going to tell the local advertisers how you feel about that too. Local communities should have a say in what is shown on their own television stations. This is a scam on the good people of ____.

Local advertisers:

You don't care who somebody plans to vote for, but you think it's cheating for stations to run controversial political advertisements for one candidate and call it news.

You won't be able to support businesses that fund this kind of fraudulent and unbalanced partisanship.

After 2000, you realize that every vote counts and you think that elections are important enough to get involved with. You have a lot of friends who think the same way. This is something you feel strongly enough about to change your shopping habits over. This is unbusinesslike behavior and you don't think you can trust people who are so partisan.

You think that local communities letting corporations from out of state come in and tell local stations what they have to run us just wrong and you can't support that.


Josh Marshall says that station affiliates are asking callers to call Sinclair headquarters instead of advertisers.

Nice try, but we're not Republicans.


digby 10/12/2004 11:39:00 AM |

 
Pouty Press Tarts

Atrios has posted an excerpt from this article in which McCurry discusses Bush's obvious insecurity, an observation with which I concur. Everything about the man oozes insecurity and immaturity, always has.

This same article contains an interesting observation about the press corpse which I also think deserves some analysis:

In late september, i spent a week on the Kerry plane. Unlike the 2000 Bush plane, which became notorious for its party atmosphere -- margaritas flowed at the end of the day and affairs among the press corps were widely rumored -- the feeling on the Kerry plane is professional and businesslike. It soon became apparent that many members of Kerry's traveling press make no attempt to hide their open dislike of the candidate. The morning after Kerry had addressed the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute gala on the evening of September 15th, two members of the press corps were talking on a campaign bus. "That event was stupid," one said, referring to the previous night's occasion -- one of the largest Hispanic galas of its type. "A waste of time," the other said.

Other reporters were just as dismissive. Kerry had gotten a series of impassioned standing ovations during his speech. But when Elisabeth Bumiller described the event in the New York Times, she said, referring to a moment when Kerry spoke an entire paragraph in flawless Spanish, "Kerry's audience . . . listened in startled silence, then broke out into cheers and applause when he made his way through [the paragraph]."

But to report on these events accurately would mean you had to say something unqualified and positive about Kerry. This is something his traveling press corps has been -- and still is -- loath to do. On the evening of September 21st, outside an auditorium in Orlando, where inside more than 7,500 people were screaming wildly as Kerry spoke, Candy Crowley stood next to the venue and reported on CNN that Kerry was "trying . . . to rev up the crowd." The implication was unmistakable: Kerry's supporters in Florida were resistant, even standoffish. Just to make sure Crowley was able to get away with downplaying the event as she was, CNN never showed a wide shot of the large, cheering crowd.

As a result of the media bias against Kerry, there is an unmistakable disconnect between what you see on the trail when you travel with him and the way he is depicted in the media. On Mike McCurry's first trips on the plane, the Thursday and Friday after Labor Day, he immediately identified the animosity that existed between Kerry and the press corps. Specifically, the traveling press were mad because Kerry had not given a press conference since August 9th, five days into the SBVT controversy. McCurry realized he needed to fix the problem at once.

But, that can't be it. Bush never gives press conferences and he treats reporters like shit, yet the press has been fawning toward him since 2000. Why is it that the press corpse persists in treating Democratic candidates this way?

I don't think it's political. I think it's an institutional habit of mind that they are too lazy or too self-absorbed to challenge. "The Democrat" is an object of derision and mistrust, no matter who he or she is. Like so many others in this country, the media have absorbed and internalized the right wing propaganda about the Democratic Party and their subconscious attitudes and behaviors are a reflection of that. It's not an ideological or even a political bias. It's a personal bias born of right wing cant. Reporters need to take a good hard look at themselves and recognize that they've been spun in the worst way possible and they need to unwind themselves from the bullshit.

It is quite a testament to Kerry's political acumen and Bush's ineptitude that we have managed to stay so close in the last two elections considering this pervasive media bias against Democratic politicians.

