Hullabaloo

Thursday, August 31, 2006

 
Springsteen Sings Big Easy Pain

by digby


How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?



Well, the doctor comes 'round here with his face all bright
And he says "in a little while you'll be alright"
All he gives is a humbug pill, a dose of dope and a great big bill
Tell me, how can a poor man stand such times and live?

He says "me and my old school pals had some mighty high times down here
And what happened to you poor black folks, well it just ain't fair"
He took a look around gave a little pep talk, said "I'm with you" then he took a little walk
Tell me, how can a poor man stand such times and live?

There's bodies floatin' on Canal and the levees gone to Hell
Martha, get me my sixteen gauge and some dry shells
Them who's got got out of town
And them who ain't got left to drown
Tell me, how can a poor man stand such times and live?

I got family scattered from Texas all the way to Baltimore
And I ain't got no home in this world no more
Gonna be a judgment that's a fact, a righteous train rollin' down this track
Tell me, how can a poor man stand such times and live?


.
digby 8/31/2006 08:43:00 PM |

 
Consequences

by digby


If Dan Bartlett is any indication, the administration is going completely over the bend and are going to try to convince the American people that "Islamic fascism" is literally equivalent to WWII.

Here's what he just said on Hardball:

Nora O'Donnell: Dan do you agree that making an analogy to Hitler can be disproportionate with the current battles --- while it's extremely important, the war on terror --- comparing it to WWII is overstepping

Dan Bartlett: Absolutely not. The fascist movement from that era is very similar to the totalitarian ideology that al-Qaeda and other extremists, those who are wanting to pervert a very rich tradition of peaceful religion - Islam - to accomplish a certain set of objectives.

They have taken 3,000 American lives on one single morning, they've attacked country after country after country throughout the world with a very determined idoelogy, they're trying to overturn governments. They took control of Afghanistan, they're trying to take control of Iraq, they're trying to take control of Lebanon and they're doing it for a very specific reason --- they have territorial ambition, they want the resources, they want the nuclear weapons, they want to destroy the west.

Very similar in proportion I would argue, and many other people would argue as well. So it is a very important historical lesson for to understand today because the fight we're in today is as consequential as the fight we fought in the last century.

Let's think for a moment about what he's saying. If it is true that they have suddenly discovered that this threat is equal to the threat posed by the axis powers in WWII, then they have clearly failed miserably to meet such an existential threat. These monsters are allegedly attacking "country after country after country" trying to seize territory so they can take the resources and get nuclear weapons and we are sending national guard troops over to Iraq for their fourth or fifth tours instead of mobilizing the entire nation? The only sacrifice Bush has asked of the Amrican people is to pay their taxes and spend money.

But there's more to the story. Nora then commented on Bush's insistence yesterday that this wasn't "political" and admonishing others not to politicize it. Bartlett was having none of it.

He continued:

Dan Bartlett: It's important that certain aspects or certain reflection points in this war that the president of the United States speak directly to the public about the conduct of this war, developments in this war and the consequences of this war. He is not partisan in the sense that he's going out and attacking individual members of the other party or the like...

Nora O'Donnell: No, because you are going to leave this for Rumsfeld to do.

Dan Bartlett: Rumsfeld talked about [inaudible]who as you have pointed out are many times on this program go off and say the president lied and people died, that the president, the administration is incompetent, the administration is this, the administration is that, and it's important that the administration clearly articulate and set the recod straight on many of these outrageous comments that people are making.

And some of the outrageous comments are coming from people who want to take control of the congress. Now there are consequences for the rhetoric they are employing at this time and at this juncture in the war on terror and it is incumbent upon officials in this administration to clearly explain to the American people what those consequences are, so...

It's a two way street Nora and as long as our critics are out there, saying what they're saying, often times not based on fact, it's important for the administration to very very aggressively articulate what the facts are and why we believe it. There are two sides to this debate.

Well now. That certainly clears up what the real motivation for this PR offensive is, doesn't it? Bartlett lost his shit and pretty much admitted that this is a simple political ploy --- a gambit to draw attention away from Bush's failures. (Shrum just called it a "Katrina foreign policy.")

But if this takes hold and people really begin to accept this WWII analogy, the logical extension of the argument is that the US needs to do everything it possibly can to defeat this existential threat and that can only mean we must be willing to use nuclear weapons. They keep using the word "consequences" and I'm getting a rather ugly picture in my head of just what they might be.


Update: Glenn Greenwald notes the similarities between Bush's Iraq speech in Cincinnatti and his speech yesterday. I don't know if they've decided on war with Iran and/or Syria, but they most certainly are preparing the ground.

Greenwald advises the Democrats to go on the offensive and hit Bush hard. I agree, of course. I was a little bit depressed to hear Nora O'Donnell tell Jack Reed today that they've tried to get a Democrat to come on for days to rebut the Republican attack and couldn't get any calls returned. I guess people are on vacation... All Reed could say is "I'm here now."


Update II:

And a Freeper has an aneurysm:

To: governsleastgovernsbest

I wonder if oberman has children;or nephews/nieces etc. All of these idiots that refuse to allow the front loading of a looming confrontation will be directly responsible for the fact that in all likelihood OUR children will absolutely be involved in a life or death struggle to preserve OUR nation. The very same elitist , do nothing but babble , morons that decry every use of force , every vengeful indiscretion, every PERCIEVED slight, of a murdering Islamofacists rights, will be the very same people that squall like stuck pigs , when all of our children are fighting and dying because of the aformentioned idiocy.

I just hope the marksmanship I taught my children can keep them alive when it becomes the difference between those that make out alive and those that don't .

The really terrifying aspect of all this is the open borders issue and how it darn near grandee's that 5th columnist are or will be in place to harm us in a much more personal way than Hitler ever did. 56 posted on 08/30/2006 8:16:31 PM PDT by ping jockey (radical islam; the great evil of all times.)

digby 8/31/2006 04:28:00 PM |

 
Stateless Fascists

by digby


I find it fascinating that the administration has taken on the shibboleth of the nuttiest far right wingnuts and is calling Islamic radicals, fascists. Clearly, they are just throwing it around as some sort of boogeyman word because Islamic extremists are like fascists only to the extent that they are dangerous creeps. But then you could say that about a lot of people, couldn't you?

They are all blathering stuff like this to explain it:

Charles Black, a longtime GOP consultant with close ties to both the first Bush administration and the current White House, said branding Islamic extremists as fascists is apt.

"It helps dramatize what we're up against. They are not just some ragtag terrorists. They are people with a plan to take over the world and eliminate everybody except them," Black said.

Run for your lives!!!

I know I don't have to spell out all he ways in which Islamic radicalism is unlike fascism. But it is worth taking a look at the writings of the guy who pretty much invented fascism, good old Benito Mussolini. He wrote a little treatise back in 1932 that spelled it all out. It's true that fascism considered itself an enemy of democracy (and Marxism) and it fetishized war and violence. And yes, one of its primary tenets was imperialism.

We can argue about whether any or all of those components are part of the "Islamo-fascist ideology," but for the sake of argument, let's agree that on some level they are. But there are a few defining characteristic of fascism --- as defined by the man who made fascism a household name --- that surely make Islamic radicalism something else entirely.

For instance:

...The Fascist accepts life and loves it, knowing nothing of and despising suicide: he rather conceives of life as duty and struggle and conquest, but above all for others -- those who are at hand and those who are far distant, contemporaries, and those who will come after...


[...]

The foundation of Fascism is the conception of the State, its character, its duty, and its aim. Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived of in their relation to the State. The conception of the Liberal State is not that of a directing force, guiding the play and development, both material and spiritual, of a collective body, but merely a force limited to the function of recording results: on the other hand, the Fascist State is itself conscious and has itself a will and a personality -- thus it may be called the "ethic" State.......The Fascist State organizes the nation, but leaves a sufficient margin of liberty to the individual; the latter is deprived of all useless and possibly harmful freedom, but retains what is essential; the deciding power in this question cannot be the individual, but the State alone....

Those two things, it seems to me, make any comparison between fascism and a loose confederation (if that) of suicidal religious fanatics spread all over the world, ridiculous. They might just as well have appropriated the phrase Mongol Hordes for all the sense it made. (Actually, Osama bin Laden has made that comparison --- with the US.) Not that it will stop the wingnuts from pimping it like it's the latest teen-age fad --- making sense has never been a hallmark of these people.

The funny thing is that if you look at Mussolini's definition it does fit some modern western political factions much better than Islamic radicalism. I leave it to you to figure out who they might be.




.
digby 8/31/2006 02:33:00 PM |

 
Freedom

by digby

Hawlati: Couple were killed in Arbil for 6 minute sex video

8/3/2006 KurdishMedia.com

London (KurdishMedia.com) 03 August 2006: In Arbil, southern Kurdistan’s capital, a couple were killed after their pornographic video CD was distributed in the city’s market, according to news published in the Kurdish weekly Hawlati on Thursday.

The couple were killed within one week. The woman’s body was found on Tuesday. The video is only 6 minutes and 10 seconds and it is taken on a mobile telephone, Hawlati stated.

The event has been the topic of discussion all over Arbil and the religious community in the mosques issued decrees for clamping down on the couple, Hawlati added.

They have good reason to nip this in the bud. Just ask this mullah:

As the 21st century progresses, it seems that every day brings new extremes of sexual debauchery and degradation. Simply put, our society has become obsessed by perversity. The term "pornography" itself no longer carries much of a stigma culturally, because what was once taboo is now the norm. Obscene material that was confined to seedy bookstores on the wrong side of town is now aired on network or cable television during the "family hour."

[...]

At the outset, let me be perfectly clear — especially to those who may shrug off or slyly wink at the cultural acceptance of pornography. Much like a mistress, the philosophical acceptance of this salacious material in everyday life is a wickedly insidious thing that, over time, will devastate individuals and families. We must assume a zero tolerance policy toward obscenity ... With every new assault made on God’s sacred and holy gift of sex, the appetite for lascivious images grows more insatiable.

As far as he's concerned, Iraqi society has the kind of morality we should aspire to. One wonders if he agrees with the sanctions. Let's say I'm more than a little bit curious about what he means by "zero tolerance."



.
digby 8/31/2006 01:39:00 PM |

 
One Year Ago Today

by digby


Even though the media doesn't seem to be buying it on the merits, I have to give the administration credit for their smooth pivot from their Katrina failure to defeating Hitler. It was savvy, you have to admit, to go down to New Orleans and give a couple of plodding, desultory speeches while Rummy delivered a half-mad stemwinder about appeasement in the 1930's. Then, the minute the Katrina "anniversary" was over, Bush hightailed it out of town and immediately evoked the spectre of the Nazis, commies and martians coming to kill us all in our beds. I'm not seeing much about New Orleans anymore.

But I think it's important to remember, nonetheless, that while Bush drones on and on about terror and fear and struggle and pain and sacrifice this morning, one year ago today Katrina was far from over. Indeed, the story of his incompetence was just beginning.

Today was the day he did this:




After he returned to Washington he held that bizarre, stiff press conference as we watched people begging to be rescued from the top of their houses.






The New York Times described it the next day:

George W. Bush gave one of the worst speeches of his life yesterday, especially given the level of national distress and the need for words of consolation and wisdom. In what seems to be a ritual in this administration, the president appeared a day later than he was needed. He then read an address of a quality more appropriate for an Arbor Day celebration: a long laundry list of pounds of ice, generators and blankets delivered to the stricken Gulf Coast. He advised the public that anybody who wanted to help should send cash, grinned, and promised that everything would work out in the end.

He can assume a strong, manly pose today and catterwaul about "the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century," and fearmonger about "a single movement, a worldwide network of radicals that use terror to kill those who stand in the way of their totalitarian ideology" from the comfort of a hand picked audience. But when the chips were down a year ago, he proved he couldn't lead his way out of a FEMA trailer.

One year ago today, I think we were all just beginning to wrap out minds around the scope of what was happening. I went back and looked at my posts and I think I was watching television most of the time because I only wrote a few. The pace picked up significantly over the following week as we all watched, appalled, at what was happening in an American city.

But it was clear that things were horrible even this early. That morning I wrote:

The pictures coming out of New Orleans are all horrible. But the income disparities among the citizens are brought into stark relief by this tragedy. Everyone is affected of course, but those who had little to begin with are truly left with less than nothing now. A whole lot of people who were hanging by a thread already just dropped into total despair. That dimension of the tragedy really makes my heart ache

.

As we know, it only got worse.



Think Progress has a very thorough timeline of events, here.



.
digby 8/31/2006 09:43:00 AM |

 

The Other Media Ain't Buyin' It Either

by poputonian

Boston Globe: Loose lips sink history
The latest effort -- transparent as it is inaccurate -- tries to draw parallels between Iraq and World War II.

LA Times: Pipe Down, Rummy
Rumsfeld's cranky outburst mangles a historical analogy, bad-mouths legitimate critics.

Seattle PI: Iraq War: The false specter
The defense secretary now deals with questioning of the mismanaged campaign by raising the false specter of World War II style appeasement.

Yahoo News: What Keeps Don Rumsfeld Up at Night?
Hint: It's Not the Body Count in Iraq.

How do you eat an elephant?

One bite at a time.

UPDATE: Sara at The Next Hurrah on Murrow and Olbermann

UPDATE 2: From the Salt Lake Tribune

A crowd of thousands cheered Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson for calling President Bush a "dishonest, war-mongering, human-rights violating president" whose time in office would "rank as the worst presidency our nation has ever had to endure."

The group - including children and elderly and some hailing from throughout Utah - then marched to the federal building Wednesday to deliver a copy of a symbolic indictment against the president and Congress for abuse of power and failure to uphold the U.S. Constitution.

With their signs labeling Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld the "axis of evil," calling the Iraq war a "mission of lies" or comparing the invasion of Iraq after Sept. 11, 2001, to invading Mexico after Pearl Harbor, the estimated 1,500 to 4,000 protesters hoped their demonstration at the Salt Lake City-County Building sent a message about the reddest state in the country.

"If they [the Bush administration] lack support in Utah, my God they're in trouble," the Rev. Tom Goldsmith of the First Unitarian Church told the lively gathering between protest songs and banner waving.

via: Dependable Renegade

poputonian 8/31/2006 06:37:00 AM |

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

 
See It Now

by digby



The full transcript is at Crooks and Liars.



.
digby 8/30/2006 10:22:00 PM |

 
Springtime For Felix

by digby

I find it quite interesting that every few years another picture turns up of some powerful Republican Senator with the grand Kliegels of the Council of Conservative Citizens? George Felix Allen is just the latest.















Many of you will remember this picture from a few years back. (h/t Atrios)
















Lott was criticized heavily for his association with the CCC back in the 90's. Stanley Crouch wrote when the whole "Strom" thing blew up in 2002:

The "he," of course, is Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.). In late 1998 and early 1999, when I was writing column after column about him and calling for his resignation because of his connection to the Council of Conservative Citizens, there was no response from the media at large, with the noble exceptions of Frank Rich and Bob Herbert, both of The New York Times.

That proved to me that all the talk about a liberal media bias was bunk - at least when it comes to race.

What better target could there have been? Here was a man from Mississippi, a heaven for rednecks. Here was the council, an organization that described itself as "pro-white," that published articles in its organ, the Citizens Informer, that advocated separation of the races and discouraged interracial marriage.

Lott had published a column in the Citizens Informer and had his picture on the cover of an issue in 1992. The photograph showed Lott giving a speech to the council at "the exclusive" (guess what that means) Green Country Club in Greenwood, Miss. The accompanying article quoted Lott as saying: "The people in this room stand for the right principles and the right philosophy. Let's take it in the right direction, and our children will be the beneficiaries."

Peggy Noonan breathlessly agreed:

In the Lott scandal our indignation reached critical mass. A lot of conservatives, many of them 50 and under, decided enough is enough, let's end this, let a new party be born. And by the way, in the particular case of Trent Lott, it didn't start yesterday. Stanley Crouch just surprised me by sending me a column he wrote almost four years ago for the New York Daily News. It was about a Lott appearance before the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white-supremacist group. I said it was springtime and it's time to throw out the garbage, and Mr. Lott should go.

I wonder if any Republicans will be willing to publicly decare their desire to throw old Felix out with the garbage? I tend to doubt it. Racism is the new black this election season. But even if they do, it's quite clear there are many more where he came from. There always are.


.
digby 8/30/2006 09:01:00 PM |

 
Nothing To See Here

by digby

The Hotline blogometer says:

So What?

In sum, that's Ramesh Ponnuru response to lefty criticism of Club for Growth's targeting of Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R-RI) at the possible expense of a GOP majority in the Sen. For months now, progressive bloggers have been decrying the lack of media attention RI SEN has received compared to their efforts to unseat Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT). There are many things that distinguish the two races (Chafee was never a GOP VP candidate, for starters) but the more important difference is mentioned by Ponnuru: the Club for Growth does not exist to help the GOP control Congress.

On the other hand, pure partisanship is the stated goal of DailyKos' founder Markos Moulitsas in his book Crashing the Gates. This is part of what made the targeting of Lieberman such a story. Perhaps it is a function of who is in power, and who is not, but the lefty blogosphere is much more concerned with tactics and strategy than ideological purity. If the Dems have a Sweet November, then maybe we'll see if Lieberman-like purges become the norm, instead of the exception.

Uhm. Ok. But if the lefty blogosphere, under the iron rule of our Exalted Overlord Markos, only cared about "pure partisanship" then why would we target a Democratic senator in a safe seat? Kicks? Anyway, I thought we were a bunch of fanatical hippies trying to inflict our marginal 60% Iraq position upon the Democratic party against its will in order to re-run the 1972 election. Which is it?

And, yes, it's true that the Club For growth doesn't "exist to help the GOP control Congress," but then the GOP already controls congress, doesn't it? It doesn't make them any less partisan. Here's what the Club For Growth itself has to say about its intentions:

The Club for Growth exists to encourage, and make possible, the enactment of pro-growth economic policies by the federal government. The primary tactic of the Club for Growth PAC has been to provide financial support from Club members to viable pro-growth candidates to Congress, particularly in Republican primaries.

-----

One lesson we've learned from the Left, is that if you really want to advance your agenda, take on an incumbent who opposes you. Let the people know the truth about how they vote in Washington. This terrorizes all the rest. In fact, it's amazing how fast cowardly politicians see things our way when they believe that their political careers are in danger.

Ed Crane of the Cato Institute has praised the Club for Growth as "the conscience of the Republican Party."

Yikes. Maybe they ought to change some of that "terrorize" rhetoric. Lord knows if we 'angry leftists" said it there would be rending of garments from one end of the radio dial to the other. And I don't know when the Club "learned" this from the left because the last I heard we blogofascists had just started this thing in Connecticut. When has this technique ever been used by lefty groups? Our special interests won't even withhold their support from Republicans when they stab them in the back over and over again?

The Club For Growth admits that it exists for the sole purpose of hammering Republicans who don't toe their line and puts big, big money into play in Republican primaries to mau-mau the incumbent or turn the seat over to someone they prefer. They brag about it all over their site. Yet we lonely bloggers sitting in our homes around the country, mostly as a hobby, are Stalinists who are purging the Democratic Party of anyone who deviates from our party line, which is ... pure partisanship.

The Club For Growth wrote the book on purging the Republican Party of politicians whom they deem to be insufficiently conservative on issues they care about. Why it should be considered a national story when "the angry left" challenges a senator they believe is out of touch with their values and not a story when "the angry right" does the same thing makes no sense.

Certainly, it's puzzling, to say the least, that nobody deems it a problem that a very close senate election looms --- and "the angry, suicidal left" was pragmatic enough to choose a safe Democratic seat to make their point, while the Republican Club For Growth (don't bullshit me) may just cost the Republicans the Senate.

No story there, nosiree.



I want to say thank you to the Club for Growth, one of the nation's most conservative organizations! They've always taken on tough races in order to help conservative candidates win in Republican primaries. The Club for Growth added a significant punch - just when we needed it most.

—After winning the GOP primary run-off in North Carolina's 10th district, Patrick McHenry,2004



.
digby 8/30/2006 06:14:00 PM |

 
Closing Out Of Town

by digby


It looks like Bush has finished his walk-on performance in the Katrina pageant and is moving directly into his next project, "They're Comin' Tah Gitya! Part VXIII"

So far the critics aren't impressed. From CNN:

QUESTION: So do you think your new series of speeches are going to have an impact on midterm elections?

BUSH: My series of speeches are -- they're not political speeches. They're speeches about the future of this country, and they are speeches to make it clear that if we retreat before the job is done, this nation will become even more in jeopardy. These are important times.

And I would seriously hope people wouldn't politicize the issues that I'm going to talk about. We have a duty in this country to defeat terrorists. That's why we'll stay on the offense to bring them to justice before they hurt us, and that's why I work to spread liberty in order to keep the peace. Anyway, thank you all.

PHILLIPS: That was the president in Little Rock. He's now on his way to Nashville, Tennessee. That's where our White House correspondent Ed Henry is.

Ed, he has got these series of speeches talking about the war on terror, capabilities of al Qaeda, and what the administration has done to protect the nation but he's saying these are not political speeches.

ED HENRY, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Well, very interesting. The White House confirming today that the president will have a new series of speeches, as you're noting. He will start it tomorrow at the American Legion, and will go right through September 19th when he speaks to the United Nations General Assembly.

Does this sound familiar, a series of speeches from the president? It should. He's done at least three of these series. And I think this is a tacit acknowledgement by the White House that it really has not sold so far, and that's why he's taking yet another crack at it.

As far as the president's claiming he does not want this to get political, that's hard to believe at this point, obviously, given the fact that Democrats today are very upset with the comments yesterday from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, basically suggesting that critics of the White House war strategy are similar to those who were calling for appeasement that sparked Naziism back in the 1930s and '40s. That's gotten Democrats pretty hot today.

And it's interesting given that last week the president said that he's not questioning anyone's patriotism when they criticize his war strategy. Then you hear that from Secretary Rumsfeld.

What we're hearing from the White House is that the president is going to focus on broader themes about the struggle between freedom and tyranny. It certainly sounds like a two-prong strategy. The president putting out these larger, more flowery themes whereas some of his key officials like Secretary Rumsfeld really employing that hardball strategy, Kyra.

The previews don't look so good. The press is all over Rumsfeld's statements. Ken Mehlman on Hardball just about had a full-on meltdown under the withering questioning of Norah O'Donnell, of all people, who kept referring to Rumsfeld's speech as calling the Democrats "Nazi-era appeasers." (Evan Thomas even looked up from his snuff box, rearranged his lace cravat and intoned "it does have a whiff of desperation about it, what, what?") Victoria Clark on The Situation Room twice raised her voice above a whisper and appeared to have a pulse under a grilling by the robot named John King.

Maybe it's time for a rewrite. Or better yet, just close this turkey out of town.



.
digby 8/30/2006 02:21:00 PM |

 
Berube Writes A Dangerously Great Book

by tristero

I'm on vacation, and net access is bad around here but I got an email from Professor Michael Berube, DP* and he informs me that his new book What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts? is now available through Amazon. I've read it and it's flat-out wonderful.

Like all of Berube's writing, the book is crystal-clear, often very funny, and eloquent. His ostensible subject is the modern liberal arts education as seen from inside the belly of the beast, the English Department, ground zero of the extreme right assault on American academia. But as interesting as that is, and it's very interesting, that's just the maguffin (google it). It's like saying Gravity's Rainbow's about WW II rocketry. Well, yeah, but...

To be brief about it, if you have any interest in what liberalism really is, what it can accomplish in the US today, and why it is crucial to vehemently resist the far right's relentless obsession to eliminate it, you should read this book.

Full disclosure: Yes, Michael's a friend of mine. If you read the book, you'll understand why. He asked me to read What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts? in galleys and, if I liked it, to blurb it. I did so, happily. In fact, I'm quite honored he asked me, of all the people he could have asked.

*DP = "Dangerous Professor." Dr. Berube has been designated by David Horowitz one of the most Dangerous Professors in America and I am so totally jealousl I could spit.
tristero 8/30/2006 01:53:00 PM |

 
Sacrifices

by digby

There's plenty of commentary this morning about this Brian Williams interview with the president yesterday. But can I just point out that neither Williams nor Bush make any damned sense? Take this exchange:

WILLIAMS: When you take a tour of the world, a lot of Americans e-mail me with their fears that, some days they just wake up and it just feels like the end of the world is near. And you go from North Korea to Iran, to Iraq, to Afghanistan, and you look at how things have changed, how Americans are viewed overseas, if that is important to you. Do you have any moments of doubt that we fought a wrong war? Or that there's something wrong with the perception of America overseas?

BUSH: Well those are two different questions, did we fight the wrong war, and absolutely -- I have no doubt -- the war came to our shores, remember that. We had a foreign policy that basically said, let's hope calm works. And we were attacked.

WILLIAMS: But those weren't Iraqis.

BUSH : They weren’t, no, I agree, they weren't Iraqis, nor did I ever say Iraq ordered that attack, but they're a part of, Iraq is part of the struggle against the terrorists. Now in terms of image, of course I worry about American image. We are great at TV, and yet we are getting crushed on the PR front. I personally do not believe that Saddam Hussein picked up the phone and said, “al-Qaida, attack America.”

Talk about dumb and dumber. I know the president is intellectually handicapped and I don't expect much from Williams either. But couldn't someone have written down the questions for him beforehand so he doesn't ramble incoherently when he's interviewing the president?

And why oh why can't somebody pin the codpiece down when he says in one breath that the war came to our shores and that's why we're fighting in Iraq? Couldn't Williams have followed up with, "but if Iraq wasn't involved in the attacks, in what way was it part of the struggle against terrorism? Until we invaded, Iraq didn't have any terrorists." Bush would blather on about weapons of mass destruction and our oceans not protecting us, but at least it would be out there. That would be too much to ask, I guess.

The thing about how we are "great on TV but getting crushed on the PR front" is just bizarre. I have no idea what he meant by it other than it's something someone said about about himself and he applied it to the country. I can't figure out any other explanation.

This next part makes me feel sad for Bush the first. Junior is a terrible son, condescending and rude. Shakespeare is needed to explain it properly:

WILLIAMS: Is there a palpable tension when you get together with the former president, who happens to be your father? A lot of the guys who worked for him are not happy with the direction of things.

BUSH: Oh no. My relationship is adoring son.

WILLIAMS: You talk shop?

BUSH: Sometimes, yeah, of course we do. But it's a really interesting question, it's kind of conspiracy theory at its most rampant. My dad means the world to me, as a loving dad. He gave me the greatest gift a father can give a child, which is unconditional love. And yeah, we go out and can float around there trying to catch some fish, and chat and talk, but he understands what it means to be president. He understands that often times I have information that he doesn't have. And he understands how difficult the world is today. And I explain my strategy to him, I explain exactly what I just explained to you back there how I view the current tensions, and he takes it on board, and leaves me with this thought, “I love you son.”

He speaks as if his father is some simple working class bloke who loves his highly successful son and keeps him grounded with homespun wisdom. Bush doesn't listen to him about important things. But that's ok, because his simpleminded old Dad "understands that often times I[Junior] have information that he doesn't have." Sad, sad, sad.


Williams actually asks one interesting question:

WILLIAMS: The folks who say you should have asked for some sort of sacrifice from all of us after 9/11, do they have a case looking back on it?

BUSH: Americans are sacrificing. I mean, we are. You know, we pay a lot of taxes. America sacrificed when they, you know, when the economy went into the tank. Americans sacrificed when, you know, air travel was disrupted. American taxpayers have paid a lot to help this nation recover. I think Americans have sacrificed.

Dear God. He brags endlessly about lowering taxes and then calls it a sacrifice for the war effort. It's true that having air travel disrupted for a week was truly a lot to ask of us but we rose to the occasion. The economy he's been pumping as being great for years is now seen to have "tanked" and caused Americans great suffering. I won't even mention the war we didn't need to fight that's costing huindreds of billions of dollars --- which he promised would be paid for with Iraqi oil revenues and which will instead cost every American child more than can even be calculated.

The truth is that we have been asked to make a lot of very important sacrifices. As the blogger Phila at Boufonia writes:

It's often claimed that George W. Bush has asked for no sacrifices in this time of war. On the contrary, he's asked us to sacrifice our humanity and our compassion. He's asked us to sacrifice our privacy and freedom, and our respect for our fellow citizens. He's asked us to sacrifice every irreducible ideal - and there were few enough of them, God knows - on which this country was founded, and whatever fragile steps we've taken towards implementing them under the law. He's asked us to sacrifice any religious truth that would interfere with the dreary, mechanical pursuit of redundant wealth and false security. He's asked us to sacrifice our souls and our conscience, in exchange for his snake-oil promise that we'll never have to suffer the consequences of our own inhumanity. He's asked us to sacrifice our present for his future, and our future for his present.

And we have to take off our shoes at airports too.




Update: I just saw an extended version of the interview and Williams did follow-up with Bush about al Qaeda in Iraq and as predicted, Bush blathered on about all the usual crap about "suiciders" and state sponsors of terrorism and the world being safer without Saddam. But the question was, at least, asked.


.
digby 8/30/2006 01:35:00 PM |

 

Bush Ahmadinejad Debate Update

Meet Them In St. Louis - From Raw Story
(H/T to Commenter Ed Drone)

poputonian 8/30/2006 08:22:00 AM |

 

Liberated But Not Free

by poputonian

In a city with few real refuges from sectarian violence - not government offices, not military bases, not even mosques - one place always emerged as a safe haven: hospitals.

So Mounthir Abbas Saud, whose right arm and jaw were ripped off when a car bomb exploded six months ago, must have thought the worst was over when he arrived at Ibn al-Nafis Hospital, a major medical center in Baghdad.

Instead, it had just begun. A few days into his recovery at the facility, armed Shiite Muslim militiamen dragged the 43-year-old Sunni mason down the hallway floor, snapping intravenous needles and a breathing tubes out of his body, and later riddled his body with bullets, said family members.

In his book appropriately titled Liberty and Freedom author and historian extraordinaire David Hackett Fischer says, "In early uses, both words implied a power of choice, an ability to exercise one's will, and a condition that was distinct from slavery. In all of those ways, liberty and freedom meant the same thing."

But Fischer goes on to describe other ways in which their original meanings were different.

Our English word liberty comes from the Latin libertas and its adjective liber, which meant unbounded, unrestricted, and released from restraint. A synonymn was solutus, from the verb solvos, to loosen a set of bonds. These words were similar to the Greek eleutheria and eleutheros, which also meant the condition of being independent, separate, and distinct. The Greeks used these terms to describe autonomous cities, independent tribes, and individuals who were not ruled by another's will. That ancient meaning survives in the modern era, where eleutheros has spawned scientific terms such as eleutheropetalous or eleutherodactylic, for separate petals or fingers or toes. Eleutheria, like the Roman libertas, always impled some degree of separation and independence.

Freedom has another origin. It derives from a large family of ancient languages in northern Europe. The English word for free is related to the Norse frie, the German frei, the Dutch vrij, the Flemish vrig, the Celtic rheidd, and the Welsh rhydd. These words share an unexpected root. They descend from the Indo-European priya of friya or riya, which meant dear or beloved. The English words freedom and free have the same root as friend, as do their German cousins frei and Freund. Free meant someone who was joined to a tribe of free people by ties of kinship and rights of belonging.

A very similar meaning also appeared in the Sumerian ama-ar-gi, the oldest know word for anything like liberty or freedom, which appeared on clay tablets in Lagash before 2300 B.C. Ama-ar-gi came from the verb ama-gi, which meant literally going home to mother. It described the condition of servants no longer in bondage who returned to their free families.

In that respect, the original meanings of freedom and liberty were not merely different but opposed. Liberty meant separation. Freedom implied connection. A person with libertas in Rome or eleutheria in ancient Greece had been granted some degree of autonomy, unlike a slave. A person who had Freiheit in northern Europe or ama-ar-gi in southern Mesopotamia was united in kinship or affection to a tribe or family of free people, unlike a slave.

The question has been asked many times whether people in Iraq were better off under Saddam Hussein's dictatorship. Is that possible? I'm not necessarily asking is that so, but more is it possible for someone to enjoy a higher degree of freedom while existing beneath a dictator's umbrella?


Fischer again:

Roman libertas gave rise to a complex vocabulary of stratification and mobility that still echoes in modern English speech. The Latin adjective liberaliter meant knowing how to behave gracefully and generously, in the manner of a highborn person who is secure in the possession of many liberties. It is the root of our word liberality. The noun libertinus meant an emancipated slave who had been granted liberties that he had not been prepared to use. Our modern word libertine preserves this ancient meaning.

Within this social frame, ancient philosophers developed libertas and eleutheria as ethical ideas of high complexity. The leaders were the Stoics, who wrote at greater length about liberty than others in the ancient world, especially the slave Epictetus (A.D. 55-135) and the emperor Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 121-180). Both argued that to be truly free is to cultivate a spirit of independence from things that are not in one's control: bondage, tyranny, illness, pain, and death.

This Stoic condition of liberty could be achieved even in a despotism. It is striking that the leading stoic philosophers of liberty in ancient Rome were an emperor and a slave.

The article linked to above continues:

Authorities say it was not an isolated incident. In Baghdad these days, not even the hospitals are safe. In growing numbers, sick and wounded Sunnis have been abducted from public hospitals operated by Iraq's Shiite-run Health Ministry and later killed, according to patients, families of victims, doctors and government officials.

As a result, more and more Iraqis are avoiding hospitals, making it even harder to preserve life in a city where death is seemingly everywhere. Gunshot victims are now being treated by nurses in makeshift emergency rooms set up in homes. Women giving birth are smuggled out of Baghdad and into clinics in safer provinces.

In most cases, family members and hospital workers said, the motive for the abductions appeared to be nothing more than religious affiliation. Because public hospitals here are controlled by Shiites, the killings have raised questions about whether hospital staff have allowed Shiite death squads into their facilities to slaughter Sunni Arabs.

I guess in some cases it really sucks to be free.

Perhaps the great young inde-rocker Conner Oberst (with Emmylou Harris) said it best in his song Landlocked Blues:

We made love on the living room floor
With the noise in the background of a televised war
And in the deafening pleasure I thought I heard someone say
"If we walk away, they'll walk away"

But greed is a bottomless pit
And our freedom's a joke
We're just taking a piss
And the whole world must watch
The sad comic display
If you're still free start running away
Cause we're coming for you!

UPDATE: Here is a very nice set of photographs set to this Bright Eyes song (via You Tube) -- stay with it long enough to hear the bugle (is it a bugle?) that follows the words above, and of course, to hear the beautiful voice of Emmylou Harris. For those not familiar with Conner Oberst, the Bright Eyes front man, Rolling Stone Magazine tagged him as this generation's Bob Dylan.

poputonian 8/30/2006 05:18:00 AM |

Tuesday, August 29, 2006

 
The Big Picture

by digby




What changed in the US with Hurricane Katrina was a feeling that we had entered a period of consequence --- Al Gore

I assume that a great many of you have seen An Inconvenient Truth by now. If you haven't, make a point to do it as soon as you can. One year ago today, that picture was on all our television screens and it is one scary image.

It's quite clear to all sentient beings (which excludes the faith based GOP and its corporate masters) that global warming is real, it's very serious and it's vastly important that we do something about it as soon as possible.

WHAT IS GLOBAL WARMING?

Carbon dioxide and other gases warm the surface of the planet naturally by trapping solar heat in the atmosphere. This is a good thing because it keeps our planet habitable. However, by burning fossil fuels such as coal, gas and oil and clearing forests we have dramatically increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere and temperatures are rising.

The vast majority of scientists agree that global warming is real, it’s already happening and that it is the result of our activities and not a natural occurrence. The evidence is overwhelming and undeniable.

We’re already seeing changes. Glaciers are melting, plants and animals are being forced from their habitat, and the number of severe storms and droughts is increasing.

The number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes has almost doubled in the last 30 years.

Malaria has spread to higher altitudes in places like the Colombian Andes, 7,000 feet above sea level.

The flow of ice from glaciers in Greenland has more than doubled over the past decade.

