This is no Way to Organize Chaos.

It can't be repeated enough that these people believe women are nothing more than baby-making machines with no capacity for making moral choices. That is what underlies this pig's argument that feminism is "a minority social movement, whose members murder innocent children in order to obtain sexual gratification."

For only a self-interested amoralist would murder for pleasure, right? When one believes, with no evidence to support it, that feminists desire "abortion on demand," it becomes easier to argue that women are incapable of making moral decisions. That leaves it up to the men, which reinforces a social pattern of gender-based hierarchy and power. And of course, that is the feminist critique in the real world. Feminism's contribution to our understanding of the human condition is to point out that subtle barriers exist between men and women that manifest themselves as power in the social world. It isn't a prescription for matriarchy, but a prescription for social equality.

Conservatives believe that creating social equality is an artificial process, which explains the intellectual roots of antifeminism. Cruder conservatives, such as the one quoted above, don't take the human nature high road and instead take offense at female autonomy in general. And since it is hard to seriously argue that women and men should be unequal in the social world, regressive conservatives resort to demonizing women. In fact, the reprehensible "definition" cited above even incorporates a couple Deadly Sins (lust, wrath) for good measure.

I think the key thing to remember about the pro-life movement (as distinct from the antifeminists) is that they value the nine-month long existence of the embryo/fetus more than the human being that gives it life in the first place. And as soon as it is born, that favoritism disappears in a tidal wave of movement conservatism that bankrupts public schools, opposes maternity rights for women, and abhors the idea of a social safety net. I find that so warped that I can barely get my mind around it. Surely this derives from the notion that the soul enters the body the moment conception is achieved, yet it is a soul that cannot make decisions until it is released from its mother's womb where it can then make personal choices that are supposedly unaffected by the social environment. Then the evangelicals come to save you. Or something like that.

And most important, the mother is lost in this process. Was her pregnancy desired? Accidental? The result of ignorance? The product of a terrible crime? Apparently none of these things matter. Only that embryonic soul matters. And I find that appalling and disgusting. The issue is entirely about women controlling their own bodies. Period. Either they have that right--and it is a right--or they don't. If you're remotely modern in your thinking, you support legal abortion. If you're not, then you construct rhetorical traps of varying sophistication to argue that women can't make that decision and that the process should be illegal. Criminalizing women. What an ugly legacy for the political philosophy once known as "conservatism."

Posted by morte at 11:56 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Is Bill O'Reilly illiterate or is he simply unaware that newspapers print stories on page one both above and below a fold that greatly reduces the size of the periodical for shipping?

My suggestion is that O'Reilly should read Sun Tzu and gain insight by learning about his enemies. Since the NY Times is on his official enemies list, he could have taken Tzu's advice and learned that the Times prints page one stories both above and below the fold.

But really, this is quite unbelievable. This guy attracts millions of viewers with pure, grade-A bullshit. In fact, it barely qualifies as bullshit at all. It is either a total lie or an admission of utter ignorance. What an inspiring figure to get political "news" from.

UPDATE: The full story about the JFK plot appeared in the 'metro' section of the Times although it is clearly referenced below the fold on page one. O'Reilly, of course, could have argued that the Times should have devoted more attention to the story, running it in its entirety on the front page but instead his deliberately misled his viewers into thinking there was no mention of it at all on the front page. Regardless, O'Reilly isn't really interested in the editorial decisions at the New York Times, he's interested in finding evidence of "liberal bias" and that by not hyping the story, that bias becomes tantamount to treason or fellow-traveling with terrorists. That's the real story here, not that some idiots thought they could cripple the United States by bombing JFK airport. The would-be plotters were morons, and perhaps that's why O'Reilly considers them such a threat: they're as dense as he is.

Posted by morte at 11:45 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

...should Hillary Clinton win the Democratic nomination. And even though this is being promoted by the internet gossip Matt Drudge, who is not a journalist, it derived from a story that first appeared in the Boston Herald, which I assume does employ journalists (the Herald has since corrected the photographic error).

Countless other stories with the theme "Democratic superficiality" have appeared this year. Expect this to intensify next year, but also become focused on the presidential candidate. Its going to be a circus of epic proportions and I think at some point a large portion of the public is simply going to be disgusted by mass media coverage of the race for the most important elected office in the world. That doesn't mean the death knell for mass media, nor the ascent of blogs as an alternative, but rather that people will stop watching trash news and start getting information on their own through the internet.

I'm not holding my breath, mind you. But if turnout is high next year, which it almost certainly will be, that cannot coexist with a nonparticipating public that tunes out both news and voting. I lean towards the possibility of a not insignificant portion of the public realizing that information can easily and quickly be obtained online and thus avoid going through the paparazzi filter of shitty mass media (i.e. cable news).

Posted by morte at 11:30 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Many of us have felt betrayed by Bush's original campaign promise to be a "uniter, not a divider" in light of the war in Iraq and several thousand other efforts by the administration to rule with 51%. But check out the unity that Bush has spawned:

Many adults in the United States believe the coalition effort will still be active when the second term of their current head of state expires, according to a poll by Zogby Interactive released by UPI. 93.3 per cent of respondents think U.S. troops would still be in Iraq when U.S. president George W. Bush leaves office.

Posted by morte at 12:09 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I find this interesting. Snippet from a CNN segment with Laura Ingraham:

INGRAHAM: By the way, John, how did you introduce me for this segment before the break. The outspoken Laura Ingraham. Do you guys introduce liberal commentators that way? I'm going to check.

1 : to excel in speaking
2 : to declare openly or boldly

In other words, it appears that Ingraham was highly conscious of who the audience would be, or at least her perception of who the audience would be (i.e. liberals). Likewise, when she knows or thinks that her audience is going to be conservatives, the meaning of everyday words changes for her. And ultimately, this is what I find fascinating: being a modern political commentator often entails the utilization of two distinct dictionaries which are called upon depending on the venue. I don't think this is exclusive to conservatives or to liberals but I will say that wordsmithing is something conservatives rely upon heavily to shape the political conversation. It would follow that they would be more inclined to posses the dual-dictionaries than their liberal counterparts.

Posted by morte at 11:18 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Gee, there's an idea: having an occasional opinion segment on the nightly news that is clearly identified as such with an anchor who isn't a White House stenographer.

There may yet be hope for the news.

Posted by morte at 4:32 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Bill O'Reilly, doing his part to ensure the dominance of white, Christian, males:

Bill O'Reilly: But do you understand what the New York Times wants, and the far-left want? They want to break down the white, Christian, male power structure, which you're a part, and so am I, and they want to bring in millions of foreign nationals to basically break down the structure that we have.

O'REILLY: But he's got a very -- how important in this world is Romney's appearance? Which, I mean, you can't get more presidential looking than Mitt Romney.

I mean, look, if you were to make up a guy, this would be the guy, you know, that looks presidential. He's got the jaw going on, the little gray thing in there. And I think that means a lot in America.

Of course, none of this applies to Democrats, who are routinely treated as effeminate:

“Do you think, uh, do you think, Jill, he’s had cosmetic surgery around the eyes, below the eyes? What do you think? … You don’t want to talk about that one? Everybody’s so afraid of that one, but I think there’s some work been done. It looks pretty good actually.”

Fortunately its not universal. I have never felt threatened as a white, agnostic male because my identity doesn't have anything to do with being white, male or agnostic. Apparently it does bother others, something I'll never understand.

UPDATE: And if you're a female Democratic politician, God help you. Enlightening quotes from the forthcoming Carl Bernstein book about Hillary Clinton:

“‘At first, she didn’t wear stockings….Her hair was friend into an Orphan Annie perm….There wasn’t one…feminine thing about her.’” (p. 130)

“Hillary’s weight was a regular topic of conversation, spurred by her inability to shed the few pounds that would have made her more attractive.” (p.130)

“Many colleagues of the Clintons had concluded that Hillary was not as intrinsically bright as her husband.” (p. 274)

“[S]he was no longer wearing her trademark headbands…she had ‘zipped her lip’ and now gazed lovingly and silently at her husband from a wifely vantage point.” (p. 208).

Posted by morte at 2:03 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The Bush administration continues to break new ground:

While the political world obsesses over whether Attorney General Alberto Gonzales can survive the outcry over the politically motivated dismissal of eight United States Attorneys, the legal academy has been debating a different aspect of the fallout:

Could a case be made that the chief law-enforcement officer of the United States should be disbarred?

But that won't happen, which means there are no consequences for what has happened the last six years. No one's fault. Nothing to see here. Let's just move along.

Shameful.

Posted by morte at 1:57 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I've said it before and I'll say it again. We're not dealing with a rational president. He's not going to take the advice of Baker-Hamilton. He's not interested in the survival of the GOP. The September deadline is bullshit. In the words of Homer Simpson, he's "Commander Cuckoo-Bananas."

Friends of his from Texas were shocked recently to find him nearly wild-eyed, thumping himself on the chest three times while he repeated “I am the president!” He also made it clear he was setting Iraq up so his successor could not get out of “our country’s destiny.”

20 more months to go.

20

Months.

Posted by morte at 1:46 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday I noted Andrew Sullivan's observation that the Bush administration's term "enhanced interrogation techniques" used to describe torture originated with the Nazi regime in Germany. (Read my post for all the usual Nazi analogy caveats.) I also noted the, shall we say, irony of the people who claim we're in the middle of fighting "World War IV" against totalitarian ideologies using the same techniques of those totalitarian regimes to get results. And wouldn't you know it: not only are we using the interrogation techniques of our World War II enemy, but now we're using the reverse-engineered interrogation techniques of our World War III (Soviet Russia, in case you lost track) foe:

Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) is a program designed to train U.S. soldiers to withstand torture if they are ever captured as prisoners of war. Developed during the Cold War, U.S. solders are subjected to techniques based “on how the Soviet Union and its allies were believed to treat prisoners,” including “prolonged use of stress positions, exposure to heat and cold, sleep deprivation and even waterboarding.”

A recently declassified investigation from the Department of Defense’s Inspector General confirms “how the military training was ‘reverse engineered‘ for use by American interrogators,” training interrogators on more “effective” ways to elicit information

Posted by morte at 1:31 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The Bush administration has done many things to damage America and one of my chief interests has been the damage it has done to the ideal of political conservatism. I do not know how many self-described liberals or progressives actually care about conservatism's fate but they should. Understanding the transformation of political conservatism in this country over the last 40 years is, in my opinion, the single most important and lasting change to occur in our political culture since the New Deal.

And of course, there would be no conservative movement without the New Deal. Postwar conservatism is a reaction to and, as a political movement, reaction against the liberal welfare state conjured up by FDR and his brains trust in the 1930s. Since relief of economic disaster was immediately followed by response to a military crisis, there wasn't much traction to the idea of seriously challenging the liberal consensus until after the war. It is no accident that the seminal books of the conservative movement would appear at or soon after the war's end, notably The Road to Serfdom (1944), Ideas Have Consequences (1948), The Conservative Mind (1953) and most important, the magazine National Review (1955). The books argue that there is an alternative to the liberal welfare state (classical liberalism) and further that the ideas and theories underpinning political liberalism have had disastrous consequences for American civilization, political freedom and even Western Civilization itself. And with Kirk's exploration of the roots of the conservative mind and National Review's demonstration that conservatism could be taken seriously again, the stage was set for mounting an assault on the theoretical as well as political foundations of liberalism.

All of this is important to understand the current dilemma conservatives find themselves in. Important criticisms of the Bush administration have been growing in frequency, quantity and intensity from the right for some years now. Yet many self-described conservatives continue to support Bush and enthusiastically support whoever will emerge as his more right-wing successor. The obvious question is, "who are the real conservatives?" I make the distinction between the genteel, aristocratic and intellectual conservatives who founded the postwar movement and the more populist, jingoistic and authoritarian conservatives who are the foot soldiers of the subsequent political movement. Given this basic division, the question isn't one of "who is the real conservative," it is "which is more dependent on the other?"

In the 1950s and early 1960s, the conservative intellectual movement was critical to the later successes of the political movement. They provided the theoretical foundations that would generate credible challenges to liberalism and peel off converts like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Irving Kristol, Henry "Scoop" Jackson and most significantly, Ronald Reagan. They founded the magazines that would allow conservative ideas to flourish and develop. They organized and networked and created college and youth organizations that gave identity to the next generation. I must agree with Richard Weaver's conclusion that ideas do indeed have consequences.

But without political power, conservatism was only theory, not practice. That all began to change with the political movement that sprung up around Barry Goldwater first in 1960 and with greater impact in 1964. A dispassionate assessment of Goldwater's politics reveals that he was a classic libertarian, socially and economically. But he gave a face to a movement ripe for leadership. He was, as his ghost-written book was appropriately titled, the "conscience" of conservatism. And while the intellectual movement was largely supportive of Goldwater's candidacy, their aristocratic tendencies instinctively recoiled at the bottom-up popular support of his constituents. Lasting damage to the movement could be caused not only by Goldwater himself--whose propensity for gaffes and off-the-cuff remarks were legendary--but by his supporters who were dedicated, ravenous and sometimes dangerous and deranged. National Review had to decide what to do with the John Birch Society, for instance, which promoted such absurdities as Dwight Eisenhower being a communist conspirator. Ultimately the magazine took the wise step of denouncing Robert Welch, the Society's founder, personally, so as not to alienate the Birchers themselves, who were a necessary component towards electoral victory.

For well documented reasons the Goldwater campaign was a disaster that resulted in a landslide victory for LBJ. Also well documented is the triumphalism of liberal journalists, academics and pundits. The "center" held. The "end" of ideology had been achieved. The liberal consensus was here to stay, a permanent fixture of American political life. They were all wrong. Conservatism had not been defeated in 1964, only Goldwater; the movement itself had been triumphant, decisively shifting the center of power in Republican politics away from the Northeast to the South and the Southwest. The conservative populists now ran the party machinery, disciplined by their work on the Goldwater campaign. And they even had a future spokesman, the ex-liberal, smooth talking, fatherly and reassuring natural, Ronald Reagan. He had supported the Goldwater campaign and successfully presented himself the the public days before the election in the televised "A Time for Choosing," which not only displayed the conservative vision with eloquence, but even caused, according to some reports, observers to wonder whether he or Goldwater was the candidate.

During the 1970s conservatives were busy building the alternative think tanks, message machines and political foundations that would form the basis of their power and influence today. And a new generation of conservatives, some activists, some intellectuals, started careers which were not shaped by the postwar ennui of conservatism, but were forged when liberalism was conspicuously in decline. The tension, in my view, never disappeared from these two groups, and what emerged was the sense that conservatism was not only historically, morally, intellectually and factually correct, but that it also was in the public sentiment. Reagan's victory in 1980 created this illusion. It wasn't an electoral realignment, but a political realignment within the Republican party which had occurred. But today's conservatives--young and old alike--seem unable to see past the Reagan mythology that has been deliberately erected in place of his actual record.

On account of this, the scales have only fallen off the eyes of those whose allegiance was always to conservative puritanism; that is the ideals of the movement. They see that George W. Bush is not a conservative and has in fact done the opposite of what a pure conservative would do. Some have come late to this conclusion, deceived as many were, by the aftermath of 9/11. And now that conservative government, as it were, is demonstrably a total failure and disgrace, conservatives must grapple with that fact. Today, the columnist George Will attempts to do just that, making his "Case for Conservatism." I was eager to see how Will, a Reagan-era conservative aristocrat, would argue for returning to conservatism's roots. I was disappointed, to put it lightly. This column reads as though it was written in 1979, when these ideas were somewhat fresh, not 2007, when those ideas have been totally discredited. It is an essay that asks us to forget Bush (who isn't mentioned once) and dutifully works to conjure up every stereotype about the liberal welfare state imaginable. In an article supposedly about salience--he is, after all, making a political argument--his arguments are vintage 1970s: bureaucratic waste; government dependence; interest group dominance; arbitrary egalitarianism. But we are not living in the 1970s. We are living in a world that has been shaped--again, unprecedentedly in my opinion--by the very conservative movement Will was part of. This is ignored. The liberal welfare state and Democratic interest groups, apparently unchanged since the 1930s, are still the paramount problem. Savor this vintage prose:

Conservatism's recovery of its intellectual equilibrium requires a confident explanation of why America has two parties and why the conservative one is preferable. Today's political argument involves perennial themes that give it more seriousness than many participants understand. The argument, like Western political philosophy generally, is about the meaning of, and the proper adjustment of the tension between, two important political goals -- freedom and equality.

Steadily enlarging dependence on government accords with liberalism's ethic of common provision, and with the liberal party's interest in pleasing its most powerful faction -- public employees and their unions. Conservatism's rejoinder should be that the argument about whether there ought to be a welfare state is over. Today's proper debate is about the modalities by which entitlements are delivered. Modalities matter, because some encourage and others discourage attributes and attitudes -- a future orientation, self-reliance, individual responsibility for healthy living -- that are essential for dignified living in an economically vibrant society that a welfare state, ravenous for revenue in an aging society, requires.

Hence liberalism's goal of achieving greater equality of condition leads to a larger scope for interventionist government to circumscribe the market's role in allocating wealth and opportunity.

Racial preferences are the distilled essence of liberalism, for two reasons. First, preferences involve identifying groups supposedly disabled by society -- victims who, because of their diminished competence, must be treated as wards of government. Second, preferences vividly demonstrate liberalism's core conviction that government's duty is not to allow social change but to drive change in the direction the government chooses.

But that was then. Macho foreign policy has led to Iraq and the costs of that hubris reach deep into the future. "Supply-side" economics has reacquainted middle and working-class Americans with the term "Gilded Age." And conservatives have been at the helm of government for over a decade. People know Republicans are responsible for the deep hole we find ourselves in and that is why self-identified Republicans have plummeted in recent polls and about 70% of the country thinks we're on the wrong track. But for George Will, recent history does not exist. He is, and perhaps always was, living in the 1970s when the conservative movement was about to triumph. Bush is the culmination of the conservative political movement and for Will to ignore that fact is effectively for him to deny it. And denial, perhaps more than anything else, is the defining feature of contemporary conservatism and that which must be overcome if they are to be viable politically again.

Posted by morte at 10:09 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Determined to protect the meat industry's right to poison you.

Is it 2008 yet?

Posted by morte at 1:18 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Continuing their slide into the televised version of the National Enquirer, CNN decides they need a reporter dedicated to coving Britney Spears and Michael Jackson. Presumably this is an effort to compete with Fox and their tireless coverage of Anna Nicole Smith who, apparently, is still dead.

And in other news, professional bigot Glenn Beck's ratings are worse than when he started. The Most Trusted Name in News is experiencing a serious identity crisis if they think people are interested in this shit.

Posted by morte at 11:48 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

From Andrew Sullivan:

Critics will no doubt say I am accusing the Bush administration of being Hitler. I'm not. There is no comparison between the political system in Germany in 1937 and the U.S. in 2007. What I am reporting is a simple empirical fact: the interrogation methods approved and defended by this president are not new. Many have been used in the past. The very phrase used by the president to describe torture-that-isn't-somehow-torture - "enhanced interrogation techniques" - is a term originally coined by the Nazis. The techniques are indistinguishable. The methods were clearly understood in 1948 as war-crimes. The punishment for them was death.

That rather large caveat aside, what we have here is an administration that has (likely) unwillingly adopted the language of a totalitarian regime that represents the antithesis of liberal democracy, indeed a component of a larger struggle against ideology that neocons refer to as a series of world wars. To call this ironic doesn't begin to capture how flawed the neocon worldview is. And as Sullivan notes, these very techniques were deemed criminal by the 1948 war crimes tribunal. Conveniently, neocons abhor all efforts towards international law precisely because they impede the power of states to act as they wish in their own interests. It causes one to wonder exactly what sort of world these people want to live in. America's moral standing in the world--whether you think it is justified or not--was earned. It isn't a God-given right. To claim moral superiority and enforce it on others while adopting a realpolitik of moral relativism is the height of hubris. It captures everything that is wrong with American foreign policy under Bush. And for the NY Times to headline an article, "Interrogation Methods are Criticized," demonstrates how far we need to come back from the dark recesses this administration has taken us in thinking this is just business-as-usual.

Posted by morte at 10:45 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I pick on Fox News a lot, but I also argue that they're bringing down the other cable news networks to their level. For example, CNN's daring inquiry into whether blacks or Latinos "work harder."

Fucking shoot me now.

Posted by morte at 3:33 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I'm too tired to hack apart another bad column today--especially Tom Friedman--so I'll leave this one to Ezra Klein.

Posted by morte at 2:29 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Over at NR's Corner, Jonah Goldberg describes "Designer Vagina Surgery" as another milestone on the road to the "End of Civilization."

Surely this would be defended by Goldberg as tongue-in-cheek humor, but remember, in conservative fantasyland, women are nothing more than baby-making machines who lack the mental powers to make moral decisions, even including the right to do what they wish to their own bodies.

Never forget that.

Posted by morte at 2:15 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

My two previous posts talk about what constitutes good journalism. Perhaps you agree or disagree. But allow me to cite several examples of bad journalism, all on the same day, and all on the same subject of the GOP candidates' credibility on national security matters, or lack thereof. First from The Politico:

But, like Dwight Eisenhower's in 1952, Giuliani's national security stature after the Sept. 11 attacks more likely explains his continued popularity within the religious right, whose voters have long held hawkish positions on the issue.

And perhaps it already has been internalized. Here's some gasbag on MSNBC:

HARWOOD: Well look, Keith, I think those answers by both McCain and Giuliani help both men perhaps in the primary and in the general election for different reasons. McCain`s core message is toughness, and that I`m tough enough that I can go against my party on this issue. Why? Because I`ve been in combat. I`ve been tortured myself, as you mentioned.

Rudy Giuliani also has a bit of a claim to combat in a different way, because he was on the ground in 9/11.

Finally we come to Richard Cohen, second only to David Broder as the Washington Post's crown jewel for unsubstantiated delusions. Writeth Cohen:

Years ago, someone coined the term "neoliberal." I was never sure what it meant, and it has since fallen into disuse, but whatever the case, I'd like to revive (and mangle) the term and apply it -- brace yourself -- to George W. Bush. He's more liberal than you might think.

An overriding principle of conservatism is to limit the role and influence of the federal government. Nowhere is this truer than in education.

Similarly, let's take a look at the much-mocked notion of diversity. Bill Clinton was widely berated for his effort to have an administration that looked like America -- women, African Americans, Hispanics, you name it. Whether by design or not, Bush has also managed that feat. A female education secretary is one thing, but a national security adviser -- the uber-macho post -- is something else, and that went first to Condi Rice. And over at Justice, Bush chose Alberto Gonzales, the son of Hispanic migrant workers and, incidentally, a lawyer with the singular gift of forgetting meetings he attended.

Allow me to make the case that this is also true when it comes to Iraq. I acknowledge that the war is a catastrophic mistake and was incompetently managed. But if you don't think it was waged on behalf of oil or empire, then one reason for our involvement was an attempt to do some good -- rid the world of a really bad guy and make life better for Iraqis and others in the region. This "liberal" intent may have left Dick Cheney cold and found Don Rumsfeld indifferent, but it appealed to Bush and it showed in his rhetoric and body language. Contrast it to the position of the so-called foreign policy realists, exemplified by the first President Bush and his trusted foreign policy sidekick, Brent Scowcroft.

I can't follow through on this. That last one made my head hurt too much. These wise, wise, pundits have given me far too much to think about...

Posted by morte at 12:10 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I'd like to note a couple of items from the weekend.

First, the indispensable Paul Krugman sets the standard all op-ed columnists should follow:

Here’s the way it ought to be: When Rudy Giuliani says that Iran, which had nothing to do with 9/11, is part of a “movement” that “has already displayed more aggressive tendencies by coming here and killing us,” he should be treated as a lunatic.

When Mitt Romney says that a coalition of “Shia and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda” wants to “bring down the West,” he should be ridiculed for his ignorance.

And when John McCain says that Osama, who isn’t in Iraq, will “follow us home” if we leave, he should be laughed at.

But they aren’t, at least not yet. And until belligerent, uninformed posturing starts being treated with the contempt it deserves, men who know nothing of the cost of war will keep sending other people’s children to graves at Arlington. (emphasis mine)

Most people, I realize, don't follow politics that closely. And although I wish they did, I'm not going to hold them responsible for their ignorance. People rely upon the news for information about the world. But when the regular statements of the GOP presidential candidates are treated as nothing out of the ordinary, repeated uncritically, then the news has failed to inform. You don't simply write what they said; a tape recorder can do that. You provide context and analysis that explains the meaning of those statements. Some people call this "bias" but I would respond that if you are incapable of passing your own judgment on news analysis without resorting to the bias charge, then you possibly deserve to be ignorant. Accusations of bias seem to me a lazy way of saying, "I disagree with this, but I can't explain why, so the reporting must be biased."

But I digress. Krugman's opinion ought to be paired with this piece in the Boston Globe that discusses the very same subject. The professional standards of journalism prevent its author from saying that the candidates are lunatics, ignorant or ripe for ridicule, but he doesn't need to. Simply reading the facts, one can come away with that conclusion themselves. Thinking for oneself isn't that hard.

In the May 15 Republican debate in South Carolina, Senator John McCain of Arizona suggested that Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden would "follow us home" from Iraq -- a comment some viewers may have taken to mean that bin Laden was in Iraq, which he is not.

Former New York mayor Rudolph Guiliani asserted, in response to a question about Iraq, that "these people want to follow us here and they have followed us here. Fort Dix happened a week ago. "

However, none of the six people arrested for allegedly plotting to attack soldiers at Fort Dix in New Jersey were from Iraq.

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney identified numerous groups that he said have "come together" to try to bring down the United States, though specialists say few of the groups Romney cited have worked together and only some have threatened the United States.

"They want to bring down the West, particularly us," Romney declared. "And they've come together as Shia and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda, with that intent." (emphasis mine)

But critics, including some former CIA officials, said those statements could mislead voters into believing that the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks are now fighting the United States in Iraq .

Michael Scheuer , the CIA's former chief of operations against bin Laden in the late 1990s, said the comments of some GOP candidates seem to suggest that bin Laden is controlling the insurgency in Iraq, which he is not.

"There are at least 41 groups [worldwide] that have announced their allegiance to Osama bin Laden -- and I will bet that none of them are directed by Osama bin Laden," Scheuer said, pointing out that Al Qaeda in Iraq is not overseen by bin Laden.

The belief that there is a clear connection between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks has been a key determinant of support for the war. A Harris poll taken two weeks before the 2004 presidential election found that a majority of Bush's supporters believed that Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks -- a claim that Bush has never made. Eighty-four percent believed that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had "strong links" with Al Qaeda, a claim that intelligence officials have long disputed.

But critics have maintained that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney encouraged these ideas by using misleading terms to describe the threat posed by Iraq before the war.