Kos discusses today the necessity of keeping up the fight even after we win this November --- it's a long slog, as Rummy memorably said. Trying to unspin the press from their toxic habits of mind is part of that process.






digby 10/12/2004 11:02:00 AM |

 
Camera dei Fasci e delle Corporazioni

Via First Draft and Hesiod, here are the Sinclair online polls. Take just a moment to stop impending fascism, won't you folks?


Las Vegas
Minneapolis
Flint
Buffalo
Las Vegas (second station)
Milwaukee
Oklahoma City
Pittsburgh
Raleigh
Rochester
Tampa


Update: Check out this post by Josh Marshall if you haven't already. Airing your complaints to the local advertisers is a powerful way to put pressure on these stations.


digby 10/12/2004 09:09:00 AM |

Monday, October 11, 2004

 
Not Into Nuisances

Ezra wonders Why Does George W. Bush Hate Brent Scowcroft?

He must hate lil' Davy Horowitz's favorite tin soldier, Ralph Peters too:

The security environment will improve as Saddam, Osama and their most virulent supporters are killed. Eliminating terrorist operatives, masterminds and supportive dictators brings vital results. But we will never reduce Islamic terrorism to nuisance level unless we address the greater evil behind the deadly strikes.

This respected Fox News terrorism analyst has similar heretical ideas.

Why on earth would anyone ever think that the tactic of terrorism could be reduced to nuisance levels when it is the ultimate battle between good 'n evul? My God, there has never been a threat as grave as this in the entire history of the world. It cannot just be reduced, we must kill all the bad guys and spread freedom and goodness and puppies and ice cream! Don't these people know anything?




digby 10/11/2004 09:52:00 PM |

 
Rocking Chair Babies

Of all modern popular culture touchstones, I have to say that the South Park phenomenon interests me about the least. I find Stone and Parker's alleged iconoclasm pretty boring. That's just me.

This morning I watched an exchange on Fox News between two vacuous talking heads, though, that made me realize that they really are a couple of useful idiots for the right. The gasbags were going on and on about how silly it was for Sean Penn to get angry about a purported message in their new puppet movie in which they tell young people not to vote. It sounded like typical FOX blather, and I assumed that Penn was being his usual wingnut bait. But, the gasbags then took the South Park silliness and applied it to an indictment of Rock the Vote and other youth outreach groups in general by condemning the youth vote in general as uninformed, mostly by using liberal arguments as examples. It became apparent that there is a subtle GOP youth suppression campaign going on, for reasons that are obvious.

Here's Parker and Stone's response to Sean Penn's letter in today's Salon.

According to Stone, "when you read it, the letter comes from such a high place of arrogance, you know, [deep, serious voice] 'You guys are young guys! If you don't have children, you can't say anything about anything!' And the whole voting thing. All we ever said was that we thought that uninformed people should not vote -- on either side of the political spectrum. It doesn't matter who you're gonna vote for. If you really don't know who you're gonna vote for, or are uninformed, or haven't really thought about it? Just stay home. Don't let people fucking shame you into going to the polls."

Added Parker: "If you have absolutely no idea, fuck it."

"If you really don't know or you're just going to vote for George Bush because he's already in office, or you're gonna vote for John Kerry because he's on the cover of Rolling Stone, don't do that," Stone said. "That's lame. Just stay home. That's all we ever said."

An irreverent attitude that one might expect from ones so young. That 44 year old asshole Sean Penn is being a mean old man.

But, Parker is 35 and Stone is 33. Getting a little long in tooth to be protesting on the basis of their youthful impudence, don't you think?




digby 10/11/2004 05:10:00 PM |

 
Et tu Russert?

Chris Bowers has a number of helpful links in this post on MYDD, if you would like to protest the Sinclair nonsense. I would imagine that Sinclair, since it is openly and proudly partisan, actually believes that this is good for their cause. (They may just be surprised to find that their stations start screaming bloody murder, however, if they are harrassed day after day over this thing.)

I suspect that this will ultimately be decided by lawyers as Steve Soto and ex-commissioner Reed Hundt indicate. It may also be interesting to see what the FCC has to say about it in a general sense, although I have no hope that they would necessarily step in for the common good.