At least 279 species of plants and animals are already responding to global warming, moving closer to the poles.

If the warming continues, we can expect catastrophic consequences.

Deaths from global warming will double in just 25 years -- to 300,000 people a year.

Global sea levels could rise by more than 20 feet with the loss of shelf ice in Greenland and Antarctica, devastating coastal areas worldwide.

Heat waves will be more frequent and more intense.

Droughts and wildfires will occur more often.

The Arctic Ocean could be ice free in summer by 2050.

More than a million species worldwide could be driven to extinction by 2050.

There is no doubt we can solve this problem. In fact, we have a moral obligation to do so. Small changes to your daily routine can add up to big differences in helping to stop global warming. The time to come together to solve this problem is now – TAKE ACTION

"I Need To Wake Up" By Melissa Etheridge

.
digby 8/29/2006 01:01:00 PM |

 
Keep Your Nerve

by digby


Matt Yglesias has it exactly right. Regarding Rumsfeld's wild-eyed crazy act at the American Legion he writes:

This, I think we can assume, is the fall campaign. The idea is to psyche the Democrats out. To make them think they can't win an argument about foreign policy. To make them act like they can't win an argument about foreign policy. And to thereby demonstrate to the American people that even the Democrats themselves lack confidence in their own ability to handle these issues.

This is terribly important for everyone to understand. This is not a real critique. It's a psych-out designed purely to make the Democrats go wobbly and to get the media to portray them that way. It's about optics, heuristics and image. If the Democratic Party falls for it, it will be a crime. There is no substance to what they are saying and there is no reason for Dems to even flinch from such empty intimidation. Indeed, they should snarl right back in their faces.

Don't fall for it Dems.



.
digby 8/29/2006 11:54:00 AM |

 
Kewl Kid Krush

by digby


A bunch of people have commented on this kewl kidz exchange as they tried to explain their crushes on Flyboy McCain. Their halting explanations are all perfect illustrations of typical vapid, courtier sensitibilities. But I'd like to address just one comment from Howard Fineman, who seems to have gotten over his Dubya infatuation at long last and gone back to his first love:

MATTHEWS: -- after listening to the four of you. Why does the media like McCain? What's going on here? Does he seem to be more authentic than other politicians?

O'DONNELL: Well --

FINEMAN: Well, I think part of it on this --

O'DONNELL: Well --

FINEMAN: -- part of it on this specific thing, he knows what he's talking about. He clearly has a lot of experience, militarily, from the inside out on the Armed Services Committee.

MATTHEWS: OK.

FINEMAN: He knows his stuff on that -- on this particular question.

Feinman was referring to military issues apparently, but I think it's fair to extrapolate from that that he thinks McCain would make a good Commander in Chief. This leads me to mention Senator Straight Talk's recent unbelievable quote once again:

"One of the things I would do if I were President would be to sit the Shiites and the Sunnis down and say, 'Stop the bullshit,'"

There's a man who knows what he's talking about, alright.

Now, McCain does know a lot about certain military matters from his perch on the Armed Services Committee --- weapons procurement. He finds the odd system to rail against to keep his reputation as a "reformer" but he's neck deep in the military industrial complex. For instance:

I believe the American people can and must be protected from the possibility of a missile attack on our soil. Recent reports of successful tests of a missile defense system demonstrate that such a system can work. I supported legislation stating that it should be the policy of the United States to build a national missile defense system as soon as technologically possible. As President, I would make the deployment of a national missile defense system, as well as defense systems for our Armed Forces deployed overseas, one of my highest priorities."
salon.com | Jan. 10, 2000

Six years later:

FORT GREELY, Alaska, Aug. 27 — Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said here Sunday that while the fledgling United States ballistic missile defense system was becoming more capable, he wanted to see a successful full-scale test before declaring it able to shoot down a ballistic missile.

“I have a lot of confidence in these folks, and I have a lot of confidence in the work that’s been done,” Mr. Rumsfeld said after touring one of the system’s two interceptor sites. But he added that he wanted to see a test “where we actually put all the pieces together; that just hasn’t happened.”

Mr. Rumsfeld’s assessment was more cautious than that of the Missile Defense Agency director, Lt. Gen. Henry A. Obering III of the Air Force. General Obering said recently that he was confident the system could have shot down a ballistic missile test-fired July 4 by North Korea, if it had been a live attack aimed at the United States.

And the boondoggle expands:

HUNTSVILLE, Ala., Aug. 15 -- The Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency, concerned about a potential threat from Iran, plans to recommend in the coming months a European site for ground-based interceptor missiles, the head of the agency said Tuesday.

Poland, the Czech Republic and Britain have been named by the agency as possible candidates to help bolster a fledgling U.S. missile defense shield against missiles launched from the Middle East.

Despite all the happy talk by people "who know what they are talking about," missile defense continues to fail spectacularly. But it sure pays well.

This is what McCain knows so much about. He knows how to feed the MIC beast. He's still stands solidly for this money pit and will stand solidly behind many more defense department money pits. He'll point to his lists of "defense pork," counting on the gullible kewl kids to take him at his word that they amount to anything --- or that he will lift one finger to stop any of them. But at the end of the day, the greatest insight he gained as a member of the armed services committee has been to deliver for defense contractors. The main lesson he's learned about national security generally is to enthusiastically endorse every single war that is proposed --- and then modify his position as necessary as the war proceeds. He does this for purely political reasons --- voting for war means never having to say you're sorry. He wisely calculates that he can con the kewl kidz into covering for his bad judgment because they think he "knows what he's talking about" even though he's often wrong and constantly criticizes the execution of wars he "supports" when it becomes politically expedient to do so.

It's possible that the calculation has changed with the obvious failure of Iraq, but I doubt it. Certainly, among the gullible kewl kids all you have to do is strut manfully and they will fall in love every time.



.
digby 8/29/2006 11:28:00 AM |

 

Faith-based Positing

by The Presbyterian Church

Religious Book Points 9/11 Finger At Bush

The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has tumbled into a new dispute over the Sept. 11 attacks of five years ago.

Its Presbyterian Publishing Corp. has issued "Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11" (Westminster John Knox), containing perhaps the most incendiary accusations leveled by a writer for a mainline Protestant book house.

Author David Ray Griffin tells of concluding that "the Bush-Cheney administration had orchestrated 9/11 in order to promote this (American) empire under the pretext of the so-called war on terror."

"No other interpretation is possible," he asserts
...

Presbyterian Publishing's unapologetic responses to the critics insist that Griffin's "carefully researched" work and "intellectually rigorous arguments" merit "careful consideration by serious-minded Christians and Americans concerned with truth and the meaning of their faith."

The publisher's publicity contends that Griffin "applies Jesus' teachings to the current political administration" and puts forth "an abundance of evidence and disturbing questions that implicate the Bush administration."

Presbyterian News Service explains that the publishing house, though one of the denomination's six national agencies, receives no church money and "operates with complete editorial autonomy." It is governed by a board elected at the Presbyterian assembly.

Griffin's ultimate goal? He wants Christians to try to supplant America's "demonic" regime with a system of "global government."

I'll be darned.

poputonian 8/29/2006 10:59:00 AM |

 

Ahmadinejad Challenges Bush To TV Debate

by poputonian

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad voiced defiance on Tuesday as a deadline neared for Iran to halt work the West fears is a step toward building nuclear bombs, and challenged US President George W. Bush to televised debate.In a news conference, Ahmadinejad condemned the US and British role in the world since World War II but made no direct mention of the international nuclear confrontation.

“I suggest holding a live TV debate with Mr. George W. Bush to talk about world affairs and the ways to solve those issues,” he said.

Maybe Bush could define tribal sovereignty for him.

poputonian 8/29/2006 07:25:00 AM |

Monday, August 28, 2006

 
The Buck Stops Over There

by digby

Poor little Brownie is telling the truth:

Former Director Michael Brown told ABC News' "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" Sunday he stood by comments in a Playboy interview, and President Bush wanted him to take the heat for the bungling.

[...]

The former FEMA chief cited what he called an e-mail "from a very high source in the White House that says the president at a Cabinet meeting said, 'Thank goodness Brown's taking all the heat because it's better that he takes the heat than I do.'"

How do I know he's telling the truth? Well, I can't prove it, but I doubt very seriously that poor little Brownie read the Washington Monthly in 2002 and remembered this little tid-bit:

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

That is why he shall ever be known as the Empty Codpiece.





.
digby 8/28/2006 11:20:00 PM |

 
Man Of Principle

by digby

Here's the man all the kewl kidz just love:

MCCAIN: I believe that the “Christian Right” has a major role to play in the Republican Party. One reason is because they’re so active and their followers are. And I believe they have a right to be a part of our party. I don’t have to agree with everything they stand for, nor do I have to agree with everything that’s on the liberal side of the Republican Party. If we have to agree on every issue, we’re not a Republican Party. I believe in open and honest debate. Was I unhappy in the year 2000 that I lost the primary and there were some attacks on me that I thought was unfair? Of course. Should I get over it? Should I serve — can I serve the people of Arizona best by looking back in anger or moving forward?

RUSSERT: Do you believe that Jerry Falwell is still an agent of intolerance?

MCCAIN: No, I don’t. I think that Jerry Falwell can explain how his views on this program when you have him on.

Here are some of those views that John McCain now believes have a major role to play in the Republican Party:

FALWELL: I expect the Lord to return in the 21st century to Rapture at his church. Now, I can't prove that. I cannot prove that the Lord is gonna come in this century. No one knows the day or the hour, but in my heart I believe it because there are no more predicted events that need to happen before our Lord can return.

[...]

I expect a global economy in the 21st century, which first will manifest itself as a cashless society. I believe that plastic will take the place of cash, and that while this will only be fulfilled during the tribulation period at the Rapture, I believe that God is setting the stage for, and laying the infrastructure for, a cashless society right now. Most people, many pay their bills online already. And the day will come, I believe, when there will be no cash, and the only way you can get cash and trade and to do business is to [points to his forehead] have the mark of the beast.

And then I expect the nations of the world in the 21st century to move rapidly towards a one-world government. We already have the U.N. -- it's a useless bunch. But we've already got the U.N., and they will not be the one-world government, but they are the infrastructure, the stage on which the Antichrist will build his one-world government.

And they have the brass cojones to call the netroots unhinged.




Update: And he's ready to go to Bob Jones U, too!



.
digby 8/28/2006 05:40:00 PM |

 
Pimping the Victims

by digby

Remember this woman?

Bronwynne Bassier was desperate. Roaming the streets of her Biloxi, Miss., neighborhood four days after Katrina, scavenging for food and clothes for her 2-year-old son, Bassier stumbled upon the one man who presumably could help: President George W. Bush. Rushing toward him, the 22-year-old single mother pleaded and sobbed. "My son needs clothes," she cried. "I've lost everything." Momentarily stunned, Bush appeared on the verge of tears himself as he listened. Bush tried to direct her and her younger sister, Kim, toward a Salvation Army shelter down the road, but ultimately comforted them the only way he knew how: he hugged them. "Hang in there," he told Bassier, kissing her forehead. "We're going to take care of you." Press cameras captured the moment and beamed the image of compassion around the globe.

A year later, Bassier's life remains like that of countless other Katrina victims: she lives in a FEMA trailer with her son and new husband. Her story offers a window into the workaday reality of life post-Katrina. "Meeting [Bush] didn't really change anything for me," Bassier tells NEWSWEEK. "I've been just like everybody else, trying to move forward with my life one day at a time." In a new NEWSWEEK Poll, 51 percent of Americans say they don't think Bush has followed through on his promises to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.

To complicate matters, Bassier—a native of South Africa—has had a hard time getting a work visa. She'd applied for one after graduating from a local college last summer, but in the chaos of Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security lost the paperwork. More than a year later, her application is still pending. In May, Bassier sent a letter to the man who'd been there for her last year. But as of last Thursday, the president still hadn't responded. A White House spokeswoman confirmed last week that the administration received it, but said it had been forwarded to DHS. "We don't intervene in individual cases," says Deputy Press Secretary Dana Perino.

But guess what? Just in time for the Katrina anniversary, when Bush is planning his series of saccharine, phony photo-ops, somebody gets a call:

This chapter of Bassier's story may yet have a happy ending: after NEWSWEEK's inquiries, Bassier received a call Friday from the White House inviting her to meet with President Bush this Monday when he visits Gulfport to mark the first anniversary of Katrina. (A White House aide tells NEWSWEEK that the invitation had long been in the works, but they hadn't been able to locate her until Friday.) She plans to make her case in person for a work visa. And she wants to thank President Bush for coming back. She's not angry, but she's looking for more than a hug.

I'm sure the invitation was in the works for some time. They have been planning their pageant for months. Perhaps if they'd spent as much time working on actually fixing the problems as how to spin them, the Gulf Coast might look a little bit better today.

Let's hope they come across with that work visa and more. Too bad Ms Bassier didn't have an agent. She could have set herself up for life.


.
digby 8/28/2006 02:03:00 PM |

 
Diaspora Lemonade

by digby




Jonathan Alter writes in this week's Newsweek:

A year ago, in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, NEWSWEEK published a cover story called "Poverty, Race and Katrina: Lessons of a National Shame." The article suggested that the disaster was prompting a fresh look at "The Other America"—the 37 million Americans living below the poverty line. "It takes a hurricane," I wrote. "It takes the sight of the United States with a big black eye—visible around the world—to help the rest of us begin to see again." I ended on a hopeful note: "What kind of president does George W. Bush want to be? ... If he seizes the moment, he could undertake a midcourse correction that might materially change the lives of millions. Katrina gives Bush an only-Nixon-could-go-to-China opportunity, if he wants it."

Some readers told me at the time that this was naive—that the president, if not indifferent to the problems of black people, as the singer Kanye West charged, was not going to do anything significant to help them. At first this seemed too cynical. The week after the article appeared, Bush went to Jackson Square in New Orleans and made televised promises not only for Katrina relief but to address some of the underlying struggles of the poor. He proposed "worker recovery accounts" to help evacuees find work by paying for job training, school and child care; an Urban Homesteading Act that would make empty lots and loans available to the poor to start over, and a Gulf Enterprise Zone to spur business investment in poor areas. Small ideas, perhaps, but good ones.

Well, it turned out that the critics were largely right. Not only has the president done much less than he promised on the financing and logistics of Gulf Coast recovery, he has dropped the ball entirely on using the storm and its aftermath as an opportunity to fight poverty. Worker recovery accounts and urban homesteading never got off the ground, and the new enterprise zone is mostly an opportunity for Southern companies owned by GOP campaign contributors to make some money in New Orleans. The mood in Washington continues to be one of not-so-benign neglect of the problems of the poor.

It's not neglect. It's design. The Republicans took a hit for their incompetence in handling Katrina, but in the long run they stand to benefit greatly from the African American displacement outside the state. The reconstruction delays and "not so blind" neglect serve the goal of a much lower black population in New Orleans. Louisiana is likely to be a deep red state from now on.

Perhaps that sounds too cynical, just as the idea that Bush would do nothing significant to help the poor victims sounded cynical last year. But after Bush vs Gore and the Texas gerrymandering and the California recall and voter disenfranchisement and on and on, I think it's incredibly naive to think they wouldn't make lemonade out of the Katrina lemon. The modern Republican party is deadly serious about electoral politics and nothing is too cynical for them.

The Institute of Southern Studies has sponsored a project called Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch which has just put out an in depth report on the state of the Gulf and New Orleans and it's fascinating.

The first part deals with the diaspora:

Hurricane Katrina had an enormous impact on Gulf Coast communities from Alabama to Louisiana, with about 1.2 million people under evacuation orders before the storm made landfall. More than 1,500 people died as a result of the hurricane, and at least 135 are still missing. Besides killing hundreds of people, Katrina displaced thousands. According to estimates released by the U.S. Census Bureau in June, southern Louisiana today is home to 344,781 fewer people today than before the hurricane. Evacuees were scattered to more than 700 communities throughout the United States, with some landing more than 4,000 miles from home. Life in the diaspora has been difficult for many, with survivors facing problems finding steady jobs and secure housing. Many survivors—both those who left their homes and those who remained behind—are also struggling with serious mental health problems such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

A disproportionate number of those whose lives were devastated by Katrina were poor and African-American people, many of whom faced intensified discrimination in the chaos that followed Katrina. Perhaps nowhere was that more apparent than in what happened on the Mississippi River bridge from New Orleans to Gretna, La. Soon after the storm, largely African-American crowds began to cross the bridge after New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin promised that buses were waiting on the other side. But police from Gretna, the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s office and the Crescent City Connection (a division of the state Department of Transportation and Development), blocked their way, even firing shots over the heads of desperate storm victims. That tragic incident sparked one of the first civil rights protests following the storm, when on Nov. 8 activists from New Orleans and other U.S. communities marched across the bridge following a rally at the Convention Center, where thousands of residents had suffered through inhuman conditions in the days after the storm.

The race and class divides exposed by last year’s hurricanes continue to manifest in the recovery. While many middle-class people and whites were able to summon the resources to return and rebuild, that task has been more difficult for poor people and people of color. That unfortunate reality is illustrated in statistics that have been released since Katrina showing a decline in the percentage of New Orleans’ African-American population as well as an increase in income among those who have returned.

For historically disadvantaged communities throughout the Gulf, Katrina continues to rage a year later.

Demographics Index

Number of persons Hurricane Katrina displaced from Louisiana: 645,000 to over 1.1 million

Number displaced from Mississippi: 66,000 to several hundred thousand

Total number of applicants for FEMA Individual Assistance for Katrina and Rita: 2,560,230

Estimated number of storm-displaced Gulf residents who were ages 65 and older: 88,000

Estimated number of U.S. communities to which storm victims evacuated: 724

Average distance traveled by evacuees from Chalmette, a largely white community in St. Bernard Parish, La.: 193 miles

Average distance traveled by evacuees from the Lower Ninth Ward, a largely African-American community in New Orleans: 349 miles

Estimated percentage of the New Orleans metro area’s pre-storm population of about 460,000 that had returned as of June 30: 37

Percent of the New Orleans area’s pre-storm population that was African-American: 36

Percent of the New Orleans area’s post-storm population that is African-American: 21

Increase since Katrina in the New Orleans area’s prestorm mean household income of $55,000: $9,000

Percent decline since Katrina in single-mother households with children in the New Orleans area: 43

Housing Index


Percent of Louisiana mortgages past due as of July 2006: 20

Percent of Mississippi mortgages past due: 13

National average for percent of past-due mortgages: 4

Average rent for a one-bedroom New Orleans apartment before Katrina: $578

Average rent for a one-bedroom New Orleans apartment as of July 2006: $803

Occupancy rate of livable apartments in New Orleans: 99 percent

Number of mobile homes ordered for the Gulf Coast: 7,737

Number of smaller travel trailers : 105,927

Number of storm-affected households holding Federal Emergency Management Agency hotel vouchers: 39

Number of storm-affected households approved for housing assistance: 946,597

Minimum percent of New Orleans public housing that is still closed: 80

Number of homes the Army Corps of Engineers has demolished in Louisiana since Katrina: 1,105

Minimum number of New Orleans public housing units scheduled for demolition: 5,000

Months after Katrina that federal money for housing reconstruction was approved: 10

Total federal funds dispersed so far to rebuild homes: $0

Interestingly, the Gulf Coast now has a higher African American population than it did before, although I doubt it has the electoral significance that an intact black community in New Orleans had. Still, it will be interesting to see if the whites on the Mississippi Gulf Coast start getting antsy about this state of affairs and if it will affect Mississippi politics.



.
digby 8/28/2006 11:49:00 AM |

 

Blown Circuits: An Autopsy Of The PPs

by poputonian

Jose Chung helpfully keeps the story moving along for us, the evil Left, with his dry and deadpan opposition to every point made. So once again he should be thanked for leaving this inquiry about the liberal world's fascination with literary GIANTS:

How much longer is the Left going to sit at rapt attention at the knees of Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal, two octogenarians ...

Oh those eighty-year-olds. What are they good for?

I twice commented in that thread that one other octogenarian, Kurt Vonnegut, should not be forgotten. Last year, Vonnegut published another best-seller, this one called A Man Without A Country. Vonnegut's humor will make you laugh, but his fatalism will make you cry. In typical Vonnegut fashion, the points he makes throughout the book are woven together with the flair of a creative writer. The two main complaints he emphasizes are unmistakable: the senseless killing being perpetrated by America, and America's addiction to fossil fuel. America is destroying the planet, which leads Vonnegut to reject the country he once fought for.

Overall the book is about politics, government, and philosophy, but on its sweeter side it is about people and family, about community. It might well be his best work ever. At one point in the book, Vonnegut describes how children learn to be creative, or how they came to use their brains to think and imagine; no sounds, no pictures, just thinking and imagining:

We are not born with imagination. It has to be developed by teachers, by parents. There was a time when imagination was very important because it was the major source of entertainment. In 1892, if you were a seven-year-old, you'd read a story--just a very simple one--about a girl whose dog had died. Doesn't that make you want to cry? Don't you know how the little girl feels? And you'd read another story about a rich man slipping on a banana peel. Doesn't that make you want to laugh? And this imagination circuit is being built in your head. If you go to an art gallery, here's just a square with daubs of paint on it that haven't moved in hundreds of years. No sound comes out of it.

The imagination circuit is taught to respond to the most minimal of cues. A book is an arrangement of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numerals, and about eight punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo. But it's no longer necessary for teachers and parents to build these circuits. Now there are professionally produced shows with great actors, very convincing sets, sound, music. Now there's the information highway. We don't need circuits any more than we need to know how to ride horses.

Let's see how this circuit business works. Read carefully, Jose, and try to feel something as Vonnegut describes an experience he had during WWII. Have you ever served in a war? Have you ever been held captive? Vonnegut was an American prisoner of war, held in captivity in Dresden, Germany on February 13, 1945. That was the night the British intentionally massacred 135,000 people. Killed them all dead, in one night.

It was pure nonsense, pointless destruction. The whole city was burned down, and it was a British atrocity, not ours. They sent in night bombers, and they came in and set the whole town on fire with a new kind of incendiary bomb. And so everything organic, except my little POW group, was consumed by fire. It was a military experiment to find out if you could burn down a whole city by scattering incendiaries over it.

Of course, as prisoners of war, we dealt hands-on with dead Germans, digging them out of basements because they had suffocated there, and taking them to a huge funeral pyre. And I heard -- I didn't see it done -- that they gave up this procedure because it was too slow and, of course, the city was starting to smell pretty bad. And they sent in guys with flamethrowers.

Why my fellow prisoners of war and I weren't killed, I don't know.

I was a writer in 1968. I was a hack. I'd write anything to make money, you know. And what the hell, I'd seen this thing, I'd been through it, and so I was going to write a hack book about Dresden. You know, the kind that would be made into a movie where Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra and others would play us. I tried to write, but I couldn't get it right. I kept writing crap.

So I went to a friend's house -- Bernie O'Hare, who'd been my pal. And we were trying to remember funny stuff about our time as prisoners of war in Dresden, tough talk and all that, stuff that would make a nifty war movie. And his wife, Mary O'Hare, blew her stack. She said, "You were nothing but babies then."

And that is true of soldiers. They are in fact babies. They are not movies stars. They are not Duke Wayne. And realizing that was key, I was finally free to tell the truth. We were children and the subtitle of Slaughterhouse Five became The Children's Crusade.

Why had it taken me twenty-three years to write about what I had experienced in Dresden? We all came home with stories, and we all wanted to cash in, one way or another. And what Mary O'Hare was saying, in effect, was, "Why don't you tell the truth for a change?"

Ernest Hemingway wrote a story after the First World War called "A Soldier's Home" about how it was very rude to ask a soldier what he'd seen when he got back home. I think a lot of people, including me, clammed up when a civilian asked about battle, about war. It was fashionable. One of the most impressive ways to tell your war story is to refuse to tell it, you know. Civilians would then have to imagine all kinds of deeds of derring-do.

But I think the Vietnam War freed me and other writers, because it made our leadership and our motives seem so scruffy and essentially stupid. We could finally talk about something bad that we did to the worst people imaginable, the Nazis. And what I saw, what I had to report, made war look so ugly. You know, the truth can be really powerful stuff. You're not expecting it.

Of course, another reason to talk about war is that it's unspeakable.

I can sense the brain circuits of the right-wingers, or the flag conservatives, or the authoritarian followers, as they try to process Vonnegut's words: Just how courageous was he in battle? Prove it. Did he have any serious injuries, or just superficial ones? Did he have the right attitude, that of a soldier dedicated to his country? Does Vonnegut think any war is worth fighting; is the Constitution worth fighting for?

It so happens that idealism enough for anyone is not made of perfumed pink clouds. It is the law! It is the U.S. Constitution.

But I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened instead is that it was taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d'etat imaginable.

I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show. I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: "C-Students from Yale."

George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka Christians, and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or PPs, the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences.

To say somebody is a PP is to make perfectly respectable diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete's foot. The classic medical text on PPs is The Mask of Sanity by Dr. Hervey Cleckley, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Medical College of Georgia, published in 1941. Read it!

Some people are born deaf, some are born blind or whatever, and this book is about congenitally defective human beings of a sort that is making this whole country and many other parts of the planet go completely haywire nowadays. These were people born without consciences, and suddenly they are taking charge of everything.

PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!

And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining their employees and investors and country and who still feel as pure as the driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them? And they are waging a war that is making billionaires out of millionaires, and trillionaires out of billionaires, and they own television, and they bankroll George Bush, and not because he's against gay marriage.

So many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick. They have taken charge. They have taken charge of communications and the schools, so we might as well be Poland under occupation.

They might have felt that taking our country into an endless war was simply something decisive to do. What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is they are so decisive. They are going to do something every fuckin' day and they are not afraid. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with any doubts, for the simple reason that they don't give a fuck what happens next. Simply can't. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody's telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In these Times, and kiss my ass!

By now the brain circuits of the authoritarians and their followers are breaking down. Ken Lay's did, and he killed himself. Rush Phlegmball's did, so he turned to painkillers. George Bush never had any circuits. The man used to blow up frogs with firecrackers. Now he blows up children with bombs. He can't feel a thing. Who will do the post-mortem on the brains of these psychopaths? Whoever it is, surely they will find broken circuits.

And please, Jose, respect your elders. Literary giants have something to offer that you won't get from Republican politicians or the right-wing echo chamber; something you'll never get out of the President-who-can't-feel-a-thing:

Experience, wisdom, and the truth.

Think about it. Imagine.

A Man Without A Country. It's worth the investment. Vonnegut even explains precisely why Shakespeare's Hamlet is a masterpiece. It might well be the best lesson you can get from the wise old man.

poputonian 8/28/2006 05:45:00 AM |

Sunday, August 27, 2006

 
Ethical Realism

by digby


Your Sunday night reading assignment, should you decide to accept it, is this article in The American prospect by Flynt Leverett, former member of the Bush administration, who quit in 2004.

His assessment is one of the most clear eyed views I've seen of the ramifications of the Bush Doctrine as it's been applied in the middle east. He calls for a return to "realism" which not so long ago was considered a dirty word by people like me. But I've learned a few things in the past few years --- there is something far worse than foreign policy realism and it's called neoconservatism in full effect, a lethally stupid combination of puerile Trotskyite idealism with a belief that brute force is the only path to democratic utopia. Combine that with epic ineptitude and you have the chaos that the Bush administration will bequeath to the next administration. And if a Republican succeeds him, the roots of neoconservatism are now deep enough in the party establishment that it will probably carry on for some time.

After five years of that Frankenstein experiment I'm more than happy to try some old fashioned stability, if only to catch a breather and survey the damage that's been wrought. I suspect many ordinary people in the mid-east would appreciate it as well.

Leverett points something out that we Democrats are going to have to think about. As I noted in my post yesterday about the "bipartisan" neocon think tanks, we have some issues to deal with on our side:

This focuses attention on the role of Democrats as the nation’s “loyal opposition” and whether the party can articulate a “return to realism” in U.S. foreign policy. The party has little to be proud of in the way it has discharged its role on foreign-policy issues. It has endorsed (or acquiesced to) all of the fundamental tenets of Bush’s revisionist approach to the Middle East. Broad support for the Iraq War among congressional Democrats was intellectually legitimated by “experts” like Kenneth Pollack, who wrote a best-selling book using an analytically flawed assessment of the Iraqi WMD threat to argue that going to war against Saddam was the “conservative” option. Similarly, Democrats have not posed a significant challenge to the administration’s emphasis on democratization in its strategy for the war on terrorism or its non-historical approach to the Palestinian issue.

Democrats have fallen into a “soft neconservatism” that has dulled the party’s voice on foreign policy. Henry Kissinger once observed that the United States is the only country in which the term “realist” is used as a pejorative. The more progressive elements of the Democratic coalition have been especially strident in voicing their antipathy to Kissingerian realism. But it was the 20th century’s greatest Democratic secretary of state, Dean Acheson, who defined a fundamentally realist paradigm for U.S. foreign policy in Europe during the Truman administration that laid the foundations for eventual peaceful victory in the Cold War. America needs that kind of wisdom about the Middle East today. It is time for Democrats to understand that, when it comes to curbing the threats posed by problematic states like Iran, encouraging reform in strategically important states like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, or ensuring Israel’s long-term future, realism has become the truly progressive position on foreign policy.

It's popular to invoke the Truman, Acheson period these days and i'm a little bit skeptical about this somewhat romantic characterization of a policy that was driven as much by simple pragmatism (a good part of the world was in rubble) as overarching philosophy. But I suppose there is an argument to be made that by connecting with some heroic ancestors we might be able to reclaim the mantle of patriosim from the nutball neocons. But regardless, the critique of the Democrats is correct. Many of them have adopted a soft neoconservatism, which until recently, I assumed to be a purely political decision due to Bush's massive early popularity and the trauma of 9/11. I'm not so sure now. Seeing the reactions to the recent Israel-Lebanon war, I can only assume that some sincere kool-aid drinking has gone on and that is very worrisome.

I am not entirely sure how I feel about this notion of "Ethical Realism" but I'm completely confident that neoconservatism in any permutation is dangerous and doomed to fail.

I will repeat my favorite little story to illustrate:

I remember as a child a strange little neighbor girl who was found in her backyard swinging her cat by the tail against the sidewalk screaming "you're gonna love me!"

That's neoconservatism. It's so insane, I believe almost anything is an improvement.



.
digby 8/27/2006 12:09:00 PM |

 
Rich Sunday

by digby


Frank Rich does a bang-up job this week comparing the Duelling Pageants. He sees the empty Codpiece coming up short on both counts. (Here's a free link to the column.)

The best part, I think, is this:

What’s amazing on Katrina’s first anniversary is how little Mr. Bush seems aware of this change in the political weather. He’s still in a bubble. At last week’s White House press conference, he sounded as petulant as Tom Cruise on the “Today” show when Matt Lauer challenged him about his boorish criticism of Brooke Shields. Asked what Iraq had to do with the attack on the World Trade Center, Mr. Bush testily responded, “Nothing,” adding that “nobody has ever suggested in this administration that Saddam Hussein ordered the attacks.” Like the emasculated movie star, the president is still so infatuated with his own myth that he believes the public will buy such nonsense.

I hadn't thought about the similarities between Bush's plight and that of Tom Cruise before and I should have. After all, Bush consciously adopted the Cruise Top Gun persona for the most audaciously over-the-top performance of his presidency. And here they both are today: absurd, clownish versions of their former selves, rejected by the masses who once worshipped them. The only difference is that Cruise was massively successful at everything he did until he fired his amazing publicist Pat Kingsley and turned into a freak a couple of years ago. Bush's Pat Kingsley, Karl Rove, hasn't been nearly as successful over the long haul.

Rich also provides a quote by Douglas Brinkley, the historian, about the real Katrina agenda and I really think there is no doubt that he's correct:

Douglas Brinkley, the Tulane University historian who wrote the best-selling account of Katrina, “The Great Deluge,” is worried that even now the White House is escaping questioning about what it is up to (and not) in the Gulf. “I don’t think anybody’s getting the Bush strategy,” he said when we talked last week. “The crucial point is that the inaction is deliberate — the inaction is the action.” As he sees it, the administration, tacitly abetted by New Orleans’s opportunistic mayor, Ray Nagin, is encouraging selective inertia, whether in the rebuilding of the levees (“Only Band-Aids have been put on them”), the rebuilding of the Lower Ninth Ward or the restoration of the wetlands. The destination: a smaller city, with a large portion of its former black population permanently dispersed. “Out of the Katrina debacle, Bush is making political gains,” Mr. Brinkley says incredulously. “The last blue state in the Old South is turning into a red state.”

We all talked about the Aftrican American NOLA diaspora sort of abstractly last year but it really has come to pass. A large part of the city and environs aren't coming back and as long as the rebuilding is so "slow" they won't. Eventually they will put down roots elsewhere. The result is that the Democratic base of Louisiana has been disappeared. I have no doubt that is no accident.



.
digby 8/27/2006 09:59:00 AM |

Saturday, August 26, 2006

 
"I'm Nothing Like Her, Nothing!"

by digby

I was perusing the Limbaugh web site (subs. only) for some specific Lieberman info and I was quite surprised at the defensiveness we netkooks seem to engender in the old gasbag. He haaates being being compared to us more than anything:

LIMBAUGH: Isn't it interesting, by the way, these people are just flat out loonies; they are insane kooks, these left wing blog types, yet they are treated with great reverence and great respect and fear in the Drive-By Media and Democratic Party circles -- and yet let Pat Buchanan run for president; let his supporters, you know, do their number, and the whole focus is on how insane Buchanan supporters were, how wacko, how dangerous and so forth they are. These people are being pumped up as though they are actual factors. They can't sell books; they don't generate much of anything other than a bunch of hot air amongst themselves. Because they're liberals and because they hate Bush, the Drive-By Media loves them. So her question again to John Harwood. "Well, we know Lamont's campaign in many ways has been driven by the netroots, many bloggers very supportive of him. What about that?"

HARWOOD: What the netroots Democrats are trying to do in some ways, they've got their own way of emulating Republicans because in the Republican Party today, conservatives drive the train, they get nominated, and they win elections. Can these netroots Democrats win nomination contests and then win general elections? Conventional wisdom has been that their Democratic liberal base is not large enough to do that.

RUSH: Well, let me clue you in, John. To compare the liberal netroots, these literally insane kooks to the conservative base is where you're off base, is where you're missing the point. It is not a bunch of kooks, it is not a bunch of extremist wackos and it's not a bunch of fringe minority members who drive the conservative train or who drive the Republican Party train. So to compare the netroots to the mainstream conservatives that dominant the Republican Party is the first mistake that is made, but again, it's a Drive-By Media guy and they've got their template and of course there's no such thing as a fringe liberal, but fringe Republicans are all over the place. The only problem is there just aren't enough of these liberals. Can you believe that? There aren't enough liberals. Life is so unfair, folks. There just aren't enough liberals to compete with the conservatives in their base operations.

Keep telling yourself that Oxy-boy.

He can't quite make up his mind whether the Democratic party loves us or hates us, but no matter what, Rush starts snivelling like a spoiled little schoolboy whenever anyone suggests that he is equivalent to lefty bloggers. It's hilarious.

RUSH: This is from the Beltway Boys on the Fox News Channel on Saturday.

KONDRACKE: Ned Lamont represents -- if he wins -- represents a triumph in the Democratic Party for the MoveOn.org, Howard Dean, Daily Kos, Michael Moore, left wing of the Democratic Party, which is not only, you know, bad on foreign policy, but on globalization, but is also just as nasty and mean on the left as Rush Limbaugh and those other hot dogs on the right.

RUSH: What has gotten into this guy? He knows better than this. There has to be some reason for this. He knows that this program is not on the same page as those guys. But let's talk about this Lieberman thing because the latest announcement is that Der Schlick Meister is going in there to campaign for him. I'll tell you the reason why, folks. It's really not complicated. The Democrats, more and more of them, are really getting afraid of the MoveOn.orgs and the Daily Koses and these wackos at the Democrat Underground. They're trying to deflect as much of the influence of these people as possible.