Bush, for instance, repeatedly spoke of Hussein's support for terrorism -- which many Americans apparently took to mean that Hussein supported Al Qaeda in its jihad against the United States. The administration, however, sourced that claim to Hussein's backing of Palestinian terrorist groups targeting Israel.

Posted by morte at 11:22 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

An interesting post at the Times' politics blog:

Psychologists coined the term “pluralistic ignorance” in the 1930s to refer to this type of misperception — more a social than an individual phenomenon — to which even smart people might fall victim. A study back then had surprisingly found that most kids in an all-white fraternity were privately in favor of admitting black members, though most assumed, wrongly, that their personal views were greatly in the minority. Natural temerity made each individual assume that he was the lone oddball.

A similar effect is common today on university campuses, where many students think that most other students are typically inclined to drink more than they themselves would wish to; researchers have found that many students indeed drink more to fit in with what they perceive to be the drinking norm, even though it really isn’t the norm. The result is an amplification of a minority view, which comes to seem like the majority view.

In pluralistic ignorance, as described by researchers Hubert O’Gorman and Stephen Garry in a 1976 paper published in Public Opinion Quarterly, “moral principles with relatively little popular support may exert considerable influence because they are mistakenly thought to represent the views of the majority, while normative imperatives actually favored by the majority may carry less weight because they are erroneously attributed to a minority.”

What bothers me incessantly is how elite pundits (and certain politicians, but that's another story) selectively use the "will of the people" to back up their claims. For instance, if a poll shows a solid majority of people on one side of an issue that is contrary to the held opinion of a pundit, that pundit will argue that their "judgment" is better. And when the opinions of the public and the pundit are in sync, the pundit will point to those polls to show that everyone is wise. So I don't care if a pundit behaves like an elitist, as long as they're consistent about it. You're either a populist or an aristocrat, so choose.

Of course, there is a third, superior, option: analyze the situation correctly in the first place. Back up your opinion with fact. Show me that you've thought about the issue and arrived at a conclusion. Too many opinion columns rely upon some orthodoxy or false assumptions or dated theories and that degrades the quality of the analysis. And in elite journalism (actually, ANY journalism) this is even more important because what you're ostensibly doing is providing facts, not opinion. Yet assumptions sneak in and taint the work. This isn't about achieving some ideal of objectivity, it's a process of qualifying information. Vetting sources. Reaching learned conclusions. Relying on experienced editors to fix mistakes. That's what good journalism is all about. And by this criteria, there's no reason why partisanship should be excluded. As long as the facts are correct and verifiable, the political leanings of the news source don't really matter. Their interests are simply going to be liberal/progressive or conservative and that should be transparent. Which is why Fox's "we report, you decide" mantra is so insulting. As I've said time and again, I don't care if Fox is a conservative news outlet. Everyone knows that. But they insist on gilding themselves with the veneer of journalistic objectivity, which is clearly an illusion. Add to that their tendency to confuse fact and opinion and their reliance upon poor sources (other right wing fanatics) and its easy to see why Fox is such a sham. And it is depressing that other news organizations saw what Fox was doing and decided, "me too."

There's no one solution to this problem because there's no one source. And there's no use in pining for a bygone day when journalists were courageous heroes because no such day existed. The Woodwards and Bernsteins of the past stood out precisely because they were the exception, not the rule. And likewise today. It starts with bucking conventional wisdom and that can come from anywhere, whether professional reporters or bloggers. As long as these people exist and can make an impact, journalism can be saved from these myriad problems. And while larger institutional changes are no doubt imminent, it will always be quality reporters and their editors that make the difference.

Posted by morte at 4:37 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I realize the title is redundant, but it's important to emphasize and repeat that these activists want to live in the Dark Ages.

In other words, the conservative position on women is that they are not fully human. They are merely baby-making machines.

I think I'll have that drink now...

Posted by morte at 1:56 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Bush reminds us that he is the only thing standing between our children and the scary terrorists.

I swear there's something in the air today that is making people say and write stupid things. Of course, Bush is immune because whatever's in the air only affects the minds of adults.

Posted by morte at 12:12 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The Maverick shows up for work.

I wonder if he'll show up for the Iraq funding supplemental vote, given that he has based his entire presidential campaign on extending and expanding the War.

Posted by morte at 12:05 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

George Will, discussing immigration:

To those who say border control is impossible -- often these are the same people who said better policing could not substantially reduce crime, until it did -- one answer is: It took just 34 months for the Manhattan Project to progress from the creation of the town of Oak Ridge in the Tennessee wilderness to the atomic explosion at Alamogordo, N.M. That is what America accomplishes when it is serious.

I'll discuss Broder's column fantasies after a few stiff drinks...

Posted by morte at 11:42 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

What are we living in here, the Dark Ages?

Gay men are still banned for life from giving blood, “leaving in place — for now — a 1983 prohibition meant to prevent the spread of HIV through transfusions.” The Food and Drug Administration’s ban prevents an estimated 62,300 gay and bisexual men per year from donating blood, despite the Red Cross calling the policy “medically and scientifically unwarranted.”

On its website, the FDA attempts to justify the 24-year-old rule by arguing that current HIV testing cannot always pick up right away when someone is HIV positive

Posted by morte at 10:16 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I don't have anything to add to the Liberty University bomb-thwarting story, and I think my views on the episode are clear. For the sake of reference, Rick Perlstein goes into the question of right-wing terrorism a bit deeper, and Max Blumenthal looks at the would-be bomber's MySpace diary for motivations. And of course, Dave Neiwert helpfully puts together these strands of right-wing extremism and terrorism to point out the obvious: they're much more common than anything "foreign," whether home-brewed or external.

Oh hell, I might as well chip in. I don't give a damn about these people's causes, other than understanding what motivates them. But when an individual or an organization crosses the line and uses violence to make a statement, political or otherwise, they are engaging in terrorism. It's really that simple, folks. That's why I don't consider ELF or PETA terrorists: they haven't gone beyond vandalism to my knowledge. Certainly felony offenses have been committed but it has not yet reached the level of murder or any of its legal cousins (manslaughter, etc.). The day it does, those individuals responsible become terrorists. And the groups they belong to also become terrorists if they endorse or do not denounce the actions of those individuals.

Pretty simple definition. A clear dividing line. And the real story is that while the wingnuts amplify and shriek over every instance of Islamic conspiracy that is uncovered, they never talk about the more advanced domestic terrorism practiced by their Christian Nationalist cousins. And I'm not singling out the Christian Nationalists. I'm not singling anybody out. And if you've been paying attention, that's my whole point: identifying terrorism is a non-partisan activity.

Posted by morte at 3:13 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Digby:

Perhaps these two views of "pleasure" actually represent the essential difference between the parties --- conservatives get off on power and believe it should be kept private and unaccountable to the public and liberals get off on sex and believe it should be kept private and unaccountable to the public. You tell me which one upholds the constitution and which one threatens it.

The right wingers are unable to make this distinction. This explains why they are not shocked by Bush's flagrant flaunting of the law. It is, in fact, what fuels their identity. So while Digby's observation is simple and needs unpacking, it is nonetheless true regarding conservatives and power.

Posted by morte at 1:55 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I have zero tolerance or even sympathy for plagiarism. This article about Google's decision to ban ads from companies that sell pre-written essays, theses and dissertations (!) contains the industry's cry that the move is "unfair." If I have no sympathy for the plagiarists, then I have even less for the business that provide pre-fab writing. It is unethical and cheapens the academic experience. If university is just some means to an end (a degree) and the experience of education means nothing to you, then why wouldn't you simply buy your way through? People like this don't belong at university. And I find it appalling that companies actually exist that provide welfare for these shallow individuals.

I guess I'm just in a testy mood today, but this sort of thing disturbs me deeply.

Posted by morte at 11:05 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Mitt Romney continues to baffle me. In a new campaign ad, he essentially says "fooled you, suckers!" to the state that elected him governor for one term. Trying to figure out why this excites the mind of the wingnuts is equally baffling.

Why do the Republican candidates continue to do things that are guaranteed to make them lose big in 2008? Good riddance.

Posted by morte at 10:44 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

If I have to read one more goddamn Maureen Dowd column where she essentially gossips about the physical features of a Democrat without saying anything substantive...

I hear the National Enquirer is hiring. This garbage is perfectly suited to that page, not the New York Times which, despite its faults, remains America's best daily newspaper. It is a serious periodical unsuited to this trash Dowd writes. I'd rather have a double dose of Friedman and Brooks than an ounce of Dowd's tired cliches and pathetic insights.

Posted by morte at 10:14 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Benedict XVI style:

ROME, May 23 — Pope Benedict XVI tried today to quell anger in South America over his recent comments on the conversion of native populations there, acknowledging today that “unjustifiable crimes” were committed in the European conquest of the continent five centuries ago.

Speaking in Italian to a weekly audience here, the pope said that it was “not possible to forget the suffering and the injustices inflicted by colonizers against the indigenous population, whose fundamental human rights were often trampled.”

In a speech in Brazil last week, the pope sparked controversy by saying that native populations had been “silently longing” for the Christian faith brought to South America by colonizers.

“The proclamation of Jesus and of his Gospel did not at any point involve an alienation of the pre-Columbus cultures, nor was it the imposition of a foreign culture,” he said in Brazil.

I don't know if this is a new trend, but in general I have observed that conservatives--throughout the world, not just in the US--continue to test the waters, to publicly advocate backwards sentiment and then are rebuked by solid majorities of people and the efforts of organized activists. Is this an effort to reorient the conversation so people return to thinking that we must civilize the savages, or that women are incapable of moral decisions, or that our Western heritage is under assault by "the left?" These are all sentiments conservatives seem to share, to name a few, and if they really think the world hasn't moved on, then they are even more out-of-touch with reality than I thought. Real conservatives, in my view, accept gradual change, and from that perspective, America and the world is gradually progressing. Almost imperceptibly gradual. But progress is progress. What bothers me about self-proclaimed conservatives (especially in America) is that they desire no change or worse, desire regression. Talk about advocacy of social engineering!

There's a very good reason why I use anachronisms such as "civilizing the savages" to title these posts. I want the unvarnished truth of these sentiments to be on display. When Dinesh D'Souza writes about kinship with Islamic fundamentalists, it should be clearly stated that he believes in the ends of Islamic terrorism. When neocons talk about the need for bombing Iran, we must be clear that their intent is to subjugate and annihilate a people. Nothing more, nothing less. And when presidential candidates and their frothing-at-the-mouth supporters say immigration is the greatest threat to our Western Civilization, it must be clarified that they simply don't want brown people living in White America. And the more brazen these comments get, the more candid, the easier it becomes to thoroughly denounce and marginalize these people for what they are: backwards, racist, misogynist regressives who are incapable of living in the modern world. If I had a time machine, I'd give it to them. But since I don't I'll do everything in my power to show exactly what these people represent. And it ain't conservative in any sense I understand, that's for sure.

Posted by morte at 9:49 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Liberty University style.

A small group of protesters gathered near the funeral services to criticize the man who mobilized Christian evangelicals and made them a major force in American politics -- often by playing on social prejudices.

A group of students from Falwell's Liberty University staged a counterprotest.

And Campbell County authorities arrested a Liberty University student for having several homemade bombs in his car.

The student, 19-year-old Mark D. Uhl of Amissville, Va., reportedly told authorities that he was making the bombs to stop protesters from disrupting the funeral service. The devices were made of a combination of gasoline and detergent, a law enforcement official told ABC News' Pierre Thomas. They were "slow burn," according to the official, and would not have been very destructive.

Also deservant of mention: what does this incident say about the charge that secular society was responsible for the Virginia Tech massacre? To me, the evidence continues to mount that politicized religious movements--East and West--are inherrently antagonistic to the ideals of liberal democracy.

Posted by morte at 8:11 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Among all the travesties of the Bush administration, none are worse on the domestic front than the rampant politicization of government by Karl Rove. This takes many dimensions, including the imperial presidency, warrantless wiretapping, indefinite detention and torture, but also includes nefarious efforts to utterly destroy any political opposition (the Democratic party) using the power of the Justice Department to chase imaginary "voter fraud" cases. But the resources of the federal government are vast, so why stop with Justice? Watch this exchange between Lurita Doan, head of the General Services Administration and the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee back in March. If you don't feel disgust at this political hack's refusal to admit that she took part in a deliberate politicization of government, then I don't know what to say.

If you do feel disgust--which I'm sure all of you will--then take heart that the GSA has determined that Doan violated the Hatch Act, and soon the courts will be dishing out steaming bowls of rich, creamy justice. Think Progress has the goods.

Posted by morte at 4:48 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Andrew Sullivan on Fox News:

Until recently, my view has been that the Democrats were foolish to boycott FNC. I think you should go on any media channel to make your case, as Hitch did recently to great effect. Now, I'm not so sure. When a news channel has sunk to these depths of deliberate disinformation, they are no longer a news channel.

Posted by morte at 3:51 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Paul Krugman proves again that he is an invaluable columnist, and latches onto the idea that conservative ideology is the key to understanding all the failures of conservative government:

These are anxious days at the lunch table. For all you know, there may be E. coli on your spinach, salmonella in your peanut butter and melamine in your pet’s food and, because it was in the feed, in your chicken sandwich.

Who’s responsible for the new fear of eating? Some blame globalization; some blame food-producing corporations; some blame the Bush administration. But I blame Milton Friedman.

Why would the administration refuse to regulate an industry that actually wants to be regulated? Officials may fear that they would create a precedent for public-interest regulation of other industries. But they are also influenced by an ideology that says business should never be regulated, no matter what.

The economic case for having the government enforce rules on food safety seems overwhelming. Consumers have no way of knowing whether the food they eat is contaminated, and in this case what you don’t know can hurt or even kill you. But there are some people who refuse to accept that case, because it’s ideologically inconvenient.

As with public corruption, the root cause is the same: adherence to an ideology that is premised on dismantling the government. And despite its origins, the conservative movement that fuels all of this is anything but conservative. Krugman and Perlstein and the liberal blogosphere can't be the only ones to point this out if America is to decisively throw "conservative government" in the ditch.

Posted by morte at 12:21 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I guess we're staying in Iraq until the new guy (or gal) takes over in 2009.

And let's be honest: Democrats can only do so much with their thin Congressional majorities. Significant defections from the GOP in the form of votes to end the war are the only way Congress can force Bush's hand and thus far I don't see much willingness on the part of Congressional Republicans to decisively turn their back on the Commander Guy. And I don't put much stock in Republican hand-wringing over their Bush problem if they're not willing to vote the same way they talk in private.

So I don't blame the Dems in Congress. But that's not to say they can't be more aggressive. They should continue reintroducing their funding bill every month, forcing Bush to come to them for money. And each time there will be a vote. And each time the American people will see that Republicans consistently voted to continue the war, and Democrats consistently voted to end the war (with the usual exceptions, of course). And that will stick in their minds on Election Day 2008. I know that sounds crass, using a war vote to shore up political points but I don't see how else people are going to recognize that Republicans should never be given great power again. They got us into this mess, refuse to take responsibility for it, and should therefore pay the price at the polls.

Dark times we live in.

Posted by morte at 4:24 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

From Reason's March 2006 Iraq Progress Report:

Louis Rossetto

1. Did you support the invasion of Iraq?

Yes, both the one that didn't happen in 1991 and the one that did in 2003. But Iraq is not the war, it is a battle. The war is The Long War against Islamic fascism.

2. Have you changed your position?

If anything, I believe even more strongly in actively combating Islamic fascism throughout the Global Village. Everyday is Groundhog Day for the anti-war movement, which is stuck re-protesting Vietnam — while we are confronted by a uniquely 21st century challenge: a networked fascist movement of super-empowered individuals trying to undo 50K years of social evolution. Waiting to get hit by an NBC weapon is not an option. Dhimmitude for me or my children is not peace. Righteous forward defense is a necessity.

3. What should the U.S. do in Iraq now?

The US should persevere militarily until we defeat the fascists in Iraq, as we did in Afghanistan, as we must everywhere. The US's biggest failure has not been on the battlefield — where we are relentlessly reducing our enemies — but in waging media war against the Islamists and their fellow travelers on the Left, and in rallying the American people, who are confused, and perhaps angered, that once again we are being called upon to save the world.

Louis Rossetto is the founder of Wired magazine

I guess I'm still shocked that people can be this stupid and still be successful in business. I'm also amazed that people like Rossetto think tribal violence is something that was created on the morning of 9/11, or in his words, "a networked fascist movement of super-empowered individuals trying to undo 50K years of social evolution." Ever read a history book? Life was, and has been, brutal for most people for centuries.

UPDATE: This post should have been a segue into a proper dissection of David Brooks' column in todays NY Times. Brooks' argument is basically the same--technologically savvy "insurgents" are going to "defeat" the nation-state--but is more sophisticated. And by sophisticated I don't mean that it is any more convincing. It isn't. I simply mean that Brooks does a masterful job of masking his intents (credit where credit is due) whereas people like Rossetto are, shall we say, less subtle.

Posted by morte at 3:40 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Is Paul Krugman the only columnist in America who understands what Bush, the Republican party and the conservative movement have wrought upon America?

But the leading contenders for the Republican nomination have given us little reason to believe they would behave differently. Why should they? The principles Mr. Bush has betrayed are principles today’s G.O.P., dominated by movement conservatives, no longer honors. In fact, rank-and-file Republicans continue to approve strongly of Mr. Bush’s policies — and the more un-American the policy, the more they support it.

But aside from John McCain, who to his credit echoed Gen. Petraeus (and was met with stony silence), the candidates spoke enthusiastically in favor of torture and against the rule of law. Rudy Giuliani endorsed waterboarding. Mitt Romney declared that he wants accused terrorists at Guantánamo, “where they don’t get the access to lawyers they get when they’re on our soil ... My view is, we ought to double Guantánamo.” His remarks were greeted with wild applause.

In appointing unqualified loyalists to key positions, Mr. Bush was just following the advice of the Heritage Foundation, which urged him back in 2001 to “make appointment decisions based on loyalty first and expertise second.” And the base doesn’t mind: the Bernie Kerik affair — Mr. Giuliani’s attempt to get his corrupt, possibly mob-connected business partner appointed to head the department of homeland security — hasn’t kept Mr. Giuliani from becoming the apparent front-runner for the Republican nomination.

What we need to realize is that the infamous “Bush bubble,” the administration’s no-reality zone, extends a long way beyond the White House. Millions of Americans believe that patriotic torturers are keeping us safe, that there’s a vast Islamic axis of evil, that victory in Iraq is just around the corner, that Bush appointees are doing a heckuva job — and that news reports contradicting these beliefs reflect liberal media bias.

Posted by morte at 11:18 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

We've now had a couple chances to see the GOP presidential candidates stand together and debate and the results have been highly disturbing. While their counterparts in Congress can't wait to shuffle off the Bush albatross, the presidential candidates continue to argue with each other over who will go further than Bush. And there's only one reason they're taking this seemingly counterintuitive route: the bloodthirsty conservative base demands it. As was aptly demonstrated in the Tuesday's debate, offering oneself as a tyrannical president consistently yielded whoops and cheers from the ignorant authoritarians present in the audience. And when one candidate suggested something reasonable--maybe US foreign policy has something to do with Middle Eastern terrorism--a livid Rudy Giuliani let loose an incoherent barrage of violent options for dealing with the Islamofascists, to the mass-rally cheer of the 25%ers Fox News gathered to hear the debate.

This spectacle of authoritarian xenophobia and demagoguery got me thinking back to my longstanding prediction about Gingrich and McCain being the two candidates most likely to win the nomination and what led me to that conclusion. With regards to McCain, his earlier inevitability as a front runner along with his unwavering support for the War and its escalation signaled to me that he could easily capture a major chunk of the GOP voting base. Events since then have demonstrated a McCain campaign that has repeatedly shot itself in the foot and erased any advantage that inevitability might have had. And in a crowd of candidates that all want more war, more torture, less liberty and more authority, there's just nothing to make McCain stand out.

My inability to recognize that the GOP candidates would distinguish themselves by being worse than Bush also clouded my judgment about Gingrich. I assumed, in the wake of a conservative movement deep within an identity crisis, that Gingrich would represent a return to conservative ideals that firmly repudiate Bush conservatism. My mistake was in assuming that these principled conservatives would be politically engaged. Rather it has been the most bigoted and bloodthirsty elements that are leading the charge. And the candidates are giving them red meat by the truckload. Whether it is abortion, war, homosexuality or immigration, the response has been unblinking power, slavish authoritarianism and exclusionary policy. This is nothing but the war cry of conservative white Christian males who demand that they rule the globe. And the candidates are giving them just that. How is Newt to compete? Sure, he holds many of these views himself, but how is supposed to distinguish himself from the rest of the pack? Indeed, that is the major problem with each of the GOP candidates. The consensus amongst people like me who analyze politics (professionally or otherwise) is that Giuliani's lead in the polls is due to his early adoption of the authoritarian model. From the get-go he was the pro-torture, pro-war, anti-liberty candidate whose entire candidacy rested upon his 9/11-forged mythological image. That is why Rudy's social liberalism is so far irrelevant to the base. His promise to use the presidency as a position of tyranny is enough for the 25%ers. If he held orthodox right wing views on abortion, gun control and immigration, he would already be the nominee.

This is all to say that I've had to rethink my predictions. It isn't clear who the nominee will be, and that is due to the candidates' group decision to throw general electability to the wind and run campaigns that cater exclusively to a distinct minority of the country. I didn't expect the candidates to go this far right, in other words. And actually, I'm glad they are taking such reprehensible and unpopular positions. It forces the GOP into a corner and hastens the crackup that has been in the works for the past couple years. It's better for the public at large to see exactly what conservatism has become and decisively reject it rather than to delay the inevitable.

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At the end of an otherwise good (if too late) column on the Bush administration's politicization of American government and a parallel project in Iraq reconstruction, Tom Friedman writes:

Democrats need to be careful, though, that they don’t let their rage with the hypocrisy of Mr. Bush make them totally crazy, and blind them to the fact that they — we — still need a credible plan to deal with the very real threat to open societies posed by Islamist terrorism. But I understand that rage. After all, who can ask more soldiers to sacrifice their lives in Iraq for an administration that wouldn’t even sacrifice its politics?

I don't get this. Why is everything that is bad for Republicans worse for Democrats? You could almost set your watch to this lazy assumption on the part of our elite journalists.

Posted by morte at 11:40 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Glenn Beck is a bigoted, xenophobic ignoramus who hosts a shitty show that no one watches. CBS, on the other hand, sees ratings gold.

...and poor Katie is slumping in the ratings. So obviously the cure is to give some right-wing asshole his own show.

I'm speechless.

Posted by morte at 12:42 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

For all the talk that timetables allow the enemy to simply wait for our defeat, it is rarely recognized that timetables are discussed all the time in public without nary a worry about the repercussions. Of course these timetables aren't serious--the "we'll know in X months" variety--so there is no reason for the enemy to take them seriously. This begs the question of why unserious timetables are allowed to be discussed with impunity by the likes of Joe Lieberman and John McCain and John Boehner and whoever else wants to stay in Iraq forever, but serious timetables--those that would actually end the war--are considered borderline treason.

I'm starting to think that collectively America doesn't know a thing about actual warfare, and instead only knows how to discuss it as if it were sport. This isn't the sole fault of any one person or institution or organization, but this perverse tendency to treat war as a game between good guys and bad guys is deeply disturbing. I'd wager that it is the product of regarding war as the best foreign policy option, rather than the last foreign policy option.

Posted by morte at 11:28 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The way people complain about anonymous commentators on the internet reminds me of how people react to guerrilla movements--someone isn't playing by the rules. However, this suggests that anonymous commentators on the internet have some sort of powerful influence over other people yet chose to hide behind a handle while dishing out their opinions. This isn't too hard to figure out, people. Arguments should be and often are judged on the merits of their argument. If someone's "argument" is to hurl insults without any substantive analysis behind it, then ignore it. No one ought to take such bullshit seriously, and no one does. Its really that simple.

I'll use myself as an example. You may not find my name on this site anywhere, but a little research (I hear they have this thing called "the google") will demonstrate that I am perhaps semi-anonymous; I don't offer much personal information about myself yet do not take pains to hide that information either. The fact is that no one has any reason to know who I am because my impact on the political conservation is minimal, virtually non-existent. Greater blog fame and riches would change that posture, as it should. But the whole exercise of anonymity for me is to strip away who I am in favor of the arguments and analysis I present. And if I insult a few people along the way in order to amuse myself and, hopefully, my readers, then so be it.

The only thing the internet has done that is remotely "revolutionary" is to make it very easy for public strangers--anonymous people whose identity is irrelevant to the argument they make, if they make one--to speak their mind in a way that may or may not be amplified by internet technology. Successful blogs amplify one or a handful of voices who are not anonymous and amplify the voices of hundreds or thousands of other people who might as well be anonymous. And like any sort of man-on-the-street commentary, it is going to be a mixed bag, quality-wise. But journalists who wring their hands over this phenomenon need to develop thicker skin and worry about doing their job better, rather than what anonymous people say on the internet. And if some anonymous person makes a valid point, you better acknowledge it, even if it is disagreement, or you run the risk of perpetuating the stereotype that journalists are elites who are protecting their privileged turf from the crude and vulgar masses of the anonymous internet.

Anonymous people have anyways had opinions. Those opinions are now somewhat more prominent. I don't understand see why this is suddenly considered a new thing.

Posted by morte at 10:41 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Frank Rich has a typically good column in the Sunday Times that points out the obvious disadvantages the GOP faces in a post-Bush era. But he fails to really connect the dots. After noting the homogeneity of the candidates, their tendency to talk more about Reagan than anything else and their general superficiality, Rich rattles off a top-of-his-head list of cabinet-level departments that have suffered for either "corruption, incompetence, and contracting or cronyism scandals" before stating the obvious:

Wrongdoing of this magnitude does not happen by accident, but it is not necessarily instigated by a Watergate-style criminal conspiracy. When corruption is this pervasive, it can also be a byproduct of a governing philosophy. That’s the case here. That Bush-Rove style of governance, the common denominator of all the administration scandals, is the Frankenstein creature that stalks the G.O.P. as it faces 2008. It has become the Republican brand and will remain so, even after this president goes, until courageous Republicans disown it and eradicate it. (emphasis mine)

And there is no reason why it should be otherwise. Republicans in particular and the conservative political movement in general have been building for the past thirty years a network of counter-establishments that prepare young counservatives for politics, not government. Conservatives don't study social science or public policy and planning. They study how to politicize government services (i.e. to sell them) that are market-based, faith-based or almost any alternative to having the government provide it. Yet these New Deal, Great Society and even Nixon and Reagan-era institutions still exist and must be staffed. The point at which Bush arrived on the scene saw the waning of old moderate conservatives and Republicans who might be tapped for government service and not seek to eviscerate it. In their place were younger and much more ideological conservatives who were given enormous responsibilities for which they had neither the inclination or ability to carry them out effectively.