There is another avenue, to which Soto alludes in his post, that may be worth pursuing. Sinclair is insisting that this be shown as a "news" program and is offering Kerry some free airtime to respond on a panel or a call-in show in order to satisfy the McCain-Feingold law. They apparently believe that they can simply tell their stations to "call it news" without any sort of repurcussions from the news divisions of these stations or, more importantly, the network news divisions that air their nightly programs on those stations. Why is that?

This is an advertisement that is done in vitually the same format as the Swift Boat ads and even featuring many of the same sad old men who are stuck in a time warp. The local news divisions of those stations should scream bloody murder, but there are so few notions of journalistic integrity in local news left that I wouldn't expect much. (It may be worth trying to cause dissension in those newsrooms, however, by writing some letters and calling the stations and asking the news managers and reporters about their journalistic ethics.) But, this is beyond those local stations. By insisting that this program be aired as news, Sinclair is also implicating the national news networks in their act.

ABC, CBS and NBC have a stake in this. This isn't a local story; it involves a national election and it will be aired on a large number of their affiliate channels that also air the national news shows that are identified with those stations. It will likely be seen as having their impramatur even if they have nothing to do with it.

Will what is left of the national broadcast news media step up and use their clout to protest the corporate owners of their affiliate stations using their network's hard won news credibility to pass off a George W. Bush campaign commercial as a news event? They really should because if they sit back and say nothing, the last shred of their independence and journalistic integrity will have been tossed into the garbage can.

It's been a rough year for the mainstream news organizations. Maybe it's time they spoke up for what's right and redeemed a little bit of their honor. Unless they like being nothing but lackeys and whores, this may be one of their last chances to stand up for journalistic integrity. They won't have too many more chances.




digby 10/11/2004 02:59:00 PM |

 
Partisan Gamers

Campaign Desk prints a warning from one of its readers about the Iowa Electronic markets that I think should be flooded to any news organization that decides it would be fun to write about its miraculous predictive powers in past elections:

"Once you get past the lack of acuity [of] markets ... in general, there are simply too many additional problems with these minute exchanges" such as the Iowa Electronics Markets. "They are too small, have too little money at stake, and are therefore readily susceptible to undue 'influence'" by mischief makers.

The fact is that in past elections nobody paid attention to them so there wasn't the likelihood that anyone would think they would be worth gaming as they are this year.

Therefore, the IEM is best seen now as an unscientific online poll. The money is pretty inconsequential so it's not very risky to make the numbers move and that's exactly what's happening.

There are a couple of ways to deal with this. One is to attempt to educate the media, as this piece does, about how easy it is to manipulate such a small market. The other is to fight fire with fire and put our own cash on the barrelhead.

I'm not sure how effective the first option would be since it's never worked before. But, it might just be worth opening an account to trade in these last couple of weeks. Maybe it's not a big enough deal to worry about, though. Still, for those with a lot of disposable income, this might be a place to wager a couple of bucks.




digby 10/11/2004 10:52:00 AM |

 
R.I.P. Christopher Reeve

He was a good guy who inspired us all when his previously charmed life threw him a terrible curveball. One would think that Americans, no matter the political party or religion, would all mourn a man who showed such courage and determination in the face of adversity and spoke so eloquently for others with similar disabilities. It seems almost inhuman that some people can't feel any empathy for someone who had been a celebrated movie superhero one moment and in the next became a fragile corporeal being facing the most fundamental and difficult challenges a person can face --- and who then became an inspiration and spokeman for others with the catastrophic disability he lived with from that moment on. But there are such people.

Evidently, over on Free Republic quite a few people got out of hand and made some ugly remarks about Reeve and the moderator had to remove the threads. Here are some examples of the perfectly acceptable ones that remain:

Wouldn't rule out that Kerry might have spoke with Reeve before the last debate. Reeve might have had an idea the end was near for him and told Kerry to play up the emotional angle with stem cell research and Reeve's own paralyzed circumstance.