Limbaugh, you see, thinks of himself as a serious player, invited into all the finest homes in DC, married by a supreme court justice, the chosen voice of the most powerful people in the world. He's very important. It totally unfair to lump him in with all us nobodies!

Poor Rush. When you get right down to it, after all the money and all the fame, he's just another mean and nasty kook. That's certainly not news to us --- but it seems to be news to him.


.
digby 8/26/2006 05:37:00 PM |

 
Wingnut Welfare Queens Take On The First Amendment

by digby

For several years, Javed Iqbal has operated a small company from a Brooklyn storefront and out of the garage at his Staten Island home that provides satellite programming for households, including sermons from Christian evangelists seeking worldwide exposure.

Mr. Iqbal’s home, a modest two-story stone and brick house on Van Name Avenue in Mariners Harbor, stands out because among the children’s toys in the backyard were eight satellite dishes.

But this week, the budding entrepreneur’s house and storefront were raided by federal agents, and Mr. Iqbal was charged with providing customers services that included satellite broadcasts of a television station controlled by Hezbollah — a violation of federal law.

Yesterday, Mr. Iqbal was arraigned in Federal District Court in Manhattan and was ordered held in $250,000 bail. The Hezbollah station, Al Manar — or “the beacon” in Arabic — was designated a global terrorist entity by the United States Treasury Department in March of this year.

Hezbollah was designated a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department in 1997.

“The charge lurking in the background is material support for terrorism,” Stephen A. Miller, an assistant United States attorney, told United States Magistrate Judge Gabriel W. Gorenstein. He said Mr. Iqbal, 42, was a flight risk because he has family in England and Pakistan. “We think there is a strong incentive for him to run,” Mr. Miller said.

[...]

Court papers filed by the government to obtain a warrant to search Mr. Iqbal’s business and home suggested that the authorities learned that certain high-definition global transmission systems were providing access to Al Manar broadcasts in the United States. They got their information from Mark Dubowitz, who heads a Washington-based policy group that has monitored Al Manar — through a project called the Coalition Against Terrorist Media — and campaigned for its removal from worldwide broadcasting.

[...]

According to the government documents, agents flew a helicopter over Mr. Iqbal’s home, then sent a confidential informant to the shop to buy a satellite package from Mr. Iqbal. The informant said that Mr. Iqbal had told him that the station was legal. Mr. Iqbal, according to the government, pressed the informant to buy a package with Al Manar instead of another service.

Mr. Iqbal’s family members declined comment yesterday. Neighbors said that the family had lived there for about five years. A sign attached to a chain-link fence along the driveway announces the business, “HDTV-LTD,” and advertises “TX/RX Earthstation and video, audio data, IP security.”

This is a big win for the "Coalition Against Terrorist Media" which I had never heard of until I read this story. A quick visit to Mr Google tells me that it is affiliated with The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies:

The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, founded two days after the September 11, 2001 attacks, describes itself as the “only nonpartisan policy institute dedicated exclusively to promoting pluralism, defending democratic values, and fighting the ideologies that drive terrorism.”

Who can argue with that? And it's bipartisan too! Well, sort of:

Republican Party insiders dominate FDD's board, and its president, Clifford May, is the former director of communications for the Republican National Committee (1997-2001) and was the editor of Rising Tide, the party's official magazine. FDD's three board members are Steve Forbes, Jack Kemp, and Jeane Kirkpatrick. As a way to achieve widespread acceptance of its positions on counterterrorism and on Middle East affairs, FDD has two bipartisan advisory groups.

Its four “Distinguished Advisers” are Newt Gingrich, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, Louis J. Freeh (former FBI director), and James Woolsey. FDD also has a Board of Advisers, whose members are: Gary Bauer, Donna Brazile, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY), Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL), Frank Gaffney, Amb. Marc Ginsberg, Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R-AZ), Charles Jacobs, William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, Hon. Richard D. Lamm, Richard Perle, Rep. Jim Marshall (D-GA), Sen. Zell Miller (D-GA), and Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY).

Through frequent media interviews and news analysis, Clifford May is the prominent public face of FDD in the media. In addition to his former work with the Republican National Committee, May's other institutional affiliations include being vice chair of the Republican Jewish Coalition. He is also chairman of the policy committee of the Committee on the Present Danger, which is described by FDD as a “venerable Cold War group” that was recreated by FDD in 2004.

I really have to wonder what posseses certain Democrats to join groups that consist of the most virulent wingnut freaks in the country. Well, maybe not: it is an extremely well funded "think tank" that has more money floating around than just about anyone else.

According to their web site, the Coalition Against Terrorist Media has had quite a bit of success in persuading satellite companies around the world not to carry the station, which seems legitimate to me. But once again, we find the rightwing being unable to resist using the government to criminalize things which are not normally criminal in the name of terrorism. In fact, the government made a point of even saying that selling this channel could be considered "giving material support to the terrorists," which is a very chilling concept to say the least.

In response to this arrest the ACLU wrote:

“It appears that the statute under which Mr. Iqbal is being prosecuted includes a First Amendment exemption that prevents the government from punishing people for importing news communications,” Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement. “Such an exemption is constitutionally necessary, and the fact that the government is proceeding with the prosecution in spite of it raises serious questions about how free our marketplace of idea is.”

Very serious questions indeed.

And then we have the usual rightwing intellectual incoherence. Cliff May, the welfare queen who sits at the head of this wingnut pyramid wrote recently:

Where are all the Muslim moderates?...They are out there, I suspect; in larger numbers than we might be led to believe. But if most are silent and fearful of speaking out, can you blame them? The vast majority of Arabs and Muslims live in countries ruled by illiberal and oppressive regimes. And in the few relatively free countries – Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia – there is no protection from the long arm of Militant Islamism. Indeed, even in Europe it can be dangerous to challenge religious fascism. And last year, Shaker Elsayed, leader of Dar al-Hijrah, one of the largest mosques in the U.S., told American Muslims: "The call to reform Islam is an alien call."

Muslims who dissent from this orthodoxy have received precious little support from anyone. As far back as 1989, Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini called for the murder of British author Salman Rushdie. Such a frontal attack on freedom of speech should have prompted Western governments to send Iranian diplomats packing. Instead, Rushdie went into hiding while most Western intellectuals persuaded themselves this quarrel was none of their business.

Since that time, and perhaps partly as a consequence, Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh was murdered for making a movie some Muslims found insulting. Danish journalists who dared publish cartoons satirizing the radicalization of Islam have been threatened. Such formerly-courageous publications as The New York Times declined to publish the cartoons, claiming – unconvincingly -- that they had not been intimidated; they were merely demonstrating sensitivity.

That's another stirring rightwing defense of free speech and a rousing condemnation of repressive governments for stifling dissent. What's more, the media itself is complicit for not publishing the offending material as a matter of principle regardless of its offensiveness or potential to incite terrorism.

How odd then that this same man runs a lavishly funded a program devoted to eliminating speech they consider to be offensive and which has the potential to incite terrorism. Moreover, his organization has gone even further by informing to the government and demanding that it arrest those who are accused of selling such material. And I think we can be quite sure that he would heartily condemn any news organization that insisted on broadcasting it as a matter of principle. It makes your head ache.

I have no idea how bad Al-MANAR (Hezbollah TV) really is. But I'm willing to assume that it's pretty bad and I can't see why I would want to add it to my cable package. (If I want extremist political propaganda I'll watch FOX, which is of far more immediate relevance to my life.) But I'm damned if can agree with Cliff May and Joe Lieberman that speech should ever be considered giving material support to terrorists or that selling such speech is a criminal offense. That kind of thing is Stalinist claptrap of the worst kind.

As Noam Chomsky said, "Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you're really in favor of free speech, then you're in favor of freedom of speech for precisely for views you despise. Otherwise, you're not in favor of free speech."

Ok, I know. Chomsky is a leftist terrorist lover so he's full of it. How about this guy, who used to be considered quite a hero to many on the right:

John Stuart Mill: "If any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility."

Of course, assuming their own infallibility is a feature of the rightwing, so this argument probably isn't persuasive.



.
digby 8/26/2006 12:30:00 PM |

 
Heroes

by digby

If they can appropriate JFK, FDR and Truman, we can damn well take Barry Goldwater. Eventually, we'll take Reagan too --- remember, he got all touchy feely with Gorby toward the end and he signed the biggest tax increase in history to save social security. (Haha. Did you just hear that collective gasp?)

They can keep Nixon and the Bush family. They are the true leaders of the modern GOP, anyway --- crooked and psychologically unfit for office.



.
digby 8/26/2006 12:06:00 PM |

 

Stupid Explained - The Flag Conservatives

by poputonian

Norman Mailer differentiates between two types of conservatives, and articulates about pseudo-Christians. In doing so, he labels the inferior of this class as the Flag Conservatives, who, unfortunately, also happen to be running America:

There is just this kind of mad-eyed mystique in Americans: the idea that we Americans can do anything. So, say flag conservatives, we will be able to handle what comes. Our know-how, our can-do, will dominate all obstacles. They truly believe America is not only fit to run the world but that it must run the world. Otherwise, we will lose ourselves. If there is not a new seriousness in American affairs, the country is going to go down the drain.

...

On the other hand, conservatism has its own deep ditches, its unclimbable walls, its immutable old ideas sealed in concrete. But lately, there are two profoundly different kinds of conservatives emerging, as different in their way as the communists and the socialists were before and after 1917, yes, two types of conservatives in America now. What I call "value conservatives" because they believe in what most people think of as the standard conservative values—family, home, faith, hard work, duty, allegiance—dependable human virtues. And then there are what I call "flag conservatives," of whom obviously the present administration would be the perfect example.

I don’t think flag conservatives give a real damn about conservative values. They use the words. They certainly use the flag. They love words like “evil.” One of Bush’s worst faults in rhetoric (to dip into that cornucopia) is to use the word “evil” as if it were a button he can touch to increase his power. When people are sick and have an IV tube put in them to feed a narcotic painkiller on demand, a few keep pressing that button. Bush uses evil as his hot button for the American public. Any man who can employ that word 15 times in five minutes is not a conservative. Not a value conservative. A flag conservative is another matter. They rely on manipulation. What they want is power. They believe in America. That they do. They believe this country is the only hope of the world and they feel that this country is becoming more and more powerful on the one hand, but on the other, is rapidly growing more dissolute. And so the only solution for it is empire, World Empire. Behind the whole thing in Iraq is the desire to have a huge military presence in the near-East as a stepping stone for eventually taking over the world. Once we become a twenty-first century version of the old Roman Empire, then moral reform will come into the picture. The military is obviously more puritanical than the entertainment media. Soldiers can, of course, be wilder than anyone, but the overhead command is a major pressure on soldiers, and it is not permissive.
...
You see, behind flag conservatism is not madness but logic. I’m not in accord with the logic. But it is powerful. From their point of view, America is getting rotten. The entertainment media are loose. They are licentious. The kids are getting to the point where they can’t read, but they sure can screw. Morals are vanishing. The real subtext may be that if America becomes again a military machine that is huge in order to oversee all its new commitments, then American sexual freedom, willy-nilly, will have to go on the back burner. Commitment and dedication will become necessary national values (with all the hypocrisy attendant on that.) Flag conservatives may see all this as absolutely necessary. In the last decade, there have been many blows to the psychic integument of conservatism. And the last half-year has been horrific. We have all had to recognize the outsize chicanery and economic pollution of the corporations, we have had to deal with the great blow the Catholic Church took, not to mention 9/11, which was a shock, if not an outright chasm at our feet. I think Americans took a hit that is not wholly out of proportion to what happened to the Germans after World War I when inflation came and wiped out the fundamental German notion of self, which was that if you worked hard and saved your money, you ended up having a decent old age. It is my belief Hitler could never have come to power ten years later without that runaway inflation. By the same measure, I think 9/11 did something comparable to the American sense of security.
...
The point I want to make is that—let me do it in two parts: First, there was a fierce point of view back when the Soviet Union fell. Flag conservatives felt that was their opportunity to take over the world because we were the only people who knew how to run the world. And they were furious when Clinton got in. One of the reasons he was so hated was because he was frustrating what they wanted. That world takeover, so open, so possible from their point of view in 1992, was missed. How that contributed to intense hatred of Clinton! This attitude, I think, grew and deepened and festered through the eight years of the Clinton administration. I don’t know if White House principals talk to one another in private about this, but the key element in their present thought, I suspect, is that if America becomes an empire, then of necessity, everything here that needs to be strengthened will be affected positively. By their lights! If America grows into the modern equivalent of the Roman Empire, then it will be necessary to rear whole generations who can serve in the military in all parts of the world. It will put a new emphasis again upon education. Americans, who are famous for their inability to speak foreign languages, will suddenly be encouraged and over-encouraged to become linguists in order to handle the overseas tasks of empire. The seriousness of purpose will be back in American life. These are, I suspect, their arguments. They are not mine. I am not for World Empire. I can foresee endless disasters coming out of that.
...
One of the messages that the flag conservatives are trying to send to China is, I expect: Hear this! You Chinese guys are obviously very bright. We can tell. We know! Because your Asian students in our universities get better marks than our people do. They are more serious. They were born for technology. People who have led submerged lives love technology. They don’t get any pleasure anyway, so they do like the notion of personal, right-at-your-desk power. Technology is ideal for them. All right, goes the unspoken message of the flag conservatives, you guys can have your technology, but you had better understand, China, that you will be the Greek slaves to us Romans. We will treat you well because you will be most important to us, eminently important. But don’t try to rise above your future station in life. The best you can ever hope to be is Greeks.
...
Flag conservatives are not Christians. They are, at best, militant Christians, which is, of course, a fatal contradiction in terms. They are a very special piece of work, but they are not Christians. The fundament of Christianity is compassion, and it is usually observed by the silence attendant on its absence. Well, the same anomaly is true of the Muslims. Islam, in theory, is an immensely egalitarian religion. It believes everyone is absolutely equal before God. But the reality, no surprise, is something else. A host of Arab leaders, who do not look upon their poor people in any way as equals, make up a perfect counterpart to the way we live with Christianity. We violate Christianity with every breath we take. So do the Muslims violate Islam. Your question, is it a war to the end? I expect it is. We are speaking of war between two essentially unbalanced inauthentic theologies. So, it may prove to be an immense war. A vast conflict of powers is at the core and the motives of both sides are inauthentic which, I expect, makes it worse. The large and unanchored uneasiness I feel about it is that we may not get through this century. We could come apart—piece by piece, disaster after disaster, small and large.

It's frightening to think how many followers of the Bush/Cheney flag conservative administration have no idea they are being deceived, that what they are following is exactly as Mailer describes. All those flags and all the yellow ribbons. If people only knew. They bought the simple logic: we're for Good and they're for Evil.

Here is another clip from Mailer, this one again is from his book, Why Are We At War?, which was published in 2003, several months after the interview above. This anectdote seems a good summation of the present state of affairs with regard to the flag and to the future of America:

We had a parade in Provincetown on the Fourth of July, 2002. A rather nice looking, pleasant fellow -- he looked to me like a young liberal lawyer -- came up to me and handed me a small American flag. And I looked at him and just shook my head. And he walked on. It wasn't an episode in any way. He came over with a half-smile and walked away with a half-smile. But I was furious for not saying, "You don't have to wave a flag to be a patriot." By July of 2002, it bothered me a good deal. Free-floating patriotism seemed like a direct measure of our free-floating anxiety.

Take the British for contrast. The British have a love of country that is profound. They can revile it, tell dirty stories about it, give you dish on all the imperfects who are leading the country. But their patriotism is deep. In America it's as if we're playing musical chairs, and you shouldn't get caught without a flag or you're out of the game. Why do we need all this reaffirmation? It's as if we're a three-hundred-pound man who's seven feet tall, superbly shaped, absolutely powerful, and yet every three minutes he's got to reaffirm the fact that his armpits have a wonderful odor. We don't need compulsive, self-serving patriotism. It's odious. When you have a great country, it's your duty to be critical of it so it can become even greater. But culturally, emotionally, we are growing more arrogant, more vain. We're losing a sense of the beauty not only of democracy but also of its peril.

Democracy is built upon a notion that is exquisite and dangerous. It virtually states that if the will of the populace is freely expressed, more good than bad will result. When America began, it was the first time in the history of civilization that a nation dared to make an enormous bet founded on this daring notion--that there is more good than bad in people. Until then, the prevailing assumption had been that the powers at the top knew best; people were no good and had to be controlled. Now we have to keep reminding ourselves that just because we've been a great democracy, it doesn't guarantee we're going to continue to be one. Democracy is existential. It changes. It changes all the time. That's one reason why I detest promiscuous patriotism. You don't take democracy for granted. It is always in peril. We all know that any man or woman can go from being a relatively good person to a bad one. We can all become corrupted, or embittered. We can be swallowed by our miseries in life, become weary, give up. The fact that we've been a great democracy doesn't mean we will automatically keep being one if we keep waving the flag. It's ugly. You take monarchy for granted, or a fascist state. But democracy changes all the time.

poputonian 8/26/2006 05:27:00 AM |

Friday, August 25, 2006

 
The Stupids: Episode 4,577

by digby

A geography teacher put on paid leave for refusing to remove Mexican, Chinese and United Nations flags from his classroom will be allowed to return to school today after district officials backed down.

But Eric Hamlin, who teaches seventh-graders in Jefferson County, hopes his experience will inspire a backlash against a Colorado law that restricts display of other nations' flags.

"This hasn't been a teacher-versus-school- district issue," Hamlin said. "This has been a teacher taking on the state statute, with the school district stuck in the middle as the enforcer."

Carmody Middle School principal John Schalk put Hamlin on paid leave Wednesday after the teacher refused three orders to take the flags out of his classroom.

The school district cited a state law prohibiting the display of any flag but the American, Colorado or local flags on public buildings, including schools. Temporary displays for instructional or historical purposes are exempt, but the school principal did not consider Hamlin's display temporary enough.

District officials agreed Thursday that Hamlin could keep the flags up for six weeks, then exchange them with other flags from his collection of more than 50. The district said he could keep his next set of flags, 25 of them from Middle Eastern nations, up for 12 weeks.

Former state Rep. Carl Miller, who sponsored legislation in 2002 strengthening a 1971 law restricting foreign flag displays, said the school was right to put Hamlin on leave and should not have let him return so soon.

Miller, a Democrat from Leadville, disagreed with Jefferson County Superintendent Cindy Stevenson, who said the outcome was a "win-win situation."

"The only win-win I see is that Mr. Hamlin wins, China wins, Mexico wins and the United Nations wins," he said.

The Stupids: Episode 4,578

Littleton schools take down foreign flags

A Littleton middle school removed 30 flags from the gym today, fearing they violate a Colorado law against displaying foreign flags in state buildings.

Goddard Middle School Principal Amy Oaks said students will express the same message of diversity by creating banners that symbolize the foreign nations.

"Perhaps I have a much more cautious interpretation of the law than other people," Oaks said. "I have no idea. I just know that we certainly wouldn’t want to be in violation of the state law...

"We don’t want it to be anything that anybody would say, ‘Do you realize you’re violating the law on the wall of your gym? We don’t want that."

State law allows flags as part of a temporary display for educational purposes, provided the flags are not permanently affixed to the building. The Goddard flags have been up since the 2003-04 school year.

"It kind of feels permanent to me," Oaks said.

Oaks pulled down the flags after a teacher in Jefferson County was placed on administrative leave over a flag controversy in his classroom.

The 30 flags at Goddard, including a U.S. flag, represented the nationalities of Goddard students, including some from as far away as Mongolia and Eritrea.

Oaks said she and an art teacher will oversee creation of the banners, using paint on artists canvas.

These are the educated people.



.
digby 8/25/2006 05:05:00 PM |

 
Re-Runs

by digby


I am getting so tired of this nonsense. I read today from Avedon Carol that the wingnuts are attacking feminists again for not being sufficiently exercized by the plight of women under Islamic theocratic regimes:

Another re-run being linked by right-wingers is this crap about how western feminists are uninterested in condemning Islamic extremism. Of course, we do - all the time - but no one listens. We condemned Bush for leaving Afghan women high and dry after bombing Kabul, where the Taliban is now having a resurgence. We condemned the neocon plan to invade Iraq, thus unleashing extremist Islam in what had been a secular country. And we don't like the way Bush's policies have interrupted what had been a gradual weakening of extremism in Iran. Not one thing Bush-Cheney has done in the Middle-East has improved the lot of women, and in Iraq they have made things dramatically worse. The last thing the Islamic world's women need is more of this kind of help.

And by the way, where were the wingnuts before 9/11 on this subject? I don't remember them saying anything at all. But I do remember the Feminist Majority's Campaign to Stop Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan:

October 21, 1998

Lenos Announce $100,000 Contribution to Raise Awareness of Gender Apartheid in Afganistan

Mavis and Jay Leno today presented a gift of $100,000 to the Feminist Majority Foundation to expand its Campaign to Stop Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan and to restore women's rights to work, education, healthcare and freedom of movement. Mavis Leno will chair the national effort.

"Our contribution kicks-off an expanded organizing drive to mobilize public support and increase visibility for our Campaign to Stop Gender Apartheid," said Mavis Leno. "We are determined that every American know about what is happening to women and girls in Afghanistan. We must not remain silent. Jay and I are challenging others to lend their help and support."

"Two years ago women in Afghanistan could work, be educated, and move about freely," explained Leno. "Then the Taliban seized power. Today women are prohibited from leaving their homes unless accompanied by a close male relative and are forced to wear the burqa - a head-to-toe shroud. Girls and women are banned from schooling. . .even home schooling. Male doctors are forbidden to examine women. Women doctors are no longer allowed to practice. No healthcare. . .no education. . .no freedom of movement. This nightmare is reality for 11.5 million women and girls in Afghanistan."

[...]

Smeal and Leno were joined at today's the press conference by Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) who has been leading efforts in Congress to stop gender apartheid, Zohra Rasekh, MPH of Physicians for Human Rights which has just completed an important study of the condition of women living under the Taliban, Jan Goodwin who has traveled extensively in Afghanistan and written on gender apartheid, and Sima Wali, an Afghan woman working in the U.S. to end gender apartheid.

Every couple of years some idiot rolls out this dipshit canard and everyone has to spend hours rebutting it. It's ridiculous on its face, the same way it's ridiculous that the rightwing claims that liberals, gays, women whomever are in league with the Islamic fundamentalist terrorists. If there are any Americans who have a basic sympatico with these most conservative of social conservatives it's the ... American social conservatives.


.
digby 8/25/2006 02:29:00 PM |

 
Blind Cruelty

by digby

Glenn Beck is "driven out of his mind" by little signs in braille outside offices that tell blind people which office they're entering. Apparently, this "political correctness" interferes with wingnut freedom to not have to look at little plaques they dislike ... or something:

MILANO: Well, "Dare to Ask," Glenn, like my book, I Can't Believe You Asked That!, is -- it's a chance for people to ask those kinds of taboo cultural questions that we all wish we could ask but we're so afraid of offending in this P.C. world that, you know, we -- we dance around it, as you were saying earlier.

BECK: OK. I have one. I have one. I'm going to get to some of the questions that have already been asked, but I've got one that drives me out of my mind. I work at Radio City in midtown Manhattan, and up by the doors, you know, like where the -- you know -- the office kitchen is, in Braille, on the wall, it says "kitchen." You'd have to -- a blind person would have to be feeling all of the walls to find "kitchen." Just to piss them off, I'm going to put in Braille on the coffee pot -- I'm going to put, "Pot is hot." Ow!

It's downright cruel that society is so "politically correct" that they restrict the freedom of good and decent poeple like Beck from exercizing his god-given right to commit acts of physical violence against people with physical handicaps, too. Where will all this political correctness end, I ask you?

The good news is that CNN is making sure that men like Beck have a national forum from which to educate and entertain the people with commentary such as this.



.
digby 8/25/2006 01:49:00 PM |

 
Here We Go

by digby


When I wrote about the Duelling PageantsI never imagined that it would come to pass so literally. The cable nets are hammering Ray Nagin for his foot in mouth comment that it took New York five years to rebuild a hole in the ground so a reporter from NY ought to cut New Orleans some slack. Typical Nagin nonsense.

But it has provoked a case of the vapors among certain excitable folks that seems just a tad out of place considering the horrors that both cities underwent. Most officials of Louisiana and New York have respnded in measured tones like this:

The chairman of the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., the agency created to oversee the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site and downtown Manhattan, said that tremendous progress has been made in lower Manhattan, with the Freedom Tower, a transportation hub and a memorial to the nearly 3,000 attack victims under construction.

"We understand how difficult rebuilding a city after such destruction can be," chairman Kevin Rampe said in a statement.

The guy who seems to be stoking the story is none other than Rep. Peter King (R-Asshole), who went on radio and TV and went nuts on Nagin today. This is, the same Peter King who commented during the Katrina crisis:

"The main problem in obstructing the relief operation - it's almost like a Mogadishu-like gang situation that's prevailing in New Orleans," Rep. Peter King told WABC Radio's John Gambling.

"It's hard to get federal troops in to bring about order when the local police have broken down," he added. "I just think the situation would have gone a lot better if there were a Rudy Giuliani down there - someone who could have set a firm tone from day one."

King has always had a little problem with New Orleans and I think we can guess why. This was, you'll recall, the prevailing view of many critics like King during the crisis last year. The "problem" was all the lawlessness. Mogadishu in America. The natives were running wild. This was later shown to be simply the fevered rumormongering you tend to find in crises where communication is down. But King and the rest of the hankie wringers naturally assumed the mob was taking over despite the fact that there were cameras all over the city and no one captured the crazed marauding beasts doing anything other than liesurely looting a local Wal Mart. Their bedwetting fearmongering did more to delay the response than any other single reason.

King isn't alone today in his disdain for Ray Nagin and his constituents. Here are some nice comments from the CBS web site on its story about the Nagin comment:

Give me a break Nagin. More Kill Whitie, Poor Black People Garb! Hate to break it to you people, but the era of MLK is over. You have your equal rights. The only racism going on here today is that of Affirmitive action, and you cries over "racial profiling." You have more liberties that the 30 year old white male today and Ray Nagin is another black trying to use the poor race card to get his 15 minutes of fame. Do the job you are hired to do Ray and rebuild the city which you have been given the funds already to build. But then again, maybe you are doing your job, maybe this kind of rhetoric is your base.

Nice.
Posted by ttennison at 03:38 PM : Aug 25, 2006
+ report this comment

..................................................................................
I was in NO & Gulf Coast in Sept & Oct as a volunteer trying to help make a difference in some small way; a lot of us that came in from all over the country did more for NO than their mayor ever will, because we were doing it to serve others; the only thing Nagin serves is himself.
I was there and heard a press conference he gave to a large group of contractors. His words were "this is our time"; that and other things he said meant they were going to cash in for a lifetime. He accused a lot of "outside" contractors of being carpetbaggers; the biggest carpetbagger in Louisiana is sitting in the Mayors office.
And I saw parking lots full of school buses and city bises, sitting parked with water up to the windows; totally destryed and useless that could have been used to evacuate "his chololate city" before the worst hit.
Nagin is a first class jerk and I still can't believe he scraped enough absentee voters to put him back in office

Posted by kancan71 at 03:32 PM : Aug 25, 2006
+ report this comment
..................................................................................
Nagin is one the the biggest idiots of our time, not too mention a racist as well.
Posted by z3pr at 03:31 PM : Aug 25, 2006
+ report this comment
..................................................................................
It's time for the citizens of NO to face the truth and stop blaming the government for the life they chose to live and where they chose to live it. Grow up and accept responsibility for your own life. It should be pointed out to Nagin that New Yorkers were on their way work or at work when the unthinkable event occured. After the attack New Yorkers dug themselves out from underneath the distruction and strangers helped strangers. On the other hand the people of New Orleans were sitting at home on the front porch waiting for someone to tell them what to do. After Katrina every one sat on their butts and grew angry that no one is helping us. BooHoo!
You cant compare NO to NY and you sure as heck cant compare Rudy to Nagin.
Posted by Terrys1955 at 03:29 PM : Aug 25, 2006
+ report this comment
..................................................................................
Being from Florida I'm very familiar with hurricanes. Hurricanes do not just happen spur of the moment. Comparison to ground zero is absurd. Maybe if there was less whining and these folks got their lazy behinds off their waterlogged couch things would be better. But that's a lot to expect from the kind of people who would vote for Nagin. You got what you deserved. Maybe if we're lucky a couple more canes will head your way and NO can become a great scuba diving spot. "See the ruins".

Check ou the story yourself and you'll see that these kind of comments are, by far, the majority.

Here's a typical one from Free Republic:

I gave much more than I could really afford to give. It looks like it all went into someone's pocket. There was a tremendous amount of money given to the red cross and other charities by people just like me. The residents of N O sucked up the "FREE" money like there was no tomorrow but they will not go to work and rebuild their own city. They are having to import Hispanics to get any work done and then they bitch about the change in population. I think the property should go to those who are willing to work to clean up the mess. If you won't work to restore you own property then you should not get one dime from the government or private charities. One thing is for certain, they will not get another penny out of my pocket!

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
The guy is a typcal "Jessie-Al" con artist...we can outsmart these white boys. New (old) New Orleans has garnered more money out of this tragedy than all the other affected states tgether...they still want to milk it for all it's worth...All the Incometents.. Mayor, Governor, Senators, Congressman..all together now..."It's Bush's fault"...and the Democrats will play this up in the November elections...but it may backfire when they do...Us white boys know what is going on.... and will react accodrdingly,. Jake

If anyone is stil wondering why we have had trouble creating a decent safety net in this country, you need look not further. The benefits always seem to go to the "wrong people."

Rove is hoping to tap into these primitive feelings to shore up his base and mitigate the perception of Republican incompetence in dealing with the most catastrophic American natural disaster in our lifetimes. So far, the news media seems more than willing to help him.


.
digby 8/25/2006 12:17:00 PM |

 

Never Trust The King With The Army

by poputonian

As John Bonifaz described in his 2003 book Warrior King: The Case For Impeaching George W. Bush, the vote to authorize the Iraq war violated the War Powers clause of the U.S. Constitution:

"In drafting the War Powers Clause of Article 1, Section 8, the framers of the Constitution set out to create a nation that would be nothing like the model established by European monarchies. This is why they made the momentous decision of whether or not to send this nation into war a matter to be decided solely by the people, through their elected representatives in Congress."

Before suggesting that it was Congress who made the choice for war, consider another example from Bonifaz. He says:

"Imagine this: The United States Congress passes a resolution which states: "The President is authorized to levy an income tax on the people of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to pay for subsidies to U.S. oil companies." No amount of legal wrangling could make such a resolution constitutional. Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution grants the power to levy taxes solely to Congress."

But this is old stuff. Glenn Greenwald has the latest on who should make the call on war with Iran. Glenn's post contains his normal extraordinary insight, coupled with Federalist gems that remove any ambiguity about who can make war.

poputonian 8/25/2006 08:49:00 AM |

 
Comment Of The Day

by digby

Dover Bitch responding to the JC Watts inanity on Plan B:

Yesterday, they said life begins with conception.

Today, they say life begins with intercourse.

Tomorrow, they will tell us life begins with dinner and a movie.

Dover Bitch blog
digby 8/25/2006 08:34:00 AM |

Thursday, August 24, 2006

 
CNN Political Analyst

by digby

Just shoot me and put me out of my misery. I can't take it any more:

BLITZER: Joining us now in our "Strategy Session," radio talk show host Bill Press and CNN political analyst, former Republican Congressman J.C. Watts.

In this Plan B decision, the morning-after contraception pill, in effect, Hillary Clinton came out with a strong statement: "While we urge the FDA to revisit placing age restrictions on the sale of Plan B, it is real progress that millions of American women will now have increased access to emergency contraception."

Women 18 and older can just go in and buy the pill. Seventeen- year-olds and under have to get a doctor's note.

J.C. WATTS, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Well...

(LAUGHTER)

WATTS: ... Wolf, I don't know what is the difference in, you know, harming the child the night or the day after. I still don't think that changes the debate. Those...

(CROSSTALK)

BLITZER: You think this is abortion?

WATTS: I do. I think -- I still don't think it changes the debate one bit.

I think those who are opposed to abortion are going to be opposed to this. Those who support abortion, they will like this decision, as -- as Senator Clinton said. It's abortion the day after.

So, it doesn't change the debate any. And I do. I agree that the FDA has made a huge mistake in this ruling.

BLITZER: The other side, Wendy Wright of Concerned Women of -- For America, says, "The FDA's irresponsible action today takes those rights out of a parent's hands and gives them to ill-intentioned perpetrators."

Clearly, they're very unhappy with this FDA decision.

BILL PRESS, RADIO TALK SHOW HOST: Well, you know, that's too bad, Wolf. I think this is a major breakthrough for American women.

And, J.C., it's hypocritical to be against abortion and to be against Plan B. We heard Sanjay Gupta, who knows more about this than you and I do, at the top of the show, say, if a woman is already pregnant, this does nothing. This is not an abortion pill. It's a contraceptive pill. It has been used safely by European women for years. It has been held up in this year only for -- in this country only for political reasons.

And what this pill is going to result in is fewer unwanted pregnancies and fewer abortions, which I thought -- is certainly my goal -- I thought was your goal, too.

WATTS: Well, it's ironic, Wolf, that we say it's a contraceptive, but you take it the morning after.

PRESS: So what?

(LAUGHTER)

PRESS: You take one pill the day before. You can take one the morning after.

(CROSSTALK)

PRESS: It's a medical breakthrough.

WATTS: The morning after.

PRESS: It's a contraceptive.

WATTS: It's...

PRESS: And it's not funny.

WATTS: It...

PRESS: Three-and-a-half -- no.

WATTS: Bill, the bottom line is...

PRESS: It's...

WATTS: ... your mind is not going to be changed by this decision. Nor -- and nor is mine.

(CROSSTALK)

WATTS: I believe it's abortion. I believe it takes the life of a -- you don't. So...

PRESS: No, but I...

WATTS: ... that's the issue.

PRESS: ... would hope...

WATTS: That's the issue.

PRESS: But I would hope people who have strong beliefs would listen to the experts and listen to the facts.

As Sanjay said, three -- and he's the medical expert here, not you, not me -- three-and-a-half million unwanted pregnancies in this country. One-half of them could be eliminated because of this pill. I would think you would say...

BLITZER: All right.

PRESS: ... it's about time.

WATTS: But you want to listen...

BLITZER: All right.

WATTS: ... to the experts on abortion, but you don't want to listen to the experts on the war that says that evil people are trying to kill us.

BLITZER: All right.

WATTS: But you don't want to do anything about that.

And then there are the Teen Sex Cults.



.
digby 8/24/2006 11:05:00 PM |

 
Slippery Flyboy

by digby


I understand that some alleged liberals are getting all tingly at the notion of John McCain as the next president. As Yglesias said, "And why shouldn't he? A handful of additional wars and steep cuts in vital retirement security programs would be a small price to pay for minor alterations to the campaign finance system." Not to mention that JJ, the manly fighter pilot, is just soooo dreamy.

The truth is that McCain is actually more hawkish and deceitful than Bush. The only difference in their rhetoric on national security is that McCain pretends he didn't cheer every single move Bush made until it started to go wrong. Senator Straight Talk is very, very slick, I'll give him that. Take this exchange on Press The Meat from 2005:

R. RUSSERT: Let me show you something that John McCain said describing a war situation: "And we have a horrific strain on the men and women in the military. We can't keep our pilots. We're lowering our recruiting standards. It's a very serious situation. And to have another one of these extended, unending burdens placed on the men and women in the military has some consequences. All I'm saying is: Let's develop a strategy overall and let's also then develop an exit strategy for this particular situation."

That was February 14, 1999, Kosovo. That's exactly what the Democrats are saying about Iraq.

SEN. McCAIN: Mm-hmm.

MR. RUSSERT: Aren't they saying things that should be said and should be listened to?