And that is what is lacking in Rich's analysis. But Rich isn't the problem. No one with a prominent voice in our news media is really underscoring that conservatism no longer has anything to do with fiscal responsibility, good government or preserving the strength of the body politic. That form of conservatism--true conservatism--has been replaced by fiscal recklessness, corrupt and incompetent government, and a pattern of weakening the United States in almost every imaginable way. A few already privileged people profited from this. Most everyone else did not. And it is high time that our news media--which suffers from its own host of problems--clearly state this. Conservatism is broken. And whatever has replaced it is ugly. It can't govern, and it panders to either the very worst elements of society (the racists, bigots and xenophobes) or the very well off (we'll call them "Country Club Republicans"). And as Rich rightly notes, appealing to Reagan reminds people that GOP is trying to sell its candidates to itself, not the American people, who will decisively reject them en masse next year.

Posted by morte at 7:28 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Recently I referred to Mitt Romney as something of a ditz for some uniformed comments he made about French marital law and Saddam's WMD. I mused whether he actually believes this stuff or if he is just transparently pandering to the GOP base, a question I have yet to answer. Then today on the NY Times politics blog I read this:

“In my opinion, the science class is where to teach evolution, or if there are other scientific thoughts that need to be discussed,” he said. “If we’re going to talk about more philosophical matters, like why it was created, and was there an intelligent designer behind it, that’s for the religion class or philosophy class or social studies class.”

Two things amaze me: that these questions are relevant to a presidential campaign and that the candidate most desperate to prove his conservative credentials is the voice of reason. Strange times.

Posted by morte at 10:50 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Glenn Greenwald goes to great lengths to explain that the bias in the media isn't right or left, its biased towards authority.

This is so fundamental, so important to understand. The reason so many pundits are clueless and so many journalists write such horrible stories is because they are trying to approximate in words the power structure they see around them. The DC power structure. That is why lefty bloggers don't spend much time on local journalism -- the problem is with the Beltway journalistic elite who write, essentially about "their" town and the people in it. These people inhabit a world that has been institutionally assaulted by conservatives for a quarter century so it's hard for them to remember that it wasn't always this way. Likewise for a previous generation weaned on Lippmann, the power structure they saw had been crafted by the era of liberal dominance stretching from the New Deal to the Great Society. Is it any wonder that conservatives saw a bias and set about creating their own counter-establishment?

Of course, the conservatives of the 50s and 60s never called it the "authority bias;" they called it the "liberal media" because the object of the press' authority bias was the liberal establishment. Today, there has been a lot of cross-pollination between the old establishment media and its conservative counterpart which suggests a "conservative bias" in the media. And yes, there are a lot of right-wing voices out there, much more than in the 60s. But the dynamic is the same. Authority is what elite journalists are drawn to, and despite their personal biases--which we all have--it is what influences their worldview more than anything else.

Posted by morte at 3:32 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Ezra Klein reminds us that Clinton won with a populist approach, even if it was hitched to a DLC "New Democrat" platform. Matt Yglesias clarifies, noting that the two weren't distinct and separate, but really more of a synthesis.

This is really the point I've been making about populism: it is a winning strategy, not an ideology. Conservatives didn't win in 1980 because of their ideology, they won because of the way their ideology was pitched--as a populist message. Likewise, Clinton didn't win because of the DLC approach by itself, but because it was married to a populist delivery. Its also important to bear in mind that Perot received the votes he did not because of his stand on policy, or the personal wealth he could use to make himself viable, but because of who he was: an outsider challenge to the two-party DC elite.

Yet the populism magic only works when there is the perception of a problem in society. Lydon Johnson didn't win with a populist message, he won because he ran on the prosperity he credited to himself and Democrats' rule. And prosperity (or at least the perception of it) surrounded the 2000 election. Nothing is more symbolic of this than the budget surplus, and while Bush talked about the surplus in populist terms (it's your money!) I think that voters were torn between continuing the good policy of the Clinton years (vote for Gore) or making what appeared to be minor changes (Bush's "compassionate conservatism"). Thus the election was close. 9/11, the War on Terror and Iraq removed populism from the equation and replaced it with time-tested demagoguery. And even with that Bush barely won. Now that most people have belatedly come to realize that they've been fucked by the GOP, Bush and the conservative movement, they are ripe for a new populist message. Obviously this message will take into account the War, the looming economic problems, health care and a host of other issues, on all of which the Democrats are largely on the right side of the fence. I'd like to say that guarantees them a default victory next year but if they want a landslide and durable majority, they need the populist message. Unfortunately, with Clinton and Obama being "inevitable" the media interpretation of the race dominates. But as I've stated before, that's just as much part of the problem as the GOP. And the sooner Democrats figure that out, the better off they'll be.

Posted by morte at 3:09 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Some day I'll come up with a more succinct way of saying this, but I think it is important to note that the sort of generalized populism I have been advocating is directed not only against political elites (i.e. the GOP) but also the journalistic elites who have greatly expanded conservative populism's reach. Case in point, this snippet from Glenn Greenwald:

Beaming after the Columbia event, Gravel walks with [Newsweek's Jonathan] Alter to a nearby Cuban restaurant for a late lunch. On the way they encounter a gray-haired gentleman in owlish glasses. Alter greets him very respectfully. "This is Tom Edsall," he says. Edsall was a senior political writer for the Washington Post for 25 years. He retired from the paper in 2006 and now writes for the New Republic and teaches at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.

Gravel smiles broadly and says, "Hey, can you straighten out David Broder?" Broder, an influential columnist at the Post and the unofficial godfather of the D.C. press corps, has been a target of much criticism from liberal blogs for seeming to provide political cover for Bush on Iraq, even with a majority of Americans now opposing the war. "He doesn't believe in the power of the people!" Gravel says.

Edsall blinks and looks perplexed. "David Broder is the voice of the people," he replies matter-of-factly. Gravel starts to smile, assuming Edsall is making an absurdist joke. But Edsall is not joking. The two men look at each other in awkward silence over a great gulf of unshared beliefs, then Gravel chuckles and walks ahead into the restaurant.

Posted by morte at 3:30 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Question: for what purpose do large armies serve? I ask this in response to several presidential candidates' call for increasing the ranks of the military. Now this seems like a no-brainer politically. You get to look tough on security, you get to support the troops, and you get to give the impression that you have a foreign policy. The problem is that large armies really only serve two functions. In the first, a large army is a deterrent. During the Cold War, regardless of the bellicose effects, one could make a strong argument that having a large army ready to go was a wise policy choice. Even prior to the great wars of the 20th century, states had large armies (by the standards of the day) and fought constantly because war was even more the cornerstone of foreign policy than it is today. In other words, having a large standing army was a defensive deterrent and absolutely necessary for offensive imperialism.

The second reason you might have a large army is because you expect to use that manpower for military occupation. As we have seen in Iraq and countless other historical examples, the war isn't over until you can militarily pacify the capital of the state you occupy. That is why the military victory in Iraq ("Mission Accomplished") was very shallow: it only satisfied the goal of toppling the old regime. And since occupation was the word that dared not speak its name in the runup to the war, we were deluded into thinking that less than 200,000 troops would be sufficient to pacify Iraq. If the war planners had been honest about their objectives, or if they had not been blinded by the Rumsfeld Doctrine of small armies, Iraq might have been stabilized rather quickly, in theory. But since the United States has been in a relaxed state of military readiness following the collapse of the Soviet Union, it made no sense to recruit a large army during the 1990s. There simply wasn't a force available that was sufficiently large enough to occupy a country the size of Iraq.

So what are these calls for larger armies all about? If large armies are only useful for defense and occupation, then is that what the foreign policy goals of Giuliani, McCain, Clinton and Obama are? Fighting terrorism does not require large armies, certainly not the size necessary for defense or occupation. It seems to me that these candidates are still buying into the war on terror shell game initiated by Bush and the neocons after 9/11. By defining the enemy in military terms, a military response is appropriate. But anyone who knows the history of terrorism and how it functions realizes that it is a response to the power of large states, their economic might and military power. If Al Qaeda had a standing army of 500,000 men, they wouldn't be terrorists. Understanding how to deal with terrorism without resorting to overwhelming asymetrical force still appears to be lost on presidential candidates who think being tough on terrorism means being ignorant of terrorism.

Posted by morte at 10:55 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

While I find the field of Republican candidates for president to be at best enormous hypocrites and at worst bigoted demagogues, I wouldn't go as far to say that any of them are stupid. However, reading all the stupid things Mitt Romney has claimed recently, I think he might just deserve a place in that special category currently held by George W. Bush. Besides confusing Mormon space opera for French marital law, Romney has also claimed to have super special knowledge about Saddam's missing weapons of mass destruction. "Its possible," he said, that the weapons which never existed might be in Syria. Now to be fair, this was a leading question asked by one of Fox News' propagandists to a Republican candidate that has made pandering to the right wing his calling card. But I wonder if Romney really believes this nonsense or if he thinks that his audiences are always going to be the conspiracy theorists. If he were nominated--which seems remote to me based on recent trends--he would suddenly have to speak to crowds which would be appalled by his ignorance and blatant pandering. Or I should hope they would be.

Nevertheless, the magic is gone. Reagan's ghost can't be conjured up for another electoral haunting. And Romney, who could conceivably be a decent centrist Republican candidate, has chosen to suck up to the twits who make up the conservative base. No wonder everything that comes out of his mouth makes him sound like a twit as well.

Posted by morte at 3:21 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: conservative governance is abysmal. Social justice, fair play...these things matter not to the conservative movement and its political arm, the GOP.

Instead they approvingly quote from former (that is, dead) members of the KKK.

And let's not forget the essential worldwide conspiracy theories (complete with Jews!) promoted by the Moonie Times (remember when calling someone a "Moonie" was an insult?) and the NRA (PDF link to a gun ownership pamphlet that has to be seen to be believed).

Your conservative movement. Bringing out the worst in America for 40 years.

Is it 2008 yet?

Posted by morte at 12:28 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I know we're not as smart as cable news executives, but this blogger looks at the ratings data and asks the eternal question, why the hell is Glenn Beck on the TV?

Posted by morte at 6:47 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

How did we get to the point in this country where Chris Matthews has to spend airtime explaining civics 101 to right wing hacks?

Just asking.

Posted by morte at 6:35 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Conservatives can't decide whether Bush is the most brilliant man who ever lived or the worst thing to happen to conservatism. And none of these conservatives recognize that the Bush disaster is a direct product of the conservative ideology being shoved down America's throat.

Is it 2008 yet?

Posted by morte at 1:02 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Is he really that stupid? I think he is. Yes, a four-year long military occupation in a country hostile to your presence that accomplishes nothing but wastes lives and money is exactly like running a small packaging business in Ohio.

Just shoot me now.

Posted by morte at 12:59 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

This tendency for conservative politicos and commentators to make immigration the cornerstone issue is puzzling. Voters simply don't care about immigration as much Iraq, health care and the economy, but apparently in conservative fantasyland, our very civilization hangs in the balance. How can this not be viewed as naked nativism? Get a load of Lou Dobbs (anchor, the Most Trusted Name in News):

“When this president and open-borders, illegal-alien-amnesty advocates say, ‘You can’t deport them,’ my answer is, ‘You wanna bet?’ Because this is the United States,” Dobbs said.

Host Lesley Stahl followed up, “If you think it’s possible. How’s it possible?” Said Dobbs: “I think this country can do anything it sets its mind to.”

1. Did you support the invasion of Iraq?

Yes.

2. Have you changed your position?

No. Sanctions were failing and Saddam was a threat, making any other action in the region impossible.

3. What should the U.S. do in Iraq now?

Win.

At a private gathering on Friday, Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) told supporters that immigration is “an issue that is so much broader than all that, so much more serious. It is the issue of our culture itself, and whether we will survive.”

And amidst all this jingoistic xenophobia, the actual policy problems related to immigration are largely lost. How does this country address illegal immigration? We cannot, as Dobbs ignorantly suggests, deport everybody. That's impossible. People come here to earn money which they then send back home to their families. They risk their lives, often, to cross the border to then live and work illegally in the United States. And there is work for them, and no shortage of people to pay them for that work. These are the fundamental realities of the immigration issue, and recognizing these realities is the first step to "solving" illegal immigration. For what its worth, I support something along the lines of the McCain-Kennedy guest worker program, whereby illegal immigrants, after being here a certain period of time, can apply for a work visa. I support this because the other options are not only impractical (constructing a wall, deportation, vastly increasing border security) but they are also unnecessary and smack of ugly nativism that I wish to relegate to America's past. And I suppose that conservatives who make this their central cause truly are living in, or wish to live in, America's past.

Posted by morte at 12:04 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Lots of interesting numbers in this thorough Newsweek poll. And even though the election is months and months away, rendering these numbers all but meaningless statistically, can we really say they tell us nothing about the mood in this country and who it will be inclined to pick as president? The Democrat wins in any head-to-head matchup, though by a statistically insignificant amount in most cases. The real aberration is Mitt Romney, who loses by 20-30 points against any of the top three Dems. That's pretty remarkable and goes to show that fundraising (Romney nabbed many of the big GOP donors last cycle) alone doesn't make a campaign. Also note the 25 point gap between Democrats and Republicans regarding overall satisfaction with their choice of candidates. Whatever support Giuliani has now, whatever advantages he has over his opponents, it bears remembering that half of the Republican voters aren't satisfied with him, and don't appear to be satisfied with any theoretical alternative. All of this depresses turnout, dries up funding sources, and depresses the race. These numbers simply bear out what I've observed for a while now: 2008 is going to be merciless on the GOP.

Just take a look at the "direction of the country" question. 25% are satisfied. I'll assume those are the hardcore Bush sycophants who live in their own carefully constructed reality. The rest of us--a commanding 71%-- are dissatisfied with the course our country has taken. Gee, you think it has something to do with President 28% over there? compare that to lowest-recorded approval ratings for other presidents. Bush's numbers don't look bad compared to Truman's 22% or Clinton's 36% or his father's 29%. But W has been in the 30s for months and months. For other presidents, the low approvals were transient. Clinton's 36% came at the very beginning of his term; that is, his approval rating was higher during the scandal that supposedly taints his administration, at least for this poll. Likewise with Reagan in 1983, there was a sense of being adrift policy-wise, and that damaged him. Even Iran-Contra didn't permanently damage The Gipper, conservative efforts to canonize him notwithstanding.

The point of all this is that while we don't know who Americans will vote for in 2008, it is clear that the current president is phenomenally unpopular, the would-be successors from his own party have tepid support at best, and more Americans define themselves as Democrats than Republicans. I just don't see how any of this will magically change over the next 20 months, even if Bush were to withdrawal from Iraq, which he will never willingly do. These numbers may be early, but it seems clear that the die has already been cast for `08.

Posted by morte at 11:12 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

In the past, I've dismissed psychological explanations for why conservatives think the way they do. I've always felt such explanations are designed to make liberals feel better about themselves, and by treating conservatives as mentally ill, ostracizes them the way the genuinely mentally ill and criminals are. Conferring pariah status on conservatives also gives them something to rally around, which does nothing to "cure" the "problem" of conservatism.

But I have to wonder sometimes. Spend a few minutes hanging out in the right-wing blogosphere and you can't help but wonder how these people believe the things they do. Predominately, certain assumptions are held about liberals, assumptions that are not based on fact or any sort of record, but on a narrative that has been sustained for decades. it is reflexive to think Nancy Pelosi is a traitor, or that Hillary Clinton is a closet totalitarian, or that there is a secular movement that is undermining Western Civilization...it really is an alternative reality. And the totality of the worldview, and its reflexive nature make me wonder if some of the more outrageous conservatives really are in some sort of mental paralysis.

Last weekend David Kurtz at TPM made the following observation regarding a noxious alternative reality statement at the Powerline blog:

If you're a hard-core conservative reading Powerline, does this sort of nonsense make you feel better about yourself or about your beliefs? For the uninformed, maybe it offers the assurance that things are okay. For the semi-informed, maybe it comforts them that things aren't as bad as they may seem. At what point does the internal dissonance of those who read and write such garbage exact a personal toll--morally, emotionally, spiritually?

I don't have any answers here. But when I see the determination of hard-core movement conservatives to deny reality in favor of what they believe to be true, it astounds me. Whether it is the "Conservapaedia" or qubetv (to combat the liberal bias of Youtube), I'm still flabbergasted. Maybe it's because I believe that knowledge is power and such Baconian pronouncements are anathema to intellectual conservatives, or maybe it's because I wasn't raised to obediently and unthinkingly respect hierarchy. I don't know. Part of me hopes a polarizing Democrat like Clinton does become the next president. Perhaps all the conservative heads exploding might give us some insight into why so many of them are deranged and anything but "conservative."

Posted by morte at 3:34 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Too lazy at the moment to look up all the instances where I've talked about it, but it is very important to remember that a big part of being a conservative today is to embrace your total fear of the feminine. Via LG&M today, Mark Dery writes in the LA Times:

The trouble with manhood, American-style, is that it's maintained by frantically repressing every man's feminine side and demonizing the feminine and the gay wherever we see them. In his book, "The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars, and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity," clinical psychologist Stephen Ducat calls this state of mind "femiphobia" — a pathological masculinity founded on the subconscious belief that "the most important thing about being a man is not being a woman."

OK, so maybe I'm overstepping the bounds of my Learning Annex degree in pop psychology. But the hidden costs of our overcompensatory hypermachismo are far worse than a few politicians slimed by pundits. The horror in Iraq has been protracted past the point of lunacy by George W.'s bring-it-on braggadocio, He-Ra unilateralism and damn-the-facts refusal to acknowledge mistakes — all hallmarks of a pathological masculinity that confuses diplomacy with weakness and arrogant rigidity with strength. It is founded not on a self-assured sense of what it is but on a neurotic loathing of what it secretly fears it may be: wussy. And it will go to the grave insisting on battering-ram stiffness (stay the course! don't pull out!) as the truest mark of manhood.

Posted by morte at 3:26 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Drug addict Rush Limbaugh, via TPMCafe, today:

Long after we're all dead and gone, when historians who are not yet born begin to write about this era, they're going to place George Bush in the upper echelon of presidents who had a great vision for America, who looked beyond our shores, who didn't just restrict himself to domestic policy niceties.

Powerline, July 28, 2005:

It must be very strange to be President Bush. A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius, he can't get anyone to notice. He is like a great painter or musician who is ahead of his time, and who unveils one masterpiece after another to a reception that, when not bored, is hostile.

I don't understand what could possibly make these people think such things...

Posted by morte at 3:12 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

McCain: "Fags make me uncomfortable."*

*Not actual quote. Embellished by author to mock McCain.

Posted by morte at 2:55 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The Gray Lady is very confused today. Here's the first example:

SHARM EL SHEIK, Egypt, May 3 — Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met today with Syria’s foreign minister, Walid al-Moallem, the first diplomatic contact at such a high level between the two countries in at least two years.

The Bush administration was publicly critical of a visit to Syria last month by a delegation led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the Democrat of California, who met with President Bashar al-Assad and other senior officials, including Mr. Moallem, the foreign minister. A separate group of Republican members of Congress also visited the country.

Example 2:

WASHINGTON, May 2 — Think of Senators Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Russell D. Feingold of Wisconsin as the yin and yang of Democratic views on what to do about the Iraq spending legislation now that President Bush’s veto has been upheld.

Mr. Nelson, a centrist, grudgingly voted for the measure calling for a troop withdrawal to begin by Oct. 1 because he was confident the deadline would be stripped out the second time around.

Mr. Feingold, a liberal, grudgingly voted for the measure as a first step toward taking more substantial action, including ending most spending on the war by next spring.

Example 3:

Let’s say you’re a Republican appointed to an important job in Washington. You’ll probably find that 90 percent of the people who work in your agency are Democrats, as are 90 percent of the media types who cover you and 90 percent of the academics who comment on your work.

But here’s the thing to remember: There are Democrats, and then there are Democrats. A quarter of the Democrats you’ll work with are partisans. They believe the rantings of the agitprop pundits, and they’ll never be open-minded toward you. But the other three-quarters are honorable, intelligent people. If you treat these people with respect, and find places where you can work together, they will teach you things and make you more effective. If you treat them the way you treat the partisans, they’ll turn into partisans and destroy you.

I'm not sure I understand this at all. The World Bank, surely an American creation, is nonetheless very different from any domestic political apparatus. Furthermore, it is a neoliberal institution, hardly a haven for "agitprop" liberals. Brooks is using the tired classic of conservative victimization to help us recognize the virtues of bipartisanship. David Broder would be proud. Joe Lieberman would be proud. Mark Halperin would be proud. And apparently the Times is proud, having given Brooks to OK to print this nonsense. Nothing new here concerning Brooks and his talents of subtle truth-bending. But why is the Times still carrying him? Because he's a reasonable conservative (or appears as one)? Are they secretly snickering behind his back? I have no idea.

These points are all minor, but addressing them all comprehensively would make the NYTimes a great paper again. it's not that hard.

Posted by morte at 10:19 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I meant to note this yesterday, but unspoken is Sowell's assumption that a military coup would come to the aid of a conservative America being oppressed by liberal decadence. Or something like that. But given who's actually been running the government lately, and how they've run it, don't you think the purpose of the military coup would be to remove the civilian leadership that is responsible for stretching the military to the breaking point? And I don't just mean the DoD. If a military coup were to occur in this country today, it would be for the express purpose of removing George Bush from office.

I shouldn't even need to say this, but I do not support military coups. However I think it is important to understand how such an event would play out in our contemporary polity. Sowell thinks the coup would be like the one Franco pulled. I think the facts reject that interpretation.

Posted by morte at 3:47 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The great Republican presidential hope for 2008, the next Ronald Reagan for conservatives suffering from Bush fatigue, doesn't have a clue what he's talking about.

I can't say I'm surprised.

Posted by morte at 2:27 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Republican Congressmen from Illinois are morons.

They are also undeserving of the responsibilities of their office for comparing war to sport. That's the sort of thinking that got Europe into WWI.

Posted by morte at 11:22 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Tom Friedman wishes Bush would reach out the the Middle East and admit his errors in Iraq. This last chance, "Hail Mary Pass" might be the only way to prevent defeat in Iraq and to protect out allies from becoming the victims of Islamic terrorism.

Really, what is the point of this? To make Friedman feel better about himself? He must know that Bush will never do anything like this, so we must assume that the speech is really just Friedman pretending to be the president. But clearly Friedman is still buying into this clash of civilizations nonsense, and still--still--can't see that the very premise of invading Iraq was faulty.

Isn't that Friedman's career in a nutshell? Describing the world in the simplest terms possible, expressing an optimistic desire to bring people together, and then bemoaning the fact that reality isn't the same as fantasy. We need mature thinking on this subject, not pulp fiction.

Posted by morte at 10:06 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

This is one for the books. Thomas Sowell, longtime shill for the movement, lays out some thoughts at National Review. When thoughts are presented in this fashion--a series of disconnected musings--it has the same unguarded immediacy, I feel, as the old Latin proverb, cum vin veritas: with wine, the truth. Behold, my reader:

A reader wrote: “Have you ever noticed that opinion polls ask the opinions of people who have no expertise in the subject on which they are being polled and publish these opinions as if they were gospel truth instead of group ignorance?”

Our education system, our media, and our intelligentsia have all been unrelentingly undermining the values, the traditions, and the unity of this country for generations and, at the same time, portraying as “understandable” all kinds of deviance, from prostitution to drugs to riots.

“Global warming” seems to be joining “diversity,” “gun control,” “open space,” and a growing list of other subjects where rational discussion has become impossible — and where you are considered a bad person even for wanting to discuss it rationally.

Is your employer poorer by the amount of money he pays you? Probably not, or you would never have been hired. Why then should we assume that a corporation or its customers are poorer by the amount paid to its chief-executive officer?

When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our educators, and our intelligentsia, I can’t help wondering if the day may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is a military coup.

Compare what he wrote to what William F. Buckley Jr., founder of National Review, wrote the other day:

The political problem of the Bush administration is grave, possibly beyond the point of rescue. The opinion polls are savagely decisive on the Iraq question. About 60 percent of Americans wish the war ended — wish at least a timetable for orderly withdrawal. What is going on in Congress is in the nature of accompaniment. The vote in Congress is simply another salient in the war against war in Iraq. Republican forces, with a couple of exceptions, held fast against the Democrats’ attempt to force Bush out of Iraq even if it required fiddling with the Constitution. President Bush will of course veto the bill, but its impact is critically important in the consolidation of public opinion. It can now accurately be said that the legislature, which writes the people’s laws, opposes the war.

Posted by morte at 6:59 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Nancy Pelosi gets it. Why, Mr. President, did you feel that Bill Clinton ought to lay out timetables with regards to our deployment in Kosovo in 1999 but now describe such timetables as “It makes no sense to tell the enemy when you plan to start withdrawing.” Or how about you, Senator McCain? His response?

Matt David, McCain's campaign spokesman, said it is "intellectually dishonest" to compare Iraq to Haiti and Somalia because of the volatility now in the Middle East and terrorist threat.

"Haitians and Somalians do not want to follow us home and attack us on American soil," David said in a statement.

Lessons learned:

1. George Bush and John McCain are liars whose foreign policy goals are self-serving and therefore beneath contempt because it needlessly endangers the lives of American soldiers.
2. Nancy Pelosi must be reading the blogs. And she could care less about the concerted effort on behalf of "conservative" activists to paint her leadership as bumbling, incoherent and even treasonous. The fact that she has been so successful and suffered little if any repercussions vis-a-vis public opinion is a testament to how desperate the right wing is and how out-of-touch elite journalism is for taking these baseless right-wing smears seriously.

I'm going to go out on a limb here. I think something big is going to happen in American politics soon. Something on the order of a collapse of the conservative coalition or major shakeups in elite journalism. I don't have much in the way of evidence, and I freely admit that it is little more than a strong feeling. The confrontation between the president and Congress is only the beginning. Ask yourself, how long can Bush and his supporters continue to foist their twisted (and self-serving) version of reality upon the United States, not to mention the world? Something has got to give, and that is the basis of my hunch.

Posted by morte at 6:37 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Jim Webb department:

"We won this war four years ago. The question is when we end the occupation."

Waiting for that veto, Mr. President...

Posted by morte at 3:34 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

CNN pays Glenn Beck to say this:

And I read this one part on global warming about how they got -- what was the first thing they did to get people to exterminate the Jews. Now, I'm not saying that anybody's going to -- you know Al Gore's not going to be rounding up Jews and exterminating them. It is the same tactic, however. The goal is different. The goal is globalization. The goal is global carbon tax. The goal is the United Nations running the world. That is the goal. Back in the 1930s, the goal was get rid of all of the Jews and have one global government.