Wonder if Hell is handicapped accessible..

The willingness to sacrifice another life to save his own was not worthy of the Man of Steel.

I'm sorry, but I have no compassion for this man. He suffered a terrible injury through his own fault and, instead of accepting it, he lashes out in anger against Bush.

I would love to have been a fly on the wall when Kerry got the news of Reeve's death. Did he hang up and shout "YES!"? Did he dance a little jig? Did he excitedly phone McAuliffe with the news? Noone but Mama T knows...

Reeve? Is this the guy who, his picture-perfect Hollywood life having been tragically altered by an accident, spent the remainder of his life advocating the killing of unborn children so that he might walk again?

He was a 3rd-rate actor (Ever see him in any movie besides Superman? When playing a real human being, he was dreadful!). When injured living a life of luxury and leisure, he fought for vain, desperate hopes for what might keep him alive, even if it caused the deaths of millions. Contrary to mythology, he sunk into bitter, violent anger, pouring every ounce of derision he possibly could on Christianity and America. And then he simply died.

I'm sorry for Reeve's family...his wife has stood by him for several tragic years. However, to have liberals (Ron Reagan will probably be leading the charge) milk this is disgusting. And let's be honest...Christopher Reeve WAS doing something that was very dangerous when he broke his neck. A lot of us common folks are living with situations that just happened...beyond our control and not our fault. That's what life is about, and we don't have wealthy friends helping support an extravagant lifestyle.

I have a feeling that Kerry was tipped off about Reeve's condition prior to the 2nd debate, which is why he mentioned him along with Michael J. Fox. You can bet Kerry will again mention Reeve at the 3rd debate. It is this crude, blatant exploitation of the disabled and afflicted, which make the Dems so despicable. They provide false hope in order to win debating points and votes. The implication will be that GWB caused the death of Reeve.

You could make an argument that the first implemention of "Political Correctness" was the custom of speaking better about someone after their death than while they were living. But I won't try to make that argument here. I will say this: if it were demonstrated that Reeve, knowing the seriousness of his condition, actually made an explicit request that his possible death be used to help the Kerry campaign, all subsequent scorn would be deserved.

Oh, this is going to be disgusting. Bitter twst of fate that Reeve is mentioned by Kerry and then he dies. Or perhaps did Kerry know in advance Reeve was ill/on his deathbed?

Is there no level of filth to which these Dems won't sink?

The main gist of the dem line is: we need to keep legal the ability to take growing humans and detroy them through abortion so we can use their body parts to help other people like Chris Reeve (potentially) live better. The bloodlust is positively demonic.
I am just not happy hearing about this this AM.

Ahh... reminds me of the Paul Wellstone rally err memorial service. Always trying to work in a political advantage over a death, aren't they.

You think you're cynical? I am wondering if Clark Kent would possibly pull the plug on himself in a desperate attempt to "matyrize" the stem-cell issue and help Kerry?

Reeve seemed like a nice chap until he got involved with the pro-death wing of the democrat party. We can't always get what we want, but we often get what we deserve.

The fact is, Mr. Reeve spent his last days using his fame and access to champion the murder of unborn children.

The fact is, Mr. Reeve took very clear and very selfish political stands and used his medical condition to gin up sympathy for murder.

My point is that some people spend their entire lives breaking down traditional morality and then when they die they are eulogized as if they did as much for the world as Mother Theresa.

Reeves spent his last few years advocating the destruction of human life in order to find a cure for what ailed HIM. It may have seemed selfless to some, but in reality and objectively, it was selfish. He was looking for a cure and if it meant the destruction of unborn children to acheive that end, then too bad for them. He was not willing to let a fetus stand between him and his goalpost.

Sure hope he was a saved man. Otherwise right now he is roasting in hell.

I shudder to think what the deleted threads contained...