SEN. McCAIN: Mm-hmm. Well, I guess this is true confessions. I was wrong about Kosovo. I was right about Bosnia. We did the right thing in Kosovo by going in there and stopping ethnic cleansing. And we haven't done what we should be doing in Darfur and some other parts of the world, by the way. But I--if there's a strategy for withdrawal, it is success. It is the formula that the president described last week and the one I just described to you. I'm not for keeping troops there forever. I hope--I wish we could take them out tomorrow. It's not a question of whether we want to withdraw or not. We all want that. The question is: Will conditions on the ground dictate whether we withdraw or not and when we withdraw, or will it be some arbitrary date? I say conditions on the ground.

He successfully deflects the logical charge that he's an opportunistic partisan flip-flopper by just saying -- "oh yeah, my bad" and then just blathers incoherently. Because Russert yearns to service him, he lets it pass. The fact is that McCain was screeching for more troops in Kosovo too, which may explain why nobody listens to him. No matter what, we never seem to be committing enough troops to fight the big land war that he thinks we should be fighting:

Tuesday, Apr 20, 1999

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- U.S. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) today was joined by Senators Joe Biden (D-DE), Chuck Hagel (R-NE), Joe Lieberman (D-CT), Thad Cochran (R-MS) and Richard Lugar (R-IN) in offering a Senate resolution on Kosovo. The text of McCain’s floor speech follows:

“As my colleagues know I am concerned that the force the United States and our NATO allies has employed against Serbia– gradually escalating air strikes – is insufficient to achieve our political objectives there – the removal of Serb military and security forces from Kosovo; the return of the refugees to their homes; and the establishment of a NATO led peacekeeping force. I hope this resolution, should it be adopted, will encourage the Administration and our allies to find the courage and resolve to prosecute this war in the manner most likely to result in its early and successful conclusion. In other words, I hope this resolution will make clear Congress’ support for adapting our means to secure our ends, rather than the reverse.

In exactly the same way, McCain began agitating for more troops in Iraq in August of 2003. And because the war actually was a dud this time, his arguments for more troops were taken up by just about everybody and have successfully framed the argument for many Iraq war supporters by implying that the war would have been a "day at the beach" if only they had sent in more troops when McCain wanted to.

But McCain knew that this was nonsense. The fact is that we have never had enough troops to do what he belatedly thought should be done and unless the administration was willing to institute the draft or pull troops from other vital missions (besides Afghanistan, where we'd already pulled them), we never did. The key to the mission that McCain and Bush sold was always to have large a multi-national force, which Codpiece and Unka Dick did everything but spit in the world's face to avoid. McCain knows this very well but continued to argue publicly that we could just easily conjure up a larger military to "fix" Iraq and just slides on through like the oily political conman he really is.

It has certainly set him up nicely for a presidential run, though. He gives speeches more stirring than anything Michael Gerson ever dreamed of about liberty and freedom. He made the argument before Bush did that "some say" arabs can't govern themselves, but he begs to differ! Remember, he's Mr "National Greatness" which is all about the Glory That Is Imperial America. And somehow he manages to convince people that he would have magically won this stupid war and we'd all feel better about ourselves today if he'd been in charge --- even though he backed Bush's cock-up every step of the way and only came along later to carp about troop levels once it was already too late.

Here's a good example of his weaselly ways, from this past July

KING: We have an e-mail for you, Senator McCain, from Heather in Epsom, New Hampshire and it says, "Larry, I would like to ask Senator McCain if there is any hope that, if he were president, he would take a new approach to securing peace in the Middle East?" What would you do differently?

MCCAIN: I'm not sure, Larry, and for me to articulate something different obviously might be a criticism and I'm not sure right now that I'd like to criticize this administration because I think they're doing the very best they can.

I would have done things differently in Iraq, as you know, even though I continue to support our effort there. I think this is a very difficult situation.

Heather, as you know in the past, Henry Kissinger or Jim Baker or whoever was secretary of state could shuttle from one capital to another that basically controlled the fighting and that's much more difficult when you've got terrorist organizations that are doing the fighting and so it's much more complicated.

Slicker than owlshit, as my father always says.

John McCain is no better than George W. Bush on national security and foreign policy. This is best exemplified by their similar views of how to deal with the complicated issues in the mid-east. You'll recall that Dubya was caught on tape recently saying, "What they need to do is to get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit." But that's downright Churchillian compared to McCain's view. From Steve Benen we have this report:

Jason Horowitz reports in the New York Observer that John McCain met with an exclusive audience of very wealthy Republicans in New York late last week, shortly after getting booed relentlessly at the New School's commencement ceremony. The students weren't terribly impressed, but apparently McCain "saved some of his best material" for the elite crowd that gathered behind closed doors in the back of the Regency Hotel.

In a small, mirror-paneled room guarded by a Secret Service agent and packed with some of the city's wealthiest and most influential political donors, Mr. McCain got right to the point.

"One of the things I would do if I were President would be to sit the Shiites and the Sunnis down and say, 'Stop the bullshit,'" said Mr. McCain, according to Shirley Cloyes DioGuardi, an invitee, and two other guests.

Oh, so that's what we need from the Oval Office. I'm sure the Iraqis will find this immediately persuasive and lay down arms thanks to the power of McCain's personality and his desire to see the two sides get along. Somewhere, Bush is slapping his hand against his forehead, saying, "Why didn't I think of that?"

Or, as Brendan Nyhan put it, "So honest! So bold! What an innovative diplomatic concept! If only John McCain were president, we'd have peace in Iraq!"

Well, yes. That's what the McCain would have you believe and there are plenty of people who want to believe it. As Benen pointed out:

It's worth noting, however, all sarcasm aside, McCain's audience ate this up. DioGuardi, the wife of former Republican congressman Joseph DioGuardi, said McCain was "fantastic" and has "a vision for what should happen to this country.

And if anybody thinks that McCain is more sane on some of the other foreign policy challenges, think again:

"The greatest single threat that we are facing right now to our national security is Iran," he said. "If they get that weapon, and they have the capability to deliver it, put yourself in the position of the government of the state of Israel. This could be one of the most unsettling and difficult challenges that we have ever faced."

Brilliant.


.
digby 8/24/2006 02:43:00 PM |

 
Club Mad

by digby

The governor of Alaska, Frank Murkowski, came in 3rd in the Republican primary on Tuesday, and although it has widely been interpreted as a revolt over local issues, there can be no doubt that it sent a chill down the spines of DC incumbents, particularly the Senate majority.

Frank Murkowski isn't just some obscure Alaskan nobody --- he was a US Senator for 22 years, a member of the most exclusive club in the world, from one of the most reliable red states. In small (population) states like Alaska, he should have been an iconic figure who stayed in office until he was forced out by term limits or death. For years he had the backing of the most important industries in the state as well as the religious right, the NRA and the Alaska GOP. And yet, he couldn't get over 20% in the Republican primary this year. And the woman who won ran against the Republican establishment.

This is the fourth incumbent, two Republicans, one Replieberman and one Dem who have lost their primaries since August 8th. Lincoln Chafee is facing a very tough go from the big money Club For Growth challenge on his right. All of this is highly unusual.

I just heard Jeff Greenfield say that it's coincidence. Perhaps so. But if this is a "throw the rascals out" election, which it appears to me to be, let's just say there are a lot more Republican rascals than there are Democrats in national office these days. And even their own voters don't like them.



.
digby 8/24/2006 01:38:00 PM |

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

 
Oh Daddy

by digby

Echidne has posted a piece about a professor who claims that liberals are being outbred by conservatives and are therefore, going to eventually go the way of the dodo bird. The professor writes:

Simply put, liberals have a big baby problem: They're not having enough of them, they haven't for a long time, and their pool of potential new voters is suffering as a result. According to the 2004 General Social Survey, if you picked 100 unrelated politically liberal adults at random, you would find that they had, between them, 147 children. If you picked 100 conservatives, you would find 208 kids. That's a "fertility gap" of 41%. Given that about 80% of people with an identifiable party preference grow up to vote the same way as their parents, this gap translates into lots more little Republicans than little Democrats to vote in future elections. Over the past 30 years this gap has not been below 20%--explaining, to a large extent, the current ineffectiveness of liberal youth voter campaigns today.

Alarmingly for the Democrats, the gap is widening at a bit more than half a percentage point per year, meaning that today's problem is nothing compared to what the future will most likely hold. Consider future presidential elections in a swing state (like Ohio), and assume that the current patterns in fertility continue. A state that was split 50-50 between left and right in 2004 will tilt right by 2012, 54% to 46%. By 2020, it will be certifiably right-wing, 59% to 41%. A state that is currently 55-45 in favor of liberals (like California) will be 54-46 in favor of conservatives by 2020--and all for no other reason than babies.

And here I thought liberals were the lovers and conservatives were the fighters.

But where's the guarantee that Republican embryo becomes Republican voter? There are three kids in my wingnut family and only one is a chip off the old block, and he's pretty apathetic. The rightwing politics in my family were what turned my brother and me into raving liberals. I think that happens fairly often --- the old preacher's kid syndrome. It's certainly possible that a lot of conservatives come from liberal families as well --- I just haven't come across a lot of them. I do know quite few people who have been influenced by their spouses to change political directions, though.

I guess my point is that I'm not really sure that being born into politics is the predictor this professor seems to believe it is. According to Echidne there's a pretty good possibility that this professor is pulling his data out of his ass, so perhaps that's not surprising.

How many of you liberals out there came from conservative families?



.
digby 8/23/2006 09:29:00 PM |

 
Remedial Democracy

by digby

Scott Winship has an interesting article in The Democratic Strategist today in which he dissects one of those polls that measures how stupid Americans are about politics. And boy are they stupid about politics --- only one in ten knows who Denny Hastert is. But the good news is that they aren't measurably more stupid than they were in the 40's and 50's when there was a lot more illiteracy and many people didn't graduate from High School. I suppose that's good news.

Here's the part I find interesting:

Bennett shows that consistency in positions taken across issue areas increases as political knowledge increases. Those who have little knowledge tend to have unconventional combinations of issue positions. If it is also the case that those with little political knowledge are less consistent in their positions on individual issues over time than other people are, then the result might be a sizeable constituency for demagoguery and misdirection. Bennett’s results imply that that bloc would be as large as one-third of the population. It seems important to separate these people out, to the extent possible, when analyzing characteristics of the electorate by, say, party or ideology. And it would be nice to know more about the positions they take on issues and the candidates they support.

I happen to know an excellent place to start. Chris Hayes wrote an article about exactly this odd phenomenon after the 2004 election and I posted about it here.
Hayes wrote:

Undecided voters aren't as rational as you think. Members of the political class may disparage undecided voters, but we at least tend to impute to them a basic rationality. We're giving them too much credit. I met voters who told me they were voting for Bush, but who named their most important issue as the environment. One man told me he voted for Bush in 2000 because he thought that with Cheney, an oilman, on the ticket, the administration would finally be able to make us independent from foreign oil. A colleague spoke to a voter who had been a big Howard Dean fan, but had switched to supporting Bush after Dean lost the nomination. After half an hour in the man's house, she still couldn't make sense of his decision.

[...]

A disturbing number of undecided voters are crypto-racist isolationists. In the age of the war on terror and the war in Iraq, pundits agreed that this would be the most foreign policy-oriented election in a generation--and polling throughout the summer seemed to bear that out...But just because voters were unusually concerned about foreign policy didn't mean they had fundamentally shifted their outlook on world affairs. In fact, among undecided voters, I encountered a consistent and surprising isolationism--an isolationism that September 11 was supposed to have made obsolete everywhere but the left and right fringes of the political spectrum.

[...]

To be sure, maybe they simply thought Kerry's promise to bring in allies was a lame idea--after all, many well-informed observers did. But I became convinced that there was something else at play here, because undecided voters extended the same logic to other seemingly intractable problems, like the deficit or health care. On these issues, too, undecideds recognized the severity of the situation--but precisely because they understood the severity, they were inclined to be skeptical of Kerry's ability to fix things. Undecided voters, as everyone knows, have a deep skepticism about the ability of politicians to keep their promises and solve problems. So the staggering incompetence and irresponsibility of the Bush administration and the demonstrably poor state of world affairs seemed to serve not as indictments of Bush in particular, but rather of politicians in general.

[...]

undecideds seemed oddly unwilling to hold the president accountable for his previous actions, focusing instead on the practical issue of who would have a better chance of success in the future. Because undecideds seemed uninterested in assessing responsibility for the past, Bush suffered no penalty for having made things so bad; and because undecideds were focused on, but cynical about, the future, the worse things appeared, the less inclined they were to believe that problems could be fixed--thereby nullifying the backbone of Kerry's case. Needless to say, I found this logic maddening.

Undecided voters don't think in terms of issues. Perhaps the greatest myth about undecided voters is that they are undecided because of the "issues." That is, while they might favor Kerry on the economy, they favor Bush on terrorism; or while they are anti-gay marriage, they also support social welfare programs. Occasionally I did encounter undecided voters who were genuinely cross-pressured--a couple who was fiercely pro-life, antiwar, and pro-environment for example--but such cases were exceedingly rare. More often than not, when I asked undecided voters what issues they would pay attention to as they made up their minds I was met with a blank stare, as if I'd just asked them to name their favorite prime number.

[...]

But the very concept of the issue seemed to be almost completely alien to most of the undecided voters I spoke to... So I tried other ways of asking the same question: "Anything of particular concern to you? Are you anxious or worried about anything? Are you excited about what's been happening in the country in the last four years?"

These questions, too, more often than not yielded bewilderment. As far as I could tell, the problem wasn't the word "issue"; it was a fundamental lack of understanding of what constituted the broad category of the "political." The undecideds I spoke to didn't seem to have any intuitive grasp of what kinds of grievances qualify as political grievances. Often, once I would engage undecided voters, they would list concerns, such as the rising cost of health care; but when I would tell them that Kerry had a plan to lower health-care premiums, they would respond in disbelief--not in disbelief that he had a plan, but that the cost of health care was a political issue. It was as if you were telling them that Kerry was promising to extend summer into December.

[...]

In this context, Bush's victory, particularly on the strength of those voters who listed "values" as their number one issue, makes perfect sense. Kerry ran a campaign that was about politics: He parsed the world into political categories and offered political solutions. Bush did this too, but it wasn't the main thrust of his campaign. Instead, the president ran on broad themes, like "character" and "morals." Everyone feels an immediate and intuitive expertise on morals and values--we all know what's right and wrong. But how can undecided voters evaluate a candidate on issues if they don't even grasp what issues are?

Liberals like to point out that majorities of Americans agree with the Democratic Party on the issues, so Republicans are forced to run on character and values in order to win. (This cuts both ways: I met a large number of Bush/Feingold voters whose politics were more in line with the Republican president, but who admired the backbone and gutsiness of their Democratic senator.) But polls that ask people about issues presuppose a basic familiarity with the concept of issues--a familiarity that may not exist.

As far as I can tell, this leaves Democrats with two options: either abandon "issues" as the lynchpin of political campaigns and adopt the language of values, morals, and character as many have suggested; or begin the long-term and arduous task of rebuilding a popular, accessible political vocabulary--of convincing undecided voters to believe once again in the importance of issues. The former strategy could help the Democrats stop the bleeding in time for 2008. But the latter strategy might be necessary for the Democrats to become a majority party again.

I think Democrats need to do a bit of both. Certainly, the Republicans, for whatever reason, seem to better understand heuristics and are willing to demagogue wherever necessary. These last few years have taught us nothing if they haven't taught us how far you can go even when you make no sense whatsoever.

But the fact remains that this is not good for the country. We simply cannot adequately govern ourselves if a large number of us are dumb as posts and vote for reasons that make no sense.

The polling data suggests that the best solution is this:

The surest way to enhance political information levels is to convince people to become more interested in politics. In 2004, the mean score on the PI scale for the least interested segment of the public was 1.7. Among the most interested, the mean score was 6.2.

Increasing political interest won’t be easy, however. One suggestion has been for schools to conduct more classes in civics or American history, but the link between the number of such classes taken K-12 and informed citizenship is extremely weak. Get-out-the-vote campaigns in the mass media have also been popular, but the people who most need such encouragement don’t read newspapers or watch the news on TV. “Kids Voting” programs may benefit some, but they tend to be too few in number around the country, and their effects are generally minor.

Tne possible solution is deliberative polls, as suggested by University of Texas professor James Fishkin. The 2004 ANES found, for example, that persons who reported discussing politics with family and friends were significantly better informed than those who eschewed political talk. It is likely that political information and political discussions are mutually reinforcing.

And that, my friends, is our mission, should we decide to accept it. As the trainspotting, vanguard political junkies, our job is to take this conversation offline and spread the good word to our families and friends and co-workers. We can hang out in the blogosphere and hash out the arguments and organize ourselves around issues and candidates and raise money and volunteer. But if we do nothing else, we need to talk about this stuff out in the real world and build this dialog into the body politic.

I don't know how many people you can inspire or how many in whom you can even tweak an interest. But it doesn't take very many. Once a poltically informed person is created they tend to create more. I've been quite hopeful that this will be a positive benefit of the blogosphere for sometime. And when you read that data you can see just how necessary it is.



.
digby 8/23/2006 05:03:00 PM |

 
BFF's

by digby

The RNC has put out an amazing hit piece today on our glorious overlord Kos. Apparently, Democrats who associate themselves with our Dear Leader are to be shunned for such extremist associations.

But, it's funny, as I was over on the site reading through their various press releases, I saw that they have issued many in support of John Bolton. And yet John Bolton's most important and passionate online operative is none other than Pamela "Atlas" Oshry, surely one of the most shocking extremists in the right blogosphere. Why he was being "interviewed" one-on-one by the wingnut-gone-wild while he was supposedly right in the middle of brokering a cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon a couple of weeks ago. They are practically joined at the hip ... or something.

And needless to say, since Republican politicians routinely go on radio shows like Rush Limbaugh's and appear at conferences with psychotic hatemongers like Ann Coulter, making the "guilt by association" argument is very, very risky for them.

Are they sure they want to go there?



Update: From Seeing the Forest, I see that the man who said, "I would only add that these liberals want us to lose, not just in some small corner, but with their whole hearts; in fact, our defeat is the only thing they whole-heartedly work for" was invited to the white house this week.

He wasn't talking about liberals wanting conservatives to lose --- he was talking about liberals wanting America to lose to the terrorists, which logically means we desire a fundamentalist Islamic theocracy.



.
digby 8/23/2006 01:20:00 PM |

 
Massaging Katrina

by digby

I wrote a few days ago about the "Duelling Pageants" of 9/11 and Katrina. It appears that the Bush administration is going to go into the belly of the beast on the day and try to squeeze out some good publicity from the stagnant floodwaters.

As next week's anniversary of Hurricane Katrina triggers recollections of rooftop refugees and massive devastation along the Gulf Coast, the White House has begun a public relations blitz to counteract Democrats' plans to use the government's tardy response and the region's slow recovery in the coming congressional elections.

President Bush will visit the area Monday and Tuesday, including an overnight stay in New Orleans. He probably will visit the city's Lower 9th Ward, the heavily black area that remains mired in debris, and is expected to meet with storm victims.

The trip will force Bush to revisit sensitive racial issues that arose with the flooding of New Orleans; at that time, civil rights leaders charged that the White House was slow to respond because so many victims were black. GOP strategists acknowledged that the administration's failure to act quickly was a significant setback in their efforts to court traditionally Democratic African American voters.

The White House announced Bush's visit Tuesday as a phalanx of administration officials stood before reporters to argue that billions of dollars had flowed to the region and millions more was on the way. The plans for the trip were disclosed one day after Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales announced that he was sending additional lawyers and resources to the city to fight fraud and abuse.

At Tuesday's briefing, White House aides passed out folders and fact sheets that painted a picture of aggressive recovery efforts. A packet from the Army Corps of Engineers, responsible for the levees that were breached after the storm, carried the slogan: "One Team: Relevant, Ready, Responsible, Reliable."

Donald E. Powell, the White House official in charge of recovery plans, declared that Bush was "fulfilling his commitment to rebuild the Gulf Coast better and stronger."

The administration's coordinated response is the latest example of White House officials maneuvering to cast a positive light on a campaign issue expected to hurt Republicans. Just this week, Bush acknowledged public anxiety over Katrina, along with concern about the war in Iraq and rising gasoline prices. But he defended his record and accused the Democrats of weakness, particularly on national security issues.

I suppose you could call this progress. The administration has progressed from never acknowledging they made a mistake to "acknowledging public anxiety."

The tone of the article suggests skepticism on the part of these particular reporters, but there's no guarantee that the white house won't be able to pull out that old photo op magic the press won't be compelled to portray Bush as a benevolent religious figure. They've had a lot of time to plan this.

The White House effort comes as the Democrats, who plan to challenge Republicans on national security in this year's midterm election campaign, are portraying the government's response to Katrina as evidence that Bush failed to fix inadequacies exposed by the Sept. 11 attacks.

A report being released today by top Democrats, titled "Broken Promises: The Republican Response to Katrina," features a picture of Bush during his Sept. 15, 2005, speech in New Orleans' Jackson Square, in which he promised to oversee "one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen."

The report argues that every aspect of recovery — including housing, business loans, healthcare, education and preparedness — "suffers from a failed Republican response marked by unfulfilled promises, cronyism, waste, fraud, and abuse."

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada is scheduled to spend Thursday in New Orleans with fellow Democratic Sen. Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana to kick off what they call the "Hope and Recovery Tour." House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco plans to arrive this weekend with about 20 other Democrats for additional events.

That's good. But, thank goodness the visual images of the crisis speak for themselves. The ninth ward still looks like it was hit with a bunker buster.

I would really like to see Bill Clinton down there next week. This is the type of thing at which he excells:

Leaders of the recovery effort said Tuesday that although progress had been slow in some areas, Bush would be able to point to successes in some New Orleans neighborhoods, including the famed French Quarter and the Garden District. However, neither area was damaged as severely as the Lower 9th Ward. The question for White House schedulers is how much to accentuate the positives while acknowledging the negatives.

"If you go to most of the city you see enormous progress," said Walter Isaacson, president of the Aspen Institute and vice chairman of the Louisiana Recovery Authority. "They are probably going to go to the Lower 9th Ward, which is very honest of them, because that's the place you see the least progress."

Isaacson, a New Orleans native, said he considered many of the Democrats' critiques to be unfair. He credited the White House with safeguarding millions of dollars in grants for housing and levee reconstruction, some of which was only approved this summer amid a contentious budget debate.

"They protected that housing money and the levee money in the appropriation process when every congressman was looking at it greedily," he said.

Good old former editor of TIME magazine Walter Isaacson, still shilling for his GOP buddies. He neglects to mention that if this is true, the whitehouse was "protecting" the housing money from its own Republicans --- and they did it for purely partisan political reasons.

On Monday, Bush offered a preview of his anniversary message, contending at a news conference that despite frustrations about the slow arrival of housing funds and delays in debris removal, "the money has been appropriated, the formula is in place, and now it's time to move forward."

He suggested that $110 billion in federal funds had been "committed" to help the region rebuild, but confusion persisted Tuesday over what portion of that money had actually been spent.

During the White House briefing, Powell said that about $44 billion, about 40% of the total, had been distributed to hurricane victims, but suggested that state and local governments were mostly to blame for the gap.

Obviously Iraq is the primary political issue in the coming election. But the real issue, cutting across all the others, is the fact that the Republicans simply cannot handle the responsibility of government whether it's terrorism, gas prices or a crisis in a major American city. Katrina is the most vivid image of their incompetence and lack of accountability right here in the US.

The country is going to be reminded of this lowest moment of Republican rule next week. Let's hope the Republicans aren't able to turn that soggy lemon into lemonade. They are absolutely terrible at governing and with Bush they have a guy who they can't count on to react well during the crisis. But nobody manufactures a campaign photo-op better than they do.

Case in point:

Remarks by President Bush After Meeting With Rockey Vaccarella
Wednesday August 23, 11:39 am ET

WASHINGTON, Aug. 23 /PRNewswire/ -- The following are remarks by President Bush:

THE PRESIDENT: I just had coffee with Rockey Vaccarella, St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana. He caught my attention because he decided to come up to Washington, D.C. and make it clear to me and others here in the government that there's people down there still hurting in south Louisiana, and along the Gulf Coast.

And Rock is a plain-spoken guy. He's the kind of fellow I feel comfortable talking to. I told him that I understand that there's people down there that still need help. And I told him the federal government will work with the state and local authorities to get the help to them as quickly as possible.

MR. VACCARELLA: That's right.

THE PRESIDENT: He met with my friend, Don Powell. Don's job is to cut through bureaucracy. I told Rocky the first obligation of the federal government is to write a check big enough to help the people down there. And I want to thank the members of Congress of both political parties that helped us pass over $110 billion of appropriations. And that's going to help the folks. And I told him that to the extent that there's still bureaucratic hurdles, and the need for the federal government to help eradicate those hurdles, we want to do that.

Now, I know we're coming up on the first-year anniversary of Katrina, and it's a time to remember, a time to particularly remember the suffering that people went through. Rocky lost everything. He lost -- he and his family had every possession they had wiped out. And it's a time to remember that people suffer, and it's a time to recommit ourselves to helping them. But I also want people to remember that a one-year anniversary is just that, because it's going to require a long time to help these people rebuild.

And thank you for your spirit.

MR. VACCARELLA: Thank you, Mr. President.

THE PRESIDENT: It's an amazing country, isn't it, where --

MR. VACCARELLA: It is. You know, it's really amazing when a small man like me from St. Bernard Parish can meet the President of the United States. The President is a people person. I knew that from the beginning. I was confident that I could meet President Bush.

And my mission was very simple. I wanted to thank President Bush for the millions of FEMA trailers that were brought down there. They gave roofs over people's head. People had the chance to have baths, air condition. We have TV, we have toiletry, we have things that are necessities that we can live upon.

But now, I wanted to remind the President that the job's not done, and he knows that. And I just don't want the government and President Bush to forget about us. And I just wish the President could have another term in Washington.

So it begins.

CNN is, predictably, having an orgasm. They are down with Rocky's lovely family in their FEMA trailer right now.

Rocky, by the way, is a very nice local Republican politician and he's very grateful for everything the president has done --- unlike some of those other "ungrateful" macaca types.


.
digby 8/23/2006 08:52:00 AM |

Tuesday, August 22, 2006

 
White Underbelly

by digby


I was reading about the latest outrage from Felix "Macaca" Allen's campaign over at Gilliard's place and something about his comment tickled my memory. Steve wrote:

They're clearly worried about the impact of the racist words coming from Allen's mouth. And even if he didn't say Macaca/Sand Nigger/Dune Coon/Haji what came after is worse. "Welcome to America".

Excuse me. America is no longer just white people. That's the real insult there. Especially when the kid was born in Virginia, unlike Allen.

I recalled that the empty Codpiece had said something along the same lines a couple of years ago:

There's a lot of people in the world who don't believe that people whose skin color may not be the same as ours can be free and self-govern. I reject that. I reject that strongly. I believe that people who practice the Muslim faith can self-govern. I believe that people whose skins aren't necessarily -- are a different color than white can self-govern.

Felix and Dubya default to the same patronizing, bigoted assumptions. Bush may be less hostile than Felix, but he's no less racist. "America" to both of these rich, privileged Republican creeps, is white.



.
digby 8/22/2006 07:24:00 PM |

 
Bring It

by digby


Our man Hackett debating a robot:

"Where's the six-foot-two, left-handed guy with the flowing white robe and the kidney problem? (Taylor) doesn't understand the war on terror."

Crooks and Liars has the vid.


Am I right, or am I right?


.
digby 8/22/2006 07:00:00 PM |

 
Conservative Crack-Up Watch

by digby

So we know that king neocon Norman Podhoretz is sticking with Bush to the bitter end, which is kind of sweet when you think about it. But the movement conservatives are bailing. Here's a blurb from Richard Viguerie's new book:

This is the first book that deals with the disappointment and even anger that most conservatives have with President Bush and the GOP-led Congress on major public policy issues. In this conservative manifesto, Viguerie applies conservative principles to 21st Century problems and issues. He also presents a detailed strategy for conservatives to take back control of the Republican Party and govern America.

With President Bush's low approval numbers, the unrest among grassroots conservatives, and the potential for GOP losses in the 2006 and 2008 elections, this book is a roadmap for conservatives as they begin to rebuild the conservative movement, recapture the Republican Party, and move even the Democrats to the right. In Conservatives Betrayed, Mr. Viguerie proposes bold action for conservatives to take back the Republican Party from Big Government Republicans, including:

Withhold financial support from Republican committees and most Republican incumbents.

Withhold support from all 2008 presidential candidates.

No longer call yourself a "Republican" but rather a Reagan conservative or Reagan Republican.

Work for wholesale change in Republican leadership at all levels of government.

And think and act as a third force (not third party) independent of the Republican Party. While not advocating GOP defeat, Mr. Viguerie says conservatives should not fear the loss of Congress in 2006, since our best gains usually come after a defeat:

-- 1976: Gerald Ford's loss made possible Ronald Reagan's victory in 1980.

-- 1992: George H.W. Bush's loss made possible the Republican congressional victories in 1994.

Losing is always a good tonic for the New Right, who always get a little disoriented when they hold power for too long. It messes with their sense of victimization. And, of course, they have to do this to save conservatism from the taint of Bushism.

But there's more to it than that and it has to do with old Norman. Even before the last election, Viguerie was seeing the writing on the wall:

... for Viguerie and other conservative leaders, maintaining that discipline this year is harder than usual. The Republicans' united front masks a growing struggle sparked by the president's hawkish and ambitious foreign policy--one that may burst into the open soon after the polls close, whoever wins. "Most conservatives are not comfortable with the neocons," Viguerie says. He decries the neocons as "overbearing" and "immensely influential. . . . They want to be the world's policeman. We don't feel our role is to be Don Quixote, righting all the wrongs in the world."

Viguerie's disquiet is widely shared by veteran conservative activists, who are increasingly blaming neoconservatives for placing Iraq at the center of the war on terrorism.

Viguerie is one of the great old men of the modern conservative movement. He's a keeper of the flame. The GOP is just the political arm, not the center of the movement itself. Bush and his friends the neocons have failed conservatism, big time:

...the neocons now find themselves in a fight for their place in the Republican Party--and in a second term, should Bush win. Former Reagan administration official Stefan Halper and former British diplomat Jonathan Clarke, in a widely discussed book called America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order, charge that Bush's foreign policy was hijacked after 9/11, leading to a "betrayal of both Republican and conservative principles." Francis Fukuyama, a former State Department official in the administration of Bush's father, assailed some fellow neocons and Bush's Iraq policy in a National Interest article. He argued that Bush overlooked the need for international support to build a sense of "legitimacy" for the Iraq invasion, antagonized many by announcing a pre-emption strategy, and "went into Iraq with enormous illusions about how easy the postwar situation would be." Conservative columnists like George Will, Robert Novak, and William F. Buckley Jr. are stoking the fire. Will recently complained that ideology is crowding out facts in Bush's Iraq nation building. "This administration needs a dose of conservatism without the [neo] prefix," he wrote.

Behind the scenes, movement conservatives are disputing neocon ideas as well. Says Alfred Regnery, publisher of the American Spectator and numerous conservative books, "The administration got sold a little bit by the neocons. . . . We should return to a traditional, strong Republican foreign policy: We go to war only as a last resort, and we're not in the business of building nations." Phyllis Schlafly, president of the Eagle Forum, says the administration needs to "finish up the job in Iraq." However, Schlafly says, "we don't think we can be the policeman of the world." She describes herself as "not a fan" of Wilsonian policies: "All this talk of democracy in Iraq is kind of ridiculous," she argues. "What's really important is that they have governments that are friendly to the United States."

Meanwhile:

Under fire, neoconservatives out of government are regrouping. This summer saw the rebirth of the Committee on the Present Danger--the third incarnation of a group first launched in the 1950s and restarted in the 1970s to promote a hard line against Soviet communism. Norman Podhoretz, one of the movement's leading thinkers, laments the darkening mood of "gloom and doom," in particular the "newborn pessimism among supporters" of the Iraq war. "Things have gone not badly, not disastrously, but triumphantly," he declared at the group's inaugural conference last month. The group posits that the United States now faces another existential threat and has dubbed the struggle "World War IV," the Cold War being World War III. The group's chairman, former CIA Director James Woolsey, says its rebirth recognizes that "people are to some extent choosing up sides. . . . Get the job done or go back to the '90s" --before 9/11 and Bush's pre-emption doctrine. "A number of critics have a nostalgia for an earlier era," he warns. But with a toxic mix of Arab and Islamist totalitarianism, weapons of mass destruction, and terrorists, he says, "those days are gone with the wind."

Woolsey predicts "the long war of the 21st century" will last decades. The fight between neocons and other cons might last just as long.

If the Dems pull off a win this fall, it's well worth thinking about how to stoke these divisions over the next few years as the Republicans re-group. This fault in their coalition is a big one and its worth driving a wedge in as deeply as possible.


HT to Pastor Dan
.
digby 8/22/2006 05:40:00 PM |

 
Oversold

by digby


So Holy Joe agrees with the far right neocon nutballs that the real reason we went into Iraq was to "pop the head of the snake in Iran" and himself says, "if I fault the administration for anything before the war -- 'cause I think we did the right thing in going in to overthrow Saddam -- it's that they oversold the WMD part of the argument...."

Man oh man, the guy has brass ones.

MR. RUSSERT: And we're back with Senator Joe Lieberman. Can the president commence military action against Iraq without a smoking gun?

SEN. LIEBERMAN: There are smoking guns, and that's the important point to make. Look, I think that the president has to do a better job of explaining what we mean by a smoking gun. There's a way in which people are now looking at the U.N. inspectors in Iraq as if some local prosecutor has sent people in to investigate an innocent man for a suspected crime and find the evidence. Saddam Hussein is not an innocent man. He made clear he wants to dominate the Arab world, which would be terrible for the Arab world and the rest of the world. He invaded his neighbors. He's killed hundreds of thousands of people. We know that he had weapons of mass destruction.

You want to find the smoking guns? There are thousands of them in the report issued by the United Nations inspectors after they were kicked out of Iraq in 1998. Thousands of tons of chemical agents, thousands of liters of biological agents, and the aim of the United Nations resolution, in my opinion, was to send those inspectors in and to force Saddam Hussein to say, “I've destroyed the smoking guns that you knew I had in 1999.” He hasn't done that, and unless he does, we're going to have to take action to disarm him. Nobody wants to go to war, but sometimes you have to go to war to protect the lives of the American people. This may be one of those cases.

MR. RUSSERT: In your guess, it probably will be necessary?

SEN. LIEBERMAN: Well, so far, he's done nothing but continue to deny and deceive and cheat. And I don't want to look
back one day after he uses those chemical and biological weapons against Americans and ask ourselves: “Why didn't we act to protect our security?”

Yeah, no overselling there. He's a foreign policy genius.


.
digby 8/22/2006 04:00:00 PM |

 
Cooties

by digby


Everybody's talking about this blurb today, and it is kind of amazing. The president who claimed he would bring honor and dignity to the white house is apparently known for puerile fart jokes --- and even emits them in the office to play jokes on his aides. Me, I much prefer a grown up president who privately has sex in the oval office than one who farts publicly. But that's just me.

But this is the part I find interesting and the little blurb doesn't elaborate at all:

A top insider let that slip when explaining why President Bush is paranoid around women, always worried about his behavior.

Forget the farting. What's with the paranoia around women? (There is apparently a clinical term for it called "gynophobia" which I've never heard of until today.) It's quite clear that he doesn't know how to behave around powerful women he doesn't control, judging from his inappropriate groping of the prime minister of Germany. And I've often wondered about his relationship to Rice, Hughes and Mieres --- the office wives. Is he afraid that he's going to accidentally pass gas or use a bad word in front of these women or does he let fly with women he knows and is just paranoid around strange women? I'm genuinely curious. This is very wierd for any 60 year old man much less a highly succesful politician.

He is such an immature person that I think it's entirely possible that he's still stuck in that pre-pubescent little boy state where girls are just "yucky." That's how his behavior comes off anyway. There's some frat boy stuff, to be sure, especially in his behavior with other men. But I'm thinking that when it comes to women, he's stuck even further back than that --- cub scouts, maybe. Did mommy lock him in the closet or something?