Folks, this is paranoid delusion. Glenn Beck is out to lunch. He's a right-wing conspiracy theorist. Nothing more.

Contact CNN. Contact Premiere Radio Networks. Contact Good Morning America. Ask them if they endorse the views of Glenn Beck, and if not, why is he on the air? This is news media at its very, very worst.

UPDATE: To clarify, Beck's remarks were from his radio show, but he does appear on all three venues I listed above.

Posted by morte at 11:27 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

From the man who proclaimed global warming to be the "greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people."

Posted by morte at 10:54 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

April 25, 2001: NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim May 1, 2001, as Loyalty Day. I call upon all the people of the United States in support of this national observance.

May 1, 2001: This year marks the 44th commemoration of May 1 as Law Day, U.S.A., a national day of observance to celebrate our legal heritage. On this occasion, we reflect on the role our legal system plays in the lives of every American and how the freedoms we enjoy would not be possible without a strong and independent judiciary. The theme of this year's Law Day, "Ensuring the Rights of Victims," acknowledges our gratitude for a legal system that recognizes the importance of protecting the rights of those who are victimized by crime.

May 1, 2002: One of our Nation's greatest strengths is its commitment to a just, fair legal system and the protection it affords to the rights and freedoms we cherish. On May 1, we observe Law Day to draw attention to the principles of justice and the practice of law. The theme of this year's Law Day, "Celebrate Your Freedom: Assuring Equal Justice for All," acknowledges the essential task of protecting the rights of every American.

April 30, 2003: NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim May 1, 2003, as Loyalty Day. I call upon all the people of the United States to join in support of this national observance. I also call upon government officials to display the flag of the United States on all government buildings on Loyalty Day.

May 1, 2003: Thank you all very much. Admiral Kelly, Captain Card, officers and sailors of the USS Abraham Lincoln, my fellow Americans: Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. (Applause.) And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country.

May 1, 2003: America was founded on the ideals of liberty and equality for all, and the Framers of the Constitution created three branches of the national Government to uphold these principles. The third branch, the Judicial, is responsible for administering justice fairly and impartially. On Law Day, we recognize the achievements of our Nation's legal system and our independent Judiciary in sustaining the rights and liberties we cherish.

April 30, 2004: NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim May 1, 2004, as Loyalty Day. I call upon all the people of the United States to join in support of this national observance. I also call upon government officials to display the flag of the United States on all government buildings on Loyalty Day.

April 30, 2004: NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, in accordance with Public Law 87-20, as amended, do hereby proclaim May 1, 2004, as Law Day, U.S.A. I call upon all the people of the United States to observe this day with appropriate ceremonies and activities. I also call upon Government officials to display the flag of the United States in support of this national observance.

April 29, 2005: NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim May 1, 2005, as Loyalty Day. I call upon all the people of the United States to join in support of this national observance, and to display the flag of the United States on Loyalty Day.

April 29, 2005: NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, in accordance with Public Law 87 20, as amended, do hereby proclaim May 1, 2005, as Law Day, U.S.A. I also encourage Americans to observe May 1 through May 7, 2005, as National Juror Appreciation Week. I call upon the people of the United States to acknowledge the importance of our Nation's legal and judicial systems with appropriate ceremonies and activities, and to display the flag of the United States in support of this national observance.

April 28, 2006: NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim May 1, 2006, as Loyalty Day. I call upon all the people of the United States to join in support of this national observance, and to display the flag of the United States on Loyalty Day.

April 28, 2006: NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, in accordance with Public Law 87-20, as amended, do hereby proclaim May 1, 2006, as Law Day, U.S.A. I call upon all the people of the United States to observe this day with appropriate ceremonies and activities. I also call upon Government officials to display the flag of the United States in support of this national observance.

April 28, 2007: NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, in accordance with Public Law 87 20, as amended, do hereby proclaim May 1, 2007, as Law Day, U.S.A. I call upon all the people of the United States to observe this day with appropriate ceremonies and activities. I also call upon Government officials to display the flag of the United States in support of this national observance.

April 30, 2007: NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim May 1, 2007, as Loyalty Day. I call upon the people of the United States to participate in this national observance and to display the flag of the United States on Loyalty Day as a symbol of pride in our Nation.

Posted by morte at 10:12 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Again, Robert Novak provides competent, reality-based reporting on the Post op-ed page, this time with quotations from Chuck Hagel that were designed to be on-the-record.

Imagine that, journalists pressing their sources to not be anonymous. And what do you know, the candor flies out of Hagel's mouth, like

What about claims by proponents of the Iraqi intervention that failure to stop the terrorists in Iraq will open the door to them in the American homeland?

"That's nonsense," Hagel replied. "I've never believed that. That's the same kind of rhetoric and thinking that neocons used to get us into this mess and everything that [Donald] Rumsfeld, [Paul] Wolfowitz, [Richard] Perle, [Douglas] Feith and the vice president all said. Nothing turned out the way they said it would."

Posted by morte at 4:09 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Time magazine continues to exhibit bizarre behavior in who it hires to inform us. First it was Bill Kristol, now it's Mark Halperin.

Halperin thinks Karl Rove-style electoral politics are the "way to win" and he thinks that Matt Drudge is the "Walter Cronkite of our era." Halperin also likes to get the approval of Hugh Hewitt, who introduced a pledge for Republicans to demonstrate their fealty to The Leader's surge. Oh, and he also claims to be apolitical, even though he thinks the liberal media needs to prove that it understands the grievances of conservatives.

Money quote:

“We’re a 24/7 news site now, and politics is the biggest game in town,” said Mr. Stengel, who has overseen a redesign at the magazine and a major shift in resources from print to the Web site. “Everybody wants to be ahead of the curve in this area, and Mark is the curve,” he said.

Cancer of the Republic.

Posted by morte at 11:41 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Drug addict Rush Limbaugh, helping the GOP with their quest to alienate every black voter in America.

Keep up the good work guys! Onward to '08!

Posted by morte at 4:16 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Strangely, referred to in this country as the "pro-life movement."

Maybe they weren't brown enough to be terrorists.

Posted by morte at 3:34 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Principled, Honest and Brave.

They are fucked in '08.

Posted by morte at 3:29 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

In light of my Washington Post bashing yesterday, I thought we might revisit the paper today and see what it offers us. I had written, "[the] Post needs to take a long hard look at itself and the sort of garbage it allows its editorial staff to print" knowing full well that there are decent columnists at the venerable Washington paper, but they were not the object of my scorn. Here's E.J. Dionne Jr. today, saying what critics of this administration and this war have been saying from the beginning:

The president's comments this week were less measured. "I will strongly reject an artificial timetable withdrawal," Bush said, "and/or Washington politicians trying to tell those who wear the uniform how to do their job."

Let's parse that statement. The notion that Congress has an "artificial timetable" suggests there must be such a thing as a "natural timetable." But what would that be? Presumably, the president would reply: when we achieve victory. But what is the definition of "victory" in the murky mess we're in? The administration offers only generalities that lead us nowhere.

And it's beyond chutzpah for a politician who has lived at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. for more than 2,280 days to attack "Washington politicians." Didn't Petraeus get his orders to pursue the surge from a certain Washington politician otherwise known as the commander in chief?

Or take Vice President Cheney's statement on Tuesday: "Some Democratic leaders seem to believe that blind opposition to the new strategy in Iraq is good politics." Cheney assumes that opposition to the administration's policies must be "blind" rather than a considered, rational response to four years of failure. And the opposition must be rooted in "politics" and not in principle, presumably because reasonable people cannot possibly have good cause for disagreeing with the administration.

The president needs to convince Americans that a decent result in Iraq is still possible. Above all, he needs to answer the essential question: If we shouldn't have timetables now, how long does he think we'll need to keep combat forces in Iraq? Two years? Five years? More? And to what end?

Instead, the burden of proof should be on those who have offered years of bravado and false optimism. Why are Americans supposed to believe Bush's current claims? Why shouldn't Congress continue to pressure the president to bring our combat troops home on a reasonable schedule? And why doesn't the president start talking seriously to Congress instead of just shouting at Democrats?

Pretending he is in the middle of an electoral campaign will do nothing for Bush if what he wants is to rally the country behind a sensible way forward in Iraq. Petulance isn't working, and before long many Republicans who have stuck with the president so far will run out of patience.

Posted by morte at 10:25 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Putting Kristol in his place.

The man could use a million doses of such humility.

Posted by morte at 3:58 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

My short review of the Moyers documentary last night:

Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit drinking/smoking/sniffing glue/amphetamines.

Posted by morte at 2:48 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Giuliani's comments made me physically ill the other day, and I thought we might have a new winner for the coveted "America's Most Disgusting Politician" award (previous holders Sens. Lieberman and McCain) but today we're going to have to give it back to St. John McCain, perhaps permanently.

McCain, who thinks "winning" in Iraq is so important that he is willing to base his entire presidential campaign on it, can't even be bothered to vote for the Iraq spending bill that passed in the Senate today. He was busy campaigning in New Hampshire. What a maverick (Here's a news link titled, "McCain calls Iraq war 'great tragedy'").

And to make things worse, Think Progress has dug up video clips from the 90s when St. John McCain supported immediate withdrawal from not one, but two Clinton-initiated wars.

Welcome back to the despicable, Senator McCain. We missed you.

UPDATE: McCain thinks IEDs are funny, and other highlights. Words fail me. No one should be taking this man seriously on matters of foreign policy.

Posted by morte at 2:11 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

So in other words, should we all just assume that anything and everything the administration says is a lie?

I think that's a safe assumption at this point.

Posted by morte at 12:52 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Here's a nice summary of the game Rove is playing with your tax dollars to ensure that Republicans stay in control of the government forever. And supposedly married to this naked desire for power is the "principled" conservative position that "government is the problem." Notice how those two things--power and hatred of government--must lead to corruption. That's what the GOP is all about. Sometime in the distant past there might have been such a thing as principled conservatism in the GOP. But not anymore. And if you consider yourself a principled conservative, and believe the tenets of classical conservatism, then the GOP is not the party for you.

Something Dems should remind the American people at every stop on the 08 campaign trail.

Posted by morte at 12:46 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Obama: "We are one signature away from ending the Iraq War."

And I also like this from TPM reader DH:

All of the Democratic responses to Giuliani's "white flag" fear appeal were inept -- unfortunately and somewhat surprisingly, Dean's "should be ashamed of himself" was the worst. The opposite reaction would have been best. No advice on how Rudy should feel, instead simply pointing out that this is the real Giuliani, a Bush clone employing the same failed rhetoric to prop up the same disastrous ideas. Who wants another 4 years of that?

Americans believe Giuliani is different, a leader, a maverick, brave. But Rudy's constant pandering to the Bush hard line on Iraq and defense issues presents a fantastic opportunity for Democrats to pin the Bush label on him, a scarlet letter that has already brought down one GOP front-runner and could well work its magic again, if the Democrats simply point out the obvious connection.

Posted by morte at 12:25 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

You know it's a bad day when Robert Novak is the voice of reason on the Washington Post op-ed page. Apropos of yesterday's discussion of the neocon vision of bringing civilization to the savages, the Post has given Joe Lieberman real estate to say things like

If such an atrocity had been perpetrated in the United States, Europe or Israel, our response would surely have been anger at the fanatics responsible and resolve not to surrender to their barbarism.

Unfortunately, because this slaughter took place in Baghdad, the carnage was seized upon as the latest talking point by advocates of withdrawal here in Washington. Rather than condemning the attacks and the terrorists who committed them, critics trumpeted them as proof that Gen. David Petraeus's security strategy has failed and that the war is "lost."

This reaction is dangerously wrong. It reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of both the reality in Iraq and the nature of the enemy we are fighting there.

What is needed in Iraq policy is not overheated rhetoric but a sober assessment of the progress we have made and the challenges we still face.

The suicide bombings we see now in Iraq are an attempt to reverse these gains: a deliberate, calculated counteroffensive led foremost by al-Qaeda, the same network of Islamist extremists that perpetrated catastrophic attacks in Kenya, Indonesia, Turkey and, yes, New York and Washington.

Basically, first-term president Bush, you invaded to remove the threat of Saddam Hussein. And you, current president Bush, are there to battle the threat created by the lack of Saddam Hussein.

Indeed, to the extent that last week's bloodshed clarified anything, it is that the battle of Baghdad is increasingly a battle against al-Qaeda. Whether we like it or not, al-Qaeda views the Iraqi capital as a central front of its war against us.

There are radicals in our government and in the Middle East that both have different visions of what the world should look like, and are prepared to fight to see it come true. Unfortunately, everyone else is stuck in the middle.

Al-Qaeda's strategy for victory in Iraq is clear. It is trying to kill as many innocent people as possible in the hope of reigniting Shiite sectarian violence and terrorizing the Sunnis into submission.

In other words, just as Petraeus and his troops are working to empower and unite Iraqi moderates by establishing basic security, al-Qaeda is trying to divide and conquer with spectacular acts of butchery.

When politicians here declare that Iraq is "lost" in reaction to al-Qaeda's terrorist attacks and demand timetables for withdrawal, they are doing exactly what al-Qaeda hopes they will do, although I know that is not their intent.

Even as the American political center falters, the Iraqi political center is holding.

The challenge before us, then, is whether we respond to al-Qaeda's barbarism by running away, as it hopes we do -- abandoning the future of Iraq, the Middle East and ultimately our own security to the very people responsible for last week's atrocities -- or whether we stand and fight.

To me, there is only one choice that protects America's security -- and that is to stand, and fight, and win.

Then there's David Broder, who culminates a long slide into irrelevancy with today's column. He's off his rocker. I don't think there is any doubt about that anymore. Witness the opening paragraphs of Washington DC's "Dean" of journalism:

Here's a Washington political riddle where you fill in the blanks: As Alberto Gonzales is to the Republicans, Blank Blank is to the Democrats -- a continuing embarrassment thanks to his amateurish performance.

If you answered " Harry Reid," give yourself an A. And join the long list of senators of both parties who are ready for these two springtime exhibitions of ineptitude to end.

Everyone got that? This war is lost. But the war can be won. Not since Bill Clinton famously pondered the meaning of the word "is" has a Democratic leader confused things as much as Harry Reid did with his inept discussion of the alternatives in Iraq.

Nor is this the first time Senate Democrats, who chose Reid as their leader over Chris Dodd of Connecticut, have had to ponder the political fallout from one of Reid's tussles with the language.

Most of these earlier gaffes were personal, bespeaking a kind of displaced aggressiveness on the part of the onetime amateur boxer. But Reid's verbal wanderings on the war in Iraq are consequential -- not just for his party and the Senate but for the more important question of what happens to U.S. policy in that violent country and to the men and women whose lives are at stake.

Given the way the Constitution divides warmaking power between the president, as commander in chief, and Congress, as sole source of funds to support the armed services, it is essential that at some point Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi be able to negotiate with the White House to determine the course America will follow until a new president takes office.

Instead of reinforcing the important proposition -- defined by the Iraq Study Group-- that a military strategy for Iraq is necessary but not sufficient to solve the myriad political problems of that country, Reid has mistakenly argued that the military effort is lost but a diplomatic-political strategy can still succeed.

The Democrats deserve better, and the country needs more, than Harry Reid has offered as Senate majority leader.

Today marks the day when David Broder lost what little ability he retained to persuade. I think it is over for him after this and the Washington Post needs to take a long hard look at itself and the sort of garbage it allows its editorial staff to print. It is nothing short of an embarrassment to the nation.

Posted by morte at 10:18 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Never forget, lurking below the surface of neoconservatism--defined as the foreign policy beliefs of contemporary "conservatives"--is the belief that spreading civilization is the burden of English-speaking people, the White Man's Burden you could say, of Americans, as the heirs to the British Empire. This is, of course, profoundly in conflict with the neoconservative belief that all people desire freedom and democracy and are equally able to enjoy it. So which is it? Either they're savages--absolving us of guilt about bombing, imprisoning or ruling over them--or they're freedom fighters in some vague sense, oppressed not by their own history but by dictators or undemocratic ideologies.

Obviously the real world is more complex, but that's my point. Complexity is lost on these people. The lessons of history are lost on these people. Even basic reality is lost on these people. They're ideologues who see the world just as the communists before them did: a power struggle resulting in an historical end-state. For the commies that was, obviously, communism. For the neocons, democracy. Unfortunately (actually, fortunately) there is no ideology of democracy to impose, or at least there wasn't until now. Yet it is a hopelessly confused ideology, totally incoherent, and deeply disingenuous. Governance based on ideology leads to oppressive states and always has.

I'd like to say that the neocons' time has passed, but they will always be with us, the older ones nurtured by their interpretation of Vietnam (liberals didn't let us win) and the younger ones will surely be nurtured by the war in Iraq (the Democrats didn't let us win). The neocon historians will make it sound noble, but at its core will always be the belief that only the Anglo-Saxon people can bring the fruits of civilization to mud-dwelling savages. Never forget that.

(BTW, liberal hawks (neocon-lite) probably reject the racist underpinnings of neoconservative theory but the fact that they don't reject the theoretical justification for spreading democracy by force (all yearn freedom) puts them on shaky ground. That is the main criticism I have of people like Peter Beinart, who can't or won't see that their "good fight" is not viewed that way by the people we are supposedly liberating.

Posted by morte at 4:20 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The print version of Fox News doesn't like the truth, so it rewrites it.

This is different from the Cancer. The Cancer is the body of horrible pundits and journalists who enable administration lies. The conservative alternative media just sees reality differently. So while the liberal media is anything but liberal (as defined by conservatives), it is the Cancer because it is classically conservative (defers to power). And the conservative media just caters to the alternative reality of the conservative political base (the 30%ers). Just look at Bill O'Reilly's cute lil liberal conspiracy chart. These people are out to lunch.

Hope that clears things up.

Posted by morte at 12:21 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Highlights from Rahm Emanuel's hard-hitting speech:

"I don’t think politics is a dirty word. (And, those of you who know me know that I am very knowledgeable when it comes to dirty words.) Politics is a vital and essential element of our political system -- the vehicle by which we advance our governing principles and policies."

"Not since the days of Watergate, when our judicial system and intelligence community were deployed by the White House in the service of partisan politics, have we seen such abuses. And in many ways, what we have seen from this administration is far more extensive than that scandal."

"And this is no accident. It’s all by design. The incidents I will list today are not a laundry list of one offs or isolated cases of corruption. There is a common denominator. Instead of promoting solutions to our nation’s broad challenges, the Bush Administration used all the levers of power to promote their party and its narrow interests."

"The good news is that this pattern of putting party first and country second has been brought into the light of day and can no longer be explained away as the product of errors or lapses in judgment by individuals. The implausible excuses are piling up, the explanations becoming harder and harder to believe and the truth more difficult to obscure. Americans now know that we are witnessing much more than just incompetent individuals at work. We are watching corruption in action."

While we pursue these ideas – and others – to get politics and policy back into balance, ultimately we need leaders who see public service as a calling and not a profit center for themselves or their political allies. A Congress that takes its oversight responsibilities seriously is our best antidote to the unprecedented politicizing of government. Furthermore, the media must also continue to shine a bright light on government and keep our leaders honest and accountable. That vigorous oversight ought to extend to the next Administration, whether Democratic or Republican and Congress.

The saddest legacy of the Bush Administration’s six-year trail of cronyism and corruption is that it contributes to the public’s already cynical view of government. This makes it even more difficult for those of us who believe that the purpose of government is to secure a better future for our country and all of its people. Repairing this sorry legacy is the first challenge our next President will face.

Posted by morte at 11:27 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The Eternal Mystery of why Glenn Beck is on TV.

Not only does he prove his ignorance on a daily basis, this is supposed to be his appeal. This is supposedly how regular folk think, right? Isn't that why he's on TV? So why do we need this guy's opinions when he is merely expressing what we already know? Doesn't that seem a bit contradictory? Unless he's fighting back against the liberal media that won't tell the truth. That's it! And CNN wants to make sure it appeases right wing nutjobs who think the cable network has a bias, so it hires Beck. Do I have that right?

Strange priorities for the "most trusted name in news."

Posted by morte at 11:17 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Rudy Giuliani is a repulsive creep. Does he really think that Americans are going to buy that "only Republicans can keep you safe" bullshit? The fact is, if you think George W. Bush has been an exceptional president, then you should absolutely vote for Giuliani. He's as ignorant as Bush, as clueless about foreign policy as Bush, as arrogant as Bush, as authoritarian as Bush and like Bush, both men's images were forged in 9/11 to mask over deep and permanent character flaws.

Let the 30%ers have their leader. They can't think independently anyway. The rest of us are going to vote for a Democrat in 2008.

Posted by morte at 10:34 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Why is Maureen Dowd employed by the NY Times and not the National Enquirer?

“I have some difficulty reconciling the two images I have of Barack Obama. There’s Barack Obama the phenomenon. He’s an amazing orator, Harvard Law Review, or whatever it was, law professor, best-selling author, Grammy winner. Pretty amazing, right?

“And then there’s the Barack Obama that lives with me in my house, and that guy’s a little less impressive. For some reason this guy still can’t manage to put the butter up when he makes toast, secure the bread so that it doesn’t get stale, and his 5-year-old is still better at making the bed than he is.”

Cancer of the Republic.

Posted by morte at 10:27 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Getting shriller by the day. I wonder how they sleep at night.

President Bush: "The American people voted for my surge in November 2006."

Criminally Indicted former House Majority Leader Tom Delay: "Reid and Pelosi are close to treason."

Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ):"We're walking off the battlefield"

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA): "I hope your families suffer a terrorist attack"

Karl Rove: "I was attacked by Sheryl Crow"

White House Spokeswoman Dana Perino: "I can't tell the difference between the president and his political adviser."

Rep. Chris Cannon (R-UT): "Gozales jumped through the Democrats' hoops."

Newt Gingrich: Virginia Tech shootings the result of liberalism, Halloween costumes, McCain-Feingold..."

And so on. And so forth. What a bunch of craven, criminal, souless, paranoid cowards.

Posted by morte at 1:10 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Some observations about the role of guns in American society:

• The Second Amendment reads: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." How often in the debate over guns do you hear about "well regulated militias?" Never. So the Amendment's purpose, clearly, is to allow private citizens to bear arms for the purpose of forming private militias in order to protect the state, not protect themselves against it, as it is commonly understood. I don't see why this is difficult to understand.


• Banning weapons, politically, is about as popular as privatizing Social Security--it aint gonna happen. I think that any legislation regarding the control of firearms should be proportionate to the type of weapon under consideration. That is, handguns serve only one purpose: shooting other human beings. Thus the regulation of such weapons should be limited to ensuring that people purchase handguns solely for the purpose of self-defense. That is why there is a background check and a waiting period. These things make sense. I'm not sure why carrying concealed weapons is so desirable, but licensing people to do so seems reasonable, given the above caveats


• The NRA is terrible organization that only increases the perception that gun owners are psychopaths. Talk about politics being at the behest of "special interests." I think one can have a good discussion about guns without the powerful NRA lobby having a say.


• Arming people or disarming people may or may not have an effect on violence in society. But we rarely hear more than "giving everyone guns will make everyone safe" or "giving nobody guns will make everyone safe." Personally I don't understand the paranoia that accompanies gun rights advocates. I mean, we have a government to provide for our security, but some of the arguments make it sound as though we are in a Hobbesian state of nature which, of course, precedes the state. No wonder gun rights advocates are of an anti-statist mold.


• Regarding security, violence is going to happen. Since weapons are readily available and low-security public places abound, killing sprees are going to happen. The alternative is to transform free civil society into a security state or make guns impossible to get. The first option is antithetical to a free society and the latter is probably impossible politically. So mass killing sprees are going to happen and that's a fact of life.


• I find the notion that assault weapons can be used for "sport" hunting to be absolutely disgusting. Actually, I find the entire notion of hunting "for sport" to be disgusting. If you kill something, eat it. Otherwise, what sort of shortcoming in your masculinity are you trying to compensate for, exactly?

Posted by morte at 11:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I hate it when they whine. Conservatives have been complaining about being victims of the liberal establishment for about half a century now and that hasn't changed despite the political grounds radically shifting over that same half century. Its a broken record, which is incidentally just as annoying as formally powerful politicians who are now indicted criminals whining about being victims.

Posted by morte at 12:13 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I have argued that Democrats need to craft a populist message because populism carries the day in American political power transitions. But what makes people wary about embracing populism is their inability to distinguish economic populism from populism itself. Populism is a political tactic that pits haves against have-nots, the privileged against the underprivileged, and The People against an elite. The reason Americans are increasingly backing the Democratically-controlled Congress and becoming more disgusted with Bush and the Republicans is because the one is listening to them on Iraq and the other is living in an alternative reality. Furthermore, the alternative reality, which is a minority view, is supported by an even smaller minority of media pundits, analysts and commentators who represent elite opinion. The populist appeal will work for Democrats precisely because all the ducks have lined up for them: an elite is totally disconnected from reality and running the country into the ground. It is, classically and historically, the populists versus the conservative establishment. My only concern is that while Republicans can be voted out of office, media pundits cannot. Obviously something has to give in the opinion-making business in order for The Pundits Who are Repeatedly Wrong About Everything to be thrown out as well.

Posted by morte at 11:55 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Why would anyone listen to the paranoid mind of Rush Limbaugh?

By the way, this is a great example of a longstanding contradiction in conservative mythology. In one breath you do everything in your power to claim liberals and Democrats are weak and powerless and in the next you proclaim that they are at the hub of a global conspiracy to take away your bibles, guns and freedom.

People who believe the conservative mythology either can't or won't acknowledge the contradictions. That means they are either stupid or liars. Limbaugh, I'm sure, is mostly in it for the money, but he does seem to actually believe his own bullshit. Then there's jackasses like Glenn Reynolds who are quite consciously carrying water for the team. Sometimes the line is blurred. But in any case, why should anyone be listening to or, God forbid, promoting this garbage?

CNN? ABC? CBS?

Posted by morte at 11:46 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Here's what I don't get. Amid all this talk that Don Imus was the victim of a public lynching is the notion that his freedom of speech rights were curtailed. How so? If the government, specifically the FCC, demanded that Imus be fired, that would be a direct violation of the First Amendment. But that didn't happen. Imus was fired by the people who employ him. The pressure to fire came from various public figures and organized interest groups. The public, in the most generic sense, was not involved. Had the public cared enough to organize for or against Imus, they might have. They didn't. So really the complaint coming from the Imus defenders is that he was the victim of liberal PC thought police. Do I have that right? The problem with this is that it makes it sound as though Imus was taken down for being "edgy." That he said something everyone else was thinking but just afraid to say. But he didn't. He said something horribly misoginistic and racist and got caught. And the only reason he apologized was because he was caught. (Which means it doesn't matter whether he was sincere or not.) What exactly was Imus contributing to public discourse anyway? What have we lost? Suppose Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck (now there's an idea) were fired? These figures are useless to any serious discussion of politics or public policy. Their MO is to simply to demonize anyone who disagrees with them. They contribute nothing. So let's stop pretending that we're living in some totalitarian regime that doesn't allow people to say what they think. People can say whatever they want and people will agree or disagree, be offended or not offended. That's called America.