Reeve was a better man on his worst day in Hollywood than these solipsistic little morons could ever hope to be.







digby 10/11/2004 10:08:00 AM |

Sunday, October 10, 2004

 
Speaking Of Unseemly Bulges

As we watch the distressing spectacle of the cable shows shilling for Junior in these last three weeks, I think it might be helpful to take a trip down memory lane. It was once much, much worse. There was a time not so long ago when the boys and girls in the press were panting and moaning and fidgeting in their seats at the mere mention of the TopGun in his Chippendale's costume.

May 3, 2003:

MATTHEWS: Let's go to this sub--what happened to this week, which was to me was astounding as a student of politics, like all of us. Lights, camera, action. This week the president landed the best photo of in a very long time. Other great visuals: Ronald Reagan at the D-Day cemetery in Normandy, Bill Clinton on horseback in Wyoming. Nothing compared to this, I've got to say.

Katty, for visual, the president of the United States arriving in an F-18, looking like he flew it in himself. The GIs, the women on--onboard that ship loved this guy.

Ms. KAY: He looked great. Look, I'm not a Bush man. I mean, he doesn't do it for me personally, especially not when he's in a suit, but he arrived there...

MATTHEWS: No one would call you a Bush man, by the way.

Ms. KAY: ...he arrived there in his flight suit, in a jumpsuit. He should wear that all the time. Why doesn't he do all his campaign speeches in that jumpsuit? He just looks so great.

MATTHEWS: I want him to wa--I want to see him debate somebody like John Kerry or Lieberman or somebody wearing that jumpsuit.

Mr. DOBBS: Well, it was just--I can't think of any, any stunt by the White House--and I'll call it a stunt--that has come close. I mean, this is not only a home run; the ball is still flying out beyond the park.

MATTHEWS: Well, you know what, it was like throwing that strike in Yankee Stadium a while back after 9/11. It's not a stunt if it works and it's real. And I felt the faces of those guys--I thought most of our guys were looking up like they were looking at Bob Hope and John Wayne combined on that ship.

Mr. GIGOT: The reason it works is because of--the reason it works is because Bush looks authentic and he felt that he--you could feel the connection with the troops. He looked like he was sincere. People trust him. That's what he has going for him.

MATTHEWS: Fareed, you're watching that from--say you were over in the Middle East watching the president of the United States on this humongous aircraft carrier. It looks like it could take down Syria just one boat, right, and the president of the United States is pointing a finger and saying, `You people with the weapons of mass destruction, you people backing terrorism, look out. We're coming.' Do you think that picture mattered over there?

Mr. ZAKARIA: Oh yeah. Look, this is a part of the war where we have not--we've allowed a lot of states to do some very nasty stuff, traffic with nasty people and nasty material, and I think it's time to tell them, you know what, `You're going to be help accountable for this.'

MATTHEWS: Well, it was a powerful statement and picture as well.

After the segment, Chris handed out cigarettes and ice cold bottles of evian to the panel. But they had rolled over and gone to sleep.

If there has ever been a more embarrassing display of repressed erotic longing on national television, I haven't seen it. Oh, wait:

From May 13, 2003, Via The Daily Howler:

MATTHEWS: What do you make of this broadside against the USS Abraham Lincoln and its chief visitor last week?

LIDDY: Well, I-- in the first place, I think it's envy. I mean, after all, Al Gore had to go get some woman to tell him how to be a man [Official Naomi Wolf Spin-Point]. And here comes George Bush. You know, he's in his flight suit, he's striding across the deck, and he's wearing his parachute harness, you know --- and I've worn those because I parachute --- and it makes the best of his manly characteristic. You go run those, run that stuff again of him walking across there with the parachute. He has just won every woman's vote in the United States of America. You know, all those women who say size doesn't count --- they're all liars. Check that out. I hope the Democrats keep ratting on him and all of this stuff so that they keep showing that tape.

"You know, it's funny. I shouldn't talk about ratings," he [Matthews] said, also gazing at Bush's crotch. "But last night was a riot because ... these pictures were showing last night, and everybody's tuning in to see these pictures again."

I plan to make it my life's work to remind Chris Matthews of these little exchanges. It was the day that Matthews revealed that he and the other mediawhores were not just shilling for the GOP for profess