Update: Coincidentally, Echidne has already inaugurated the Cootie Awards. You know who the first winner just has to be...



.
digby 8/22/2006 03:17:00 PM |

 
Wingnut Fun House Mirror

by digby

Sen. James Inhofe" U.S. involvement in Iraq has been incredibly successful and developments there have been "nothing short of a miracle,"

LIEBERMAN: The situation in Iraq is a lot better, different than it was a year ago. The Iraqis held three elections. They formed a unity government. They are on the way to building a free and independent Iraq. Their military -- two-thirds of their military is now ready, on their own, to lead the fight with some logistical backing from the U.S. or stand up on their own totally. That's progress.


Norman Podhoretz: I must confess to being puzzled by the amazing spread of the idea that the Bush Doctrine has indeed failed the test of Iraq. After all, Iraq has been liberated from one of the worst tyrants in the Middle East; three elections have been held; a decent constitution has been written; a government is in place; and previously unimaginable liberties are being enjoyed. By what bizarre calculus does all this add up to failure? And by what even stranger logic is failure to be read into the fact that the forces opposed to democratization are fighting back with all their might?

Surely what makes more sense is the opposite interpretation of the terrible violence being perpetrated by the terrorists of the so-called “insurgency”: that it is in itself a tribute to the enormous strides that have been made in democratizing the country. If this murderous collection of diehard Sunni Baathists and vengeful Shiite militias, together with their allies inside the government, agreed that democratization had already failed, would they be waging so desperate a campaign to defeat it? And if democratization in Iraq posed no threat to the other despotisms in the region, would those regimes be sending jihadists and material support to the “insurgency” there?

The new Podhoretz article (via Henry Farrell) is fascinating stuff. Farrell entitles his post "Dead Enders" and I think that pretty well covers it. But Podhoretz has nailed himself to Bush's cross so completely, I honestly don't see how he can ever crawl down. In his view every Bush misstep is actually prudent or canny, every criticism of him is petty and wrong. Bush has played every hand brilliantly --- even more brilliantly than Ronald Reagan played his hand (which Podhoretz only sees in retrospect having criticised the Gipper at the time much as the youngsters are criticizing the Codpiece.)

Keep in mind that Norman is responding to the criticisms of his fellow neoconservatives in this piece, not the crazed hippy left. Indeed, he ruefully admits that he actually agrees with the crazed hippy left in its assessment that Bush has not given up on the Bush Doctrine --- needless to say, he's quite happy about that while the CHL is not.

In Norm's view, the Bush Doctrine has not only been validated by the great success of the Iraq and Israeli military actions, it will stand us through the next several decades of WWIV (I wish they'd decide on a number and stick to it) and will eventually save the world:

It is my contention that the Bush Doctrine is no more dead today than the Truman Doctrine was cowardly in its own early career. Bolstered by that analogy, I feel safe in predicting that, like the Truman Doctrine in 1952, the Bush Doctrine will prove irreversible by the time its author leaves the White House in 2008. And encouraged by the precedent of Ronald Reagan, I feel almost as confident in predicting that, three or four decades into the future, and after the inevitable missteps and reversals, there will come a President who, like Reagan in relation to Truman in World War III, will bring World War IV to a victorious end by building on the noble doctrine that George W. Bush promulgated when that war first began.

How nice for him to live in a time of epistemic relativism where he can look back on his life and claim vindication despite the fact that everything he ever said was demonstrably wrong. How sad for the rest of us that his fetid philosophy has come to full flower just as he's shuffling off his moral coil and won't be around to share the "victorious end" when it finally comes, decades from now. I don't think J-Pod has his father's gift for delivering elegant, self-serving absolution for decades of misguided bloodlust.



.
digby 8/22/2006 12:03:00 PM |

Monday, August 21, 2006

 

Gene Cesspool

by poputonian

Does anyone know what channel this comedy is on? I've read about the episode where the dude got the death penalty for putting the celery by the tomatoes, but this one about a Republican with contaminated genes should also be good for a laugh or two.

"My church has long ago given up that practice in the 1800s, but putting that aside for a moment, it's real clear that Americans, myself included, believe that marriage is a relationship between a man and a woman and not more than that, and also not same sex couples," Romney told MSNBC's "Hardball" host Chris Matthews.

Romney, of course, didn't mention that about the time The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints renounced polygamy in 1890, his great-grandfather was among those Mormons who fled to Mexico to start their own community where plural marriage continued to be practiced.
...
Romney's family tree is rife with polygamists on the paternal side. Two great-great grandfathers, for example, had more than 10 wives each.
...
His great-great grandfather, Miles Romney, eventually took on 13 wives, including the niece with the same name of his first wife, Elizabeth Gaskell. In all, Romney's family tree harbors six polygamous men with 41 wives, according to research by The Salt Lake Tribune.
...
"Within the Republican primary, when you get into South Carolina, God knows if polygamist roots will hurt him," Ballenger says. "Maybe something like that would cost him enough votes."

UPDATED to include last snippet. Most people quoted in the article don't think this will matter in Romney's political success or failure. I have no idea and was just making fun of the fact that Romney is having to defend himself about that marriage definition thing. I think Chrissy Matthews, on the other hand, is just plain fascinated that some men once had multiple wives.

poputonian 8/21/2006 06:36:00 PM |

 
Too Much Power

by digby


For those who are looking for a way to make the accountability argument in congressional campaigns this fall, here's an example from my congressman, Henry Waxman:

There is a desperate need in Washington for more oversight, transparency and accountability. The checks and balances of our Constitution don't work when the White House and the Congressional leadership work together to shield government corruption and abuse from scrutiny.

The past five years of one-party rule have produced one of the greatest concentrations of power in America's history. The Republican-controlled Congress has ceased to function as an independent branch of government. Genuine legislative debate has vanished. Congressional committees rarely exercise their oversight responsibilities.

The consequences have been disastrous. Congress never held hearings that challenged the White House's distortion of intelligence in its rush to war in Iraq. Congress never questioned the President's reckless fiscal policies. And Congress never protested when Administration cronies were installed as heads of essential federal agencies like the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Not surprisingly, the disappearance of oversight and accountability has been an invitation to corruption. A growing list of Washington Republicans, from lobbyists to members of Congress to the Vice President's chief of staff, are either under indictment or under investigation for shakedowns, bribery and other crimes.

Fortunately, there is an agenda that will promote core American values and revive the nation's faith in government. Democrats on the House Committee on Government Reform have introduced legislation that would restore open government, block political cronies from being appointed to essential public health and safety positions, prohibit government spending on covert propaganda and stop the growing politicization of science.

Our Hurricane Katrina Accountability and Contracting Reform Act would ban "monopoly contracts" used to shield politically well-connected companies from price competition in government contracts, and it would stop the revolving door between government and industry that has created billions in wasteful spending. Our Open Government bill would bring back the old-fashioned idea that government information belongs to the public; it would halt the proliferation of pseudo-classifications like "For Official Use Only" and "Sensitive but Unclassified" that the Bush Administration has used to hide embarrassing facts.

Unfortunately, the public has heard virtually nothing about these proposals. The Republicans running Congress have kept them bottled up so effectively that not one single piece of the Democratic good-government agenda has been brought up for a vote in the House.

While each week brings to light new evidence of corruption, subterfuge and wasteful spending, there are many well-developed proposals for change waiting for a fair chance to be enacted. They will get that fair chance if Americans elect a Democratic Congress in 2006 and send a signal that they want honesty and accountability restored to government.

The Republicans are running against John Conyers and Charlie Rangel to stimulate their racist base. And they have good reason to fear them, they are tough, take no prisoners Democrats.

But Henry Waxman is the guy who made the tobacco executives testify under oath on national TV that they believed smoking was not addictive. He is extremely effective. If he becomes the chairman of the House Committee On government reform, the Republicans know he is going to successfully shine a light on in the dark corners of republican rule for the past five years.

Waxman has shown certain areas worthy of investigation and there are others. The key, as the MYDD campaign memo points out is to "pick a fight, any fight" and use it to illustrate for voters the Democrats' intention to clean up this mess in Washington. If they believe that Democrats can be effective in changing things they'll vote for them.




Thx to commenter George for the Waxman article.

.
digby 8/21/2006 02:54:00 PM |

 
KISS

by digby


Codpiece quoted General Abazaid (God help us) in his press conference today with what I assume Karl and Karen think is a new twist on their favorite zinger:

"If we leave [Iraq] before the mission is done the terrorists will follow us here."

Bam! Right between the eyes!

I would normally say we should use logic and reason by pointing out that all the terrorists aren't in Iraq --- as the foiled British plot recently showed --- so being in Iraq can't prevent terrorists who are elsewhere from coming over here.

But that's too complicated. When a Republican says "if we leave Iraq before the mission is done the terrorists will follow us here" the Democrat should reply, "well, unlike the Republicans, I won't let em in."

Democrats get too fine with this stuff. Trash talk is trash talk and they should just throw it back in their faces.


.
digby 8/21/2006 01:59:00 PM |

 
Selling Jon Benet

by digby


Bob Geiger (posting again at this old digs) wrote about the media obsession with the Jon Benet Ramsey over the week-end:

In their warped news judgment, the media is deciding for all of us that we should be more concerned about the minute-by-minute developments with John Mark Karr than the fact that our brave men and women continue to be lost in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are making a decision every hour that a story of such incredibly specious importance, is more relevant than the deaths of our men and women serving in uniform overseas.

They can't get enough of it. And either there is serendipitious synchronicity in the air, or the NY Times pushed up its feature series on child porn to take advantage of the situation. I just watched CNN's Kiera host the reporter who did the investigation, Kurt Eichenwald, and spend at least 10 minutes discussing the various disgusting things these child predators do. Yesterday the story was about fake child actor sites that featured clothes or covered children in sexy poses in order to circumvent the child porn laws.

Here's my question. Considering this new awareness of the use of overly sexualized visual images of children by pedophiles, why has nobody taken the networks to task for repeatedly showing those Jon Benet beauty pageant videos ten years after the fact? They had them on a loop the first time around and ten years later they are showing them again. Over and over and over. It's always made me uncomfortable. It seems to me that the news networks are feeding pedophiles' sick urges the same way these online sites are by repeatedly showing these creepy vids. Are they actually getting big ratings by tittilating the audience with thinly veiled child pornography? Ewww.



.
digby 8/21/2006 01:01:00 PM |

 
Switchers

by digby


This seems like a story some enterprising Real Journalist would want to pursue. It seems that there have been a bunch of party switchers in the red states this year. These are at the local and state level where politics is immediate and personal, so it takes some real chutzpah to do it. There have been more switchers than at any time since 1994 when the red states went completely red in the first place.

There's only one little difference. They are all Republicans switching to Democrat.



.
digby 8/21/2006 12:26:00 PM |

 
Bugging The Liberals

by digby


Michael Barone has long decried the unfair, hyper-partisanship of the Democratic Party. Back in 2000, during the recount, he characterized it this way:

By all accounts, including those of the Democratic legislators who campaigned for him around the country, Bush is a good listener, responds candidly and with respect to others' arguments, is willing to compromise, and keeps his word–qualities useful in building legislative majorities. In contrast, Al Gore seldom worked closely with his former colleagues on Capitol Hill and is widely disliked by many, even in his own party. His strong partisanship, evident now in the way his campaign is challenging the Florida results, means that he would have to go against the grain to seek bipartisan action on the Hill.

When Bush won in 2004 he put it like this:

Love is stronger than hate. That is the lesson of the 2004 election results. Millions of Democrats and leftists have been seething with hatred for George W. Bush for years, and many of them lined up before the polls opened to cast their votes against him -- one reason, apparently, that the exit poll results turned out to favor Democrats more than did the actual results.

But Republicans full of love, or at least affection, for George W. Bush turned out steadily later in the day or sent in their ballots days before. They have watched "old media" -- The New York Times, the broadcast networks CBS, ABC and NBC -- beat up on Bush for the past year, and they have listened to the sneers and slurs directed at him by coastal elites for a long time. Now they had their chance to speak. They did so loudly and clearly, giving Bush the first popular-vote majority for president in 16 years.

A year ago he wrote:

This summer, one big story is replaced by another -- the London bombings July 7, the speculation that Karl Rove illegally named a covert CIA agent, the nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court, more London bombings last week. But beneath the hubbub, we can see the playing out of another, less reported story: the collapse of the attempts by liberal Democrats and their sympathizers in the mainstream media -- The New York Times, etc., etc. -- to delegitimize yet another Republican administration.

This project has been ongoing for more than 30 years. Richard Nixon, by obstructing investigation of the Watergate burglary, unwittingly colluded in the successful attempt to besmirch his administration. Less than two years after carrying 49 states, he was compelled to resign. The attempt to delegitimize the Reagan administration seemed at the time reasonably successful. Reagan was widely dismissed as a lightweight ideologue, and the rejection of his nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987 contributed to the impression that his years in office were, to take the title of a book by a first-rate journalist, "the Reagan detour." As time went on, as the Berlin Wall fell and Bill Clinton proclaimed that the era of big government was over, it became clear that Reagan was a successful transformational president -- something the mainstream media grudgingly admitted when he died in 2004 after a decade out of public view.

You think they'd learn. But for the past five years, the same folks have been trying to undermine the presidency of George W. Bush.

I guess Barone was in a coma during the 90's.

But you can see that throughout Bush's presidency he has been very upset at Democratic partisanship. In fact, he thinks the Democrats have been trying to delegitimize Republicans for decades.

But it's more than just partisanship now. Here's Barone today:

In our war against Islamo-fascist terrorism, we face enemies both overt and covert. The overt enemies are, of course, the terrorists themselves. Their motives are clear: They hate our society because of its freedoms and liberties, and want to make us all submit to their totalitarian form of Islam. They are busy trying to wreak harm on us in any way they can. Against them we can fight back, as we did when British authorities arrested the men and women who were plotting to blow up a dozen airliners over the Atlantic.

Our covert enemies are harder to identify, for they live in large numbers within our midst. And in terms of intentions, they are not enemies in the sense that they consciously wish to destroy our society. On the contrary, they enjoy our freedoms and often call for their expansion. But they have also been working, over many years, to undermine faith in our society and confidence in its goodness. These covert enemies are those among our elites who have promoted the ideas labeled as multiculturalism, moral relativism and (the term is Professor Samuel Huntington's) transnationalism.

[...]

We have always had our covert enemies, but their numbers were few until the 1960s. But then the elite young men who declined to serve in the military during the Vietnam War set out to write a narrative in which they, rather than those who obeyed the call to duty, were the heroes. They have propagated their ideas through the universities, the schools and mainstream media to the point that they are the default assumptions of millions. Our covert enemies don't want the Islamo-fascists to win. But in some corner of their hearts, they would like us to lose.

The poor conservatives are always on the run from the liberal enemy. And recently we have learned that the hippies are even worse than the commies were--- or at least there are more of them. It's a wonder they have managed to survive this onslaught of treasonous liberalism as long as they have.

In all seriousness, I shudder at the implications of Barone's beliefs should things get really out of hand in this country and people like him feel compelled to use the vast police powers they covet. It's a very dangerous way of thinking among some people who have huge chips on their shoulders.

But I also admit that this up-is-down-ism simply drives me up a wall. A reader sent me the link to Barone's column this morning with the header, "this will make smoke come out of your ears" and he was right. I read this and it made me feel as if I'm living in an alternate universe.

But I have to remember that Barone is exhibiting the most fundamental characteristic of conservative culture and recognize that the smoke coming out of my ears is what keeps the conservative movement together.

Rick Perlstein's recent article on conservative culture spelled it out very well:

Purple Hearts are constitutive of conservative culture. So are Purple Heart Band-Aids. Both (conservatives feel) bug liberals. So is the simple pre-adolescent pleasure of blowing things up. That really bugs the liberals. The tone of conservative culture shades easily into a righteous lust for pissing people off. A billboard off the Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago for a talk-radio station reads, "Liberals Hate It!" For, if you piss people off, that proves you are beleaguered.

Over the last few years, as their own success challenged conservatives' feelings of marginalization, they just started working harder to sustain it. Fox News helps; that is why the vice president of the United States insists that any television in any hotel room he uses already be tuned to it before he'll deign cross the threshold. For conservatives, moving right will always be a losing career move, a sacrifice: "Veteran ABC newsman John Stossel ... abandoned his liberal perspective, became a libertarian — and paid a heavy price, he recently told NewsMax in an exclusive interview..."

And don't expect any of this to change much if Republicans lose the House in 2006 and the White House in 2008 — or if Stossel somehow ends up in the gutter. A true conservative loves a test of faith: It only proves him stronger in his convictions. I often exchange e-mails with two favorite conservative activists. I started out with a plan: One of them posts frequently on FreeRepublic; another writes on his blog of FreeRepublic's "shrieking lunacy." I've tried to get them to fight each another. It never works. They've got me, a liberal, to bug. That is how conservative culture works so well: the joy of feeling as one in their beleaguered conservatism. I've found, paradoxically, that, for this determined remnant, conservative identity becomes stronger the more discredited conservative governance becomes. They seem to take their lumps in stride and emerge all the more confident in their ideology from the challenge.

(Read the whole thing. It's a corker.)

As we contemplate a possible take-over of the congress this fall, I think we have to keep this in mind. It is ingrained in conservative culture to "bug the liberals." In fact, at this point it's the only thing holding them together and we are going to have to gird ourselves for the fact that being in the minority will only make it worse.

I am going to do some study to figure out how I can resist being "bugged." You cannot ignore them. They simply won't let you and society demands that you interact. (And anyway, we tried that and wound up with Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh being considered "mainstream.") You can't try to become more like them. They will only try harder. You can't lock them all up and you can't kill them. They never grow out of it. It's a dilemma.

What would the psychologists say about how to deal with people who embrace victimization as their organizing principle, no matter what the circumstances, and whose tribal identity is dependent upon annoying and demeaning the other tribe? I think it's a good idea to think about this because if it's true that conservatism as we know it is only held together by its shared sophomoric need to bug the liberals, then it is key that we find a way to deny them what they need. (Clearly, the reality of holding all political power in the most powerful nation on earth didn't do it. Barone is on the verge of calling for an new HUAC.)

So what will work?



.
digby 8/21/2006 09:56:00 AM |

 
Poodle Overboard

by digby

The alliance between George Bush and Tony Blair is in danger after it was revealed that the Prime Minister believes the President has 'let him down badly' over the Middle East crisis.

A senior Downing Street source said that, privately, Mr Blair broadly agrees with John Prescott, who said Mr Bush's record on the issue was 'crap'.

The source said: "We all feel badly let down by Bush. We thought we had persuaded him to take the Israel-Palestine situation seriously, but we were wrong. How can anyone have faith in a man of such low intellect?"

They just noticed?





.
digby 8/21/2006 12:29:00 AM |

Sunday, August 20, 2006

 
Losing Their Religion

by digby

I was just watching MSNBC do an in-depth report on the controversy surrounding Madonna's depiction of a crucifixion in her concert. (Here's a video of one of the discussions.)

The German's have evidently threatened to arrest her.

Madonna faces arrest over her controversial mock crucifixion.

The 'Hung Up' singer could be arrested when she performs in Germany on Sunday (20.08.06) if she goes ahead with the much-criticized routine.

Dusseldorf police have warned the singer that she could be in breach of their "insulting religious beliefs" law and they will be in the crowd ready to act if she attempts the stunt.

And then there's this:

Singer Madonna is reportedly being threathened by Russian mobsters who are plotting to kidnap her and her two kids. The threat came as the pop icon prepared for her upcoming tour stop in Moscow next month.

[...]

The alleged kidnap plot is expected to have stemmed from Madonna's controversial mock crucifixion, in which she wears a crown of fake thorns while performing on a mirrored cross, that has sparked outrage among religious leaders across the globe.

I immedately did a little check around the right blogosphere to see what the right was doing to defend Madonna's right to mock religion. After all, the entire rightwing blogosphere wrote stirring defenses of those Danish cartoons didn't they? They all agreed that free speech and a free press were fundamental western values and that simply because certain religious people somewhere might be offended by certain images, it was no reason to withhold them. Indeed, it was reason to publish them, which many of these right wing bloggers did, with no compunction about offending the muslims in their own communities or around the world.

But strangely, I saw nothing about this Madonna thing. Perhaps they just haven't heard about this affront to liberal western values yet. But then, they have some rather strange ideas about what political speech should be defended and what should be condemned, don't they? They went crazy when Jane Hamsher posted a satirical image of Joe Lieberman in blackface and didn't even blink an eye at their own intellectual inconsistency. At the time I looked around for some of their stirring defenses of the Danish cartoons and found many. It was a certifiable cause in the right blogosphere, all done in the name of western liberal values.

Jeff Goldstein, for instance, wrote this:

This battle over the Danish cartoons highlights all of these philosophical dilemmas (which I have argued previously are the result of certain linguistic misunderstandings that are either cynically or idealistically perpetuated); and so we are brought to the point where this clash of civilizations—which in one important sense is a clash between theocratic Islamism and the west, but in another, more crucial sense, is a clash between the west and its own structural thinking, brought on by years of insinuation into our philosophy of what is, at root, collectivist thought that privileges the interpreter of an action over the necessary primacy of intent and agency and personal responsibility to the communicative chain—could conceivably become manifest over something so seemingly trivial as the right to satirize.

Whew! Only it seems it isn't really a clash of civilizations at all, is it? Nor can it be attributed to mush-headed leftists and their relativistic po-mo collectivism. It turns out there are western nations that actually have laws against "insulting religious beliefs." And in the case of Jane's satirical blackface graphic the "collectivist thought that privileges the interpreter of an action over the necessary primacy of intent" was used as a bludgeon against her by "individualist" conservatives even though her intent was obviously not racist.

After all, we had Darkblack's, the artist's, intent right out there in black and white explaining his "intent" so Malkin and her followers should have had no problem understanding what it was:

As the composer of the work in question, allow me to make some broader points clearer. This will be my last word on the subject, but all are free to debate further, of course. Lieberman has attempted to activate a voting demographic that his strategists believe will aid him in his quest.

To this end, he has imported a figure, Bill Clinton, who has standing with the American black community, and has repeatedly asserted his personal credentials as one who has worked on behalf of that community.Yet Lieberman has engaged in race baiting (with the Lamont flyer) as a cynical attempt to game this demographic, and he has engaged in other activities which cast doubtful shadows upon this allegiance.

Thus, in my opinion, Lieberman is pretending to be something that he is not for personal gain, exactly like the vile caucasian minstrel show performers of Vaudeville. And so my artist's impression stands. If we as a people run from controversial imagery, we will never stop running. Better to unearth and deal with the unpleasant than to live in fear.

I am not vouching for the political effectiveness of the graphic or the wisdom of using it. American political campaigns are inherently and literally conservative (even for liberals) in that they always try to avoid unnecessary controversy. Blackface is a loaded image in American culture and causes an emotional reaction that is more appropriate to political art than to elective politics. I myself balked at showing the graphic on this site during the last days of the campaign when Michael Shaw of Bagnewsnotes featured it in his ad. Normally, I would have been happy to have it there as a point of discussion, but I didn't want to add fuel to the fire. Political activism requires such considerations and it's not always an easy call. (But then neither was the cartoons although to hear the right tell it, only a terrorist or traitor would have thought so.)

The hysterical rightwing response to the graphic, however, was a laughable exercise in rank hypocrisy. The same people who ranted for weeks about the Danish cartoons and the principle of free speech even when it is offensive were the first ones to wring their lacy designer dew rags about leftist racism and bad taste when the opportunity came along.

I actually partially agree with Goldstein (hey, even a stopped clock is right twice a day, ba dum pum) when he says some of this intolerance of controversial speech comes from the mistaken notion that the feelings of an interpreter of an action take primacy over the intent. (Hate crimes, for instance, are all about intent, although I doubt seriously that Goldstein agrees with me on that.) But the idea that it is the sole province of "collectivist" or liberal philosophy is ludicrous. It's the province of dogmatic thinkers everywhere, but it occurs far more often on the right, I'm afraid, and particularly among religious fanatics of all stripes who seek to silence anyone who doesn't adhere to their beliefs.

When I see the right wing blogosphere showing pictures of Madge on the cross and Jane's Lieberman satire on all their blogs as a sign of solidarity with the western value of free speech as they did with the Danish cartoons, maybe I'll take them seriously on that issue. Until then, they are just political cartoons themselves whose braying about western values are as meaningful as Mallard Fillmore.

And btw, in case anyone's wondering what Goldstein had to say about the blackface incident, here's a little taste:

Lamont’s victory speech video

If you look over his shoulder to the left and squint a bit, you’ll see Jane Hamsher in blackface sucking down a beer bong filled with Dos Equis. Or maybe that’s just the shadow of doom beginning its inexorable creep across a once proud nation.

He was just "kidding," of course. He's a very funny guy. Still, those lefty racists are uncivil and deserve everything they get.



.
digby 8/20/2006 03:45:00 PM |

 
Singularity

by digby


Roy Edroso looks at the Ole Perfesser's idea 'o earthly heaven. All I can say is "Ah, damn you! God... damn you all to hell!"



Unfortunately, I linked to the wrong Roy masterpiece, which made my comment incomprehensible, (not an unusual event in any case.) I fixed the link but you should read all of his posts anyway.



.
digby 8/20/2006 01:04:00 PM |

 
Stepping Into The Breach

by digby


Back in 2000, I had a standard argument for Naderites who claimed "there's not a dime's worth of difference between them" because they both are beholden to big business. I always said that you had to look at the coalitions that formed both parties and as long as Democrats had unions and women's groups and environmentalists etc in their coalition, their big business ties would be mitigated and there would be better legislation produced. I was wrong.

Matt Stoller has been doing a series of posts over the last few months about how Washington really works and it sobered me up quite a bit. He has a new installment, here. It's not that there's not a dimes worth of difference between them, it's that they are corruptly symbiotic and that symbiosis is mostly enabled by "bipartisan" players like Lieberman and the revolving door of lobbyists.

Stoller describes the way the right works in the post, but I think we are all at least fairly familiar with their style. It's how the left works that is mind-blowing:

When a bill is introduced, a network of consultants, most of whom have corporate clients, begin to chatter about how taking a liberal position could weaken the Democratic Party. This is supplemented with a strong PR strategy by right-wing temporary coalition groups who put out networks of surrogates and ads to create a powerfully framed environment. Then business lobbyists come and visit Congressional offices, and make threats, attempt legislative bribes, or put out false but extremely persuasive pieces of information. There is often little real counterpressure, because liberal single issue groups have decided not to hold politicians accountable and do not cooperate with each other on issues not directly related to their vertical.

Within the Democratic party, resisting a bill is an exercise in holding the caucus together. The long minority status of the Democratic Party has allowed the development of bad faith actors within the caucus, who cut deals with right-wing groups and sabotage any possibility of resistance. Al Wynn is one such actor; Joe Lieberman is another. On key vote after key vote, these actors have sabotaged the progressive position through fake bipartisanship. It's no surprise that Lieberman's former chief of staff was a lobbyist for Enron; Lieberman himself is responsible for many of the corporate accounting scandals over the years because of his embrace of various financial lobbies.

One irony of the Lieberman race is that all the single-issue groups have endorsed Lieberman, and if you look at donations, so have the lobbyists. Indeed, this isn't a fight between 'the left' and 'the right' as it is traditionally defined, since no one would put NARAL on the right or even in the center. This is about creating a disincentive towards bad faith actors and corrupt lobbyists on the left.

Stoller has had a very important insight in this series that I don't think anyone has fully realized. The consultants who work for Democrats also work for coporations and they consistently pitch progressive ideas as being "too liberal" not necessarily because they are, but because these consultants have a conflict of interest that either makes them unable to see things clearly --- or that makes them corrupt. In any case, they are giving bad advice to the Democratic party and it's resulted in nice fat paychecks for them. Serving the public, not so much.

This brings me to the special interests in whom I had placed so much faith to counter such corruption. I had resisted joining in the critique of these groups because I thought they had some basis for playing both sides over the long term. But I thought they knew which side their bread was really buttered on, even so. Apparently not. Stoller describes them as having been co-opted by the corrupt system and lazily enjoying the fruits of the spoils like everyone else. I have to admit that even the most generous view shows they have lost sight of their own goals.

NARAL's continued endorsement of Lieberman is a case in point. I will bet money that if Lieberman wins the race as an independent with a majority of Republican votes, within his term he is going to change his stance on abortion. It's obvious that he is uncomfortable with the dissonance between being a social conservative and pro-choice politician, and he's been feeling around for an argument to justify it for years. He's the most likely pro-choice Senator in the country to switch. If NARAL thinks they can keep him on the reservation because they've been loyal to him, they obviously don't know who they're dealing with --- or no longer care.

So, what to do? I quoted this comment by Matt Yglesias before about the role of the progressive blogosphere and the more I think about it the more interesting I find it:

The great benefit of the blogosphere is that it isn't really an "interest group"; it's more like an old-style membership organization (or a series of such organizations) whose existence used to do something to check what's now become the out-of-control influence of business groups over the policy process.

I think the netroots and the blogosphere will end up performing many functions and I don't know exactly where its influence will be most effective. But stepping into the breach and going after the system itself, from the outside, and functioning as the democratic check on the power of big money is one obvious area where we might be effective. It's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it.

Stoller and Chris Bowers, Rick Jacobs and Joel Wright wrote a campaign memo based upon their extensive polling after the Busby loss in CA-50. I looked closely at the polling data and it's fascinating stuff. They went very deep and came up with some results that are quite surprising. But its conclusions feel, at a gut level, like common sense to me, uncomplicated and obvious --- and you hear nothing like it from the Democratic consultants.

I would recommend that everyone read this memo to get a sense of just how different these ideas are from what you hear coming from the campaign shops out of Washington. And if you agree that it is on the money then perhaps we can think of some ways to get this in the hands of candidates and their advisors. They should, at the very least, be exposed to these ideas.

I've long wondered why the insiders not only come to incorrect conclusions based on the data but how their political instincts became completely ossified. Stoller's posts on this subject have finally offered an explanation.



.
digby 8/20/2006 09:49:00 AM |

Saturday, August 19, 2006

 
Liberal Flacks

by digby

In all the hoopla last week about TNR writer Elspeth Reeve's tribute to Ann Coulter, I missed this very interesting debate among Ezra, Shakespeare's Sister and Echidne about why there aren't any firebreathing liberal female hacks. It's an interesting topic and I urge you to check out all the arguments. (Echidne's title alone is worth it.)

I'm not going to delve into all the socio-political implications of the Coulter argument. These fine writers cover the topic better than I can. I will just say that my view is that the right chooses certain figures for two very particular reasons --- the first is camera friendliness and the second is counter-intuitiveness.

They promote good looking women because sex sells, the networks prefer it, the world is run by horny men, blah, blah blah. Whatever the reasons, that's a fact. In the media, (except for the pooh-bahs of the male DC punditocrisy) looks matter.

It's the second that's interesting and both Shakes and Echidne hit upon it in their posts. The right puts forth attractive female snakes like Coulter and Malkin because they can carry the white, male conservative message without the baggage of being a white male. They know their repulsive rhetoric just doesn't sound as objectionable coming from the mouth of a nice looking young woman. If you can mix in race too, as Malkin does, you've got a winner.

It worked very well during the Clinton years when you'd be blinded by the reflections off the platinum locks of the Barbizon School of former Prosecutors alumni who populated every shout fest. These rightwing women would go on the cable shows and wave their painted talons in front of their faces like lace fans decrying the president for sexualizing the culture with his allegedly crooked genitalia. The whole country sat riveted in a way they never would have if it had been nothing but hairy middle aged men talking about sex on television every night. These ladies could both moralize and sizzle and poor Lanny Davis just sat there like a bowl of overcooked macaroni while they ran circles around him.

The right understands what media wants and they give it to them. And while they are giving it to them, they go against type to innoculate themselves against attacks and soften the message by having it delivered by an unexpected source.

I think the Democrats should do the same thing in reverse. They need to toughen their message and innoculate themselves against attacks that they are too soft. They should find and train attractive males (preferably with military or sports experience) to make the case for liberal politics. Go against type and you flummox the other side.

This should not be taken as a slam on any liberal female spokespeople. I think there should be many more of them out there arguing politics with passion and fire. But since the Democratic party is already considered women friendly --- and because strong liberal rhetoric coming from a female's mouth is not counterintuitive --- I think the Ann Coulter positions on the left are better filled by handsome, big-mouthed, funny liberal guys to be effective.

Think Paul Hackett.


Update: Speaking of Hackett, here's some lefty firebreathing for yah:

Along with similarly concerned friends, neighbors and colleagues, I am starting a new project called Operation Ohio to sound the alarm to the threat of the theocratic political movement here in Ohio.

This concerns all Americans not only because this movement has roots in all states across America, but because Ohio will determine the direction of our country in 2008.

I need your help to get the project started.

Here is the problem as I see it.

In Ohio and across the country, leaders of a political movement opposed to basic principles of American democracy seek to create a "Christian nation." While claiming up and down they do not want a theocracy, their acts, associations and the words used among themselves prove otherwise. They have spent the past thirty years developing an elaborate grassroots infrastructure while the rest of us moderate Ohioans and Americans have functioned in a "business as usual" manner. Some call those who propel the movement "religious extremists", or "religious radicals", others call them the "Religious Right", "theocrats" or "Christian supremacists" but whatever we call them, we must in the end agree on the threat they pose to our constitutional republic as we know it. We know, for example, that they oppose the constitutional separation of church and state and support religiously-motivated government intervention into our private lives -- think Terri Schiavo -- while championing the diversion of taxpayer funds to advance their theocratic goals.

I like it.


.
digby 8/19/2006 04:49:00 PM |

 
A Case Study In Rightwing Delirium

From Tbogg:

In an attempt to mirror the disproportionate response exhibited by Israel in the Lebanon invasion, the rightwing is now whipping itself into a rich creamy head of outrage froth over leftwingers! attacking Zionist entertainers!

I didn't know Bernie Mac, Don Johnson, Serena Williams and Vivica Fox were Zionists?

Remember the story about this anti-Hamas, anti-Hezbollah, anti-terror ad that was published in the Los Angeles Times on Thursday and signed by 84 Hollywood stars, directors, studio bosses and media moguls?

Well, now the "Zionists" are under attack!

And who is this brave blogger leading a letter writing attack against these Zionist bastards? Is it our Dark Lord Kos or Atrios: Bestower of Wankerhood? Maybe it's Glenn Greenwald - The Man with Two Countries or Jane Hamsher and her Poodles of Doom ?

Eh. Not really.

Meet Akramwad of Bonsoir and his readership of six.

(Read on for more hilarity.)


I confess, I just scanned the names on that incomprehensible ad and saw the usual tiny cadre of Hollywood rightwingers and a bunch of studio execs and wondered why the big conservo-kahuna wasn't among them. Oops. I guess I know now, huh? My bad.

Oh well, I guess missing out on the big letter writing jihad will go down as just another missed opportunity for a godless liberal like me to offer aid and comfort to my muslim fundamentalist brothers. Maybe next time.



.
digby 8/19/2006 04:10:00 PM |

 
How Many More?

by digby


Wow. Here's an interesting new way of framing the national security debate:

A Pew Research Center poll released Thursday found "no evidence that terrorism is weighing heavily on voters -- just 2 percent cite that as the issue they most want to hear candidates discuss, far fewer than the number mentioning education, gas prices, or health care." The center continued: "And while roughly a third of Americans (35 percent) say they are very concerned that if Democrats gain control of Congress, they will weaken terrorist defenses, even more (46 percent) express great concern that Republicans will involve the U.S. in too many overseas military missions if the GOP keeps its congressional majorities."

I know it's hard to believe, but I just heard Morton Kondrake repeating that in very grave tones on The Beltway Boys while Fred Barnes fluttered about like the Madwoman of Chaillot babbling about polls being meaningless. It definitely hit a nerve.