UPDATE: To wit, The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz: "Imus made fun of blacks, Jews, gays, politicians. He called them lying weasels. This was part of his charm." Oh, truly the spokesman of our age.

Fucking Cancer of the Republic.

UPDATE: Atrios:

Judging from some of the elite media commentary (cough, howie kurtz, cough), it's clear that they are unable to distinguish (or pretending to be) between racy humor and racist humor, between jokes about sex and sexism, picking on powerful public figures versus picking on powerless private ones, etc. I can never tell if this obtuseness is genuine, or cultivated, but either way it's their story and they're going to stick to it.

Posted by morte at 11:15 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

This reader comment at TPM got me thinking...

[T]here’s one aspect of this story that seems to have attracted no editorial mention or public interest. Implicit in all the coverage is the assumption—by Democrats and Republicans alike—that the Attorney General is going up to Capitol Hill to lie. As far as I can tell, this is a universal assumption. The Republicans are rooting for Mr. Gonzales to be successful in his perjury, to tell a coherent story that his enemies cannot break down. The Democrats are rooting the other way, off course. They’re hoping that their ace interrogators will be able to shoot enough holes in Mr. Gonzales’ story that they can destroy his credibility. But nobody seems to find it shocking or tragic that the Attorney General of the United States is going to lie to congress. . . . I’m sure that if Gonzales makes it through his testimony without being totally discredited, Fred Barnes and Brit Hume will be all over Fox news boasting that the Senators “never laid a glove on him.” But no one seems the least bit concerned about his truthfulness, just his tactics. . . .

The answer, I believe, is implicit in the TPM reader's comments. Republicans are rooting for Gonzales to skillfully lie to Congress. Democrats are rooting for Congress to punch holes in Gonzales' claims. So on the one hand Republicans are fighting for one ideal--total loyalty to the leader and the party--while Democrats are fighting for a quite different ideal: integrity of public office. If this really is the party-line split on this issue--and certainly there are other ways to characterize it--then making a public issue of this should be the Democratic political strategy. Who but the most loyal Republicans are going to vote for a party that values power-preserving lies ahead of the truth and honest, open government? And this is by no means the only example--this is the rule for today's GOP. And they should be taken to task for it.

Posted by morte at 10:45 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I have a question to ask, but it should be considered in the context of these words:

"Am I the only guy in this country who's fed up with what's happening?" Iacocca writes. "Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We've got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we've got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can't even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, 'Stay the course.' "

He savages Bush's famous determination: "George Bush prides himself on never changing, even as the world around him is spinning out of control. God forbid someone should accuse him of flip-flopping," Iacocca writes. "There's a disturbingly messianic fervor to his certainty."

He accuses Bush of substituting macho for courage: "Swagger isn't courage. Tough talk isn't courage. Courage in the twenty-first century doesn't mean posturing and bravado. Courage is a commitment to sit down at the negotiating table and talk."

And he scoffs at Bush's business-degree background: "Thanks to our first MBA President, we've got the largest deficit in history, Social Security is on life support, and we've run up a half-a-trillion-dollar price tag (so far) in Iraq. And that's just for starters."

Question: How was George Bush elected president twice? And this isn't a discussion of voter fraud or Supreme Court intervention or any of the electoral details. Rather, my question is, broadly speaking, what conditions made president Bush possible? Even Iacocca voted for him in 2000, when it should have been apparent that Bush-the-man would lead directly to Bush-the-failed-presidency. At that time maybe people wanted a Republican president after eight years of Clinton. Or maybe they bought into the "compassionate conservative" message. Or maybe they identified with Bush on the level of values first, and policies second. Perhaps he was just seen as the lesser of two evils or the better of two poor choices. Whatever the reasons, the people who voted for Bush in 2000 didn't see what I saw. I saw a phony. A prep-school brat refashioned as a regular guy Texan. A repeated failure at business. Someone whose accomplishments in life derived solely from his famous family. And his attitude. People either intrinsically liked him or intrinsically loathed him. And he was given a chance by voters, though not a majority, and ascended to the White House not on his strengths, but because the Constitution was ignored in his favor. But I can't say I'm flabbergasted that people voted for Bush in 2000. I was correct in my assessment of the man, as the past six years have demonstrated, but I could not be certain of that in 2000.

The 2004 election, on the other hand, should have left no doubt. People actually voted for him again! That amazes me. I still see cars with Bush/Cheney 04 bumper stickers as if they're actually proud of their vote. These are the 30%ers who, as Atrios once noted:

The people who voted George Bush and the Republicans into office this year didn't do so because they were conned by a right wing asshole posing as a compassionate centrist. They did so precisely because he is a right wing asshole.

These questions provide us with the answer to my first question of why George Bush is president. We all seem to believe that we got what we voted for, that there really are more authoritarian pseudo-fascist bigots and misogynists than we thought, and technically, that's true: Bush won the popular vote in 2004. But isn't it fair to say that the political environment was, shall we say, tenderized, prior to--and during--the Bush administration? That we slowly became accustomed to the rantings of right-wingers and began to accept--though not believe--their message that perversely suggested that white males of privilege were being persecuted by liberal norms? Rush Limbaugh, of course, was the pioneer in this field. Now there are Rush Limbaughs on radio, on TV, on the internet, on cable, in magazines, in newspapers and in best-selling books. We have become conditioned to the anger of the "silent majority" who is, clearly, silent no longer. And by "conditioned" I don't mean brainwashed, I mean it in the defining sense that new cultural standards have been set. And they have been set by authoritarian, pseudo-fascist, jingoistic, bigoted, misogynistic right-wing demagogues who took over and corrupted the ancient political label "conservative."

The irony here is that conservatives are supposed to be cultural elitists, not fear-mongering populists. And that explains why George Bush is president. The conservative label was wide enough to include enough people for a governing majority but the extreme elements also took on a life of their own. And even though a formidable conservative alternative media rose up to challenge "liberal bias," the complaint remained that liberal elites still ran everything and had to continually be challenged. Unfortunately, people who made decisions in the "liberal media" failed to recognize the conspiracy paranoia of the new populist right-wing and took themselves to task. Thus the drive to restore "balance" and to seed all media with conservatives--the nastier the better. And now we're supposed to be shocked that there are bigots on our airwaves? The news media slept in the bed it made. And worse, the news media can't simply be voted out of office. If we consider the news as an institution, then what lends that institution legitimacy? The First Amendment allows the news to exist separate from government but what gives it legitimacy is autocorrectional: the norms of the professional news business let journalists police themselves, and lets the public trust the news it reads. Ironically, objectivity itself has led us to our present state. And it blinds journalists from saying what is obvious to everyone and Lee Iacocca: the emperor has no clothes.

Bush is a disaster in every conceivable way. He is at best a fool who never should have been given power, at worst a threat to our republic and the world. It is a testament to our system of government that the Constitution still lives and breathes, though it is very much in peril, in my view. But you wouldn't get that impression from the news. And that is because they have internalized the worldview of right-wing extremists who are in reality a distinct minority. Media amplification makes them seem more important and more representative of normal people and that perception must change. I titled this "The Public Interest" even though I have not yet said a word about it. But it lingers throughout these words as the unspoken alternative to our corrupt news media. Our news media has a cancer and I believe it can be cured by submitting news to a simple test: does it serve the public interest? Or does it serve the needs of a minority of ideologues who do not represent the best America has to offer? Under this standard, there would be more stories about the imperial presidency because it serves the public interest. There would be no stories about Nancy Pelosi "surrendering" to the Syrians because it only serves the worldview of right-wing fanatics. Most important, facts serve the public interest, and lies never do. Sadly, it seems most journalists failed to recognize that Stephen Colbert is a satirist, because they seem to believe that reality indeed has a well-known liberal bias. And reality, most of all, serves the public interest.

Posted by morte at 12:28 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The Onion, Oct. 12, 2005: "Bush To Appoint Someone To Be In Charge Of Country"

This week: "In White House Plan, War 'Czar' Would Cut Through Bureaucracy"

I was under the impression that being the "decider" and "commander in chief" were the only things sustaining George W. Bush's fantasy world. Now that he plans to outsource those roles too, what purpose does the man serve?

He can't lead and won't lead. Our country does not have a president. Sad.

(Onion link from Atrios)

Posted by morte at 12:04 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Every now and then I like to peruse the leading presidential candidates' websites to get a feel for how the online portion of their campaign is rolling out. And while there is nothing on any of these sites that makes or breaks the candidate, I would like to offer the following observations:

• Only Rudy Giuliani and Barack Obama avoid the annoying "contribute" or "donate" interstitial that precedes the actual site. I can't help but think that pitch turns off voters


• Only Giuliani's site URL doesn't simply use his name; there is no official www.rudygiuliani.com


• McCain's website is still ugly. I can't fathom why they went with that black and white / color hybrid design. It looks awful


• Everyone but Barack Obama has a "Contribute" button. Obama has instead a "Donate" button. Subtle and effective. Obama is effective, I believe, precisely because he is building a movement, rather than simply running a campaign. Whether its all perception or not, I think people will be more willing to volunteer time and donate money if they believe they are part of something larger than themselves.


• It's so hard to stop picking on McCain, but he has far and away the worst-run campaign of each leading contender. On his site, McCain proudly links to op-ed columns praising him. There's nothing wrong with that, per se, but it gives weight to the argument that McCain really is the "establishment" candidate (that is, the conservative establishment) whose base is primarily insider pundits like Brooks and Krauthammer, whose columns are on display. That also makes him the neocon candidate, which isn't surprising because he was exactly who the neocons were behind in 2000. That means McCain's biggest (or most influential, to be precise) supporters are a minority with disproportionate power who have been wrong about foreign policy for years and are completely out of step with American voters. A recipe for disaster.


• Besides McCain, the candidates each have well-designed and easily navigable websites. I don't have anything negative to say about them other than what has already been mentioned

Posted by morte at 11:31 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Yglesias goes out on a limb and predicts Edwards will receive the Dem. nomination because he leads in the Iowa polls. Specifically:

If I had a choice between leading in national polls (Clinton), leading in fundraising (Obama), or leading in Iowa (Edwards) I'd take leading in Iowa. Money has diminishing marginal returns and Edwards has "enough" fundraising to keep running a major campaign. National polls, meanwhile, can move a lot in response to what happens in Iowa, whereas Iowa doesn't move in response to what happens nationwide.

Much more to be said on this subject, but we'll leave it here for now.

Posted by morte at 1:59 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I guess it should be pretty obvious by now, but the recognition that the GOP is imploding is starting to become conventional wisdom. Yesterday's Times piece on the hand-wringing going on in GOP circles is a good place to start. Matt Yglesias asks why the GOP is unable to see the electoral disaster that is facing them in '08. But you can feel the desperation when you go straight to the source. This GOP memo on Nancy Pelosi is absurd. Not only is it mostly lies, but it engages in age-old scare tactics that resonate poorly in today's political environment ("The largest tax increase in US history!"). Obviously this is meant to rally the base which is, what, the 30% crowd? And amongst the less authoritarian elements of the Republican party there is a palpable desperation for a savior candidate. That's the only thing that explains this bizarre Time magazine piece on Fred Thompson and his place in the pantheon of great communicators like Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger. (I'm not making this up.)

Dissatisfaction with the field of candidates. A political strategy that spells disaster. Feeding red meat to the base. Hope that a savior will come along. That's a pretty deplorable state for the Grand Old Party. But we can't write them off that easily. Personally, I won't be convinced that the GOP is finished until there is a major, public and deep schism within the party. Only when this splinter ocurs can the GOP regroup and become a viable opposition party based on principle, instead of lies, smears and hate. And while I have always been clear about my preference for a lasting Democratic majority, I do believe that a principled opposition party is necessary to keep the majority honest. The GOP in its current configuration is fundamentally unable to fulfill that role.

Posted by morte at 11:40 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Today David Brooks wrote a love letter to John McCain. That would explain the column's incoherence--it originated in the heart, not the mind. To wit:

But most of all he grew sadder, in a deep way you probably have to be him to understand. He didn’t think he’d see his country slide toward defeat again in his lifetime, and sometimes the melancholy seeps out of him.

“For four years we’ve been screwing this up,” he said yesterday. “Too often we’ve misled the American people with talk of Dead Enders and Mission Accomplished.”

McCain still has the same likes and dislikes, the same romantic interest in history books and novels, and the same tendency to tell stories from Hanoi Hilton days in a matter-of-fact style you and I might use for a college anecdote.

But other things are different. In 2000, the McCain campaign was an exhilarating ride upward, and then, in South Carolina, a quick, furious descent, as McCain responded with self-destructive anger to the dishonorable tactics he perceived Bush was using against him.

In the shadow of their fighting, he says, he has an obligation to seek victory as long as there is any chance of it. He has a duty, he says, to support the strategy he still believes in, and perhaps ward off the worse cataclysm that would come from chaos and early withdrawal. Far from avoiding this potentially killer issue, he’s embraced it.

He’s been consistent and steady these past few years, while others have flickered. He’s been offended by Democrats who laughed and celebrated during the passage of withdrawal legislation. Yesterday he criticized them in a way that was harsh but thoroughly considered.

But in the long run, his embrace of Iraq may not hurt him as much as now appears. In 10 months, this election won’t be about the surge, it will be about the hydra-headed crisis roiling the Middle East. The candidate who is the most substantive, most mature and most consistent will begin to look more attractive and more necessary.

Cancer of the Republic.

Posted by morte at 10:32 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Or more accurately, incoherent. Today's big speech was supposed to accomplish...what? Solidify support for one of the few men in American that still thinks we can win in Iraq? And what about his attacks on Democrats? I wonder how much longer people will buy the notion that "Democrats play politics, Republicans act on principle." McCain himself appears to believe in little other than keeping this war going. And his little stroll through the marketplace didn't make him seem principled. It made him look opportunistic and disingenuous.

All of this is a way for me to question my prediction that McCain will be one of the contenders for the GOP nomination. McCain is losing stock every day. And I am genuinely surprised that conservatives love Giuliani so much. McCain is more belicose than Giuliani but like Rodney Dangerfield, he gets no respect from the 'wingers. I think there is some traction to the notion that conservatives support Giuliani because of his authoritarian tendencies. After all, isn't that what the 30% crowd is all about? Unflinching loyalty to The Leader? McCain doesn't have that air of authoritarianism. Instead he is the maverick, and mavericks aren't authoritarians.

At any rate, it's too early for any of the frontrunners to throw in the towel so it looks like we'll get to enjoy the spectacle of St. John McCain floundering for many months to come.

Posted by morte at 10:44 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

This was previewed by the blogs yesterday, but the formal link and following excerpt are worth posting here again:

When Bush came to office--installed by the Supreme Court after receiving fewer votes than Al Gore--I speculated that the new President would have to govern in a bipartisan manner to be successful. He chose the opposite path, and his hyper-partisanship has proved to be a travesty of governance and a comprehensive failure. I've tried to be respectful of the man and the office, but the three defining sins of the Bush Administration--arrogance, incompetence, cynicism--are congenital: they're part of his personality. They're not likely to change. And it is increasingly difficult to imagine yet another two years of slow bleed with a leader so clearly unfit to lead.

See, Bush is not a natural neocon. The architects of the Iraq war thought they had the theoretical side worked out but it was Bush that took that blueprint and linked it to a personal crusade on behalf of his God. He attached himself to it and thereby blinded himself to the horrors that followed. Thinking that loyalty somehow proved his leadership abilities, Bush didn't fire Donald Rumsfeld after Abu Ghraib even after the Defense Secretary had offered himself as a sacrifice. And it is the same reason he supports Gozales--who should have resigned weeks ago--today.

Our country does not have a president. That is the feeling I have. And we don't have a tyrant either. As Klein says, we have a man who is not only incompetent, but arrogant and cynical, and those features are the antithesis of presidential leadership (tyrants are at least competent). So not only does Congress need to fulfill its Constitutional and moral duties, but it also has to shoulder the burdens left by an ineffective executive. When conservatives charge that Congress is "micromanaging" the war, that is because no one else is managing it. Bush's "plan" is to leave things as they are until he leaves office. That is not only irresponsible but in my mind a crime against country, humanity, and the Constitution.

And we have to endure nearly two more years of this. That is unacceptable. And if impeachment comes, it won't be because we want to, but because we have to.

UPDATE: On the Time blog, Joe Klein writes

NO! I am not hinting at impeachment. There are no "high crimes" here. Just a really bad presidency. In fact, I consider impeachment talk counterproductive and slightly nutso.

The strangest thing of all is how adamant Klein is. NO! he screams. I'm not endorsing impeachment! Oh how could anyone have drawn that conclusion from my article? I wish he would be less fearful of taking a stand. He perfectly described the flaws of the administration. My take was that this might be a case where we have to impeach, for the good of the country. Klein isn't willing to take that step. He is willing to tolerate it until crimes are uncovered. I wonder if he thinks Congress investigating into such matters to be "counterproductive" and "nutso" as well?

Posted by morte at 12:45 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Perhaps it was because I didn't cross-post it here, but somehow my blog entry on the DLC vs. everyone else debate made it to the top of the TPMcafe.com page. Congrats to me. I do take this topic very seriously, though, and have been developing this theory about populism for some time now. It ultimately stemmed from my desire to understand how conservatives came into power and what I found was something strange: a conservative intellectual elite, inclined towards aristocratic notions of political organization, transformed itself into the montrosity we have today (conservative populism). I determined that this was the direct result of the conservative intellectuals' relationship to egalitarianism (they are fundamentally opposed to it) and how that relationship changed in order to become a viable political, rather than an intellectual, movement. The key moment was the takeover of the GOP by conservative activists in 1964 (a process that really began in 1960), which decisively shifted the balance of power in Republican and conservative circles. Conservatives now ran the party, not the party elders. That shift led to the sort of demagogic and jingoistic politics of the 1980s and 90s and culminated in Bush. Its inevitable collapse, of course, is because a new conservative elite arose who supplanted the populist message that made them relevant in the first place. That is why so many old-time conservative activists are aghast at where the modern GOP stands.

Anyway, I just felt like I had to spit that out in order to appreciate where I'm coming from on this subject.

Posted by morte at 3:26 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Or question of the year at this point. Again, for the umpteenth time, why the hell is Glenn Beck on the TV?

I assume CNN hired Beck because they considered him "edgy" or "controversial" but what's pathetic is that he is neither. There's nothing unique about a garden variety bigot who is terrified that his sense of white male entitlement might be usurped by a conspiracy of women, brown people and liberals that only exists in his paranoid mind. Either that or he is doing it for shock value. Or CNN thinks the views of misogynists and bigots are underrepresented on cable. None of these explanations give me much hope for the future of journalism on cable television, which leads us back to my very serious question:

Why the hell is Glenn Beck on the TV?

Posted by morte at 7:57 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Your GOP, doing everything it can to bankrupt the government and ensure people live in misery.

Is it 2008 yet?

Posted by morte at 2:26 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Of our broken news media. File this under "relying upon unsubstantiated media narratives (Democrats weak! Republicans strong!) while ignoring evidence from your own newspaper that directly contradicts that narrative." Links here, here and here.

That was the Post. But we don't want to overlook the Times, either. Let's pick apart a similar Adam Nagourney-penned story from last week:

Still, there are questions and risks for the new majority party. The biggest question is how far can Democrats go in opposing this president? The biggest risk is going so far that they feel the sting of a backlash -- of being transformed from the fresh new face of change to the latest cast of Washington players enmeshed in partisan wrangling.

Democrats clearly have some leeway to go at least as far as they have gone, if not further. A poll for the Pew Research Center last week suggests that Americans are strikingly sympathetic to Democrats: 50 percent said they identified with or leaned toward the Democrats, compared with 35 percent for Republicans. Their main opponent, President Bush, is weighed down by the war and his own unpopularity, making him feeble on this field, even Republicans said.

Yet Democrats need to take care in managing their moment. There is a recent history of aggressive Congressional majorities paying a price for being overly confrontational. The Republican Congress that impeached President Bill Clinton went on to lose five seats in the midterm elections; generally, the opposition party can expect to gain seats in midterms during a president's second term.

Democrats and some historians say that what to do here is clear, though how to do it may be another matter. Democrats will have room to maneuver as the tough hall monitors of this administration -- think hearings on Katrina and Walter Reed Hospital, more push-back on Iraq and, yes, more subpoenas. But not unless they can also compile a record of legislation by the time the next election comes around.

But how easy is this going to be in this political environment? The party holds a slim advantage in the Senate. For all intents and purposes, it will be impossible to pass big legislation without a few Republican defections. (And yes, that can very well happen as the next election approaches if Mr. Bush continues to be so unpopular.) Democrats marked their first hours controlling the House pushing through a series of high-profile bills, on issues ranging from ethics to stem cell research. Most of those have not passed the Senate.

''Democrats have no intention of going where Republicans went,'' said Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. ''The Republicans went to such an extreme when they wanted anything from the president, when Clinton was in power, including e-mails from the vice president's office. Democrats are not going to go that far.''

Asked if he could see any situation in which Democrats would bow to a small segment of liberal voters who were pushing for, say, impeachment, Representative Rahm Emanuel, the Illinois Democrat who is the party's conference chairman and was serving in Mr. Clinton's White House at this time of that impeachment, responded sharply. ''That's not going to happen,'' he said. ''Forget it.''

''We have to continue on parallel tracks, to show that the other parts of government are moving,'' Mr. Emanuel said. ''If the only thing coming out of Washington is the confrontation on executive privilege, that's a moral hazard.''

On Iraq, the party could be perceived as so broadly antiwar that it could undermine its efforts to reassure voters that it can keep them safe in an age of global terror (a theme that even a weakened White House and Republican Party continue to push hard).

And in going after the administration on whether the Justice Department removed the federal prosecutors for purely political reasons, it could risk appearing focused on another partisan feud at a time when many Americans would prefer to see the two parties address health care, education and other issues more central to their lives.

To summarize: Nagourney has written a piece that abounds with two general cliches about American politics that originated with neoconservative and Republican criticisms in the 1970s. First, Democrats need to prove they are strong on national security, whereas the Republicans somehow have this ability naturally, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Second, Democrats are inclined towards partisan bickering rather than compromise, despite all the evidence that it has been Republicans who have been playing that game for at least a decade (Even Reagan compromised). A better article would acknowledge the real institutional limits on the Democrats' power (notably the lack of a reliable veto-proof majority) and the absolute necessity for Congressional oversight of an administration that has claimed extraordinary unchecked powers for itself. Instead we get an article that relies upon tired cliches to sustain itself, and focuses on the unending gamemanship of politics which either generates disinterest or backlash in the public, depending on the paragraph. This is just bad political reporting, no two ways about it, and demonstrates how far we have to go to restore the fourth estate's reputation as the watchdog of government.

Posted by morte at 12:10 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Of how our news media is broken. First, the obsession with the trivial at the expense of substantive discourse:

Discussing coverage of the presidential campaign of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) in his April 2 Media Notes column, Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz asserted, "Nothing the New York senator says or does will ever be as fascinating to journalists as her marital situation."

Yesterday, right-wing Internet gossip Matt Drudge posted an “exclusive” report — based on an anonymous, unnamed source — claiming that Ware had acted inappropriately during a weekend press conference and implying that Ware is an alcoholic

Do you think a Congressional investigation into the dismissal of the eight federal prosecutors is a good use of taxpayer money?

Yes 39%
No 51%

Who do you trust more to decide when U.S. troops should leave Iraq — U.S. military commanders or Members of Congress?

Commanders 69%
Members of Congress 18%

After the 2004 presidential election, the president of the left-wing Moveon.org political action committee made the following comment about the Democratic Party, 'In the last year, grassroots contributors like us gave more than $300 million to the Kerry campaign and the DNC, and proved that the Party doesn't need corporate cash to be competitive. Now it’s our Party: we bought it, we own it and we’re going to take it back.' Do you think the Democratic Party should allow a grassroots organization like Moveon.org to take it over or should it resist this type of takeover?

Should allow 16%
Should resist 61%

I intend to write a more lengthy piece on the state of our current political environment but this is a good place to observe the big broken piece: the deplorable state of our news media. These are just examples, but are indicative of a much larger trend that is fundamentally hostile to facts and reality, opportunistically demagogic and terrified of genuine populism. Worse, the power these people wield cannot be checked like other political powers. Bad journalists are not elected. They are promoted by an industry that is supposed to be based on merit yet has succumbed to repeated bad editorial decisions. There is no single explanation for this; a variety of factors figure. But I think there is little doubt that until we can remove what I have been referring to as the "Cancer of the Republic," our political system is essentially broken. Notice that a complete change in political leadership doesn't change that fact.

Posted by morte at 11:45 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I'm supposed to be on vacation, but goddamn does this (and this) piss me off.

What horrible people. Totally disconnected from reality. And most shameful, they live under the delusion that somehow the country agrees with them (the country doesn't) which lends legitimacy to their "analysis." Of course they're wrong but one must wonder: if these talking heads are simply telling us what they know the country already thinks, they why do we have pundits?

Useless.

Posted by morte at 6:57 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Much like David Brooks yesterday, Charles Krauthammer would like to fool us into believing that there is no real scandal here, just bad actors on both sides of the aisle. So let's pick him apart too:

It's not a question of probity but of competence. Gonzales has allowed a scandal to be created where there was none. That is quite an achievement. He had a two-foot putt and he muffed it.

How could he allow his aides to go to Capitol Hill unprepared and misinformed and therefore give inaccurate and misleading testimony? How could Gonzales permit his deputy to say that the prosecutors were fired for performance reasons when all he had to say was that U.S. attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president and the president wanted them replaced?

And why did Gonzales have to claim that the firings were done with no coordination with the White House? That's absurd. Why shouldn't there be White House involvement? That is nothing to be defensive about. Does anyone imagine that Janet Reno fired all 93 U.S. attorneys in March 1993, giving them all of 10 days to clear out, without White House involvement?

For the next six paragraphs Krauthammer attacks Democrats by saying things like

Democrats are charging that this was done for reasons of politics and that politics have no place in the legal system.

Those decisions are essentially political. And they are decided by elections in which both parties spell out very clearly their law enforcement priorities. Are you going to allocate prosecutorial resources more to drug dealing or tax cheating? To street crime or corporate malfeasance? To illegal immigration or illegal pollution? If you're a Democrat today, you call the choice "political" to confer a sense of illegitimacy. If you're a neutral observer, you call the choice a set of law enforcement priorities reflecting the policy preferences of the winner of the last presidential election.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. Pursuing voter fraud is not, as the New York Times pretends, a euphemism for suppressing the vote of minorities and poor people. It is a mechanism for suppressing the vote of (among other phantoms) dead people. Conservatives have a healthy respect for the opinion of dead people -- conservatives revere tradition, which G.K. Chesterton once defined as "the democracy of the dead" -- but they draw the line at posthumous voting.

But this is an opinion piece, so Krauthammer can rant all he wants. I'm not particularly interested in his worldview which I find something less than disgusting. The real gem comes at the end where he ties everything up:

If the White House decides that a U.S. attorney is showing insufficient zeal in pursuing voter fraud -- or the death penalty or illegal immigration or drug dealing -- it has the perfect right to fire him. There is only one impermissible reason for presidential intervention: to sabotage an active investigation. That is obstruction of justice. Until the Democrats come up with real evidence of that -- and they have not -- this affair remains a pseudo-scandal. Which would never have developed had Gonzales made the easy and obvious case from day one.

But Republicans never do anything for shallow political reasons, right?

Posted by morte at 2:42 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Another stenographer/sychophant repeats George Bush's accusations.

Cancer of the Republic.

Posted by morte at 2:03 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Michael Weiner, terrified of women.

Savage 2008!

Posted by morte at 1:45 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

A big part of me wishes the Democrats would aggressively challenge the entire Bush presidency, its War on Terror, its efforts to bankrupt the government, its aggressive acquisition of power for the executive and its shocking contempt for the rule of law and the civil rights of American citizens. But at the same time, when facing down such a long list of immoral and criminal behavior, utter incompetence and despicable arrogance, perhaps the best thing to do is hack away at the hubris one swing at a time. By all measures, the Bush presidency, in terms of power and influence, has been in a steady state of decline for months. The Democratic victories in the midterm elections made that decline permanent. And while the Democrats have the power to aggressively challenge, I suppose I should applaud their efforts thus far.

The passage today of the House Bill to withdraw most combat forces from Iraq by September 2008 does not mean the war is over. Simply put, there is a big difference between a Democratic majority and a veto-proof Democratic majority. But under these circumstances, this is perhaps the best that can be done short of defunding the war (the aggressive option). But even beyond the assertiveness of the Democratic Congress there are scandals surrounding the administration like storm clouds that not only threaten to weaken it further but distract it from waging a focused media war against their opposition. In their weakened state that aggressive part of me wishes Congress would pursue the aggressive options--subpoenas, hearings and, if necessary, impeachment of administration officials up to and including the president and vice president--but that other part of me desires the more deliberative path of slowly grinding this president and his supporters down to near irrelevancy. They have not demonstrated an actual interest or competence in good governance but only in preserving great, concentrated power, exercised arbitrarily though vaguely defined within the powers of the commander-in-chief. The best way to stop the imperial presidency is to counter it with constitutional government. When the rule of law triumphs and rolls back the unitary executive, future authoritarians will have to build from scratch rather than have the advantage of precedent set by this disgraceful presidency.

Practically speaking, this is progress. But there is much work to be done. The Iraq war must be substantially ended. The powers granted the president by the 2002 AUMF and the Patriot Act must be repealed. The secret prisons must be shut down. The tax cuts must be revoked. And Congress must get to the bottom of this entire horrible mess of deception that led to invading Iraq in 2003. It doesn't matter if it takes until the end of the Bush presidency; it must happen. It is the only way our system of government can reclaim its dignity after 8 years of abuse and neglect.

Posted by morte at 10:24 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Jonah Goldberg, defending his book, "Liberal Fascism," which remains unfinished:

But look: If I could be done with this whole process tomorrow even if it meant releasing the book on the day after Hillary Clinton cured cancer, walked on water and saved a box of puppies from a fire I would leap at the opportunity. My book isn't like Dinesh's latest book. It isn't like any Ann Coulter book. It isn't what the Amazon description says or what the Economist claims it is. Or what Frank Rich imagines it is. It is a very serious, thoughtful, argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care.

What an arrogant ass. Here's a more in-depth review of his book's premises, for starters. I'd love to hear how I am wrong.

Posted by morte at 12:05 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Am I being alarmist when I say we headed towards, if not already in, a "Constitutional crisis?" Perhaps, but it doesn't help things when the White House press secretary says things like:

The executive branch is under no compulsion to testify to Congress, because Congress in fact doesn't have oversight ability. So what we’ve said is we’re going to reach out to you – we’ll give you every communication between the White House, the Justice Department, the Congress, anybody on the outside, any kind of communication that would indicate any kind of activity outside, and at the same time, we’ll make available to you any of the officiels you want to talk to …knowing full well that anything they said is still subject to legal scrutiny, and the members of Congress know that.

Isn't fair to say that if the executive branch doesn't respect the very Constitution that gives it power, that we are in a Constitutional crisis? Couldn't you argue that?

Posted by morte at 11:31 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Among all prominent conservative columnists, few rival the slippery disingenuousness of David Brooks. His gift is the ability to make what sound like very reasonable, fair, arguments that nonetheless, upon closer inspection, reveal inherent assumptions he uses in lieu of real evidence. Take today's column, titled, reasonably, "A Proper Distinction." He begins:

We’d like to think that prosecutors exercise their discretion with godlike impartiality, but the founders, who had a low but accurate view of human nature, figured that wasn't possible. They placed the federal prosecutors within the executive branch of government, a political branch. They ordained that prosecutors would be overseen by the attorney general, a political officer.

Since godlike impartiality is probably not possible, the founders figured, at least the prosecutors could be held accountable to the electorate. The founders made prosecutors political appointees.

But the word “political” in this context has two meanings, one philosophic, one partisan. The prosecutors are properly political when their choices are influenced by the policy priorities of elected officeholders. If the president thinks prosecutors should spend more time going after terrorists, prosecutors should follow his lead.

But prosecutors are improperly political if they bow to pressure to protect members of the president’s party or team. Most would agree that Harry Truman was being improperly political when he tried to block the reappointment of Maurice Milligan, a U.S. attorney investigating the Pendergast political machine in Missouri.

People of good faith disagree about whether the Clinton administration behaved improperly in firing almost all of the 93 prosecutors it inherited, in the midst of some high-profile and politically troublesome cases.

When you look at the prosecutors who were fired by the Bush administration, you see some who were fired for proper political reasons and some who were fired for improper ones. Carol Lam seems to have been properly let go because she did not share the president’s priorities on illegal immigration cases. David Iglesias seems to have been improperly let go because he offended some members of the president’s party.

The bad behavior has not stopped there. The Democrats, apparently out of legislative ideas after only 11 weeks in the majority, have gone into full scandal mode, professing to be shocked because politics played a role in prosecutorial priorities. They and those on their media food chain have made wild accusations far in advance of the evidence, producing enough cacophonous demagoguery to make rational discussion nearly impossible.

Posted by morte at 10:21 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Watch Tony Snow squirm. This would be fun if our Constitutional arrangements weren't at stake...

Posted by morte at 1:49 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Maybe this insecure pretty boy should team up with Glenn Beck. They both seem utterly terrified of the feminine.

UPDATE: I forgot to link to the actual ratings of the prime-time cable talking heads. As you can clearly see, Beck and Carlson share something else in common: they're the lowest-rated both overall and in their respective time slots (twice for Beck!). Which raises the obvious question:

Why the hell are Tucker Carlson and Glenn Beck on the TV?

Corollary question: Looking at the data, Fox clearly leads the ratings. More noteworthy is the fact that Olbermann ranks only behind Anderson Cooper and Larry King amongst non-Fox talking heads which raises the question:

Why aren't the cable networks hiring more Olbermanns and less Becks? That would appear to be the smart business move, not to mention the smart journalistic move.

Posted by morte at 1:46 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

From CNN, via Atrios:

So we asked the question then, well why are you citing executive privilege - or at least suggesting you will, and yesterday the president said the principle at stake here is candid advice from his advisers to the president - if the president was not involved in the decision, then how can you cite executive privilege on something he was really not involved in?

Posted by morte at 11:58 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Bush: "We will not go along with a partisan fishing expedition aimed at honorable public servants."

Classic projection strategy. Accuse your opposition of the same thing they accuse you of.

Bush: "The initial response by Democrats unfortunately shows some appear more interested in scoring political points than in learning the facts."

Actually, learning the facts is precisely the point. Got something to hide there W?

Bush: "It will be regrettable if they choose to head down the partisan road of issuing subpoenas and demanding show trials."

Issuing subpoenas is a power possessed by Congress. It can be used for partisan purposes but I think we've already covered that territory. And show trials? Is Bush comparing the Democratically-controlled Congress to Stalin's purges?

Bush: "And I have agreed to make key White House officials and documents available."

Want to guess how many unreleased documents are going to fall under "executive privilege?"

Bush: "I proposed a reasonable way to avoid an impasse, and I hope they don’t choose confrontation. I will oppose any attempts to subpoena White House officials."

Let me get this straight. Congress is choosing confrontation when the president says "I will oppose any attempts to subpoena White House officials." That sounds like a confrontation to me. (transcript link)

Let's see. That's 4 instances of the president accusing Congress of partisanship (5 if you include "scoring political points" and 6 if you include the subsequent Q&A session) and 1 appeal to the Founding Fathers vis-a-vis executive privilege. The president wants to offer off-the-record, closed-door, not-under-oath testimony to the Democrats. Why? What are they afraid of? Obviously there is only one reason for this: they wish to lie. The Democrats rejected this offer and will issue their subpoenas as they promised. And Bush is refusing to cooperate and threatening noncompliance. So where does that leave Congress? The Legislative branch relies upon the Executive branch to enforce these things. Hmm...seems like a dead end there. Congress can also take this to the courts which would result in either a) a ruling in favor of Congress which would still need to be enforced by guess-who or b) the Court tells Congress it already has the tool it needs to enforce the subpoena.

So once again we gaze ahead to another Constitutional crisis. I don't think Democrats have the balls or the votes to impeach, which means Bush wins. If they were somehow able to make the impeachment threat credible, Bush could always cut his losses and give up Rove and Miers and the rest of his cronies. In turn they could spill their guts or lie under oath. These are the many paths ahead of us.

Is it 2008 yet?

UPDATE: Glenn Greenwald, who was a lawyer, discusses a brief history of the executive privilege dodge, and how it has ultimately been rejected by the Court in both the Nixon and Clinton scandals. Greenwald also highlights the media commentary during Clinton's unsuccessful invocation of executive privilege and predicts none of these concerned voices will make the same argument when Bush invokes it. I wouldn't bet against that prediction. The salient point is that Gonzales lied to Congress and then changed his strory and that casts doubt on the administration's intentions because the evidence thus far collected strongly suggests that political decisions were at play in the firings of the US Attorneys. That's why Bush's political adviser, Karl Rove, needs to take the stand. There is nothing complicated about this. They all look more guilty with every passing day and that is why Congress is investigating: to get to the bottom of it one way or the other. What are they afraid of revealing?

Posted by morte at 4:09 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

This is pathetic. Matt Drudge decides something is newsworthy and the networks jump all over it.

Cancer of the Republic.

UPDATE: Another example of Drudge idolatry here.

Posted by morte at 3:55 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Fox News, at it again. I only watched about 30 seconds of the YouTube video, which was more than enough to get the flavor of the thing. Where do they find their news anchors? One wonders if all that time spent under makeup lights and hair dryers has somehow damaged their brains. I mean, "far left?" Where? With what influence?

Posted by morte at 10:50 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

If I have to hear one more time how we are engaged in the greatest battle in the history of mankind and all we need is to show resolve...

"We are fighting for the freedom of our children more than any war we have ever been in." -- Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-Delusional)

Was that a slap in the face to the Greatest Generation?

Then there's Joe Lieberman, courtesy of the Republican voters of Connecticut:

My real hope here is to stay and fight for the kind of Democratic party I joined when John F. Kennedy was president, which was progressive on domestic policy and very strong and muscular on foreign and defense policy.

The problem is that Lieberman doesn’t want a strong foreign policy. He wants a belligerent one.

“I don’t oppose all wars,” he declared in 2002, while Hillary Clinton and John Edwards were triangulating their way toward authorizing the Iraq invasion. “What I am opposed to is a dumb war.”

Posted by morte at 7:34 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

In yet another entry in the series I should call, "Why the hell is Glenn Beck on my TV?" Beck is determined, on this solemn fourth anniversary of the Iraq war, to bring us all the good news from Iraq:

BECK: Today marks the fourth anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq. Everybody else on television tonight, I can guarantee you, flip around, they`re giving you nothing but bad news. We thought we would try something different. We thought we`d give you the truth.

There are good things happening in Iraq, as well, and our troops are doing some incredibly heroic things under horrifying conditions. And so tonight, we begin our exclusive series that will take you inside the world of "Combat Search and Rescue." These are special operations men and women who go behind enemy lines -- under fire -- to save American lives.

All of this comes back to "why the hell is Glenn Beck on my TV?" Matt Yglesias would like to know:

Which brings around a larger question I don't think I've aired on this blog: Why on earth does Glenn Beck have that show on CNN Headline News? I'm not what you'd call a regular reader, but there's outrageous crap like this on every time I tune in. They just stop doing regular news for a little while and give us all our daily does of GOP talking points, misogyny, Arab- and Muslim-bashing, etc. And for what? Because the right-wing cable news niche seemed empty?

Posted by morte at 7:20 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Fox News, at it again. See title.

Again, I wouldn't have a problem with this if they would simply admit that they are carrying water for Bush, Republicans and the conservative movement generally. And anyway, by pretending that they're a real mainstream news source, aren't they then part of the "liberal media?" Or as Colbert said, "reality has a well-known liberal bias."

Posted by morte at 4:53 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Actually more of a compendium of the worst news stories in the lead-up to the Iraq war, courtesy of FAIR.

Cancer of the Republic.

Posted by morte at 4:51 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

While going through the archives, I discovered more than typos; I found an error in judgment. Me, Feb. 6 (last month):

If Bush starts bombing Iran next month--which I would morosely say is highly likely--there will be a complete loss of faith in the government by at least 60% of the country.

Posted by morte at 1:06 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

At one point, DeLay claimed that places like Bahrain and Qatar wouldn’t accept U.S. troops who had redeployed out of Iraq. Sestak put his hand on DeLay’s arm and informed him that the U.S. military already has bases in those countries.

Later, Perle made the incredible statement that “‘Redeploy’ is a euphemism for cut-and-run.” Note to Perle: redeployment is an official military term (see this entry in the Pentagon’s Dictionary of Military Terms). “Cut and run” is the euphemism, and a tired and false one at that.

We still have a long way to go.

Posted by morte at 12:25 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Noting the fourth anniversary of something as grim as the Iraq War is something that we must do. Ignoring it allows us to absolve the guilty and I don't think the neocons and the Boy King deserve to be absolved. I think they're war criminals, frankly, and while I'm sure they'll never be indicted, their consciences must deal with the bloddbath they have created. Some macabre milestones can be found here.

Heartless immoral criminals.

Posted by morte at 12:10 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I think it was Atrios who made the point that excitement for the 2008 candidates will not come close to the excitement generated for the 2004 candidates simply because there's no Bush to rally against. That might be true to a point, but it fails to account for 10,000 people showing up in Oakland to see and hear Barack Obama in March of 2007. Like I've argued before, Bush is still on the ballot symbolically, as the personal manifestation of what conservatism and the GOP has become. This is what Krugman argues in his Times column today:

In part this is because people whose ideology says that government is always the problem, never the solution, see no point in governing well. So they use political power to reward their friends, rather than find people who will actually do their jobs.

If expertise is irrelevant, who gets the jobs? No problem: the interlocking, lavishly financed institutions of movement conservatism, which range from K Street to Fox News, create a vast class of apparatchiks who can be counted on to be “loyal Bushies.”

The movement’s apparatchik culture, in turn, explains much of its contempt for the rule of law. Someone who has risen through the ranks of a movement that prizes political loyalty above all isn’t likely to balk at, say, using bogus claims of voter fraud to disenfranchise Democrats, or suppressing potentially damaging investigations of Republicans. As Franklin Foer of The New Republic has pointed out, in College Republican elections, dirty tricks and double crosses are considered acceptable, even praiseworthy.

Only a president who acknowledges all these missed opportunities—that is, the full extent of America’s foreign policy disaster under Bush—is likely to have the courage and integrity to do what needs to be done, starting on January 21, 2009.

First, end the war on terror. Just declare it over. It is a historical cul-de-sac, an ill-defined conflict without prospect of end on the terms Bush has laid out. Having gradually expanded his definition of the war on terror to include all Islamic “extremists,” among them Hezbollah, Hamas, and radical political groups yet unborn, Bush has plainly condemned us to a permanent war—and one in which we are all but alone, since no one else agrees on such a broadly defined enemy.

It is also why the next president, while denouncing the Iraq War as irrational, needs to advocate a continuing U.S. presence in that country. The fight against al-Qaeda must focus on failed states, and whether Iraq has become one by our own doing no longer matters. We have no choice but to be there.

But Hirsh is absolutely correct that the candidate who is bold enough to say this and make the tough decisions will reap electoral victory. The American people want a fresh start and are willing to invest in Obama, even this early in the game. Whether he--or another candidate--steps up will be the most profound decision in a political career but also increasingly the most obvious one.

Posted by morte at 11:16 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I have to agree with Kos on Ronald Brownstein's column in the LA Times about Fox News: it is spot-on.

Fox cloaks itself in the mantle of objectivity with the nudge-nudge insistence that it—and it alone—provides "fair and balanced" coverage of the news. Then it advances its financial and ideological interests by promoting lurid accusations from conservatives against Democrats, accusations that are routinely debunked later by the mainstream media. Many Fox reporters are fair. But overall the network—through its language, its news decisions and its hosts—generally functions more like a cog in the Republican message machine than as a conventional news organization that attempts to abide, however imperfectly, by the traditional standards of (yes) fairness and balance.

A senior advisor to one of the 2008 Democratic contenders was equally emphatic. "I think the more they can be de-legitimized the better," the advisor said. "They are in business to promote the Republican Party and to hurt the Democratic Party, and they have every right to do that, but to the extent that their pretense of objectivity can be challenged, it should be."

But with this precedent established, Democratic leaders may increasingly view the network less as a megaphone than as a foil: They may try to demonstrate their toughness to their own activists by appearing on Fox to denounce it, the way Bill Clinton did in his finger-wagging encounter with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday last September.

As Democrats rethink their relationship with Fox, they may, in fact, be taking a lesson from the way conservatives deal with mainstream media organizations they consider biased against them, from big newspapers (like this one) to NPR and CNN (where I appear as a political analyst.)

The situation isn't exactly parallel. For all the howling on the right, it's difficult to argue that mainstream news organizations operate with anything approaching Fox' partisan and ideological agenda. (E-mails: commence now.) But there's no question many conservatives feel as wronged by elements of the mainstream media as Democrats do by Fox.

Posted by morte at 11:02 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

More Straight Talk from John McCain:

Q: “So no contraception, no counseling on contraception. Just abstinence. Do you think contraceptives help stop the spread of HIV?”

Mr. McCain: (Long pause) “You’ve stumped me.”

Q: “I mean, I think you’d probably agree it probably does help stop it?”

Mr. McCain: (Laughs) “Are we on the Straight Talk express? I’m not informed enough on it. Let me find out. You know, I’m sure I’ve taken a position on it on the past. I have to find out what my position was. [Speaking to Press Secretary Brian Jones], would you find out what my position is on contraception — I’m sure I’m opposed to government spending on it, I’m sure I support the president’s policies on it.”

Posted by morte at 5:25 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Seriously. I don't understand why Fox News doesn't proudly proclaim itself to be a conservative news network. Everybody knows it is a conservative news network, Rupert Murdoch has admitted as much, liberals clearly see it that way, as do conservative activists and conservative alternative media pioneers agree with them. The network itself is the only party involved that does not publicly proclaim itself to be a conservative news source. And that is very strange to me.

Posted by morte at 11:39 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

That unique cultural voice, Glenn Beck, thinks he speaks for all men when he brings his misogynist analysis to us via the platforms of ABC and CNN.

I'll repeat myself: "conservatives" are terrified, absolutely terrified, of women. Who needs to hear about Beck's insecurities? I am perfectly comfortable with women in positions of power because I am a modern man. Beck is not. Perhaps ABC and CNN should reconsider their decision to hire an emotionally immature man to analyze politics on their respective stations.

Posted by morte at 11:32 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The Iraq War Timeline (for the war itself, not the build-up to it). Taking the long perspective, one can't help but wonder why the hell we went to Iraq in the first place.

Posted by morte at 11:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Shorter Stu Rothenberg: Rudy can win because he's America's Mayor. The only problem, as Sargent points out, is that the lack of foreign policy experience that supposedly hampers Romney's campaign doesn't apply to Giuliani. This dovetails well with what analyst Charlie Cook said recently:

In a Jan. 5 through 7 Gallup poll of 407 Republicans and independents who lean toward the GOP, 17 percent knew that Giuliani favored civil unions for same-sex couples, 8 percent thought he opposed them and 75 percent were unsure. Sixteen percent incorrectly thought that he was anti-abortion, 20 percent knew he was pro-abortion rights and 64 percent were unsure. When told that Giuliani actually supported civil unions and was pro-choice, 13 percent of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents said they were more likely to support him, 25 percent said they were less likely and 18 percent ruled him out completely. The poll had a 6-point error margin.

A sizeable 41 percent in the poll said those views would not affect their decision. But that was still less than the 43 percent of Republicans either ruling him out or less likely to support him. And that is before discussing his support for gun control measures while he was mayor of New York City or mentioning that the first of his three marriages was to his second cousin and that one wife found out from a televised news conference that he was leaving her.

The list could go on and on. Can he still win the GOP nomination? My guess remains no.

Posted by morte at 10:28 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The Straight Talk Express is back.

For examples of said "straight talk," please visit therealmccain.com.

Posted by morte at 10:23 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Yglesias:

The best sense I can make of McCain is that outside of his fanatical commitment to militarism, he doesn't have especially strong views on anything.

Posted by morte at 11:29 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Singling out Fox as the sole culprit in the declining quality of our news is hard to defend if you watch the other cable news stations: they're all pretty awful. But I will say that Fox was the trendsetter and remains the worst of the bunch. Ripped off from Atrios, this blogger reminds us that a picture is worth a thousand words.

It also reminds us that Fox should be treated like the propaganda outlet it is by other news orgs and ignored by those of us who believe in facts.

Posted by morte at 11:22 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Last week I said that "true citizen journalism--at least at the national level--really is impossible because the resources are lacking." I think that's mostly true--bloggers rely upon journalists--but it's not an iron-clad rule. Kos reminds us that Firegoglake--which admittedly has more resources than the average blog--had more coverage of the Libby trial than anyone else, providing unfiltered coverage of the proceedings.

So to clarify my original point, bloggers can fill the role journalists play as cops-and-courts reporters, that is, reporting on a beat, but only by targeting their resources. A blog able to cover multiple stories on a daily basis ceases, I think, to be a blog in any meaningful sense. They become journalists. The difference is structural; how the operation is funded, what means of distribution, and the mission of the page. This is all very abstract but important questions to keep in mind when looking at the changing relationship of blogs to news.

Posted by morte at 10:50 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

This piece by Kevin Drum, part of a larger group of stories in Mother Jones, succinctly captures what I've always felt is the relationship between bloggers and the dreaded "MSM." to wit:

Which leads us to the dirty little secret of newsgathering: Serious, daily, national reporting is overwhelmingly the preserve of a tiny handful of big-city newspapers with large staffs and worldwide bureaus. Of these, the Los Angeles Times is under pressure to downsize by its parent company, as is the Washington Post. Knight Ridder was recently purchased by McClatchy. And every big-metro daily in the country, including the still-independent New York Times, is under relentless pressure from deteriorating circulation, poor demographics, loss of classified ad revenue to the Internet, and the decline of urban department stores—storms that private owners might have weathered but institutional investors have no stomach for.

When these dailies succumb, there's really nothing to replace them. Television news does very little in-depth daily reporting, most radio is hopeless, and blogs simply don't have the resources. Magazines do some good work but come out only weekly or monthly. So while the raw numbers of media consolidation may be the most dramatic symptom of the problem, it's the small number of national dailies at the core of today's msm that ought to be the biggest cause for concern. And when they go? For the most part, blogs will go with them. Enjoy them while you can.

And that neatly captures the whole point of left wing blogging: it is a critique of conservatism and Republicanism and the way in which the supposed "liberal media" covers them. So naturally we're a bit pissed off after six years of Bush fucking up while "journalists" continue to obsess over Bill Clinton. They're a joke. But since a well-functioning media is critical to a well-functioning democracy, we want to help journalism. The critique has a purpose. Not anarchy but a better democracy. Perhaps that is what scares pundits and conservatives the most.

Posted by morte at 4:36 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Since I trash self-proclaimed conservatives on here regularly, I thought it might be refreshing to look at what principled conservatism looks like. Andrew Sullivan, A Political Katrina?

Add them up. We witness another horrifying suicide bombing in Iraq, murdering dozens of Shiite pilgrims. There is damning evidence that U.S. attorneys were leaned on by Republicans before the elections to bring cases against some Democrats - and the ones who refused were then fired. The vice-president's closest aide has been found guilty of perjury over whether he and his boss tried to discredit a critic in the summer of 2003 with respect to pre-war WMD intelligence. The guiltier parties - Rove and Armitage and Cheney - are still in power. We now see shameful neglect of injured veterans under the very noses of the defense secretary. On the intellectual front, we have now seen a conservative icon reveling in bigotry in full view of the national media and at the same podium and on the same day as Giuliani and Romney. Any one of these stories individually is damaging. Together, they exert a hurricane-strength storm on the Bush administration and the conservative movement.

More important, these developments re-enforce and amplify the arguments that defeated the Republicans last November. They have no control over a war they started and no way to bring it to an end. The reasons they started it look a lot more dubious now than they did then; the circumstantial evidence for Cheney's willful misleading of the American public before the war is mounting. Their treatment of the troops has been sickening from the start: they sent too few with insufficient body-armor and now give the wounded shamefully bad treatment. They are ruthless operatives who abuse the system for partisan ends (DeLay and Domenici). They are nasty bigots (Coulter) or theocons sympathizing with Islamists (D'Souza). They are perjurers (Libby) or cowards (Rove). Our future fiscal health is far, far worse than it was in 2000. Climate change looks more and more real and they have no serious policy to deal with it.

Now realize that no major Republican candidate has the backing of the base and the elites. There is no incumbent. The eclipse of old-style, limited government, realist, inclusive conservatism by the new pro-torture, left-baiting, homo-hating, debt-building, war-losing apparatchiks of the Rove machine could lead to most moderate Republicans and Independents voting Democrat or staying home next year. Of course, many things can happen before then. I've learned not to make predictions. But this feels to me like an implosion. Part of me wants to help rescue what's left of the right; part of me thinks that the only way to rescue the right is to allow it to continue committing suicide. Only once the GOP wakes up and realizes it has become a nasty rump of Dixie will some see how deep the damage of the Bush years goes.