It's a good question. How many wars do the Republicans think we should be fighting? And should the people who got us into the useless, unnecessary cock-up in Iraq really be the ones to decide?



.
digby 8/19/2006 03:39:00 PM |

 
Jungle Drums

by digby


I wrote a little teaser in my last post about the Republicans' "cunning plan" to deal with the inevitable reminders of their disasterous handling of Katrina. It's actually not very cunning and certainly not original.

One word: macaca.

A reader reminded me of a post I wrote last September during the Katrina aftermath called "Dusting off the Manual." In that post, I noted that TIME magazine was reporting the administration had a three point plan to come back after the debacle which included ginning up the base with tax cuts and votes on embryonic stem cells.

I wrote:

There's one other little way to gin up base conservative voters that we can already see developing on the shout fest and gasbags shows. But this is one that the leakers know very well mustn’t be mentioned to writers for Time magazine. They are already dusting off their old tried and true southern strategy manual and after more than 40 years it's like a favorite old song --- they just started regurgitating their coded talking points without missing a beat. They'll need to. This happened deep in Red territory.

On This Weak, George Will basically said that the problem in New Orleans is that blacks fuck too much. Or rather, the problem of the "underclass" can be traced to so many "out of wedlock births." I think it's pretty clear he wasn't suggesting that abortions be made available to poor women. (If Bill Clinton thought he neutralized that line with welfare reform, he was sadly mistaken.) As far as the right is concerned, it's all about that old racist boogeyman "dependency." Last night on the McLaughlin Group, Pat Buchanan was foaming at the mouth about "the welfare state." He was in his element, getting his "we're gonna take our cities block by block" Pitchfork Pat mojo back. These are code words. They aren't about class --- although they will certainly claim that's what they're talking about. These are code words for blacks. (And if you want to understand how it's affected our ability to create a decent liberal government, read this.)

Immigration had already reared its ugly head out of nowhere, and now this. I believe the Republicans already see the elections of 06 and 08 as an opportunity to revert to a tried and true code saturated "law 'n order" strategy. The War on Terrorism has been losing its juice for sometime --- and Iraq is nothing but an embarrassment now. It's time to go back to what works.

For those who think that we are in a post racist world because George W. Bush appointed blacks to his cabinet, think again. The modern Republican Party was built on the back of an enduring national divide on the issue of race. George Bush may not personally be racist (or more likely not know he's racist) but the party he leads has depended on it for many years. The coded language that signals tribal ID has obscured it, but don't kid yourselves. It is a party that became dominant by exploiting the deep cultural fault of the mason dixon line.

The post went on to discuss at some length the history of race and its implications for politics after Katrina; if you are interested in such arid subjects you might enjoy reading it in full. But I think there are elements of the above observation that we are seeing manifested in what we see lately from Connecticut to Virginia: race baiting.

The master stroke is that the Republicans have managed to get Democratic useful idiots to do their dirty work for them. I was quite startled to see Lieberman use crude racist appeals in Connecticut. It seemed odd and out of place, particularly for Lieberman who has always leaned so heavily on his early involvement in the civil rights movement. It's certainly not something Democrats have done in many years, even in primaries. But he ran with it hard in the last days of the campaign: his lobbyist friend Richard Goodstein screamed at Lamont at press events to say whether he was a "Sharpton" Democrat or a "Clinton" Democrat and Lieberman himself repeated the phrase. This plays right into Rove's hands quite elegantly, Clinton being known as the "first black president" and all. Either Lieberman has internalized rightwing racebaiting tactics or he was being advised by his new GOP advisors before the end of the primary.

This was followed by useful idiot number two: Marty Peretz, who added Maxine Waters to the mix of reprehensible blacks who backed Ned Lamont. Again, I find it quite odd that the subtext of this Connecticut contest keeps coming up racial. Something is in the air and I don't know if Lieberman and Peretz are just breathing it and don't understand their own racist motivations or if they are literally taking Rove's advice. What I do know is that they are playing the tune the Republicans want them to play. In the most watched race of the 2006 campaign, racial politics are front and center --- and there are no GOP fingerprints anywhere near it. Sweet.

But this racist undercurrent is coming from several directions and serves several purposes. You'll remember back in March the wingnuts put out some trash talk about impeachment in a naked ploy to intimidate Democrats into backing off a campaign built around holding the Republicans accountable. But there was more to it:

Republicans, worried that their conservative base lacks motivation to turn out for the fall elections, have found a new rallying cry in the dreams of liberals about censuring or impeaching President Bush.


[..]

Brian Jones, a Republican spokesman, said the e-mail messages generated a higher response than anything the party had sent in several months, including bulletins about the Supreme Court confirmations.

''Clearly on our side it is something that is energizing our base a little bit,'' Mr. Jones said.

''This is not about getting things done,'' he added. ''This is raw partisan politics.''

[...]

Mr. Weyrich, for his part, acknowledged that the prospect of impeachment seemed far-fetched at the moment. ''It looked bizarre, too, when Father Robert F. Drinan and a handful of others, such as John Conyers Jr. in 1972 similarly were planning for the impeachment of President Nixon,'' he wrote in his newsletter. ''When the moment of truth came, they were ready.''

(I guess the impeachment of President Clinton has been disappeared from history...)

Brendan Nyhan noted at the time that the impeachment talk was absurd:

Does anyone actually think the House Democrats would impeach Bush on a narrow party-line vote knowing they will fail to convict in the Senate? Barring some sort of blockbuster revelation, this seems improbable. From Weyrich's perspective, of course, the facts are immaterial; the point is to get the base motivated, and the prospect of a Speaker Pelosi-led impeachment might be quite effective.

This isn't just about Pelosi, though (as much as they demonize her, as well.) This is also about the prospect of "certain" Democrats being in charge of important committees. And none other than Joe Klein was there to spell it all out for the cognoscenti and make it clear that the Republicans, as always, have a good point:

The inevitability of race as a subliminal issue in the campaign became obvious as I watched House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, the personification of fluttery uncertainty, trying to defend Representative John Conyers on Meet the Press a few weeks ago... the ugly truth is that Conyers is a twofer: in addition to being foolishly incendiary, he is an African American of a certain age and ideology, easily stereotyped by Republicans. He is one of the ancient band of left-liberals who grew up in the angry hothouse of inner-city, racial-preference politics in the 1960s, a group "more likely to cry 'racism' and 'victimization' than the new generation of black politicians," a member of the Congressional Black Caucus told me.

[...]

Rangel would be one of the most powerful Democrats in the new Congress, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. He is regarded as more mainstream than Conyers, well versed in tax and entitlement policies, but he has had an unfortunate tendency to shoot off his mouth in the past. He has questioned interracial adoption, and has compared colleagues who opposed tax breaks for minority broadcasters to Hitler. After Hurricane Katrina, Rangel compared Bush to Bull Connor, the public-safety commissioner of Birmingham, Ala., who attacked peaceful civil rights marchers with dogs and fire hoses in the 1960s.

[...]

Conyers and Rangel are embarrassments, but there is nothing the Democrats can do about them -- and they are certainly no more objectionable than any number of right-wing extremists who fester in Congress. But it's not too late for Hastings to remove himself from the line of fire and make clear his support for Harman as ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee.

Conservative Dem Martin Frost wrote an article for Fox News the other day in which he did a rundown on all the incoming chairmen if Dems win a majority. It's quite an impressive list. He ended his piece this way:

The sky may fall on the Republicans once this group becomes chairmen but it won’t be for racial or ideological reasons. It will be because they will know what to do from day one.

He knows very well what any close observer can see --- they are already playing the race card.

Karl Rove and Joe Lieberman's BFF, Marty Peretz, said it quite clearly: "I'm appalled by some of the people who would become head of Congressional committees." After his repeated comments about race hustlers, I think it's pretty clear what he's getting at and it isn't a problem with John Dingell. (The General sent Peretz a fine suggestion to bring back "Birth of a Nation" with a Toby Keith soundtrack to get the word out. I wonder if he's heard back.)

And then there's Senator George Felix "Macaca" Allen. He's just a stone racist, but I think it's worth noting nonetheless that he knew he could play the race card among his supporters in "the real world" of Virginia. You didn't have to know what "macaca" meant to know what he was saying (and I would guess that more than a few of his supporters know very well what it meant.) His face in that video shows a barely leashed anger, the tight smile, the sarcastic edge --- and his supporters all got the point, laughing and tittering at his nasty little aside. Nobody has asked what purpose it served for Allen to point out this guy videotaping the event in the first place. I assume Allen's supporters thought he was with the campaign not with Webb, and even if they did I doubt they would have thought much about it. But Allen, either out of personal pique or political calculation (or both) brought this lone dark-skinned person to the attention of his audience and identified him with the opposition. He did that for a reason and I suspect it's because the word has gone forth that race is on the table in this election. (The fact that he's even more braindead than Bush is what did him in --- he pulled it on a guy who was videotaping him. Jesus.)

This is happening because the Republicans are on the run and they have to pull out all the stops to GOTV. Mostly, however, I think it's an attempt to neutralize Katrina. Let's face it, there is nothing the Republicans can do to improve their image when it comes to their performance last September. It was a national disgrace and we are going to relive the whole awful scene in living color on the first anniversary. Their only hope is to stoke enough under-the-radar racial resentment to mitigate the damage. I suspect they have been thinking about this for the past year and carefully laying out all the little racist signposts we've been seeing over the past few months.

Katrina remains very damaging for Republicans unless they can find some way to kick in the racist lizard brain. They are very good at tickling the primitive, tribal side of human nature --- in fact, that's all they are good at. Subtly and not so subtly playing the race card is one of their specialties and I think it's pretty much all they have left in their hand to play this time out. (Immigration is another racial card for this cycle although I think it's really aimed at '08.)

The question will be whether there are still enough of the old school racists left who will recoil at the idea of the uppity Conyers and Rangel in power. And it remains to be seen whether they can find a way to touch once again that deep, unexamined part of the American psyche that Katrina revealed --- not hatred, but fear of African Americans. Fear, after all, is the GOP's stock in trade.

I doubt it will work. I think we have come too far for racism of that kind to last beyond a single moment. It reared its hideous head briefly during the crisis but I don't think Rove can bring it back with standard racist appeals. His problem is that it's all he's got.

Keep your eyes open, though, for signs of this phenomenon. It's clear to me that this is the GOP subtext of the election. It's quite amazing when you think about it. Bush ran as the Republican who was beyond racial politics, known for his outreach to Hispanics and African Americans. But when it comes down to it, racism is really the heart and soul of the modern Republican party, the essence of their electoral strategy and the underlying sentiment that drives their appeals to "tradition" and "religion." We'll see if they can crank up the old macaca machine and make it work for them one more time.



Update: in case anyone needs to be reminded of the kind of person who will be reached by these appeals, Sadly No! does a little down home fisking of one GOP stalwart.


.
digby 8/19/2006 10:25:00 AM |

Friday, August 18, 2006

 
Duelling Pageants

by digby


It occurs to me that this election season is going to be characterized by two competing September pageants and whoever handles them most skillfully will have the edge in November.

We already know the Republicans are running on 9/11. They are undoubtedly gearing up for a five year anniversary commemoration in which the subtext, as always, will be portrayal of Republicans as being strong enough and tough enough to keep the country safe compared to the vacuous and naive Democratic ninnies.

The Republicans are counting on the fifth anniversary to remind people of Bush's Bullhorn moment, which was sold as a moment of potent muscular leadership when in fact it was what he had been training for since his days on the sidelines at Andover prep:





















We'll see if the nation has finally seen through Karl Rove's deft imagery to the callow little cheerleader that always lurked, like black and white pentimento, beneath the iconic picture.










That brings us to the other big pageant this fall. A few days before 9/11 we are going to memorialize another day of national horror: the death of a huge swathe of an American city, while the president and John McCain shared a few laughs over birthday cake:

































Obviously the Democrats will shine the light on Katrina as the iconic example of Bush's mismanagement but the question will be whether the white house can control the way the press reports it. My bet is the media will want to go back and show plenty of footage of themselves down in New Orleans. They were in the middle of the story for a few days reporting on the appalling conditions when the government seemed paralyzed. They are going to want to revisit their glory days.

They will also undoubtedly do a bunch of "where are they now" stories and investigations into what has happened in the past year. I believe it's going to be very bad for the Republicans to be reminded of their lowest moment, just before the election.

But they are going to fight back, never fear, and they have a cunning plan. More on that in my next post...

Meanwhile, let's not forget that the common denominator is all of this is Bush's reflexive lying about everything:

Published on Wednesday, March 1, 2006 by the Associated Press

AP: Video Contradicts Bush Katrina Statements

by Margaret Ebrahim and John Solomon


Bush didn't ask a single question during the final government-wide briefing the day before Katrina struck on Aug. 29 but assured soon-to-be-battered state officials: "We are fully prepared".

WASHINGTON — In dramatic and sometimes agonizing terms, federal disaster officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees, risk lives in New Orleans' Superdome and overwhelm rescuers, according to confidential video footage of the briefings.

Bush didn't ask a single question during the final government-wide briefing the day before Katrina struck on Aug. 29 but assured soon-to-be-battered state officials: "We are fully prepared."

Six days of footage and transcripts obtained by The Associated Press show in excruciating detail that while federal officials anticipated the tragedy that unfolded in New Orleans and elsewhere along the Gulf Coast, they were fatally slow to realize they had not mustered enough resources to deal with the unprecedented disaster.

Linked by secure video, Bush's bravado on Aug. 29 starkly contrasts with the dire warnings his disaster chief and a cacophony of federal, state and local officials provided during the four days before the storm.

He was leading a cheer, not leading the government, and that has always been the fatal misunderstanding of the man's presidency.


.
digby 8/18/2006 04:09:00 PM |

 
Rotten Apple Strudel

by digby


The Haditha atrocity investigation is looking more and more like a funhouse mirror every day. TBOGG notices that the fine fellow who is suing John Murtha turns out to be suspiciously involved in the possible destruction of evidence in the case. And then there is this from ABB1, which is almost unbelievable:

August 18, Reuters:


Probe suggests Marines hid Haditha evidence: NYT
...
The defense officials were quoted as saying the report also found commanders had created a climate that minimized the importance of Iraqi lives, particularly in Haditha, where insurgent attacks were rampant, The New York Times said.

Lt. Gen. James Mattis, the new top Marine general in U.S. Central Command, is due to decide on whether charges are warranted, officials said this week.



February 4, 2005, CNN:


General: It's 'fun to shoot some people'

Lt. Gen. James Mattis, who commanded Marine expeditions in Afghanistan and Iraq, made the comments Tuesday during a panel discussion in San Diego, California.

"Actually it's quite fun to fight them, you know. It's a hell of a hoot," Mattis said, prompting laughter from some military members in the audience. "It's fun to shoot some people. I'll be right up there with you. I like brawling.

"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil," Mattis said. "You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them."

One of ABB1's comenters points out:

I see he took command on Monday, one day before Bush's recent "why don't Iraqis appreciate everything we've done for them?" meeting at the Pentagon.

This is just in keeping with Bush administration policy that all the most outrageous of his commanders and failed advisors must be promoted and commended. Why just this month the most illustrious of all military fuck-ups, General Geoffrey Miller, retired from the Army with a Distinguished Service Medal,"for exceptionally commendable service in a position of great responsibility." Hilzoy at Obsidion Wings commemorated the event back on August 2.

I have written about him extensively over the years. His role was never adequately examined in the press. He was an artillery officer with no experience in interrogation who was called in to do some leg-breaking in Guantanamo when the former commandant refused to torture the prisoners. And when he showed himself to be sufficiently capable of overseeing a torture regime there he was sent to Abu Ghraib to show them how it was done. For some unknown reason, he kept leaving rotten apples in his wake everywhere he went.

I have a sneaking suspicion that General Mattis will find that bad apples are spoiling his bushel too. And nobody will think a thing about the fact that the guy who declared that "it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them" is ruling on a report that found "commanders had created a climate that minimized the importance of Iraqi lives." That's just SOP in Bushworld.


Update: Hilzoy at Obsidion Wings has a long post up about General Mattis based upon Thomas Ricks' description of Mattis in Fiasco, which I haven't read. It indicates that Mattis, at the very least, is a much more complicated figure than Miller and probably doesn't deserved to be lumped in with him. His comments are strange and inexplicable coming from the man whom Hilzoy describes. I can't account for it.

But the point still stands, I think. For instance, let's take a look at General Jerry Boykin from the Carpetbagger Report:

How can we forget our good friend Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, the deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence? As you may recall, eyebrows were raised around the world when NBC discovered that Bush had asked a man to coordinate our military intelligence in the war on terror who also happened to be an anti-Muslim religious zealot.

Among Boykin's more colorful remarks, which were delivered in uniform, included the notion that our enemy isn't Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden, but rather, "The enemy is a spiritual enemy. He's called the principality of darkness. The enemy is a guy called Satan." In explaining why terrorists hate us, Boykin said it's because "we're a Christian nation," which will defeat our enemies "if we come against them in the name of Jesus."

Boykin also recalled a Muslim soldier in Somalia who believed Allah would protect him in battle against the U.S. "Well, you know what I knew, that my God was bigger than his," Boykin said. "I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol." When the Muslim soldier was eventually captured, Boykin claims to have told the man that he "underestimated our God."

NBC also reported:

Boykin also routinely tells audiences that God, not the voters, chose President Bush: “Why is this man in the White House? The majority of Americans did not vote for him. Why is he there? And I tell you this morning that he’s in the White House because God put him there for a time such as this.”

The good news is that George Felix Allen's attempt to have him promoted again has been stalled out by John Warner. But he's still the Pentagon's deputy undersecretary for intelligence. When he retires he too will undoubtedly receive accolades and commendation despite the fact that he was found guilty of violating military guidelines and is cleqly nutty as a fruitcake. They certainly have no problem keeping him in a vital intelligence role despite the fact that he thinks George W. Bush was ordained by God and I find that very disturbing.




.
digby 8/18/2006 11:54:00 AM |

 
Whatever

by digby

I know everyone will be shocked to find out that the woman who was detained yesterday for having explosive make-up in her purse wasn't actually a terrorist and her make-up wasn't actually explosive:

CEREDO, W. Va. -- A West Virginia airport terminal was evacuated yesterday after two bottles of liquid found in a woman's carry-on luggage twice tested positive for explosives residue, a Transportation Security Administration spokeswoman said.

Chemical tests later turned up no explosives in the bottles, said Captain Jack Chambers, head of the State Police Special Operations unit. The airport was reopened after nearly 10 hours.

A machine that security checkpoint screeners use to test for explosives registered positive results for two containers, and a canine team also got a positive indication, said TSA spokeswoman Amy von Walter.

The TSA screening looks for a range of explosives residue, some of which can be found on common household items, said TSA spokesman Darrin Kayser.

Airport manager Larry Salyers said he was told the woman was a 28-year-old of Pakistani descent who had moved to Huntington, W. Va., from Jackson, Mich. No charges were filed against the woman, who was taken from the airport by federal authorities at 5 p.m., Salyers said.

The woman was very cooperative, officials said.

Does anyone but me find it slightly questionable that two separate tests misread this woman's make-up as being explosive? I think perhaps someone was intent upon seeing things that weren't there, don't you? In the end, this particular incident was not such a big deal. This woman was inconvenienced but they did finally recognize the truth.

But the press made a huge deal out of this all day yesterday, particularly FOX news, performing their designated role in the Bush travelling terrorist salvation show. I wonder, though, if there was even one person in the country who believed for a minute that this was a terrorist plot? I doubt it.

According to the latest Pew Poll, people seem to be "watching" the show now rather than feeling a part of it:

The news that British officials had stopped a terrorist plot to blow up planes flying to the U.S. drew higher public attention than have most other terror-related news stories since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Fully 54% say they followed this news story very closely, compared with 48% who tracked last summer's London bombings very closely, and 34% who paid close attention to the Madrid rail bombings in 2004.

The extensive public attention did not result in a spike in concern about terrorism, however. In interviews conducted after the story broke (Aug. 10-13), a quarter of respondents said that they were "very worried" that there will soon be another terrorist attack on the United States. By comparison, 17% of respondents interviewed on Aug. 9 ­ before the announcement­ reported that level of concern.

The GWOT is just another a reality TV show.



.
digby 8/18/2006 11:33:00 AM |

 
Quote Of The Day

by tristero

George Bush on the wiretap ruling:

I would say that those who herald this decision simply do not understand the nature of the world in which we live.

Let's not forget that this expert on the true nature of the world once asked the president of Brazil whether he, too, had black people in his country.

Which wouldn't be endearingly human in a "hey, I'm a just folks all American ignoramus" kind of a way even if his administration, and he himself, hadn't been entirely wrong about the danger from bin Laden, the presence of WMD in Iraq, and the cakewalk of Iraq. And Katrina. And so on, so on, so on.

This isn't funny, ladies and gentlemen and you, too, Republicans. It truly is hard to believe someone so ignorant and/or cynical commands the the most powerful military the world has ever seen. And he will accept no restraints whatsoever on his desire to do whatever he wishes.
tristero 8/18/2006 11:03:00 AM |

 
Well, At Least We Got Turkey Beat

by tristero


Not surprising, but still...


tristero 8/18/2006 10:30:00 AM |

 

Idea War

by poputonian

Iraqbodycount.net reports that more than forty thousand civilians have been killed since America launched its invasion. Dig into the database and you'll get the gory details: civilians killed by 500 pound laser bombs; children riddled by machine gun fire; deaths by sectarian violence. It's amazing the multiplicity of ways a civilian can die during an invasion. Recent newspaper reports in the US indicate almost 18,000 Iraqi civilian deaths in the first seven months of this year alone, including 3,500 in July. Ponder the numbers and weep.

It was only a few posts ago that our resident minder Jose commented: "The idea of freedom does not register with the Left." Naturally, my reaction was, "The idea of genocide does not register with the Right."

poputonian 8/18/2006 05:02:00 AM |

Thursday, August 17, 2006

 
Glorified Firecrackers

by digby


I was thinking about all this talk of zero tolerance for gel-filled bras on airplanes and the like when I turned on Rhandi Rhodes today and she was talking about this. I'd forgotten all about it:

August 12th, 2005, OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) -- A University of Oklahoma student was released on $10,000 bail Thursday after appearing in federal court to be formally accused of a felony for allegedly bringing a small explosive device into Will Rogers World Airport.

Federal agents arrested Charles Alfred Dreyling Jr., 24, on Wednesday at a security checkpoint after a Transportation Security Administration employee noticed something suspicious in his carryon luggage as it went through an X-ray machine about 9:30 a.m., FBI spokesman Gary Johnson said.

The device was described in an FBI affidavit as a carbon dioxide cartridge filled with gunpowder that could be detonated when connected to a power source such as the batteries Dreyling had in his electric razor and in his cell phone, which were also in his carryon bag.

An FBI bomb technician concluded the device could detonate with sufficient force to cause serious injury.

Dreyling faces a federal charge of trying to get on an aircraft with an explosive device. The charge carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

He was released to the custody of his mother, Vicki Dreyling. His terms of release include living at his parents' home in north Oklahoma City and a 10 p.m. curfew.

Dreyling appeared in federal court wearing an orange Oklahoma County jail jumpsuit and orange flip-flops. About twenty friends and family members attended the hearing in a show of support for Dreyling.

Former Oklahoma City Mayor Kirk Humphreys, who is Dreyling's landlord and his longtime friend, also came to the hearing.

Humphreys said Dreyling had created a ''glorified firecracker'' and then forgotten that it was in his luggage.

[...]

Dreyling told authorities that he had made the device and said it was ''basically a pipe bomb,'' according to an affidavit. Dreyling said he built the device for entertainment value, never intending to hurt anyone, and forgot that it was in his carryon bag when he brought it to the airport, the affidavit said.

Dreyling said he learned as a teenager how to build homemade explosives from Web sites like ''The Anarchist's Cook Book.'' Dreyling said he has built and detonated several explosive devices for recreational purposes, according to the affidavit.

He also told authorities that he had a bag of gunpowder, an empty carbon dioxide cartridge, and several ignitors in his Norman residence, according to the affidavit.

''I know Charlie Dreyling quite well,'' Humphreys said. ''I've known him since he was in the first grade. I appreciate what the authorities are doing making our airlines safe.

''I have every confidence that they'll find out Charlie Dreyling is a fine young man and no terrorist.

''He had a little explosive device, and boys like to see things go bang. He took it down to an outing at the lake, left it in his bag, forgot it and went to the airport.''

His charges were reduced to a misdemeanor and he was let off with a fine. But then he is a good Republican white boy and shouldn't have his life ruined over a little potential explosion on an airplane.

(Meanwhile, it's getting to the point where everyone is going to have to fly naked. As Amato says, it gives new meaning to the phrase "snakes on a plane.")



.
digby 8/17/2006 04:59:00 PM |

 
Uppity Judge

by digby

"The President of the United States, a creature of the same Constitution which gave us these Amendments, has undisputedly violated the Fourth [Amendment] in failing to procure judicial orders as required by FISA, and accordingly has violated the First Amendment Rights of these Plaintiffs as well."

And here I thought he was ordained by God and annointed by Rush. What is this constitution she speaks of?

Blitzer just characterized the ruling as having "serious implications for the War on Terror" rather than serious implications for the Bush administration. That Republican programming is something, isn't it?

And is it common to immediately put up a picture and discuss the race and gender of judges who ruled in major cases? I don't think I've seen it before. Usually they indicate whether or not a judge is a treasonous activist liberal by just indicating who appointed them. This time, we've got the designation "african american" every time the judge is mentioned. Now why would that be?

But then we are hearing an awful lot of macaca talk these days, aren't we?


.
digby 8/17/2006 11:37:00 AM |

 
Ungrateful Wretches

by digby


Bush is now caught in a trap of his own making:

“I sensed a frustration with the lack of progress on the bigger picture of Iraq generally — that we continue to lose a lot of lives, it continues to sap our budget,” said one person who attended the meeting. “The president wants the people in Iraq to get more on board to bring success.”

[...]

More generally, the participants said, the president expressed frustration that Iraqis had not come to appreciate the sacrifices the United States had made in Iraq, and was puzzled as to how a recent anti-American rally in support of Hezbollah in Baghdad could draw such a large crowd. “I do think he was frustrated about why 10,000 Shiites would go into the streets and demonstrate against the United States,” said another person who attended.

Damn Iraqis, sapping our budget and costing our lives like that. Why won't they understand that we came in and killed them, occupied their country and indiscriminately threw thousands of them in jail for their own good?

Joseph Darby the Abu Ghraib whistleblower has a first person article in GQ this week. He made a comment in passing that I think is telling:

One of the things you have to understand is the mentality of where I grew up, in western Maryland. It’s a small town, and there’s not a lot of work. So most people are either in the military, in the Reserves, or they’re related to somebody who is. They’re good people, but I knew they weren’t going to look at the fact that these guys were beating up prisoners. They were going to look at the fact that an American soldier put other American soldiers in prison. For Iraqis. And to those people—who basically are patriotic, socially programmed people who believe whatever they’re told—the Iraqis are the enemy, and screw whatever happens to them.

Bush has always been trafficking in cognitive dissonance with his Iraq talk and it's caught up with him. He tried to gloss over some fundamental illogic with slick PR and it didn't work.

From the very beginning he framed his war on terror as being "with us or with the terrorists." He then consciously conflated Iraq with 9/11 and sent many soldiers over there with the idea that they were fighting those who attacked us. But the facts never supported that and they knew it. Since we live in a world in which outright conquest is no longer acceptable, once his WMD rationale evaporated, he was forced to lean on the idea that we are there to help the Iraqi people and "spread democracy." He obviously came to believe it.

He has tried to make distinctions between the good Iraqis who are "with us" and the bad ones who are "against us" --- "terrorists" "bitter enders" "insurgents" --- but many of the soldiers over there and their families back home and Bush's racist supporters see the "enemy" as simply Iraqis --- or just arabs or muslims. And I suspect that a whole lot of other Americans are just plain confused. It's very hard to finesse all that and it's one of the reasons why the occupation has been such a disaster. Nobody really knows what we're doing there, not us, not them. Now Iraqis are boldly demonstrating in favor of terrorists and even Bush can no longer hide his own confusion and dismay.

In that sense, this war makes Vietnam a moment of foreign policy clarity. It was certainly a mistake to put so much importance on the idea that the US could not afford to fail in a small proxy war or risk communism taking over the far east. But at least everyone understood the premise and could either agree or disagree with it. This war in Iraq is totally incomprehensible to everyone. We invaded for dozens of disparate reasons none of which were entirely compelling and all of which have been proven to be mistaken. We are throwing away hundreds of billions and yet there are now many more terrorists in Iraq than there were before the invasion and many more all around the world because of it. Oil prices are sky high and rising. The middle east is more unstable than its been in many decades. Lots and lots of people are dying.

This is all because after 9/11 we had a leadership who ruthlessly exploited the crisis for political gain and an influential advisory cabal who had waited for 30 years to unleash their half-witted ideological experiments on the world. None of it ever made any sense and now that the fog of 9/11`has lifted, that much, at least, is starting to become clear to most people. The problem is that the mess they've left is so huge it's virtually impossible to clean up. Damn, I don't think I've ever seen a case of "sow the wind, reap the whirlwind" unfold so quickly and so starkly right before my very eyes.



.
digby 8/17/2006 12:56:00 AM |

 
Am Not!

by digby

Overheard on The Corner this week --- Andy McCarthy to J-Pod:

There is something disturbingly Leftist about your penchant for shrill, uninformed criticism that scorns the interlocutor rather than dealing in a mature way with the substance of his arguments. I am not mocking the President. I believe he is wrong, that the mistake he is making has tragic implications for our security, and I am saying so.

I know it's confusing but get used to it. The Republicans are arguing among themselves now and are without the means to understand such disagreements without calling someone a commie, leftist, liberal or terrorist. That's how their world is organized.

And anyway, as we all know, you cannot be wrong and be a conservative at the same time. (Certainly, no real conservative can be shrill, immature or uninformed.) Therefore, anyone who is wrong must be, by definition, a liberal-leftist-commie-terrorist. That's just how it works.



.
digby 8/17/2006 12:05:00 AM |

Wednesday, August 16, 2006

 
Terro-Hippies

by digby

I think we may have underestimated Joe Lieberman and Dick Cheney. All this scary dirty hippie talk isn't just rhetorical:

Last February the Department of Homeland Security oversaw a large-scale international cyber terror simulation involving 115 public and private organizations in the U.S., Canada, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand, all testing their ability to coordinate with one another and respond to computer-driven attacks. It was called Cyber Storm.

Nobody's said much about the results, or the details of the exercise scenario. But a newly-published DHS PowerPoint presentation on the exercise reveals that the real terrorist threat in cyber space isn't from obvious suspects like al Qaida types or Connecticut voters; it's from anti-globalization radicals and peace activists.

This is for real, apparently. The government is actually spending money doing simulations of potential terrorist attacks by peace activists.

The attack scenario detailed in the presentation is a meticulously plotted parade of cyber horribles led by a "well financed" band of leftist radicals who object to U.S. imperialism, aided by sympathetic independent actors.

At the top of the pyramid is the Worldwide Anti-Globalization Alliance, which sets things off by calling for cyber sit-ins and denial-of-service attacks against U.S. interests. WAGA's radical arm, the villainous Black Hood Society, ratchets up the tension on day one by probing SCADA computerized control systems and military networks, eventually (spoiler warning) claiming responsibility for a commuter rail outage and the heat going out in government buildings.

The Black Hoods are a faction of Freedom Not Bombs, whose name is suspiciously similar to the real Food Not Bombs, which provides vegan meals to the homeless.

[...]

The scenario is nicely laid out, and perhaps technically plausible -- some of the incidents are ripped from the headlines, kind of. And I'm frankly glad to see al Qaida wasn't behind it all, since it seems unlikely that real terrorist groups will ever move to computer attacks, while physical destruction and murder is easier and more terror-producing.

But does the administration really see the far left as potential cyber terrorists ready to take down the power grid and air traffic control systems?

Yes they do. It even has a special name. According to the FBI, it's called "special interest terrorism" although there does seem to be an unusual focus on what most people would think of as left wing special interests:

Special interest terrorism differs from traditional right-wing and left-wing terrorism in that extremist special interest groups seek to resolve specific issues, rather than effect widespread political change. Special interest extremists continue to conduct acts of politically motivated violence to force segments of society, including the general public, to change attitudes about issues considered important to their causes. These groups occupy the extreme fringes of animal rights, pro-life, environmental, anti-nuclear, and other movements. Some special interest extremists -- most notably within the animal rights and environmental movements -- have turned increasingly toward vandalism and terrorist activity in attempts to further their causes.

Since 1977, when disaffected members of the ecological preservation group Greenpeace formed the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and attacked commercial fishing operations by cutting drift nets, acts of "eco-terrorism" have occurred around the globe. The FBI defines eco-terrorism as the use or threatened use of violence of a criminal nature against innocent victims or property by an environmentally-oriented, subnational group for environmental-political reasons, or aimed at an audience beyond the target, often of a symbolic nature.

In recent years, the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) has become one of the most active extremist elements in the United States. Despite the destructive aspects of ALF's operations, its operational philosophy discourages acts that harm "any animal, human and nonhuman." Animal rights groups in the United States, including the ALF, have generally adhered to this mandate. The ALF, established in Great Britain in the mid-1970s, is a loosely organized movement committed to ending the abuse and exploitation of animals. The American branch of the ALF began its operations in the late 1970s. Individuals become members of the ALF not by filing paperwork or paying dues, but simply by engaging in "direct action" against companies or individuals who utilize animals for research or economic gain. "Direct action" generally occurs in the form of criminal activity to cause economic loss or to destroy the victims' company operations. The ALF activists have engaged in a steadily growing campaign of illegal activity against fur companies, mink farms, restaurants, and animal research laboratories.

I think you can see now why the vegans are in the government's sites, especially vegans who feed the homeless. They simply can't be trusted. And where there are vegans there are peace activists. (Why do you think they handed out peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at that anti-Halliburton rally the Pentagon monitored instead of ham and cheese like real Americans?) You have to keep an eye on all of them.

I'm afraid this is one situation where we are going to have to fight them here so we don't have to fight them over there --- or something.

Over the years, no one has been killed in any ecoterrorist "action." But officials reject the claim that ALF/ELF is "nonviolent."

"It's just a matter of time before a human life is taken," warns Rep. Scott McInnis (R) of Colorado

According to the FBI, these hippie peace extremists are the most serious domestic terrorist threat we face. As opposed to, for instance, this guy.

Last month, an east Texas man pleaded guilty to possession of a weapon of mass destruction. Inside the home and storage facilities of William Krar, investigators found a sodium-cyanide bomb capable of killing thousands, more than a hundred explosives, half a million rounds of ammunition, dozens of illegal weapons, and a mound of white-supremacist and antigovernment literature.

"Without question, it ranks at the very top of all domestic terrorist arrests in the past 20 years in terms of the lethality of the arsenal," says Daniel Levitas, author of "The Terrorist Next Door: The Militia Movement and the Radical Right."

But outside Tyler, Texas, the case is almost unknown. In the past nine months, there have been two government press releases and a handful of local stories, but no press conference and no coverage in the national newspapers.

Experts say the case highlights the increased cooperation and quicker response by US agencies since Sept. 11. But others say it points up just how political the terror war is. "There is no value for the Bush administration to highlighting domestic terrorism right now," says Robert Jensen, a journalism professor at the University of Texas in Austin. "But there are significant political benefits to highlighting foreign terrorists, especially when trying to whip up support for war."

Mr. Levitas goes even further: "The government has a severe case of tunnel vision when it comes to domestic terrorism. I have no doubt whatsoever that had Krar and his compatriots been Arab-Americans or linked to some violent Islamic fundamentalist group, we would have heard from John Ashcroft himself."

Let's not be hasty. Remember this, from this past January:

After taking nine years to penetrate what they called a "vast eco-terrorism conspiracy" in Oregon and four other Western states, federal prosecutors announced on Friday the indictment of 11 people in connection with a five-year wave of arson and sabotage claimed by the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front.

The 17 attacks, which occurred from 1996 to 2001, caused no deaths but resulted in an estimated $23 million in damage to lumber companies, a ski resort, meat plants, federal ranger stations and a high-voltage electric tower.

"Today's indictment proves that we will not tolerate any group that terrorizes the American people, no matter its intentions or objectives," Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said at a news conference.

Joining Gonzales, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III said: "Investigating and preventing animal rights and environmental extremism is one of the FBI's highest domestic priorities."

You can see why they are concentrating on the vicious environmentalists. Between 1996 and 2001 these terrorists caused 23 million dollars in property damage whereas it's been years since a rightwing extremist has actually killed anyone and more than a decade since the big one, Oklahoma City. There's no reason to make a big deal out of some white supremecist with a WMD in his living room when you have these SUV vandals on the loose. It's a much better use of government resources to run sophisticated war games and concentrate large numbers of resources on vegans.

This threat, my friends, is why Ned Lamont must be stopped. With men like him in the government it's only a matter of time until one of these terro-hippies gets around to killing you in your beds and writing Helter Skelter in organic beet juice on the bedroom walls.



.
digby 8/16/2006 10:18:00 PM |

 
Superiority Theory

by digby


An allegedly liberal writer at the New Republican has made her bones as a beltway contrarian today with a stirring defense of Ann Coulter. She writes about how she used to work on an assembly line in a red state and had to engage in rude polemics to win political arguments --- at which point stupid men would invariably be flummoxed by her brilliance and start talking about her ass. Now, darn it all, she finds that all the ever-so-smart DC types are just the same way --- when you "bitch slap" them out of their "robotic-pundit" routines with what I assume must be Coulteresque dialog, they go all assembly line on her and start talking about her looks.

That is just so, like, unfair.

That is why I love Ann Coulter. Coulter shocks and offends, but underneath her offensiveness is a grain of truth that people cope with by critiquing her hair. Americans like comfort: comfort food, comfort shoes, comfort pundits to reinforce everything we already believe. Ann Coulter is not comfort. I love that she pisses people off. I love her outsized confidence, rare in females who've gone through puberty, which means she doesn't turn into a pile of stuttering mush when an interview turns to her body. I love the way her face flickers devilishly for just a second when an interviewer wraps his own noose--the joy tinged with a bit of sadness, as if to say, Oh what fun this is, but do you have to make it so easy?

Yes, yes, Coulter has said some terrible things. But I don't think it's the terrible things that really bother liberals. Coulter makes us cringe not when she lies, but when she says things we wish weren't true. Let's go to the tape. Asked to define the First Amendment: "An excuse for overweight women to dance in pasties and The New York Times to commit treason." Just completely terrible, I know. But I have to admit, I giggled--having recently covered a pro-choice rally where I interviewed a very nice young woman whose nipples were covered by naral stickers.

I will just say for the record that Coulter 's lies do piss me off and I don't find in her "bitch slaps" even a grain of truth. I do not see the first amendment as an excuse for "overweight women to dance in pasties" and the New York Times to "commit treason." That's ridiculous on its face. I, like most Americans, define the first amendment as the right to free speech, full stop, even for heinous, shrieking dickheads like Coulter.

But let's face it, this is really just a cheap fat woman joke, not a bold grain of truth. Whatever. Lowest common denominator lizard brain laughs will always be with us. But please --- let's not elevate it to insight. (I would recommend that anyone who cares about character should probably read what Aristotle had to say about this form of humor in Nicomachean Ethics --- if you don't feel like an asshole for laughing at Coulter's lowbrow jokes after that, you definitely are one. They don't call it "Superiority Theory" for nothing.)

But aside from all that, why would Reeve, the journalist, ignore the second half of Coulter's comment --- you know, the one about the NY Times commiting treason? I suppose some might find it funny, but I would hope that any journalist would be laughing very, very nervously at such talk. How sure can Reeve be that Coulter is joking when there are many on the right who are dead serious about this?

Or take Coulter's most infamous line: Writing about her friend's death on September 11, she finished her essay with, "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity." Wow, that's pretty indefensible. The United States could never--would never--do such a thing. Instead, we've invaded their countries, killed their leaders, and are desperately trying to convert them to secularism. (It's not like mullahs appreciate the difference.)

I can't help but wonder again why Reeve calls herself a liberal. Liberals are not mullahs and do appreciate the difference. And most of us find the invading and leader-killing part a fairly dicey proposition as well, especially since Coulter's screed was pretty thin on just who "they" were other than "swarthy men." Nobody ever said that Coulter wasn't a conservative --- she's as mainstream as they get. That's the problem; what she said and what they did is indefensible.

On the BBC show "Newsnight," Jeremy Paxman asked Coulter if she'd like to withdraw her infamous statements about the September 11 widows. (If you've been living in a spiderhole, she called the more politically inclined among them "broads".) "No, I think you can save all the would-you-like-to-withdraw questions, but you could quote me accurately. I didn't write about the 9/11 widows. I wrote about four widows cutting campaign commercials for John Kerry and using the fact that their husbands died on 9/11 to prevent anyone from responding," she said. The thing is ... it's kind of true. A little. It is a little absurd to hold up a person as an expert judge of the 9/11 Commission Report, for example, just because she lost a loved one. Liberals do tend to do that kind of thing, and it makes us look like weenies.

If all Ann Coulter did was call them "broads" I don't think anyone would have been offended. What she said (among other things) was this:

"These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by grief-arazzis."

"And by the way, how do we know their husbands weren't planning to divorce these harpies? Now that their shelf life is dwindling, they'd better hurry up and appear in Playboy.

Here's the thing. 9/11 has been turned into a sacred cow by Coulter and the right, not by liberals and not by the widows. They have fetishized it to such a degree that history is now divided into two parts, before 9/11 and after, just like Christ's birth. It has spawned a War on Terror which has no discernable end and which excuses every insane decision they've made since then. You can read columns in major newpapers today in which torture and genocide are casually bandied about as reasonable. There is no questioning any of this without unleashing a torrent of rabid, rightwing opprobrium, accusing the queestioner of everything from appeasement to treason.

As for "liberals tend to do this kind of thing," think about this: ask yourself how conservatives respond to any criticism of religion or the military. For instance, if a liberal dared to criticize a returning Iraq vet for his view that the war is an important battle in the War on Terror, the entire rightwing would rise en masse and bite off the offending critics head --- despite the soldier's lack of geopolitical expertise. Go ahead, try it.

It's a game that's played on both sides and anyone who doesn't know that has either been spending way too much time among the political class or shares the conservative view that only liberals can be weenies. This kind of santimonious weenie-ism is a tried and true political tactic that has actually been perfected by the right. Jesus, they got away with whining "this is not a goooood man" when John Kerry had the temerity to point out that the Cheney's openly gay daughter was well ... openly gay.

Coulter herself went on Hannity and Colmes and went ballistic claiming that liberals were racist for criticizing Condi Rice:

COULTER: I don't know why you [Beckel] keep talking about [the unfair treatment received by] Bill Clinton when your party -- I mean, I understand why you'd like to change the subject, but your party is being biased and condescending about a black woman.

[...]

COULTER: I understand why you are so terrified of letting us point out what racists the Democrats are and how they have a big problem with black women.

Here's Coulter just this week:

Congresswoman Maxine Waters had parachuted into Connecticut earlier in the week to campaign against Lieberman because he once expressed reservations about affirmative action, without which she would not have a job that didn't involve wearing a paper hat.

I assume that the iconoclastic, fun-loving, unconventional Reeve thinks "it's kind of true" that liberals are racists and that Maxine Waters would be working at McDonalds without affirmative action. And even if it isn't, it's just side-splitting to think of Waters, who was born in 1938 and who became a school teacher long before affirmative action was even conceived of, in a paper hat. It's always ok to make fun of black liberals. They are uppity weenies after all.

And then there are the insults. Chris Matthews asked: "How do you know that Bill Clinton's gay?" Coulter, who had earlier said the former president had exhibited some "latent homosexuality," gestured casually from behind her sunglasses. "Ah, no, he may not be gay. But Al Gore? Total fag." OK, that one really is indefensible. Because gratuitous gay jokes have, um, no precedent in pop culture whatsoever. I admit it, I snickered. What can I say--her timing was great. (And yes, later, she conceded, "That's what we call in the writing business a joke.").

Perhaps if Coulter were performing at The Comedy Store that might be true. Chris Matthews, however, hosts a political show. If someone doesn't know or understand the history of the Republican party feminizing Democrats then perhaps it's understandable that they would they fail to see why this matters. But one does expect serious people to understand that such "jokes" often serve such political purposes.

Coulter is a pretty woman who holds up a mirror showing us the ugliest parts of ourselves. She makes nice liberals think bad thoughts--particularly about whether they would have sex with her. Which is why we often fight back dirty, talking about her looks. Andrew Sullivan called her "a drag-queen-fascist-impersonator." The New York Times said she's "a blonde who knows her way around a black cocktail dress." Last week at TNR Online, her arguments were described as "about as convincing as the blonde hair that gets her so much attention."

In June, the guests of "Hardball" discussed Coulter's latest book in which she made her comments about the September 11 widows, denounced her offensiveness, bemoaned her book sales, and pontificated on what it all means about "society." That obviously led to Matthews's next question, "Do you find her physically attractive, Tucker?" And Tucker Carlson dodged, as did the other guests, until the question was turned on Matthews, who replied, "You guys are all afraid to answer. No, I find her--I wouldn't put her--well, she doesn't pass the Chris Matthews test."

I only shudder that I, too, might not pass the Chris Matthews test. All wrapped up in liberals' snarky comments about her hair is a wellspring of latent guilt for judging her by her hair. Even after all those gender studies classes in college, even after having known/befriended/dated/been That Girl who Doesn't Shave Her Pits, after pretending to like Ani DiFranco, liberals still can't get over her hair. I love Ann Coulter because, in her, I see a loudmouth on the assembly line, fighting not to be squished and whittled and boxed into the shape Washington seems to think fits a girl just right.

Yes, poor little Coulter, stuck on the assembly line of liberal political hegemony, is just fighting for her right to be an obnoxious bitch with fabulous hair --- a truly important calling if there ever was one. And the fact that liberal men find her repulsive and reject her sexually is due to the fact that she's attractive and therefore they feel guilty for wanting to fuck someone who challenges their political beliefs. Uh huh. That must be it.

Apparently, Ms Reeve, who is also quite attractive, feels some kinship with poor misunderstood Ms Coulter who has made no secret of her belief that the "pretty girls" like herself are her allies:

Here at the Spawn of Satan convention in Boston, conservatives are deploying a series of covert signals to identify one another, much like gay men do. My allies are the ones wearing crosses or American flags. The people sporting shirts emblazoned with the "F-word" are my opponents. Also, as always, the pretty girls and cops are on my side, most of them barely able to conceal their eye-rolling.

[...]

As for the pretty girls, I can only guess that it's because liberal boys never try to make a move on you without the U.N. Security Council's approval. Plus, it's no fun riding around in those dinky little hybrid cars. My pretty-girl allies stick out like a sore thumb amongst the corn-fed, no make-up, natural fiber, no-bra needing, sandal-wearing, hirsute, somewhat fragrant hippie-chick pie wagons they call "women" at the Democratic National Convention.

Yes, it's awfully rude of people to derisively comment on Coulter's looks isn't it? It's not like she asks for it. And one can certainly see why some attractive young women would not want to be associated with the revolting stereotype that Coulter perpetuates about liberal females. One doesn't expect them to be writing for The New Republic, however.

Ann Coulter is not a brash comedienne, she is a propagandist and if you can't see that she is deadly serious you are a fool. She is part of a billion dollar industry that is designed solely to degrade, demean and destroy liberalism. It is subsidized by millionaires for the benefit of millionaires and they count on the ignorance of certain members of the public (and immature liberal writers) to fall for their scam.

Ann Coulter is laughing her ass off today at the silly writer over at TNR who doesn't get it. And for the first time ever, I'm laughing right along with her.



.
digby 8/16/2006 04:44:00 PM |

 
The Looming Tower

by tristero

Lawrence Wright's "The Looming Tower" really is a must read. It is probably the single best one-volume history available of al Qaeda and the events leading to 9/11. Events that have always seemed puzzling, and chronologies that were confusing become quite clear, as does the motivations and culpabilities of the people responsible.

Wright all but indicts the CIA for criminal obstruction of justice in refusing to share information with the FBI on the infamous Kuala Lumpur meeting of al Qaeda operatieves where 9/11 was clearly on the agenda. And that's only for starters - there were times the CIA literally dangled photographs in front of the FBI squad and refused to identify them. Even worse (!), the CIA knew that two al Qaeda operatives had traveled from KL into the US and refused to share the info with the FBI. Wright correctly notes that this would have been enough information for the FBi to derail the 9/11 plot when combined with all the other information the gov't had.

But the FBI had its own craziness. It grossly misinterpreted a law as requiring agents never to share or receive information from intelligence services. Furthermore, the timid bureaucratic culture of the FBI had little space for the likes of John O'Neill, who also, towards the end of his career, made some careless errors that his enemies used to prevent him from possibly replacing Richard Clarke, who had become fed up with the incompetence of his bosses at the White House, and their lack of understanding of the threat from bin Laden.

Perhaps all the information in The Looming Tower is already available, but I've found this to be the most compelling narrative yet about al Qaeda. However, I must confess I had no idea al Qaeda, in the early days, actually had a health plan for all its members, It was also gratifying that Wright avoided the ethnocentric errors that marred, ever so slightly, Steve Coll's excellent Ghost Wars: Wright knows better than to describe Wahabbism as "puritanical," for instance

Some of the reviews say this will be the "standard reference" for the history of Qutbism, al Qaeda, and the US. In fact as detailed as it is, it is much too short, or, if you prefer, succinct. A genuinely useful standared reference will last thousands of pages and go into far more detail about many issues, including the philosophy and influence of Qutb; the exceedingly complex political situation in Afghanistan in the 80's and 90's, the eerie parallel wordview between the neo-conservatives such as Frum and Perle who famously - and insanely - called for The End of Evil, and the manifesto writers of al Qaeda and al Jihad, who used the exact same phrase to attract recruits; and so on.

That said, for most of us, who don't know Arabic or don't have connections to the spy world, but who nevertheless want to get a good sense of what happened, and why, Wright's book is probably one of the best places to start. Beautifully written, intelligent, and objective - meaning capable of genuinely careful analysis that in no way shirks the obligation to come to firm conclusions about errors and incompetence - it's really worth your time.
tristero 8/16/2006 10:58:00 AM |

Tuesday, August 15, 2006

 
Irate Moderates

by digby

The day after the Connecticut primary the NY Times published an editorial that I have been thinking about in the days since. It was called "Revenge of the Irate Moderates" and I think it was more insightful than I recognized at the time:

The rebellion against Mr. Lieberman was actually an uprising by that rare phenomenon, irate moderates. They are the voters who have been unnerved over the last few years as the country has seemed to be galloping in a deeply unmoderate direction. A war that began at the president’s choosing has degenerated into a desperate, bloody mess that has turned much of the world against the United States. The administration’s contempt for international agreements, Congressional prerogatives and the authority of the courts has undermined the rule of law abroad and at home.

Yet while all this has been happening, the political discussion in Washington has become a captive of the Bush agenda. Traditional beliefs like every person’s right to a day in court, or the conviction that America should not start wars it does not know how to win, wind up being portrayed as extreme. The middle becomes a place where senators struggle to get the president to volunteer to obey the law when the mood strikes him. Attempting to regain the real center becomes a radical alternative.

When Mr. Lieberman told The Washington Post, “I haven’t changed. Events around me have changed,” he actually put his finger on his political problem. His constituents felt that when the White House led the country into a disastrous international crisis and started subverting the nation’s basic traditions, Joe Lieberman should have changed enough to take a lead in fighting back.

It seems this race in Connecticut has become a clarifying moment for many people and in the long run Lieberman may have done his the party a favor. Josh Marshall and Kevin Drum each have interesting posts up today discussing their personal odysseys. I urge you to read them both because it's important for those of us who are temperamentally fiery partisans to understand how this unfolded for those who are more temperamentally moderate. To be clear, I'm not suggesting that either Drum or Marshall needed any kind of political educating or conversion experience to understand modern politics --- they are smarter than virtually anyone I know. It was, I think, a psychological reckoning rather than a political one and I believe that's key.

Those of moderate political temperament are naturally resistent to the rather radical belief that politics have become an ugly, bare knuckle battle in which winning is defined as stopping the other side cold --- or winning elections and passing legislation through brute partisan force if necessary. I suspect that many people are resistent to this idea and for good reason. While there are some on the right who enjoy getting in others' faces, most people prefer a peaceful existence and avoid confrontation until they are absolutely forced to do it.

It took me a little while to recognize what was happening too. I was a Clintonite who was willing to see if the third way could work. But I've got a strong streak of anti-authoritarianism in me that viscerally recoiled at the conservative movement's partisan misuse of the congress and the legal system during that era. Perhaps because I grew up in a rightwing household I understood that the bipartisan rules we had all assumed were a permanent fixture in American politics were no longer operative. By 2000, I was thoroughly radicalized and believed that Democrats had to play a different, more disciplined, brand of politics even if it meant losing in the short term (which, after 9/11, I figured would happen anyway.)It was clear to me that third way politics had no future once the Republicans had a taste of power and revealed themselves.

But that's me. I'm naturally partisan anyway. I grew up in a rightwing family and I've had emotional, take-no-prisoners political arguments my whole life --- I get how these macho wingnuts love the fight and will do anything to win. Most of us have been lucky to avoid such highly charged confrontations (at least since the Vietnam era) and quite naturally assume that the opposition is reasonable. (Most people you meet in real life are.) Modern rightwingers, however, are a different animal.

Atrios touches on how this led to Democratic paralysis in a post today in which he discusses the policy implications of all this. In his own pithy style he puts it this way:

The politics side has to do with a Democratic party in which all the leading Democrats are forever running against their own party. Triangulation can work for one man, but when every leading Democrat is constantly falling all over themselves (yes, this is exaggeration) to distance themselves from Those Damn Dirty Democrats, you have a party which is without foundation and where capitulation is confused with bipartisanship.

The Lieberman race seems to have finally resolved the Democratic party's confusion on this. When even Joe Klein is correctly characterizing the Republicans as using the war for partisan gain, the zeitgeist has clearly shifted. All factions of the Democratic party, with the exception of the actual DLC membership, seem to be coming to this realization which is absolutely key to making a case for the Democrats in November and beyond.

I think we are now seeing more political analysts recognizing this than not and that's a huge step. I cannot predict how a message of contrast and confrontation will affect the unaffiliated moderates in the electorate but I think the Democrats must at least try it. The strategy of blurring differences has not worked for us in this partisan era and we need to try something new.

But because of this recent shift among Dem moderates, I think there's some hope that the Independents and moderate Republicans who are appalled at the results of total Republican rule may also see that the Democrats are getting their act together and are willing and able to confront the Republicans and change course. I believe our biggest problem among those people has not been the hippie boogeyman (which nobody under 50 really gets anyway) but rather the idea that Democrats don't stand for anything and are ineffectual against the Republicans. People won't vote for you if they feel that it's pointless. Going with the confident winners and hoping they will learn from experience is a better bet.

No matter how upsetting the current political situation may seem or how unpopular the Republicans are, if people feel that it will make no difference they won't bother to vote. A strong, united Democratic party can change that. I think we might be getting there.



.
digby 8/15/2006 10:23:00 PM |

 
Chutzpah

by digby

How does he get away with this?

Lieberman aides said that Mr. Lamont’s association with Mr. Sharpton and Mr. Jackson — both of whom campaigned vigorously for Mr. Lamont — was a political albatross that helped explain why Mr. Lieberman believed he could win over a majority of voters.

“Primary night was the first time that many Connecticut voters saw Lamont on TV, and he’s surrounding himself with two of the more divisive and problematic figures in the Democratic Party,” said Dan Gerstein, a veteran Lieberman aide who was appointed communications director for the campaign last week.

Here you have a Democrat who has rejected the result of a Democratic primary, is now running as an independent calling members of his own party soft on terrorism and out of the mainstream and he has the balls to call other people "divisive and problematic in the Democratic party?" Wow.



.
digby 8/15/2006 08:12:00 PM |

 
French Code Words

by digby


There is some debate as to whether George Felix Allen was making a deliberate slur or whether he was just repeating his French mother's phrase for "dirty arab" without fully realizing what he was saying (or thinking nobody would know what he was saying.)

I don't think so. I think this is racist code of the worst sort. Allen isn't just another southern good old boy who can't tell the difference between his family heritage and racism. He chose to become a neoconfederate long after it was out of fashion, in defiance of accepted norms of his time and he has built his good old boy reputation partially because of it. He didn't inherit his brand of racism --- he chose it.

The evidence suggests that "macaca" is a slur that American white supremecists have adopted from European white supremecists to apply to dark skinned people. And what this means is that George Allen is conversant in the language of white supremecists and he uses that language in his conversation. And while it's impossible to prove, I believe he used that word deliberately because it is a word that a racist like him would know that "certain" people would correctly identify.

It's right out of the Lee Atwater playbook, at whose knee Mary Matalin, Allen's biggest supporter, studied. Bob Herbert reported in the October 6, 2005 edition of the New York Times of a 1981 interview with Lee Atwater in which he explains the GOP's Southern Strategy:

You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" - that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.
And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me - because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."

That was Atwater, even as he was trying to say that racism was dying, helpfully explaining that the GOP mantra of "tax cuts" was another way for a candidate to say that you didn't believe in government hand outs to black people. (Too bad nobody listened to him at the time and figured out a way to fight that, but it's too late now.) But what he really revealed was that racism had just gone underground. "Macaca" is as abstract as it gets --- to anybody but a white supremecist who knows exactly what it means. It's just one of the newer code words for "nigger, nigger, nigger" and Allen, who kept a noose in his office for years, is the type of guy who would know it.

George Felix Allen is the most disgusting serious candidate for president this country has produced in many decades. The fact that he's backed by a large number of powerful mainstream Republicans for the nomination shows what that party really is, even now, after all this time.


Update: Allen has apologized again, sort of:

"I also made up a nickname for the cameraman, which was in no way intended to be racially derogatory. Any insinuations to the contrary are completely false."

“I never want to embarrass or demean anyone and I apologize if my comments offended this young man

bullshit.

.
digby 8/15/2006 04:26:00 PM |

Monday, August 14, 2006

 
Take It To The Wingnuts

by digby


Most of you have probably already read the fascinating polling data from MYDD that challenges the conventional wisdom about the Busby race in CA-50 (if you haven't, be sure to do it.) If you don't want to slog through all the numbers, here's an interesting article from the LA CityBeat that gives the basic overview.

Busby’s campaign turns out to have been far less effective than the media suggested. While she certainly galvanized Democrats in the 50th Congressional District, and while Republican turnout was markedly lower than usual because of disenchantment with the status quo, she failed to capture the one constituency she desperately needed to put her over the top, which was independent voters. Her promise to push for better ethics in Washington fell utterly flat with them, because they were almost as suspicious about the integrity of the Democratic Party as they were of the Republicans. Things might have been differenBt if Busby had been running against Duke Cunningham himself, but the man was in prison, not on the ballot. Independents, according to the survey, either stayed home or voted for a third-party candidate.

What might have induced those independents to vote for Busby? According to Rick Jacobs, the Courage Campaign’s chair, all it would have taken was a simple promise to hold the administration’s feet to the fire. “Voters want a candidate to say, ‘I will hold George Bush accountable,’” Jacobs told me. “They think the country’s heading in the wrong direction, they disapprove of George Bush, and therefore they want to know: who is going to be most likely to call him to account and put the country on a better path? I don’t think Busby did any of that.”


[...]

Busby herself appears to have taken some of these lessons on board as she gears up for a rematch against Bilbray in November. Curiously, it might actually be easier for her to win this time – if she can use Bilbray’s few months’ tenure on Capitol Hill as ammunition to suggest that a Republican representative will do nothing to force the Bush administration to change course. According to Rick Jacobs, the party as a whole would do well to approach the midterms in a similar spirit. “This is how the party can define itself, nationally,” he said. “Bush is taking the country in the wrong direction, and Iraq is exhibit number one. Vote for us, and we are going to force the president to come up with a plan to get us out of the there. A Republican congress won’t do anything. That’s the message.”

That was certainly Ned Lamont’s message, and it worked. Now the Democrats need to stop fighting among themselves, and take the message to a broader national audience. They might not have had the courage to stand up against a popular Republican administration. Now all they need is the courage to oppose an unpopular Republican administration. Really, how hard can that be?

Democrats have been demonized as being weak and ineffectual for so long that Independent voters naturally figure that they can't or won't do anything to stop the Republicans. Democratic partisans may believe, but in order to get a robust turnout throughout the country, even many of them still need to be convinced that their party leadership will follow through. Democrats must make the case in no uncertain terms that they are prepared to hold Republicans accountable --- which means that they must be willing to talk about the lack of oversight and they must promise to hold hearings into specific issues.

The Republicans will scream like banshees, but that actually plays into the Democrats' hands if they have the nerve to just stare them down and tell them to bring it. Rove's tried to innoculate against this with his little "omg! they're going to act just like we did and impeach the president!" message but its primary purpose was to get Democrats to back off. He knew that if Democrats ran on holding his boy accountable they would win. Now we have the data to back that up.



.
digby 8/14/2006 06:01:00 PM |

 
Send Her Back To Normal

by digby


The President of the most powerful nation on why Hezbollah isn't the real winner in this war:

The world got to see -- got to see what it means to confront terrorism. I mean, it's a -- it's the challenge of the 21st century, the fight against terror.

A group of ideologues, by the way, who use terror to achieve an objective -- this is the challenge.

And that's why in my remarks I spoke about the need for those of us who understand the blessings of liberty to help liberty prevail in the Middle East.

And the fundamental question is: Can it? And my answer is: Absolutely, it can. I believe that freedom is a universal value. And by that, I mean I believe people want to be free.

People want to be free. One way to put it is I believe mothers around the world want to raise their children in a peaceful world. That's what I believe...

Could somebody please keep him away from Karen? This is just embarrassing.


.
digby 8/14/2006 02:44:00 PM |

 
Craven Hawk

by digby

Atrios flags this piece by Spencer Ackerman which I also thinks is worth reading. Ackerman points out that Lieberman's reputation for sophisticated foreign policy smarts is nothing more than knee jerk me-too-ism:

Lieberman's judgment on defense questions is like that of a stopped clock: the hawkish position, applied consistently, has to be right sooner or later. What Lieberman is asking Connecticut -- and the Democratic Party, and the country -- to accept is that the only secure America is a bellicose America. And that position is a guarantee of future Iraqs.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Lieberman's defense record is the difficulty of defining Liebermanism. On the central question of why a nation should or shouldn't go to war, Lieberman's answer is simply, "yes!" His Senate-floor explanation of his 1991 vote for the Gulf War wasn't a ringing endorsement of the need to confront Saddam Hussein, or a defense of Kuwaiti sovereignty, or even a simple explanation of how the war served American interests – none of which were difficult cases to make. Rather, Lieberman contended that the war was necessary "because our president has asked us to vote to support him in this hour of challenge."

This is not a matter of philosophy. It's a lazy and craven purely political stance that was perfectly illustrated by Jacob Weisberg's Slate piece the other day:

The Lamont-Lieberman battle was filled with echoes and parallels from the Vietnam era. Democratic reformers and anti-establishment insurgents weren't wrong about that conflict, either. Vietnam was a terrible mistake for the United States. But like Iraq, Vietnam was a badly chosen battlefield in a larger conflict with totalitarianism that America had no choice but to pursue. In turning viciously on stalwarts of the Cold War era like Lyndon B. Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, and Scoop Jackson, anti-war insurgents called into question the Democratic Party's underlying commitment to challenging Communist expansion. The party's Vietnam-era drift away from issues of security and defense—and its association with a radical left hostile to the military and neutral in the fight between liberalism and communism—helped push a lot of Americans who didn't much like the Vietnam War into the arms of Richard Nixon.

Lieberman, a charter member of the DLC, learned the lesson so well that he does not discriminate at all when it comes to military action. If a war is on the table, he's for it. And that's pretty much what Weisberg prescribes as the proper Democratic position if they want to be taken seriously on foreign policy and national security.

You can be craven about a lot of things, but war is one issue you really should think twice about. Not only is it a moral question it is a most serious question of national security. Once you unleash the dogs of war, all kinds of unintended, catastrophic things can happen as we are now witnessing in Iraq. It should never be just a matter of politics.

I think that it's quite clear from Holy Joe's record that, in his case, it is. He's voted enthusiatically for every military action that's been proposed since he took office. I doubt there are many Republicans out there with that kind of record (although their reasons for voting against military action in the 90's were completely partisan.) He clearly doesn't even think about it.

What Weisberg and Lieberman and other DLC types have done is back Democrats into the corner by agreeing with the GOP that they must always follow the Republicans over the cliff or risk being called weak on security. This is political blackmail and it's exactly what led us into Iraq. The Democratic caucus was terrified of the repurcussions (especially post 9/11) of their votes against the first Gulf War and I have no doubt that guys like Lieberman were fingerwagging in the cloakroom every chance they got.

Joe Lieberman has taken the easy route on national security time after time and it's led to this horrible mess we're in. The sooner he's out of the Democratic party the better for everyone. This lazy, rubber stamping of GOP warmongering for political purposes has paralyzed the Democratic party on national security and it's time the party rids itself of it.



.
digby 8/14/2006 01:42:00 PM |

 
Unity '06

by digby


George W. Bush is not committing to support the Republican nominee for Senate in Connecticut:

Q Does the President support the Republican candidate for Senate in Connecticut?

MR. SNOW: The President supports the democratic process in the state of Connecticut, and wishes them a successful election in November.

Greg Sargent asked the Lieberman campaign over the week-end if they would demand that the GOP stop using their candidate as a talking point. This is their reply:

"Joe Lieberman has no interest in being Dick Cheney or Karl Rove's political football, just as he has no interest in being a political football for Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid. In fact, he's fed up with this kind of petty partisan game playing which is stalemating Washington and blocking progress on the problems people care about. That is exactly why he is campaigning for a new politics of unity and purpose that will deliver results for the people of Connecticut. The Republicans and Democrats in Washington can spin the results any way they want, but Joe Lieberman is focused on bringing meaningful change for his constituents."

So we have Joe Lieberman claiming to be above partisan politics and George W. Bush claiming to be above partisan politics. Look for more of that rhetorical synergy going into the fall.


Update: Armando has more.



.
.
digby 8/14/2006 01:01:00 PM |

 
White Man's Overbite

by digby

OMFG




Tucker Carlson set for ‘Dancing with the Stars’



pic via Mediabistro.com




.
digby 8/14/2006 11:43:00 AM |

 
Blowing Off Steam

by digby

It's probably overkill for me to post about this hour long Pamela Atlas Shrugs "interview" with John Bolton since so many others have already commented. But I thought it was worthwhile to emphasize something about it that Glenn Greenwald mentioned in passing. This interview was done last Saturday. Does everyone remember what was going on last Saturday?

Masood Haider from UN adds: Kofi Annan announced on Saturday night that he had been in touch with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel and Prime Minister Fouad Siniora of Lebanon and that both had agreed that the end of fighting would take effect at 8 am Monday in Lebanon and Israel.

“I am happy to announce that the two leaders have agreed that the cessation of hostilities and the end of the fighting will enter into force on Aug 14, at 0500 hours GMT,” Mr Annan said in a statement released here.

It wasn't just an ordinary day. It was the day when the ceasefire was being finalized. And while I understand that he was probably still stinging from having had his ass handed to him by the French, it was still inappropriate to give an hour long interview with a psychotic fawning righwing blogger who asked him questions like this:

Pamela: So much faith in the Lebanese government I do not understand. A puppet of Syria, who is a puppet of Iran. Iran is Barzini here. You see the Godfather? Okay? So a question about it. Who props up that government? I mean if the Israeli, if the IDF, which is, although when I was in Israel, I gotta tell you, a bunch of baby-faced kids. I know they're always portrayed in the media with Darth Vader helmets and the Israeli war machine. I'm telling you, the cutest kids ever. But if they couldn't contain, and I think there's an element of that that no one really wants to talk about. I wonder how much the US government was surprised that Israel didn't go in, bing-bang-boom, and knock these suckers out. Forget about Israel for a second, even though it's difficult for me, right and wrong, good and evil, and all that. Let's discuss real politics, shall we? It's in America's best interest that Hezbollah be eliminated. I mean this is not just Israel's problem. You know who Hezbollah is. You know where they are. So I think there was an element of surprise. Do I think it's Olmert's weakness? I do. Did I campaign wildly for Bibi? I did. Do I have a vote? I don't. So I think Israel also, you know it's interesting, when I was in Israel, you could see the country was in short of like a shock, like a 9/11 shock. Here they had banked so much on land for peace and peace, even this sh--, even a bad peace, sorry about that, John, is better than a good war, so to speak, although I don't subscribe to that. I understand that the current, modern civilization does, to which they're going to pay dearly, but that's besides the point. Such stock we're putting in the Lebanese government, who is totally kowtowing to Hezbollah. You put every remark by the crying Siniora, I mean, another Godfather moment. You remember Godfather, Frank Sinatra, it was supposed to be Frank Sinatra, he's crying, you're godfather. Same thing happens, somebody slap him. So how could you have so much faith in the Lebanon government? I mean, I want to believe, John. I believe in you. I want to believe.

It might be worthwhile to see if Chris Matthews or CNN are interested in this story. Pamela would be more than happy to go on television, I'm sure, and explain how she got an exclusive interview with the US Ambassador to the UN right in the middle of the biggest crisis of his tenure. It would be a fascinating story.

The last I heard, we were shy one vote for a filibuster. I think we all have noticed that appointments cannot be derailed on substance. A nominee can be a raving lunatic with a Nazi paper trail a mile long and they will still get through. A person will only be defeated or withdraw if the charge is trivial and easy to understand.

This could be it. Pamela is beyond crazy and this is actually the second interview, I believe, with her idol John Bolton (with whom she seems to have a rather odd familiarity.) I think she would look very fetching in a blue dress.



.
digby 8/14/2006 10:53:00 AM |

Sunday, August 13, 2006

 
One Toe In The Water

by digby


A lot of people are going to take issue with Joe Klein for this week's column about the Connecticut race, and with good reason. (Armando does so, here.)

But I am not going to join that party. I have been very hard on Klein for years for his anachronistic political analysis, but I am sensing that something has changed and I think it's worth recognizing.

Setting aside his weak defense of triangulation as a governing strategy and his misplaced hope that after all the excitement of these last few years the political system will settle down into a nice bipartisan era of good feelings if the Democrats don't go off the deep end (tell it to Dobson, Limbaugh and Kristol, Joe), I think his piece is actually amazingly right-on in some important respects. He seems to have had an epiphany recently and finally figured out how we got to where we are, if not how to get out of it. Since Klein is a major voice of the insider conventional wisdom, I think we are making progress.

Forget all the silliness he writes about "blognuts" and and his predictable he said/she said rendition of the post Lamont challenges to both parties and get a load of this:

Much was made of Cheney's venting, and it is a bit too easy, after six years of this bilge, to dwell on the Vice President's aura and miss the essential felony of the Bush White House—that it has tried to run a war without bipartisan support. Indeed, it has often attempted to use the war for partisan gain. To be sure, there is some grist to the Republican portrayal of Democrats as a bunch of wimpy peaceniks. All too often in the post-Vietnam past—the first Gulf War, for example—the default position of the Democratic Party has been to assume that any prospective use of U.S. military power would be immoral. But Bush's initial post-9/11 response was not one of those times. The invasion of Afghanistan and an aggressive effort to destroy al-Qaeda were supported by just about every Democratic politician. Many leading Democrats even gave Bush the authority to invade Iraq, although most did so, I suspect, for reasons of political expediency. One of the most convincing arguments offered by the bloggers is that the Democratic establishment should have been far more skeptical than it was about a pre-emptive, nearly unilateral assault on an Islamic country.