Posted by morte at 4:21 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Apparently the Barone blog posting from earlier is a fake...or something. It's unclear what happened. I still agree with what was written, however, and it doesn't change the fact the glaring corruption and criminality of the administration is finally coming to light, and possibly coming to a head with Congress.

Posted by morte at 3:43 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Shocking. The GOP claims it will defeat the House Democrats' bill to end our involvement in Iraq. In light of this, let's dust off the House GOP Iraq debate memo (PDF):

We are writing to urge you not to debate the Democratic Iraq resolution on their terms, but rather on ours.

Democrats want to force us to focus on defending the surge, making the case that it will work and explaining why the President's new Iraq policy is different from prior efforts and therefore justified.

We urge you to instead broaden the debate to the threat posed to Americans, the world, and all "unbelievers" by radical Islamists. We would further urge you to join us in educating the American people about the views of radical Islamists and the consequences of not defeating radical Islam in Iraq.

The debate should not be about the surge or its details. This debate should not even be about the Iraq war to date, mistakes that have been made, or whether we can, or cannot, win militarily. If we let Democrats force us into a debate on the surge or the current situation in Iraq, we lose.

Rather, the debate must be about the global threat of the radical Islamist movement. No radical Islamist leader, including Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahari, and Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, has ever claimed that the goal of radical Islam is Iraq alone or if they succeed in Iraq this war against us would end. In fact, Robert Kagen recently wrote a piece for the Washington Post entitled "Grand Delusion" noting many politicians' desire to wish the war away. He notes that those who call for an end to the war don't want to talk about the fact that the war in Iraq and in the region will not end, but will only grow more dangerous if and when we walk away.

Thanks to the liberal mainstream media, Americans fully understand the consequences of continuing our efforts in Iraq--both in American lives and dollars. The American people do not understand the consequences of abandoning that effort or the extreme views, goals, and intentions of the radical Islamist movement that is fueling the war in Iraq and the attacks on westerners and unbelievers throughout the world.

The attached map and list of some of the attacks worldwide since 2002 illustrates the global nature of this threat.

Join us in asking our Democratic colleagues the essential question: If we do not defeat radical Islam in Iraq, then where will we do so?

We will send further information in the coming days. However, should your staff require further details, please have them contact Eric V. Schlect at 5-3361 to get these insightful books: "Knowing the Enemy" by Mary Habeck and "America Alone" by Mark Steyn.

Posted by morte at 2:31 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

From the "Huh?" file, the inimitable Glenn Beck. Remember, Good Morning America described this man as "a leading cultural commentator with a distinct voice." I like how I described him better: "Shouldn't he be selling cheap satellite descramblers on Ebay to better enjoy the Spice channel?"

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Never forget. A big part of conservative identity politics is their fear and hostility towards the feminine. Coulter's "faggot" comment is simply a cruder (though not by much) version of this headline, "Could Edwards Become First Woman President?" Feminine = weak for conservatives. And even though Malkin and Coulter are women, they are not feminine and certainly not feminist (here are a couple instances of Coulter claiming women do not have the capacity to vote). This flavors everything from agressive foreign policy (manly will to power) to the "pro-life" movement (women are property). Obviously conservatives are on the wrong side of history in their belief that partriarchy shall rule forever, but they are also apparently too stupid to recognize that the alternative is not matriarchy. I'll quote myself from last year:

Rising above the simple and anachronistic gender divisions is the challenge. I believe the truly enlightened person recognizes the very real biological differences between men and women and in so doing, transcends ignorance about them. In the final paragraph of Richard Tarnas' masterpiece, The Passion of the Western Mind, he writes, "Today we are experiencing something that looks very much like the death of Western man. Perhaps the end of "man" himself is at hand. But man is not a goal. Man is something that must be overcome--and fulfilled, in the embrace of the feminine."

UPDATE: I forgot to link to Greenwald's discussion of the same topic.

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Yes, Senator. An Attorney General who lies to Congress probably ought to be replaced.

Sometimes I feel like I'm witnessing a slow-motion reaction to just how criminal and corrupt this administration is.

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For the Democrats. George Bush will never leave Iraq while he's president unless he is forced to. The only way to force him is to cut off funding. Giving him more money and with the provision that we get out of there sometime between now and September 2008 won't force him. The fact that he plans to veto the House bill should be all the proof you need.

The next piece of advice will cost you.

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Yet another reason to never, never, treat Fox News as a serious news outlet.

It's the news channel for alternative reality conservatives. Let them have it. The rest of us grownups have more important things to be concerned with.

...Adding that some other news sources need to pull their heads out of their asses as well.

Posted by morte at 12:46 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Why does the GOP hate the military?

I'm numb from how callous and disgusting these people are.

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Is the shit beginning to hit the fan for the Bush administration? Michael Barone:

The emerging scandal surrounding the dismissals of eight former U.S. attorneys should signify to American voters the depth, breadth, and permeation of corruption in the Bush administration.

When a U.S. senator (to wit, Pete Domenici, a New Mexico Republican) feels free to call a prosecutor at home and hang up on him for resisting political pressure in the course of executing his prosecutorial duties, the line between politics and law enforcement has been so thoroughly violated that it no longer exists.
...
Domenici would not have made that call had either a Democrat or a law-abiding Republican been in the White House. He would not have had the temerity to throw his weight around to such an outrageous extent.

What's going on in Washington is not sufficiently removed from the routine doings of a tawdry Third World dictatorship to give any American comfort.

"He wanted to know if the [indictments] would be filed before November. ... I gave an answer to the effect of I didn't think so. ... He said, "I'm very sorry to hear that," and the line went dead, the telephone line went dead. I thought to myself, did he just hang up on me? ... He didn't call back; I didn't call back. I had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that something bad had happened, and within six weeks I got a call from [senior Justice Department official] Mike Battle saying that it was time for me to move on."

Americans often suspect that their political leaders are arrogant and out of touch. But even then it is nearly impossible to fathom what self-delusion could have convinced Senator Pete Domenici of New Mexico that he had a right to call a federal prosecutor at home and question him about a politically sensitive investigation.

That disturbing tale is one of several revealed this week in Congressional hearings called to look into the firing of eight United States attorneys. The hearings left little doubt that the Bush administration had all eight — an unprecedented number — ousted for political reasons. But it points to even wider abuse; prosecutors suggest that three Republican members of Congress may have tried to pressure the attorneys into doing their political bidding.
...
Congress must keep demanding answers. It must find out who decided to fire these prosecutors and why, and who may have authorized putting pressure on Mr. Cummins. And it must look into whether Senator Domenici and Representatives Wilson and Hastings violated ethics rules that forbid this sort of interference. We hope the House committee will not be deterred by the fact that Mr. Hastings is its ranking Republican. The Justice Department also needs to open its own investigation. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s claim that these prosecutors were fired for poor performance was always difficult to believe. Now it’s impossible.

And here I was thinking our constitutional crisis would be over presidential wartime powers. It might still be that, or it might be these two other gross abuses of executive power. What a disaster. What a despicable display. the Bush/Cheney team has not only lived up to my worst fears, but has exceeded them.

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Other bloggers have already commented on this, but I feel I must chime in. David Gergen:

This is an administration that has been mostly free of scandal over the last six years and now they have the taint that they cannot erase

Posted by morte at 6:53 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

What Atrios says. Adding, of course, that Democratic candidates who fight back against this bullshit will be more difficult to smear.

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This Washington Post editorial on the Libby verdict is little more than a series of lies, as Think Progress demonstrates. But what's striking to me is the editorial's conclusion:

Mr. Fitzgerald was, at least, right about one thing: The Wilson-Plame case, and Mr. Libby's conviction, tell us nothing about the war in Iraq.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan summarizes it nicely:

Something is rotten in the heart of Washington; and it lies in the vice-president's office. The salience of this case is obvious. What it is really about - what it has always been about - is whether this administration deliberately misled the American people about WMD intelligence before the war. The risks Cheney took to attack Wilson, the insane over-reaction that otherwise very smart men in this administration engaged in to rebut a relatively trivial issue: all this strongly implies the fact they were terrified that the full details of their pre-war WMD knowledge would come out. Fitzgerald could smell this. He was right to pursue it, and to prove that a brilliant, intelligent, sane man like Libby would risk jail to protect his bosses. What was he really trying to hide? We now need a Congressional investigation to find out more, to subpoena Cheney and, if he won't cooperate, consider impeaching him.

Posted by morte at 11:51 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Matt Yglesias reminds us how far-reaching the power of 9/11 syndrome was in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq by quoting from the blog of Bay Area punk rock legend Dr. Frank.

When I was a wily young punk rocker, I considered Frank and his band pretty far away from the revolutionary rhetoric of some of the other bands I listened to at the time. There was pop-punk, hardcore, emo and a million other subgenres but the bulk of the 80s and 90s punk revival, politically, fell into three categories: 1) the state was powerful, evil, corporate, corrupt and needed to be destroyed, 2) the state was powerful, evil, corporate, corrupt but there was nothing you could do about it, 3) the state was powerful, evil, corporate, corrupt and ought to be avoided by engaging in an alternative lifestyle. Never was there an embrace of the state, or the sense that its flaws could simply be reformed. Now, punks aren't exactly great political theorists, but at least they were principled in their opposition to economic and military power. I like to think that my punk legacy affects my current politics, which are nowhere near revolutionary, by reminding me that alternatives--however unrealistic--do exist. I must say it saddens me to see that 9/11 syndrome afflicted even those most principled of people, punk rockers.

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I'm not going to get into the details of the US Attorneys who resigned/fired/asked to leave (others are more relaible for information on that story) but I will say this: When the Attorney General says "Attorneys' dismissals were related to performance, not to politics" and the attorneys in question say "Prosecutors Say They Felt Pressured, Threatened" it is obvious that someone is lying. Again, one should be familiar with the details of the case before making judgment, but which is more likely? The prosecutors, working independently, in different districts, have only one thing in common: prosecution of corruption cases. And if we are to believe Mr. Gonzales, they weren't performing their duty adequately. That strikes me as highly unlikely. And the details of the case indicate that there was never a performance problem but rather an executive decision to take them off the case. Now, the president has every right to do so, but we must be suspect. The Bush administration hasn't exactly built up a lot of trust during its tenure, and given the cases these prosecutors were working on--Republican corruption--I think it is pretty clear what has happened here.

Read the facts and judge for yourself. But always bear in mind that either the administration or the prosecutors are lying. And ask yourself who would benefit most from such lying.

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Michael Weiner (Savage) to Media Matters: WAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!

Conservative crybabies.

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National Review Then:

One emotion conservatives can spare themselves on the morning after is chagrin at pondering lost chances. Clearly, the fix was in. Only one Democratic senator broke party ranks, on two procedural votes. These men and women were determined to protect their own, whatever happened. Their basic calculation was partisan self-interest: As late as early fall, when it seemed that President Clinton's lying and rutting might damage the party, some talked of his resignation. When the November elections showed that no damage had been done, the party closed ranks.

National Review Now:

President Bush should pardon I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. The trial that concluded in a guilty verdict on four of five counts conclusively proved only one thing: A White House aide became the target of a politicized prosecution set in motion by bureaucratic infighting and political cowardice.

UPDATE: Libby Defense Fund now has a link to the above NR editorial. Clearly blowjobs are more important than national security. Or, in the words of George H.W. Bush

I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the name of our sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious of traitors

Posted by morte at 2:58 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Does this mean 51% of people in the world are left wing extremists under Joe Klein's definition?

Posted by morte at 2:56 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

This excellent post from Kevin Drum sums up what is wrong with centrists like Joe Klein who fail to recognize which side of the ideological spectrum the radicals and extremists are on. In short, Klein is the product of a generation where the most visible extremists were on the left. The conservative revival was largely the result of this extremism, and continues to define itself in opposition to liberal excess. But for anyone who has been paying attention to conservatism over the last 15 years, it is obvious that liberals bent over backwards to reach the center--even reaching towards the right--in order to get votes. And they failed because they were rightly perceived as inauthentic. Yet the right wing assault continued unabated, culminating in the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Conservatives lost their mojo for a while, as the public reacted with some horror at the ferocity of the conservative assault. When the Supreme Court gave the presidency to George Bush it emboldened conservatives to push their agenda even further. The result is the trainwreck we have today: war, debt and corruption. And yet self-proclaimed "centrists" think Democrats are too beholden to the radical left.

Let me be blunt: that is an insipid assessment. Conservatives, in the classical sense, cannot be radicals. But the path conservatism took was revolutionary. They called it a restoration but the intent was to remake American society in whatever image was pleasing to the social, moral and libertarian critics that formed the core of the conservative movement. It is no accident that the most militant conservatives and neoconservatives today came from left wing revolutionary backgrounds or appropriated the tactics of revolutionary Marxists: they see politics as combat and do not accept compromise. Anticommunism, furthermore, was the critical glue holding together this coalition. The communist threat held something to offend libertarians, social conservatives, and moral conservatives alike and this partly explains the path conservatives took once the communist threat was gone. Without the Soviet threat the guns were turned internally to wage war against liberalism. And after 9/11, it is no accident that liberals were repeatedly associated with terrorists and tyrants. It is incoherent at best and threatening at worst. But oddly the centrists fail to recognize this. I think Drum's analysis begins to explain why.

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Neocon on Schlesinger: he was a bad historian because he was a liberal. The money quote:

it also warped his political judgment in the present, leading him in the last forty years of his life to support the forces that were pushing the Democratic party to the Left. In becoming an apologist for these forces, he betrayed the liberalism that he himself, in The Vital Center, had earlier espoused and whose banishment from the Democratic party has been, and will continue to be, a calamity for this country.

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The Fox News gang is in agreement that the verdict represents a grave miscarriage of justice. Oddly, the Libby Legal Defense Fund still has no comment.

Posted by morte at 12:17 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Still taking cues from tabloid journalist liars.

Cancer of the Republic.

Posted by morte at 12:16 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I would never have believed that someone like Rudy Giuliani could be a serious candidate for president. But I was wrong. It appears the myth of Rudy is all we'll be hearing from now until Election Day, the template being set by Newsweek:

His remarks were dramatic, which was fitting, since Giuliani has always been a man of drama, always thriving at moments of crisis. Growing up in the Long Island suburbs of New York in the placid 1950s, he would close the door to his bedroom and listen to Italian operas, in which each song contained a challenge, a confession or a choice. As a college student he read the words of Winston Churchill, perhaps dreaming that he, too, might one day feel as though he were "walking with Destiny." For a pudgy, Brooklyn-born undergraduate at Manhattan College, his aspirations seemed somewhat outlandish. Sometimes they still do. In his daily interactions, Giuliani can be arrogant, abrasive and imperious, an average-size man trying too hard to prove himself a giant.

But when the crises come, Giuliani has proved to be big enough. New York City was crime-ridden with a dwindling middle class when he became mayor in 1994. By the millennium, the city was safe, swaggering—and the envy of much of the nation. On 9/11, with the president hidden from view, "America's Mayor" steeled the country by speaking the terrible truth: "The number of casualties will be more than any of us can bear." Now, with the war in Iraq in chaos and Al Qaeda still unvanquished, he is pitching himself to Republican primary voters as the man destined to steady the party and the nation in a time of trial.

But I just checked in with Rudy's preemient biographer, Wayne Barrett. His take on Newsweek's effort? "It's an application for access, that's what this piece is. They wanted access to the Giuliani campaign, they had none. They submitted this application."

Campaign profiles are probably unavoidable, but they should at least be dispassionate. The Rudy piece is one big, long sloppy kiss posing as news. And it's only March 2007. Fuck.

Posted by morte at 12:57 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Inspired by UggaBugga (who was in turn inspired by Digby, who was in turn inspired by...), I Googled this blog for the seven forbidden words and came up with 40 instances of me using them out of 375 entries (not including this one). "Shit" and "Fuck" were most common, although "Piss" came up on a few occasions. Now that we all know this data, how has it improved your understanding of my writing? Are you offended? Could you care less? Are you wondering why I've even brought it up?

And that's precisely the point.

Posted by morte at 12:21 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The ultimate Plan B is pull everybody out," said Stephen D. Biddle, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an adviser to the Defense Department. "Nobody wants to do that. Most are looking at the middle ground between surge and pullout."

Adding, of course, that the burden of action is on the Democrats' shoulders. Bush and the party he wrecked own the Iraq war. Democrats should avoid partial ownership of that war which is, you know, extremely unpopular. And the best way to avoid ownership is to end it. Murtha's got a plan. Try implementing it.

Quote ripped off from Atrios.

Posted by morte at 11:41 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

As promised, Joe Klein has come through with his characteristics list of right wing extremists. I subject it to the same treatment as the left wing extremist characteristic list:

--believes that America is always, in every instance, the ultimate force of moral authority in the world.

--believes that Saddam Hussein was linked to 9/11--even if not directly, he was just that sort of guy.

--sees transnational non-governmental groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International as "the next threats" to U.S. sovereignty. Calls them Transies, derisively.

--doesn't hold a passport, as a matter of principle: there's nothing over there except depravity.

--believes that capitalism creates perfect justice, and that any attempt to tax or regulate it constitutes "social engineering." (Doesn't believe in evolution, but does believe in social darwinism.)

--believes global warming is a left-wing myth.

--believes in the Second Amendment to the Constituion, but has some "problems" with the First.

--believes that any form of universal health insurance is socialism, even the tax credit system first proposed by the Heritage Foundation.

--believes that there are inferior races.

--believes that there are inferior religions.

--believes in a global conspiracy led by Jewish bankers, Hollywood executives and journalists.

--believes, despite the above, that Israel is absolutely wonderful, and that when it achieves full dominion over its Biblical lands--especially Judea and Samaria--a great battle will be fought and Jesus will descend from the clouds.

--believes that homosexuals are condemned to hell.

--only receives news from Fox or right-wing radio talk show hosts.

--believes Hillary Clinton is a dangerous radical.

--regularly uses harsh, vulgar, intolerant language to mock liberals.

"This is just a partial list, off the top of my head...but I'm sure, as with lefties, these guys simply don't exist, either."

Huh? I'm glad Klein saved this important caveat for the end. Up until then, I was under the impression that his lefty and righty lists were indicative of extremists that actually exist. But now he tells me that they simply don't exist. So why make the list? I'm confused.

It is actually quite clear what Klein is doing here. His caveat allows him to get off his chest his disdain for these people--on the right and left--without actually offending anyone or taking sides. The problem is that there are people who exhibit these features throughout society. On both the left and right they are on the fringe, but only one of them is gaining more mainstream acceptance. Klein is being thoroughly dishonest. He came up with his left wing extremist list first, declaring at the end that "It would be wildly stupid for me to get into a pissing match by naming names. I won't go there...And bear in mind, the characteristics above should be regarded as tendencies, not cast-in-stone beliefs." and then offering his right wing list as an afterthought. So he knows who the left wing extremists are, but won't name names, and then two days later says that they don't exist at all? Klein clearly believes that only left wing extremists actually exist, even though he provides an imperfect belief set for right wing extremists who actually exist!

You see why it is so hard to take this seriously. Klein can't or won't admit his agenda to himself or us. I really doubt whether he believes in anything at all other than the permanence of cynicism in politics (AKA the David Broder school of journalism). This is, captured succinctly, the decrepit state of American journalism, the Cancer of the Republic.

Posted by morte at 11:13 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

This is a bit dated now (last weekend) but is worth watching: Max Blumenthal's unauthorized documentary of the 2007 CPAC. Poor conservatives. They get all defensive and incoherent (except Grover Norquist, who I will never agree with but at least respect for his candor) when a liberal comes to their conference and asks simple, straightforward questions. Somewhat frightening stuff.

Posted by morte at 10:52 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Just to be clear about what the Coulter incident means: what she said isn't the issue. The issue is that lefty bloggers appear to be the only ones who understand the significance of the Coulter incident. The CPAC is a gathering of conservatives. It is a conference. It is essentially a statement about what it means to be a conservative in 2007. And based on the response of conservatives to Coulter at the conference, she must be one of the top spokespeople for conservatism. This is where the substance of her remarks matters. What she said, has said, and will continue to say is entirely negative. Coulter conservatism is about hatred, destruction and war. Nothing else. She doesn't make arguments, she identifies enemies and belittles them at best, threatens them with violence at worst. That in itself is bad enough but the real problem is that the mainstream media are silent about it. This is apparently "normal" for them and hence not news. They have failed to appreciate the shift in what it means to be a conservative in America. It isn't about limited government, low taxes, elevation of faith and military toughness, it is about Coulter conservatism. Conservative ideology has failed in practice and all that remains is ranting about "faggots."

I think this is big news. And it isn't new. This has been a transformation long in the works. Reagan was the success of conservative ideology in the policy sense. Ever since it has been a slow decline into Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Bill Kristol, Bill O'Reilly, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin and Glenn Reynolds. Bush senior wasn't considered a conservative to these people. Neither was Bob Dole. They were conservatives in the older, classical sense of prudence and prescription. Edmund Burke, in short. The above short list of new conservatives have nothing to do with conservativism in the intellectual or moral sense. It is all about political warfare, authoritarianism and sheer power. Again, I think this is a big deal. Highly newsworthy. But the only ones who notice are bloggers like Atrios and Glenn Greenwald (I'd go as far to say that the latter belongs in the "must-read" category). And others. Many others. But the big story, according to serious journalists, is that lefty bloggers use curse words, and that might make them extemists. And that neatly captures the whole point of left wing blogging: it is a critique of conservatism and Republicanism and the way in which the supposed "liberal media" covers them. So naturally we're a bit pissed off after six years of Bush fucking up while "journalists" continue to obsess over Bill Clinton. They're a joke. But since a well-functioning media is critical to a well-functioning democracy, we want to help journalism. The critique has a purpose. Not anarchy but a better democracy. Perhaps that is what scares pundits and conservatives the most.

Posted by morte at 12:43 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Does one need to be an idiot, a misogynist or both to listen to Bill O'Reilly?

I especially like the part where he refers to himself as a barbarian. Couldn't agree more, Bill!

Posted by morte at 12:11 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

It never ends. But here's a handy guide to civility in the blogosphere. It is also useful for pondering the question of who the extremists are.

Posted by morte at 11:58 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The top political reporter for the most important newspaper in the country reports on the CPAC as if it were the local chapter of the Elks.

Cancer of the Republic.

Media Matters has more.

Posted by morte at 11:52 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Joe Klein's list of features that make a "left wing extremist." Let's take a look.

--believes the United States is a fundamentally negative force in the world.

--believes that American imperialism is the primary cause of Islamic radicalism.

--believes that the decision to go to war in Iraq was not an individual case of monumental stupidity, but a consequence of America's fundamental imperialistic nature.

--tends to blame America for the failures of others--i.e. the failure of our NATO allies to fulfill their responsibilities in Afghanistan.

--doesn't believe that capitalism, carefully regulated and progressively taxed, is the best liberal idea in human history.

--believes American society is fundamentally unfair (as opposed to having unfair aspects that need improvement).

--believes that eternal problems like crime and poverty are the primarily the fault of society.

--believes that America isn't really a democracy.

--believes that corporations are fundamentally evil.

--believes in a corporate conspiracy that controls the world.

Myself, I only agree partially with a couple of items on that list, and think the rest are ridiculous. Obviously there is little gray area in a statement like "corporations are fundamentally evil" and I require more depth for my critiques. Yes, "American imperialism" (which Klein doesn't define) has something to do with Islamic radicalism, but is it the "primary" cause? And is "capitalism," even with Klein's caveats, really "the best liberal idea in human history?" Because he is so fast and loose with such general terms, it is hard to take Klein's list seriously. He seems to be describing the belief set, as I said, of a would-be Leninist radical. And I don't think there are enough of those people in the world to really get all that worked up about it. Plus, I've only quoted part of the list. It gets a bit incoherent after that:

--is intolerant of good ideas when they come from conservative sources.

--dismissively mocks people of faith, especially those who are opposed to abortion and gay marriage.

--regularly uses harsh, vulgar, intolerant language to attack moderates or conservatives.

I am eagerly looking forward to Klein's list of right wing extremist traits.

Posted by morte at 11:05 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The reaction to Ann Coulter's comments is hardly productive. Here's an example:

Howard Dean, the Democratic National Committee chairman, said: "There is no place in political discourse for this kind of hate-filled and bigoted comments. While Democrats and Republicans may disagree on the issues, we should all be able to agree that this kind of vile rhetoric is out of bounds."

UPDATE: More bigotry from Coulter at last year's CPAC. Greg Sargent asks, "Why is it that one of the central draws at the year's premiere gathering of conservatives is basically a child in the body of a "controversial" pundit?" and "And why is it that this conference's attendees are actually willing to take valuable time out of their brief lives in order to witness such infantilism?" Well, I believe I answered that above. These people are stupid. They care incapable of independent thought. Does that answer the question?

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The Walter Reed scandal has been in the papers for some time now. The controversy still rages on. Yet the keyboard commandos in the right-wing blogosphere could hardly be bothered with it. What's the matter with them? Don't they support the troops?

Absolutely vile and disgusting. I guess I shouldn't be shocked. Conservatives are repulsively both narcissistic and misanthropic. Its a deadly combination and tells you a lot about how such a mind works.

UPDATE: Grover Norquist, who is essentially a sociopath, is at least honest and realistic. His advice for conservatives in Congress? Do nothing for the next two years. That about sums up the conservative model of governing, doesn't it?

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As a scholar of conservative thought, I'd like to be all over the CPAC. But I guess I was just expecting too much from conservative thought in 2007. You really get the sense of grasping at straws, of canned talking points, of preaching to the choir. And of course liberals do that too. But the sheer righteousness of the conservative movement...well, it's something to behold.

And then there's the presidential candidates. What a bunch of pandering, hollow, pathetic men of absolutely no conviction. Feeding a conservative audience with red meat while asking them to ignore their liberal records. It's appalling. Absolutely appalling. These people live in another world and they truly believe in nothing but their own claim to power. I think Democrats should be pointing this out every single day.

Ugh.

UPDATE: Deep thoughts from conservative intellectual Ann Coulter: "John Edwards is a faggot." Its like a bunch of insecure jujior high students suddenly got their own political party. Now I know why I avoided the CPAC; conservatives no longer have any claim on being an ideology of ideas.

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Is Russ Feingold the only Democrat who understands what's at stake for his party (not to mention the country) with regards to Iraq?

It's still George Bush's war. But we run the risk of gaining some ownership of it if we don't make it absolutely clear that we are the party that wants to get out of there

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The Civilization vs. Savages club has a new member: Thomas Friedman. His column is behind the NYTimes firewall, but you can read parts of it here, here and here.