In 2004 Bush and Karl Rove managed to flummox the Democrats by conflating the war in Iraq with the war against al-Qaeda and insisting that any Democratic reservations about Iraq were a sign of weakness. This was infuriating. It was Bush's disastrous decision to go to war—and worse, to go to war with insufficient resources—that transformed Iraq into a terrorist Valhalla. It is Bush's feckless prosecution of the war that has created the current morass, in which a U.S. military withdrawal could lead to a regional conflagration. Rove may avert another electoral embarrassment this November with the same old demagoguery, but his strategy has betrayed the nation's best interests. It has destroyed any chance of a unified U.S. response to a crisis overseas. Even the Wall Street Journal's quasi-wingnut [quasi???? --- ed] editorial page cautioned, in the midst of a typical anti-Democratic harrumph, "[No] President can maintain a war for long without any support from the opposition party; sooner or later his own party will begin to crack as well."

That's about as harsh an assessment of Bush's failures as I've read anywhere. He has absorbed the message that supporting Iraq was a bad move from the get. He has absorbed the message that the bipartisanship he loves and values was destroyed by the Republicans, not the Democrats. And while he still bemoans the fact that Dems are weak on security, he does so with much less energy than he has in the past and lays the current disaster directly at the feet of the Republicans and their hyper partisan governing style. This is a good sign.

It's true that he fails to note his own (and others in the political establishment's) complicity in the terrible decision to back Bush's Iraq policy. And he blandly repeats the trope about the Democrats going back to the 70's (but notably fails to conjure the magic "McGovern" word even once.) However, it's far more important that he has come to recognize, somehow, that the Republicans "wave the bloody shirt of Islamist terrorism as a partisan bludgeon."

This is a big deal as we go into the 06 and 08 elections. If the punditocrisy and the media chatterers can be encouraged to see this clearly, as Klein has done, we might finally be able to change this national security narrative and take these GOP thugs down.

Furthermore, despite Klein's desperate attempt to find equivalence, anybody can see that compared to "waving the bloody shirt of Islamist terrorism as a partisan bludgeon," the "blognuts" rejecting Clintonian triagulation isn't even in the same league when it comes to extremism. After all, one is exploiting global death and destruction for political gain while the other (even if you think it's a political mistake) is just routine internecine politics. There simply isn't any equivalence and it's quite clear that Joe Klein knows it, even if he isn't ready to abandon his irrelevant position as a "raging moderate."

So, I say welcome to the reality based pool, Joe. Go ahead, you can jump all the way in. The water's fine.



.
digby 8/13/2006 04:22:00 PM |

 
Bad Move Rising

by digby

This is unbelievable. Rahm Emmanuel had better be behind the scenes twisting arms so hard he's given himself carpal tunnel system because his public stance is ridiculous:

Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., chairman of the party’s congressional campaign committee, thought Lieberman’s presence could help Democrats, because the senator "will be talking about raising the minimum wage, energy policy - echoing the Democratic candidates’ message."

Uhm no. The Senator will be talking about how the Democrats are weak on security and that the party is on the brink of being taken over by uppity negroes and dirty hippies. He made his position quite clear:

"If we just pick up like Ned Lamont wants us to do, get out by a date certain, it will be taken as a tremendous victory by the same people who wanted to blow up these planes in this plot hatched in England. It will strengthen them and they will strike again."

and

"I am committed to this campaign, to a different kind of politics, to bringing the Democratic Party back from Ned Lamont, Maxine Waters to the mainstream, and for doing something for the people of Connecticut. That's what this is all about: which one of us, Lamont or me, can do more for the future of our people here in Connecticut. And on that basis, I'm going forward with confidence, purpose and some real optimism."

The RNC couldn't have written a better set of talking points. But they didn't have to. Lieberman and his cronies have internalized all the anti-liberal propaganda of the last few years and have obviously come to believe it themselves (as have many others of the political class.) He has drawn the lines quite clearly.

Emmanuel's statement really puzzles me which is why I posited that he must be twisting arms behind the scenes. I kind of get why Shumer might hedge his bets because if Lieberman pulls it out there will be a blow job contest of epic proportions to see with whom Lieberman will caucus. (I'm betting it's the GOP. They always take their dates out for lobster and Dove bars before they take them home --- just ask Margaret Carlson.)But Emmanuel stands to lose the whole enchilada if this message that Lieberman is really a Democrat persists.

Less than an hour after Lieberman announced he’d run as an independent, Rep. Rob Simmons, R-2nd District, rushed out a statement praising the senator; Reps. Christopher Shays, R-4th District and Nancy L. Johnson, R-5th District, later followed suit.

All three Republican districts are on every national insider’s list of the 15 to 20 shakiest House seats in the nation. Democrats need a net gain of 16 to win control of the House for the first time since 1992, and polls and pundits see the party as having a good chance.

Connecticut is one of the party’s key targets. Though each of the three Republican incumbents is considered moderate, and routinely opposes GOP leaders on social issues, they all have to defend consistent records of support for President Bush on Iraq and economic issues.

All seemed to be grabbing for Lieberman’s coattails.

Conveying Lieberman as even slightly acceptable is to say that the three endangered Republican congressional representatives' mushy, useless centrism is acceptable too.

And in the big picture is devastating. Rove is obviously going to try to keep the focus on the Connecticut "Dems in disarray" theme and use poor old Joe as the poster boy for the good old days when Democrats were strong and manly. Every day that Joe stays in the race reinforcing GOP talking points is a good day for Republicans. (It's an even better day for them when the Democratic establishment goes wobbly because of a little trash talk on national security.)

None of this is the fault of the Democrats of Connecticut who chose to replace Joe Lieberman. It's the fault of the spoiler who refuses to take no for an answer and is going out of his way to help Karl Rove win in the fall. It is a bad tactic for any Democratic leader to now spit in the faces of Connecticut Democratic voters and imply that their decision doesn't matter. It will help Republicans in Connecticut and beyond. Even worse, the message will demoralize Democrats nationwide just when they are feeling that they might actually be able to effect some change. If Democratic leaders want to suppress Dem turnout in the fall, going soft of Lieberman is the way to do it.



.
digby 8/13/2006 03:25:00 PM |

 
Friends And Allies

by digby


Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime. George W. Bush, September 20, 2001

U.S. and European officials described Pakistan yesterday as the hub of a plot to down transatlantic flights, saying the young British men allegedly behind the planned attacks drew financial and logistical support from sponsors operating in Karachi and Lahore.

At least 17 suspects in British custody for the aviation plot have family ties to Pakistan, and several had traveled there in recent months to seek instructions and confer with unknown conspirators, intelligence officials said yesterday, discussing several elements of the investigation on the condition of anonymity.

Pakistan's government, portraying itself as a reliable ally against terrorism, said it had made at least seven arrests connected to the plot but insisted that the conspiracy was centered in neighboring Afghanistan. Two of the men in custody there were British citizens.

[...]

U.S. intelligence analysts say they believe that the principal remaining leadership of al-Qaeda is hiding in Pakistan. Despite increased cooperation between the Islamabad government and Western powers since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, they say, the number of extremists inside the country may be on the rise and elements of Pakistan's intelligence services remain sympathetic to their cause.

On Friday, the British government portrayed Pakistan's cooperation as vital in undoing the alleged bombing conspiracy, but some U.S. officials said that five years after the Sept. 11 attacks, they are far from countering, or even understanding, the level of threat emanating from Pakistan's lawless regions and bustling cities.

[...]

Two intelligence sources suggested that Pakistan had replaced Afghanistan as a center for terrorist activities and expressed frustration with the attempts of Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, to exert control over huge swaths of territory.

The senior administration official did not play down the problem but insisted that the situation is better today than it was five years ago. "Prior to 9/11, the whole region was a safe haven," the official said. "You see attempts from Pakistan to affect this, but it's still part of a long-term element of our battle against terrorism." Pakistani officials say the country's efforts are sincere and pursued at major cost in lives and money.

Ok. let's be generous here and say that the Pakistani government is doing the best it can. The population is probably the most sympathetic to al Qaeda of anywhere in the world. It's the epicenter of al Qaeda philosophy. It's not easy even for a military dictatorship to deal with this and it's more helpful to have them at least ostensibly on our side than otherwise.

But this makes absolutely no sense at all:

Pakistan is building a new nuclear reactor that could produce enough plutonium for 40 to 50 nuclear weapons a year, a report said.

It said the major expansion of its nuclear program could prompt an intensified arms race in South Asia.

But US officials and congressional aides, who confirmed the Pakistani plan, said it was unlikely to derail a nuclear cooperation accord with India or the sale of US-made F-16 jets to Islamabad.

News of the planned new Pakistani facility was confirmed as the US Congress faced targets for action this week on both an Indian cooperation accord and the F-16s deal.

"We have been aware of these plans, and we discourage any use of that facility for military purposes such as weapons development," White House spokesman Tony Snow told reporters.

He said the administration "discourage(s) expansion and modernisation of nuclear weapons programs, both of India and Pakistan," nuclear rivals who refused to sign the nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.

While US officials knew about the reactor project, congressional aides said the US Congress was largely unaware until a report in the Washington Post on Monday citing an analysis of satellite photos and other data by the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security.

The analysis concluded Pakistan was building a second larger heavy water reactor at its Khushab complex that could produce enough plutonium for 40 to 50 nuclear weapons a year.

Construction apparently began sometime after March 2000.

But the analysis said Pakistan did not appear to be hastening completion, possibly due to shortages of reactor components or weapons production infrastructure.

The administration preferred to keep the project quiet because public disclosure "probably will aggravate concerns in India" as well as on Capitol Hill, one US official said.

Are you feeling safer?

And then there was the inexplicable decision to allow acknowledged nuclear proliferator AQ Khan to skate with a televised apology. This from an administration that continues to make a fetish of ensuring that nuclear weapons do not find their ways in to the hands of terrorists or nations hostile to the US.

So, last week we have what appears to be a rather elaborate but low tech terrorist plot unravelled that shows that terrorists are still operating out of Pakistan. Pakistan is also ramping up its nuclear operations with the knowledge of the administration, which kept that knowledge from the US congress until a couple of weeks ago.

Why is this not considered a problem by anyone in Washington? Do they honestly believe that this combination of al Qaeda, nuclear weapons and a tenuous military dictatorship whose intelligence services are sympathetic to bin Laden is not worth worrying about ---- while we obsess over Iraq and Iran?

Apparently. It's one of those issues that has confounded me from the beginning. Al Qaeda style Islamic fundamentalist terrorism is a real threat. Their methods are designed for maximum effect and are almost guaranteed, if successful, to create a disproportionate and inchoate response. And yet the country that is the hive of such terrorism (with a government police force that is reputed to be sympathetic to it) is considered to be an ally on the par of Great Britain --- which is a target just like the US. It makes no sense and it's one of the primary reasons that we can be sure that the neocons are no more serious about terrorism than they have ever been.

Repeat after me --- these people do not really care about terrorism. They never have. If you read their manifestos from before 9/11, terrorism is a footnote. They ignored Richard Clark and the CIA when they took office. Bush told his briefer on August 6th 2001 "ok, you've covered your ass" when he was told "bin Laden determined to strike in the US." They think that terrorism is only threatening as part of an official nation state apparatus. They are completely rigid in their thinking, refusing to consider new evidence, even decades after they've been proven wrong.

And not only do they not see terrorism as a real threat, their own obsessions with toppling middle eastern states virtually guarantees that terrorism will continue to rise. Their unearned reputation for competence in this area is another case of Republican upisdownism in full effect.



.
digby 8/13/2006 11:38:00 AM |

Saturday, August 12, 2006

 
The Fall Line

by digby

NBC News has learned that U.S. and British authorities had a significant disagreement over when to move in on the suspects in the alleged plot to bring down trans-Atlantic airliners bound for the United States.

A senior British official knowledgeable about the case said British police were planning to continue to run surveillance for at least another week to try to obtain more evidence, while American officials pressured them to arrest the suspects sooner. The official spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the case.

Waiting normally wouldn't have been a problem, but because of the Connecticut primary they had to roll out their new product in August this year.

Update: The plot thickens


.
digby 8/12/2006 06:11:00 PM |

 
Elvis Has Left The Blogosphere

by digby


This one covers just about every piece of braindead conventional wisdom, smug dismissive elitism and shallow political insights it's possible to hit in one short cable TV segment. And it's done with a blatant rightwing slant that obviously feels so natural and comfortable to these bobble heads they aren't even aware of what they're saying. From CNN's "money" show:

SERWER: The blogosphere is always an interesting place to go for a wacky and sometimes wise commentary on major stories. CNNMONEY.com managing editor Allen Wastler joins us now with a closer look on what the bloggers are saying about this new terror threat.

Allen lay it on us.

ALLEN WASTLER, CNNMONEY.COM: This is the blogosphere you just got to love it. People shoot from the hip and go at it. Politics we were talking about earlier in the show, it just boils right in this. It's like distilled for you. And of course the right wing is making the most noise. Check out one of the guess bloggers. Check out this comment. "If you want to believe that George W. Bush and the Patriot Act are the greatest threats to our way of life, you won't have much trouble finding a professor on a nearby college campus to buttress your theory. But its past time we face the facts and realize this is our new normal." That was the position taken by a lot of the right wing siders.

Hey, people want to hurt us. There are terrorists out there, and this is a manifestation of that effect. Now of course, you got the other side, OK. Now the other side was basically, well, the threats out there. But you haven't really been acting that entire well about it. Check this out from America blog. "Bush was briefed about the attack days ago while he was on vacation. And guess what, he stayed on vacation. Sound familiar?" Of course, referencing previous Katrina oops. So you know, they are coming from that point of view and trying to hammer it.

And of course they always accuse the other side. And you can change right and left wing interchangeably here. Because they always accuse the other side of oh, you are playing politics. Now this time it's the left again also from Americablogs. That referencing remembers Dick Cheney commented on the Lieberman/Lamont election before the London plot was revealed to the public. And said that basically Lamont's win would give aid to the al Qaeda types. Here's a comment from Americablog. "Knowing that this story was about to break, Cheney invoked al Qaeda in purely political terms. Once again, Cheney is using terrorism for political purposes."

But, I put it to you, OK. If the administration had messed up and not caught something, would the left wing be putting it to political purposes?

HARRIS: Very good.

WASTLER: You know? It can go either way. And that's what you are seeing on the Internet here. It's sort of distilling this argument.

HARRIS: Allen, I have to ask you, one of the treats sometimes about going to the blogosphere is that you hear all manner of conspiracy theory.

WASTLER: Of course there are always the Republicans. Maybe they released this the going into November elections. I sort of dismissed the conspiracy theory. Just because the conspiracy theory comes out so often, it's kind of like status quo now.

HARRIS: Right.

VALLIERE: If things are so poisonous right now to come full circle. We talked earlier about 1968. This may be the most poisonous political environment since the late '60s. So I've given up. I just look at the economic fundamentals. Don't you guys think that one of the big stories this summer is that interest rates had peaked. Whether you look at housing rate is sensitive, my sense is the worst is over on interest rates.

WASTLER: You get that sense, but I think the Feds will go back to hiking. We haven't seen the interest rate game play out yet. If you look at some of the latest figures, the "Wall Street Journal" surveys this week showing that costs are going up out of the commerce department. You have some of these things I think the Feds are taking a little pause right now, but I think they will have to jump back in maybe one or two more hikes.

VALLIERE: I think Ben Bernanke are pretty dubbes (ph), I think they are going to dominate.

WASTLER: We got a bet, Greg.

SERWER: Of course you can always find a blog who would link Ben Bernanke into some sort of plot tied into something going on in the Middle East that would make Syriana look perfectly sane.

WASTLER: Elvis is always at the center.

I think I just understood something I've previously been unaware of. The financial media are even more stupid and even more blissfully unaware of their stupidity than the political media. It explains a lot.



.
digby 8/12/2006 04:46:00 PM |

 
Bonanza!

by digby


Speaking of Karl Rove being back in the saddle, this has been the most popular story on AOL news for the last 24 hours:

Bush Makes Promise to Dead Soldier's Mom

Says He'll Get Her Reports on How Son Died

CLINTONVILLE, Wis. (Aug. 12) - Nearly three years ago, Beth Karlson's son died in Iraq. Barely a day after meeting with President Bush, the mother said Friday that she's much closer to getting some answers about the incident that killed her son.

"We just got off the phone with the White House. It is in the process," she said Friday. "I am not bashful. When you got his ear, you might as well do something."

Karlson said she was among some families of soldiers killed in Iraq who had private meetings with Bush at an Oneida police station Thursday during his trip to Green Bay that included a fundraiser for Republican U.S. House candidate John Gard.

Her son, Army Staff Sgt. Warren S. Hansen, 36, was one of 17 soldiers killed when two Blackhawk helicopters collided above Mosul on Nov. 15, 2003.

Karlson, 63, said that during her and her husband's "very personal" meeting with the president, she brought up her frustration in obtaining the official Army report about the crash.

Karlson said Bush promised that he would look into the matter and get her the reports.

"It was a very private meeting and that is the way we want to keep it," she said Friday. "He is a wonderful man. How many other presidents have sat down with the families? None that I know of."

[...]

"He said, 'I just love the military. There's just something about military families.' And he thanked us for raising the type of child we did. That's part of what he wrote in the scrapbook," Karlson told the newspaper.

Ok, here we go. Bush the fearless terrorist killer and benevolent Dad is back. It must be election time. Rove thinks he can squeeze out one more win through the bullhorn. They are going full out with a turbo-charged version of their tried and true "Democrats are effeminate pansies and the Republicans are real manly men" campaign. The loving president Dad who manfully "comforts the moms and widders" is a staple of such imagery, making it seems as though attacking him is attacking them.

The constant reference to McGovern is this season's Swift Boat smear. Since Karl doesn't have a single candidate to tar with cowardly Vietnam stories he has chosen instead to run against the fabled "left wing" of the Democratic party circa 68-72. The point is less to convince the electorate than it is to trash talk the Democrats into backing off a harsh critique of the war. And it's remarkably effective. As we can see from countless articles and columns of the past few weeks, nothing sends the timorous insider Dems scurrying like an accusation that the Party is in the clutches of the crazy liberals. The man knows his adversaries.

But the other side of the coin is to present the Codpiece as grown-up contrast and rehab his reputation. Bush is, aftger all, remarkably unpopular and he is what's dragging down the party. Part of the plan requires him and all his minions to swagger and talk tough, of course. But this formulation of the hippie kids running amuck also needs something less confrontational: the patient parent who can calm the waters. Here comes Ben Cartwright, the pops of the Ponderosa whose credo was"A man's never wrong doing what he thinks is right."

I don't think it's going to work again. It's like the third sequel of a bad movie. The hippie extremist plot is absurd, the hysterical dialog is unintentionally funny and the actors are out of shape and looking old. Worst of all, the star is now box-office poison.



.
digby 8/12/2006 12:10:00 PM |

 
Upisdownism Makes A Comeback

by digby

It appears that virtually the entire right side of the political spectrum has chosen to disseminate an abject lie. It's everywhere and it's permeated the media to such an extent that until I signed on this morning and got around to reading the Washington Post even I didn't know it was a lie --- and I tend to pay attention to this stuff. (Imagine how this has slipped into the conventional wisdom among people who only casually tune in.)

Here it is: the British arrests prove that we need programs like the illegal wiretapping and further prove that the press has been irresponsible by reporting about such illegal secret programs. The truth is precisely the opposite. (Glenn will take you through the details.) The British and the Americans followed the laws of their respective countries that require warrants --- and the terrorist plot carried on using telephones and bank transfers long after it was "revealed" in the press that the government was tracking communications and financial transactions.

This has been a memorable week of such deep spin swallowing among the press. The Lieberman loss has somehow been morphed into great news for the Republicans and the thwarting of the terrorist attacks in Britain using legal means supports the president's absolute need to use illegal methods to stop terrorist attacks. We're through the looking glass again people. Karl Rove is definitely back in the saddle.


(And the press corps breathes a huge sigh of relief --- they hate having to report bad news for the GOP. Republicans make their lives a living hell when they do it.)


.
digby 8/12/2006 11:58:00 AM |

 
Keeping Secrets

Reading Scott's discussion of how the UK went about uncovering the recent terror plot (and how the right is trying to lie about it), I was reminded of how difficult it is for three people to keep a secret, let alone 24 or more. Of course, that's not to takeaway from the enormous hard work, and yes, luck, our cousins on the other side of the pond had this time. But the fact remains that keeping secrets just isn't that easy.

One can't expect 100%, certainly. But as I see it, without a doubt the most bizarre aspect of the 9/11 attacks were not that they were imagined and plotted but that they actually happened. Even assuming an incompetent CIA and FBI, there were many, many signs that summer and fall that something was up (start with the 9/11 commission report and work your way through Pretext to War, The One Percent Doctrine, and a slew of other books). But for some strange reason all those signs were missed ignored, failed to rise to the higher echelons. Of course, I would be the last person to suggest that George W. Bush, Condoleeza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld were unspeakably, unforgivably, negligent by ignoring the clear warnings of the Clinton administration on Al Qaeda - complaining about all the attention being focused on "just one man;" snickering, "Okay, you've coverd your ass" when folks from CIA came to brief them.

Actually, I confess it. I just lied to you. I was one of the first to suggest that the Bush administration, through its utter incompetence, bears a heavy responsibility for the carnage of 9/11. I was saying so a few hours after the attacks to my friends from Finland who called to make sure that we were ok.

If nothing else, the exposure of the latest potential atrocity simply highlights how incompetent the Bushites were. No, they didn't "let it happen" and it certainly wasn't a black op to boost Bush in the polls.* It's just that, well, Richard Clarke had been pushed aside, John O'Neill had quit in disgust to manage WTC security, Robert Mueller was the new kid on the block,and John Ashroft was proofreading an arrangement of "When the Eagle Soars" for seven kazoos and musical saw. Meanwhile, many others were simply ignored and let the obsessive, paranoid and quite essential monitoring of bin Laden's activities drop.

That failure to pay attention to reality is a hallmark of the Bush administration.


*I know some commenters disagree, but you'll first have to explain to me how, if this was some sort of nefarious Rovian plot, George Bush was caught on video during the attacks reading "My Pet Goat" to a classroom in Florida. The least we'd expect would be for Bush to be strutting around on in full Commander Codpiece regalia, not flitting in sheer panic all over the country.

No, folks, it was simple stupidity and negligence that enabled bin Laden to wreak havoc in the US - they should have been caught and they could have been if anyone up top had been paying attention. I'll leave open the question as to whether Rove slapped his forehead on 9/11 and exclaimed, "Damn! Wish I'd thought of that!" Even if he didn't - and frankly, I've always assumed that day Carl was probably cowering under a desk somewhere, overcome by the stench of fresh ca-ca in his pants and wouldn't have it together to think of much of anything else - the fact remains that within hours of the carnage, the Bush administration treated the attacks as if it were a gift from God to fastlane the prep for an Iraq War and hasten their intended evisceration of the US Constitution.
tristero 8/12/2006 11:32:00 AM |

 
Conspiracy Theory

by digby


Kevin Drum makes an interesting observation that I haven't heard anyone else voice:

British and American counterterrorism agencies have been tracking 50 al-Qaeda (or al-Qaeda-ish) terrorists for over a year. They were under intensive surveillance the entire time and never had any chance of pulling off their plans. What's more, the investigation has probably provided us with hundreds or thousands of additional leads to keep tabs on.

I wonder: what lesson will al-Qaeda draw from this? Osama bin Laden may be a religious fanatic, but he's not stupid, and my guess is that he'll conclude that in a post-9/11 security environment it's simply impossible to keep a plot this big a secret. There are too many entry points and too many ways for a single mistake to derail the whole thing.

Bin Laden may be fond of big statements, but I wonder if this failure will convince him and his compatriots to think smaller? Is our future now more likely to be full of lots of little attacks rather than the occasional big one?

Big conspiracies are very hard to keep quiet. In Europe and North America at least, stepped up law enforcement has made an elaborate Islamic terrorist plot harder than ever. Kevin's speculation may very well be correct and if so, that is good news. It's not that small bore terrorist attacks are a good thing, mind you, but simply that they have less shock value and are less likely to provoke the kind of mindless desire to lash out that led so many to support to absurd responses like Iraq. If this is true, perhaps we can, over time and with different leadership, deal with this threat more intelligently in the future.

The problem, of course, is talking these bloodthirsty, WWIII wingnut armageddonists down from the ledge.



.
digby 8/12/2006 11:15:00 AM |

 
Reality Check

by digby


Jonathan Schwarz takes a look at reality:

Apparently there's some kind of batsignal for the U.S. punditocracy that tells them all what to write each week. This week their orders are to inform us that the Democrats had better watch out for those far-left elitists like Ned Lamont, who will with their extreme anti-war positions lead them to defeat just like George McGovern did.

[...]

This might make you wonder certain things—like, was opposition to Vietnam the "wealthy, educated" position? I know it's fun to listen to stories from Uncle Dave B[roder], and extremely boring to look at reality. But let's give reality a shot just this once. Here's a Gallup poll from January, 1971:

Check it out. You won't believe what you are seeing. (Hint: "Real Americans" were not the hawks after all.)

And check out the recent polls about isolationism vs internationalism. It looks to me as if people don't know what they are voting for.



.
digby 8/12/2006 10:54:00 AM |

 
Frozen Blogofascists

by digby


Regular readers of this blog know that I used to live in Alaska back in the day. In fact, I worked on the Alaska pipeline --- the one that's drizzling oil all over the tundra right now. And I'm sad to report that Alaskans are in the process of one of those horrible leftist purges we've been hearing so much about. The state's Republican Governor, ex-Senator Frank Murkowski, looks like he's going to lose the Republican primary.

I know it's shocking to see all those leftwing hippies of the Alaska Republican party be so short sighted as to oust a man with decades of experience in both Washington and Juneau, but they won't listen to reason. For some reason these Stalinist conservatives are unhappy with their Republican Governor.

He has many problems, the most recent being this oil leak which is not only harmful to the environment (Alaskans expect their oil company landlords to take care of the land) but it's costing the Alaska permanent fund billions in lost revenue --- which translates to dollars not coming into residents' pockets at the end of the year. He froze state hiring which is a major source of employment in Alaska.

The voters are also angry that he made a secret deal with the energy companies for lucrative natural gas pipeline that greatly benefitted the companies and screwed Alaskans. He failed to fulfill his campaign promise to get ANWR passed (all those friends in high places, you know.) He appointed his daughter to the Senate which still doesn't sit well with a lot of people. Mostly, he's seen as being in bed with George W. Bush.

There is a strong military presence in Alaska with many retirees taking up residence there. It's one reason why Alaska has become such a strong red state. It's odd that they would vote against a good solid Republican like Murkowski but the numbers seem to show that they are. I'd love to know why.

Finally, Murkowski is behaving strangely and doesn't make sense half the time. I don't find this unusual among powerful Republicans, but Alaskans are evidently concerned.

Now I know that Murkowski losing his seat in a Republican primary is an affront to all that is decent and good in our system and that Democrats should be ashamed. This goes without saying. All Republicans' problems are obviously a result of the crazed blogofascists taking over the Democratic party and pushing it to the left.

Still, if one were to look at this from another angle --- you know, like it's 2006 rather than 1972 --- one might see that these primary losses portend a general sense that people are very unhappy with the status quo which, in case nobody's noticed, is Republican rule.

Oh and by the way, Murkowski is currently coming in third in that Republican primary.


Here's a story on the pipeline leak from the LA Times.


.
digby 8/12/2006 09:28:00 AM |

 

How Things Work
(Alternate title: Me and My Oil)

by poputonian

I'm not as smart as President Slaughterbush and the neocons, but I wonder what came first in their collective minds: the realization that America was dependent on oil, and therefore the US had better come up with a plan to convert it to its own control, or that by virtue of its value, oil would eventually put too much cash into the hands of a 'hostile' culture, and therefore the 'hostile' culture should be force-assimilated into America's 'things-that-glow' way of life? It's one of those chicken and egg conundrums.

So consider what the stakes are if America is unable to gain control of the oil and the economy slips into a deep recession. First, everyone would have to give up their picture cell phones and go back to the old kind without pictures. Then, we'd have to return to a normal diet by giving up two-thirds of our 6,000 calories per day. Americans would lose weight making them healthier, which would cause a drop in physician incomes, which would then cause the luxury car market to collapse. Since it's a trickle-down economy, the average suburban home would go from 4,000 square feet to less than half that.

Without money to buy liquor, alcohol consumption would drop leading corporations to withdraw their television ads from ballgames, and since ad revenue drives the sports industry, the salaries of our athlete-gods would drop precipitously to under a million a year. When the athlete-gods raped women, they would have to hire ordinary lawyers, who would be less likely to get them off scot-free, so the whole sports industry would collapse. As corporate income fell overall, business control of government would slip and the politicians' fee-income derived from business relationships would dry up.

God, it would be hell.

All these things make up our way of life, so it really doesn't matter who the oil belongs to. It's ours. Really. If your conscience bothers you, try the Republican mantra: It's all about me. It's all about me. It's all about me. It's all about ...

I mentioned that President Slaughterbush was a smart guy. As proof, take note that he has moved way up the intellectual food chain from My Pet Goat. Watertiger has the details.

poputonian 8/12/2006 06:33:00 AM |

Friday, August 11, 2006

 
Let The Ego Soar

by digby


So Bob Kerrey is going to campaign for Lieberman. This is not surprising. He was Lieberman before Lieberman was Lieberman --- a grandstanding, narcissistic pain in the ass.

Clinton had to twist a lot of Democratic arms and bow and scrape before a lot of inflated Democratic egos, but Kerrey was in a class by himself:

August 7, 1993

With Vice President Al Gore casting the tie-breaking vote, the Senate gave final Congressional approval tonight to President Clinton's five-year economic program.

This means that the budget plan, the most important legislative issue of the Clinton Presidency so far, cleared Congress by the narrowest possible margin and awaits only the President's signature before becoming law. Enactment of the legislation was viewed at the White House as essential to Mr. Clinton's ultimate success as President.

The outcome was in doubt until Senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, the last Senator to announce which way he would vote, declared on the Senate floor at 8:30 P.M. that he would support Mr. Clinton.

At the White House today, Mr. Clinton met for more than an hour with Senator Kerrey in the morning and spent much of the rest of the day on the telephone thanking Democrats who had voted for his plan in the House of Representatives.

After the Senate vote, President Clinton emerged from the White House to greet cheering supporters who had gathered at the front steps.

"This was not easy, but real change is never easy," he told them. "After 12 long years, we can say to the American people tonight, We have laid a foundation for a renewal of the American dream."

[...]


George J. Mitchell of Maine, the Democratic leader, declared: "The American people want change. They voted for change last year. And tonight we're going to deliver change. President Clinton has given us a fair plan. I say it's fair to give him a chance."

But Senator Pete V. Domenici of New Mexico, the top Republican on the Budget Committee, said the increased taxes in the program would devastate the economy.

[...]

Mr. Kerrey, the swing vote, played Hamlet all day.

At 6 P.M., White House officials and Senate Democratic leaders said that they believed Mr. Kerrey was on their side but admitted that they did not know for sure. At 7:55, his fellow Nebraskan, Senator J. James Exon, indicated to the Senate in a speech that he did not know how Mr. Kerrey would vote.

When Mr. Kerrey announced his position to the Senate, he said he did not trust the Republicans to improve the economy if he decided to vote with them to kill Mr. Clinton's plan. Addressing the President, he declared, "I could not and should not cast a vote that brings down your Presidency."

Mr. Kerrey had called the President at the White House only moments earlier to inform him of his decision. After their meeting this morning, Mr. Clinton called Mr. Kerrey in the Senate cloakroom to urge him once again to support the plan.

"Obviously, the President's very happy about Senator Kerrey's vote," Dee Dee Myers, the White House press secretary, said tonight after the announcement.

[...]

Senator Kerrey was perhaps the most critical of plan among those who voted for it. "My heart aches with the conclusion that I will vote 'yes' for a bill which challenges Americans too little," he said.

[...]

Unlike the House members, many of whom were on the fence when the debate began, all senators but Mr. Kerrey had announced how they would vote before today. It is safe to say that no one's position was changed by any one else's speech.

What a pleasure it must have been to deal with him --- kind of like dealing with Britney Spears before she's had her first Dr Pepper.

Kerrey went on to make an ass of himself many times over the next few years. And he and Lieberman (along with the sainted drunk Moynihan) have a long history of being santimonious, self-centered pricks together:

While they were thoughtful and measured, Mr. Lieberman's remarks were the most pointed of any Democrat thus far, and threatened to undermine an intense drive by the White House and leading Democrats to contain the political fallout from Mr. Clinton's disclosure two weeks ago that he had had an improper relationship with Ms. Lewinsky.

The Senator's comments immediately prompted two of Mr. Lieberman's Democratic colleagues, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York and Senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, to break their silence and rise to the Senate floor to praise Mr. Lieberman -- and offer more bristling words for the President. And Republicans, including the Senate majority leader, Trent Lott, lauded Mr. Lieberman's for what Mr. Lott termed his ''moral compass.'

Maybe all these egomaniacs can join the "Unity" party. They'll be so busy shoving each other away from the mirror they won't have time to muck things up the way they usually do.



.
digby 8/11/2006 06:25:00 PM |

 
With Us Or Agin Us

by digby


I guess the wingnuts are finally doing what they have been wanting to do since 9/11: demonize all muslims, especially Americans, who disagree in any way with Bush. (Welcome to our world!) Yglesias points out that this is a very stupid thing to do since you can't deal with Islamic fundamentalism without the help of Islamic moderates.

This other thing where "Muslim moderate" means something like "agrees with the National Review's take on American national security policy" is just to generate a world where you could fit all the world's Muslim moderates into Fuad Ajami's living room and have a nice party. There's no reason to look at the world like that, but doing it seriously does risk transforming a manageable terror problem into an overwhelming one.

That's precisely the point. It appears that warporn works the same way regular porn often does; the more someone watches it the wilder the stimulation they need. The right's bloodlust can't be sated with fevered thoughts about al Qaeda and Iraq anymore. (And those wars haven't really given them much of a release.) They need "the big one."



.
digby 8/11/2006 03:16:00 PM |

 
Depending On The Breaks

by digby

Newtie's got a stomach churning op-ed today called "The Only Option Is To Win" in the Washington Post. I would suggest that everyone take him quite seriously. There is a lot of pressure on the right to conform with this line of thinking and these ginned up crises tend to force their acceptance for a long enough time that there's no turning back. Lest we forget their boy still has his finger on the button:

Holbrooke has set the stage for an important national debate that goes well beyond such awful possibilities as Sept. 11-style airliner plots. It's a debate about whether we are in danger of losing one or more U.S. cities, whether the world faces the possibility of a second Holocaust should Iran use nuclear or biological weapons against Israel, and whether a nuclear Iran would dominate the Persian Gulf and the world's energy supplies. This is the most important debate of our time. It rivals both Winston Churchill's argument in the 1930s over the nature of Hitler and the Nazis and Harry Truman's argument in the 1940s about the emerging Soviet empire.

Holbrooke indicates that he would take the wrong path on American national security. He asserts that "containing the violence must be Washington's first priority."

As a goal this is precisely wrong. Defeating the terrorists and thwarting efforts by Iran and North Korea to gain nuclear and biological weapons must be the first goal of American policy. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, if violence is necessary to defeat the terrorists, the Iranians and the North Koreans, then it is regrettably necessary. If they can be disarmed with less violence, then that is desirable. But a nonviolent solution that allows the terrorists to become better trained, better organized, more numerous and better armed is a defeat. A nonviolent solution that leads to North Korean and Iranian nuclear weapons threatening us across the planet is a defeat.

This piece is explicitly coming out against any kind of containment. (Naturally, since containment worked in the cold war and is thus discredited as are all things that turn out in retrospect to have been right.) Note also how he says "if they can be disarmed with less violence that would be desi