One wonders how in the span of four years someone could go from believing that Arab countries can aspire to--indeed, fundamentally desire--democracy (read: civilization) to believing that Arab countries are incapable of civilization. In Friedman's case, it is clear that his usual unexamined optimism (the world is flat!) has led him to be "mugged by reality," to borrow Irving Kristol's famous definition of neoconservatism. Only in this case it was the neo-liberal Friedman who has been mugged by reality to become...neo-neo-conservative?

I don't think there is a term in the dictionary of political philosophy to describe it yet. But when you fundamentally believe that the world aspires to Western global capitalism--including the flattening effect it has on local culture, religion, social bonds, etc.--and that assumption is proven wrong, reactions like Friedman's become easier to understand. He cannot believe that these people don't want to live like us; he simply can't understand it. So he reacts coarsely, assuming that Arab countries can't be civilized because they are barbaric. He doesn't explicitly say what the solution ought to be, but we can use our imagination. How to deal with a people who refuse globalized, secular, scientific modernity? I'll bet Bill Kristol has an answer. I'll bet Jerry Falwell has an answer.

Mark my words, it won't be long before we start hearing open calls to simply make this problem go away. Disturbing times lie ahead of us...

Posted by morte at 12:21 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I'm sure I've mentioned this in the past, but the afterglow of the 2006 elections softened my attitude: my support for Democrats is conditional on them doing the right thing, listening to the will of the people who put them in office, and standing up to the GOP and their surrogates. All in all, I can't say I'm terribly impressed so far. The central issue for America, the war in Iraq, is still the central issue. And when I read things like this, I don't get much more enthused. I will grant that Bowers is probably more pessimistic than me because he is, essentially, a political professional. And he must burden the agony of watching his party fail and shirk their duty. I maintain a bit more optimism, perhaps irrationally, but I do.

I'm still waiting for someone to stand up in the Senate and give the speech of their career. I'm still waiting for momentum to build behind a candidate who will drag the party back to its progressive populist roots. But I won't wait forever. My support is conditional. One must earn the right to wield power, and the honeymoon is almost over, Democrats.

Get it together!

Posted by morte at 10:32 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Glenn Greenwald:

But what is so notable here -- and what one finds in almost every debate about Iran -- is that while the Warriors will mock and oppose every attempt to resolve the U.S.-Iranian conflicts short of war, they never have the courage to expressly say what it is that they actually favor. The reason for that refusal is clear: they oppose negotiations because they crave full-on military confrontation with Iran (or, at the very least, the use of force to bring about regime change), but they know that expressly advocating that will cause them to be stigmatized as the dangerous radicals that they are. So they keep using code to talk about the need to show strength and toughness towards Iran and never appease them -- and they mock every option designed to avoid war -- while lacking the courage of their convictions to say what they actually think.

What cowardice. What mendacity. I know I'm just a crude and uncivil blogger, but at least I state clearly what it is I want. If these charlatans are unwilling to do so, I'll gladly take their place in the prominent media niches they have established for themselves. That's an open offer to any neocon hack that wants it.

Posted by morte at 2:15 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Why in God's name is Glenn Beck on the TV? Shouldn't he be selling cheap satellite descramblers on Ebay to better enjoy the Spice channel?

Posted by morte at 2:00 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Atrios:

And when academic experts, for example, go on NPR or whatever to discuss a particular issue, they're generally inclined to stick very narrowly to their area of expertise and not consider the wider political environment in which the particular issue exists (whatever the politics of the particular academic). This feeds into our side's "hack gap" problem, as they're often matched up with conservative think tankers whose job it is to understand very well the political contours of whatever debate they're engaged in.

Posted by morte at 1:49 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

My two examples from earlier have not been rectified. McCain's office offered a clarification, but not an apology ("I should have used the word, sacrificed, as I have in the past."). Does the same standard apply to Democrats?

And the Post remains obsessed with the vulgarity that emerges, exclusively, from lefty bloggers: "If we write an article the liberals blogs do not like we will be inundated with nasty, vulgar email--which has no impact on our coverage."

No lessons learned apparently...

Posted by morte at 1:40 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

...courtesy of Rush Limbaugh.

Posted by morte at 11:49 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

This is funny.

Posted by morte at 11:47 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Eric Alterman on Arthur Schleshinger and the neocons:

we are, I'm afraid, going to read a lot of tributes from folks like David Brooks and William Kristol wherein they try to appropriate Arthur's life and work for some neocon argument or other, or, at the very least, take potshots at contemporary liberals. This is what neocons do when people die. They say their enemies secretly thought they were right. They tried it with Lionel Trilling, here. Norman Podhoretz once wrote an article for Harper's on why Orwell would have been a neocon, and it will happen with Arthur too.

Posted by morte at 11:39 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I don't believe that there is a strictly liberal or conservative bias in the news. My position is that the press is in thrall of power, and that is their bias. Nevertheless, it is appalling the degree to which different standards apply to the left and right. There are a million examples of this, but for today's lesson I've chosen two.

Exhibit A: The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz. Short version: anonymous comments made by extremists on political blogs aren't indicative of that blog's political position, except when done on left-wing blogs.

Exhibit B: Different standards for John McCain and Barack Obama. Short version: when a Democratic presidential candidate says that lives have been wasted in Iraq, he must publicly apologize or face the wrath of the people. When a Republican presidential candidate says that lives have been wasted in Iraq, he is speaking to truth.

Here endeth the lesson.

Posted by morte at 11:24 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

What part of "nonprofit" do you not understand?

Posted by morte at 11:22 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Washington Post,

"ideologically moderate" is an oxymoron.

Posted by morte at 11:19 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Josh Marshall: "In this decade there's been no stronger force for nuclear weapons proliferation than the dynamic duo of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush."

This is in regards to the administration's acknowledgment that North Korea didn't have an uranium enrichment program, which was the reason the Bush administration tore up the agreed framework enacted by Clinton which had stopped the DPRK's plutonium program, which they started up again as soon as Bush ditched the agreed framework. And as we now know, North Korea possesses plutonium nuclear weapons and have tested them.

Now, my feelings on nuclear weapons should be familiar to anyone who reads this blog: they don't change strategic reality but governments act as though nuclear weapons are a real deterent. I don't consider North Korea a threat because I know they can't use their nukes without facing their own extinction. So nuclear non-proliferation is the official policy of pretty much every state that has them. The essential contradiction is that you can't believe in the theory of deterence and oppose nuclear proliferation. If you really believe that nuclear weapons deter war, then everyone ought to have them. This is why governments prefer to talk about "rogue states" in possession of these weapons because it supports the "madman" theory of state actors and distracts attention away from the fundamental contradiction between deterence and policy.

But I digress. The point here is that the Bush administration is beyond incompetent. They have no idea how the world works. In every instance, they have got it wrong. And not just wrong. Horribly wrong. It is amazing to me that Bush was re-elected largely on the premise that he was more trusted on matters of national security. Unbelievable. Future presidents, in making foreign policy decisions, could do worse than to look at what Bush did and do precisely the opposite. It's that bad. And regardless of my theoretical observations about nuclear weapons, Marshall's assessment is spot-on.

Posted by morte at 10:55 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Jackass Republican blames yesterday's market dip/drop/plunge/crash/whatever on John Murtha.

Not only is it good for America for Republicans to be in the minority, it has provided a wealth of cheap humor as well.

Posted by morte at 4:01 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Pathetic and immoral. Nothing to add, this speaks for itself.

Posted by morte at 11:44 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

...from Glenn Beck. Courtesy of Think Progress.

Posted by morte at 11:40 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

This is probably the most repulsive thing I have read in some time. Dinesh D'Souza (yeah, that asshole) reinterprets Abu Ghraib for us:

In one crucial respect, however, the Muslim critics were wrong. Contrary to their assertions, Abu Ghraib did not reflect the shared values of America, it reflected the sexual immodesty of liberal America. Lynndie England and Charles Graner were two wretched individuals from Red America who were trying to act out the fantasies of Blue America. Casting aside all traditional notions of decency, propriety and morality, they simply lived by the code of self-fulfillment. If it feels good, it must be right. This was bohemianism, West Virginia-style.

Link courtesy of UggaBugga.

Posted by morte at 3:11 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Watch Keith Olbermann's special commentary. He asks the legitimate question of why the Secretary of State, who holds advanced degrees in political science, would think comparing Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler makes sense. If I have a pet peeve, it is this nonsense of comparing all of America's current enemies to the Third Reich. So let me be as succinct about this as I possible can:

Hitler was the political leadership of one of the most advanced industrial states in the world who had, in twenty years time, rebuilt the German state and military after the devastation of World War I. Hitler threatened the world and acted on those threats with an army that conquered much of Europe. Millions--repeat--millions of men died in WWII, mostly Russians, to repel Germany. Allied forces launched an invasion of Western Europe on D-Day that was, I believe, the largest of its kind ever attempted. Our very economy was devoted to the production of war materials. London was burned to the ground. Japan was firebombed. Millions of Jews were mechanically executed. And did I mention that millions of Russians died to push the Nazis out of their motherland? That was WWII and the results of Hitler's actions.

Saddam Hussein is not Hitler. Mahmoud Ahmandinejad is not Hitler. Kim Jong Il is not Hitler. Bashar al-Assad is not Hitler. Osama bin Laden is not Hitler. And none of these people possess the resources that the Third Reich did in its heyday. I find it appalling that someone as educated as Dr. Rice would utter such nonsense. I know she's protecting her boss, but how does she live with herself, how can she lie and pretend it is true? How can she dupe people into believing that what we face today is even remotely like the travails of the Second World War. It's not even close. The Nazis might have taken over the world. None of the above-mentioned petty dictators and terrorists could even come close to taking over the world. Obviously Dr. Rice is making the leap that since the Nazis were ideologues, and these dictators and terrorists are ideologues, there must be a similarity.

And, of course, the weapons of mass destruction. Always the fear of annihilation. For someone whose academic career was shaped by cold war theories of detente, Rice sees the world in terms of planes of stability and instability. No one denies that rogue WMDs are a problem. Of course they are. They always have been. But how do you deal with it? By toppling petty dictators who aspire to be nuclear powers? Seems like a good way to make those materials available to terrorists, doesn't it? But the premise is that there is no distinction between terrorists and the states that harbor them. That is part of the Bush Doctrine, in case we've forgotten. But is it true? Seems to me we would need good intelligence to determine that. And on that point we have no basis to trust the administration. There is every reason to be sceptical of assertions made by administration officials who we know would prefer to simply bomb these people back to the stone age. They make the intelligence fit their predispositions, rather than letting the intelligence form their judgment.

Yet the meta conversation is something grander than intelligence gathering and bureaucratic battles. It is the clash of civilizations. It is the fourth world war. It is the noble fight to bring freedom to the world. And everything hangs in the balance. I find it the most disgusting of all. And it sounds to me like the last gasps of an empire, dragged kicking and screaming into irrelevance.

Posted by morte at 11:30 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Reuniting the Swift Boat charlatans, discussing the "Left's Repeated Campaign Against the American Soldier."

I'm not sure what they intend to disucss, since under conservative government the military has been strethced to the breaking point, can't recruit enough troops, extended tours to combat verterans, not provided adequate body armor, not provided adequate armor for vehicles, put them in the middle of a civil war, used them as props at political events, given them no clear mission or objectives, slashed veteran benefits, left thousands dead and disabled, and treated them to slum life at the nation's top military hospital.

"The Left's Repeated Campaign Against the American Soldier." That's rich. These people are beneath contempt.

Posted by morte at 11:24 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The Washington Post seems a bit confused. First Broder whines about partisanship tearing the country apart, and then the editors of the paper conclude that Murtha is far from the mainstream, even though it directly contradicts the findings of their own fucking poll.

There's a reason why I call these people the Cancer of the Republic. Are they just stupid or is it their job to argue in favor of pointless war, regardless of all evidence and opinion to the contrary? I really don't know. But the Fourth Estate is barely functioning at this point.

Posted by morte at 11:15 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

...but since John Gibson is apparantly a necrophiliac, he is able to reorient our moral compasses to the real issues of the day.

I dare not ask, but how do people this disgusting and soulless get on the television to preach to us in the first place? Maybe I don't want to know the answer.

Cancer of the Republic.

Posted by morte at 11:11 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Well, better late than never: OpenCongress.org

Projects like this just seem so obvious to me. Open government is a must in a mass society with a mass media and with obfuscation and lies and agendas everywhere. And since direct democracy is impractical at best, we must rely upon citizens' sense of civic duty to shine light into the issues and into the politicians. Government doesn't have to be the bad guy, after all.

If that's the idealist in me, I would be remiss to not offer the following caveat: tools like this do make democracy flourish. They do not make people get interested in politics. I do not know how to get more people interested in politics, but the benefit of tools like OpenCongress.org is to make the work of those who are politically active easier. Even democracies need leaders.

Posted by morte at 11:04 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

More bullshit from David Broder about "Unity 08"

He pointed to two problems that many of us have decried. "The leading candidates in both parties have suggested they will decline federal matching funds and plan to spend unlimited sums," he said. "They expect the bundlers -- the people collecting for them -- to raise a million dollars each, and what do they [the bundlers] expect in return?"

Second, Bailey said, "the likelihood is that the nominees of both parties will be determined by the first three or four primaries, which means that 99 percent of the people who will vote in November will have absolutely no say in the names that are on the ballot. It's not surprising that they may be looking for an alternative."

I suggested to Bailey that the underlying premise of this campaign -- the need to cure the partisanship of Washington -- might be undercut if the Republicans and Democrats nominated people who are not closely associated with those partisan battles -- mentioning Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee on the GOP side and Barack Obama and Bill Richardson among the Democrats.

Somehow over the past 30 years "partisanship" became something to be avoided at all costs, and "bipartisanship" morphed from a mean to an end. That's a pretty significant story, I think, but according to Broder and Unity 08, we simply need to stop arguing and agree on everything. Like magic. Funny that agreement is so in line with what pundits like Broder desire.

Whiskey Fire has more.

Posted by morte at 10:35 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I knew the Conservapedia was bad, but some of the entries sound like something written by a five year old:

1984 was a book by George Orwell. 1984 describes an alternate history in which Oceania (Australia) is at war with Eurasia. It is a utopian book because it talks about a place where everyone is watched over by Big Brother, who makes sure people are doing what they are supposed to.
The protagonist is Winston Smith. Thre is something about rats at the end, but it is confusing. The end is probably supposed to be ambigous.

Read enough of the entries there and you will get a headache. But I will leave you with this puzzle. On the main page, it states:

Conservapedia is a much-needed alternative to Wikipedia, which is increasingly anti-Christian and anti-American. On Wikipedia, many of the dates are provided in the anti-Christian "C.E." instead of "A.D.", which Conservapedia uses. Christianity receives no credit for the great advances and discoveries it inspired, such as those of the Renaissance.

Christianity is a religion that follows the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, as described in the books of the New Testament. It is the world's most popular religion, with over two billion members. [1]

Posted by morte at 10:16 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

...Isn't that Iran has been at war with us since 1979, rather its that a lot of conservative commentators are fucking idiots.

Hope that clears things up.

Posted by morte at 3:37 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Finally, a definitive reference source for the alternate reality folks: Conservapedia!

Sample entry: Homosexuality

The American Psychiatric Association de-listed homosexuality as a mental disorder in 1973, indicating their blatant liberal bias.[1] Since that time, homosexuals have advocated for recognition of their civil rights and for equal protection under the law, though fortunately the American people have mostly retained their senses on this.

Sample entry: Velociraptor

The velociraptor is a small, carnivorous dinosaur featured in the fictional movie "Jurassic Park". In the movie, they make a showing due to atheist genetic engineers tinkering with God's creation. Most of these scientists get eaten for their sin.

The velociraptor is currently extinct, due to the Great Flood [1]. It's not clear why they didn't make it onto the Ark, but it's possible that Noah worried that they would eat the zebras.

Posted by morte at 11:17 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

CNN and Hotline on McCain: Is the "maverick" back?

If he's back, where did he go? And why didn't we hear about him leaving? Its gonna be a looooong election season...

Posted by morte at 11:06 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Edwards asks Clinton to explain her war vote. Defend it or retract it, either way, but explain why. Most important is when Edwards says:

"If she believes the vote was wrong, then I think it's important to be honest about that," Edwards said. "If she believes that it was not, then she can defend it.

"I don't believe this is very complicated," he said.

Posted by morte at 2:30 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Why doesn't anybody ever ask how assholes like Dick Cheney know so much about al Quaeda strategy yet seem incapable of stopping them?

UPDATE: Digby has a partial answer.

Posted by morte at 11:26 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

"War on Terror" actually causing more terrorism.

I saw this coming as early as 9/11/2001. I don't know why, but it just struck me as instinctively obvious that using conventional armies to rout terrorists would only exacerbate the problem of terrorism. And to any Democratic candidates (I'm looking at you, Sen. Clinton) who are still paying lip service to this GWOT bullshit, you're on the wrong side of history. Shape up! Don't take a seat on the Bush Titanic!

Posted by morte at 1:17 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Isn't that what this dust-up between bloggers and "real" journalists is all about? And, as I've pointed out before, and what should be obvious to everyone, is that there are thousands of bloggers out there with only a handful providing anything meaningful. When these elite journalists get together with the White House press secretary (does that strike anyone else as odd?) and whine about incivility and unfair criticism, one wonders if they have actually read any of the good blogs out there that do media criticism. Which blogs are good and bad is a judgment for sure, but can't we all agree to judge these things on the merits? On the evidence they provide? On the arguments they make? Shifting the conversation to how crude bloggers are is pointless. Generally speaking, the bloggers who approximate the professional role of journalists tend to be less crude but no less incisive in their criticism, whereas the activist bloggers tend to be partisan and snarky. Big shock there! There really seems to be a real lack of understanding amongst mainstream journalists when it comes to what the blogosphere represents, and a big part of that, I believe, is the inability of journalists to separate the different archetypes (if I might use that word) bloggers represent. There are bloggers who present opinion, there are those who work like journalists, and there are those who are partisan activists. A crude typology, but nonetheless a sufficient place to start. And once you start thinking along these lines, its pretty easy to characterize the work done by bloggers by what their role in the blogosphere is. I don't read Daily Kos for investigative reporting because I know its a place for Democratic activists (and critics) to get together and talk about politics. I don't read TalkingPointsMemo for partisan information, I read it because Josh and his crew are dedicated to getting to the truth of news stories, whether originating with them or not. Over time I've come to trust their judgment. It was earned. And I certainly don't expect even-handedness when I read Atrios. I expect him to point out the flaws in whoever he criticizes, knowing full well that it is his opinion only I am reading. Noticing these things takes time, which is to say regular blog reading. But because each of these sources are enevitably going to be talking about the same stories each day because of their audience size and reach, I generally expect different takes on a given issue. And yes, there's probably some no-name blogger out there who has an even better take on the issue but there's only so much time in each day. Once you trust a source, it is habitual. I know the New York Times is flawed, but I still read it every day because I know, despite those flaws, that it is still the best daily newspaper in the country. No blogger is going to replace the Times in terms of news-gathering, and I don't know of any blogger who claims that to be the case. Bloggers are never going to replace institutionalized news gathering organizations, but the former are going to be a thorn in the side of the latter well into the future so the issue is adaptation: are news orgs going to become better journalists, do fact-checking, scrutinize partisan sources and provide better analysis? I would like to think that blogs will provide that pressure. But one thing is clear: the club of elite journalists who mock and marginalize the blogosphere are a dying breed. These people cannot justify their privilege forever, and David Broder is not immortal. New pundits will replace the old, and they will have been schooled in the unvarnished tenacity that blogging provides.

Greenwald has more.

Posted by morte at 10:38 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Democratic Rep. to bellicose Republican Rep.: Go enlist. If this war is so important, why don't they go to Iraq to be with the brave troops, who they obviously have a fetish for?

They can enlist here.

Posted by morte at 10:21 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I briefly watched part of the Charlie Rose show last night before tuning out. I didn't recognize him as such, but it was Michael Crichton describing the alternate reality he lives in. UggaBugga gives us the highlights. My favorite: Crichton whining about "the bureaucracy" and how it corrupts good science. It sounded like he was reciting from an Ayn Rand novel. I don't have anything to add here, I just continue to find the behavior of global warming deniers bizarre.

Posted by morte at 4:43 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Responding to a post at Matt Yglesias' blog about Clinton (Hillary), I made the argument I've been meaning to make here about Clinton, so I reproduce it here, rather than re-write it:

Clinton says:
"Some people may be running who may tell you that we don't face a real threat from terrorism."

I think this is the reason Clinton is turning off so many potential supporters: she rarely says things clearly, and when she does, the position is absurd. Here she is saying that, you know, there could be someone running who, I don't know, might tell you that terrorism isn't a real threat. Well, what does that mean? Substantively, very little. And to make things worse, she still adamantly supports her war vote and tells those who disagree to look somewhere else. What sort of strategy is this? I was willing to give Clinton the benefit of the doubt, but unless she turns this around real soon, she will, despite her formidable advantages, lose the support of the Democrats who she needs to win primary elections. Obviously the subtext here is being "tough" on national security, which she fails to recognize is a trap laid by Republicans for Democrats to fall into. The first Democrat to say he or she is smart on national security will lead the pack. After all, only the most rabid Bush supporters believe this administration hasn't been utterly incompetent, so showing some competence on national security is politically smart. Rather than being politically smart, Clinton is trying her damnedest to appear "electable." And we all know how well that's worked out for the Democrats in the past...

Posted by morte at 3:16 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I'm shocked, just shocked, that the GOP would put politics above the national interest (and the truth, for that matter):

And he is unapologetic about that. He calls the Pelosi plane story, whatever its legitimacy, "the first break [Republicans] have had from the media in driving our message since before the Mark Foley story broke."

The GOP needs to take a long, long vacation from power. They don't deserve to wield it.

Posted by morte at 12:41 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I thought conservatives were opposed to "activist judges?"

And so another chunk of "principled conservatism" melts away faster than the polar ice sheets...

(link courtesy of Think Progress)

Posted by morte at 11:43 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Right wing fanatic Glenn Reynolds:

ABC NEWS: Accused terrorist is big GOP donor. This is an embarrassment -- though if I were a terrorist I'd be a big GOP donor, too. It might help, and at the very least would ensure that prosecution would be an embarrassment.

Back in the early 60's, much of the mainstream press was overly concerned with right-wing groups like the John Birch Society, and largely hyped the threat they posed to America's security. Conservatives complained, with some justification, that they were being unfairly persecuted by their tangential association with the JBS. After Kennedy was assassinated, the association "right wing extremist" was devestating to Barry Goldwater, who didn't help matters by talking rather casually about using nuclear weapons on America's enemies. One of the great successes of the conservative movement was to disassociate itself from its more extreme elements. Ironically, after finally achieving political power, the extremists are back, angrier than ever, and everywhere to be found in public discourse. I prefer calling Glenn Reynolds a "right wing fanatic" because that is what he is. Finally, the news media is catching on. There's simply no case to be made that Reynolds is anything but an extremist, who advocates the murder of who he deems his enemies, and hides behind libertarianism while arguing in favor of the imperial presidency and all the powers it has claimed for itself. Reynolds is not a voice of reason, he is a right wing fanatic. And it's high time responsible journalists started treating him as such.

Posted by morte at 11:25 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Democrats have enough problems on their hands, what with bringing an end to the Iraq war, preventing an Iranian war, and generally undoing the damage done during the last six years, without having to deal with criticism from inside their own quarters. See, this form of criticism isn't with the specifics of any particular policy, but rather with how it is presented to the public. That's what this "Third Way" bullshit is all about. This approach worked well for Bill Clinton in 1992 so it's tempting to think history can repeat itself, but as Greg Anrig points out, the problem isn't with with the Democrats, it's with the right wing that has dominated our politics for so long. Why is it that so many political insiders who are ostensibly working to further the interests of the Democratic party, are so intent on placating the right wing? Why is it ok for the GOP to loudly proclaim that it represents the interests of the people of this country but the Democrats are not allowed to do so? Why is it considered toxic to proudly proclaim you stand for liberal, progressive values, explicitly differentiated from conservatism? Take a look at how the Third Way describes itself on national security:

Third Way is helping to build a credible, tough and smart progressive national security agenda. We have devised policy and communications strategies that many progressive leaders are using to frame the debate; we released a major Third Way study laying out the Bush defense failures at a press conference with Senator Reid, Rep. Hoyer and others; we helped write legislation to increase the size of the Army that was introduced by Senators Clinton and Reed; and we produced user-friendly national security issue briefs and trained dozens of candidates on our policy proposals and messaging.

Third Way is developing new progressive approaches to cultural issues. We conducted original policy and communications research on immigration that now forms the core of the progressive approach; we drafted a report and held a press conference with Senator Schumer and Rep. Emanuel exposing the failure of the Bush Administration to enforce the immigration laws; we pioneered a new approach on abortion that is embodied in legislation sponsored by pro-choice and pro-life House members; and we developed new culture issues for progressives, including a bill combating Internet pornography introduced by a dozen Senators and featured on network news shows.

Third Way is designing a new economic agenda and narrative for the 21st century. In 2006, we developed a diagnosis of the progressive economic disconnect from the middle class and then presented those findings to twenty Senators at a caucus lunch. We also briefed every major Senate candidate and many House candidates on our middle class policies and strategies. We devised a middle-class tax agenda that has been adopted by five new Senators. And our economic insights have been hotly debated on progressive blogs and in news stories.

The Third Way is an attempt to please everyone at once. That ain't gonna happen. You run on a strong party platform and let people choose. When you try to be all things to all people you look like, well, a politician who really has no values, no preferences, no strong position on anything. When you stand for platform, even those that disagree with you ought to respect you for sticking to your position. Eventually they may come to reward you. And if opinion polls and recent electoral results are any indication, the public is already lining up behind the progressive platform. There is no need for a "third way" to sell it. It will sell itself with principled politicians and a good pitch. Kowtowing to the right wing makes Democrats look weak and bereft of ideas. That must change. Besides, if conservatives are already living in an alternate reality, why make an appeal to them anyway? Let them taste the minority for a while and perhaps a few of them will start questioning their allegiance to their failed ideology of authoritarian worship and endless war. That remains to be seen, but for now let conservative candidates appeal to conservative voters. The rest of America is willing, I believe, to listen to what the Democrats have to say.

Posted by morte at 10:50 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I wouldn't have believed it but there it is.

Not only has George Bush destroyed the GOP, he's destroying the network of conservative funding that propped him up. Keep up the good work!

(link courtesy Atrios)

Posted by morte at 12:34 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Bad analysis, courtesy of the ghoulish Robert Novak:

Murtha and his ally House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were humiliated last Nov. 16 when the Democratic caucus overwhelmingly voted against Murtha as majority leader. Three months later, Murtha has shaped party policy that would cripple Bush's Iraq troop surge by placing conditions on funding. That represents the most daring congressional attempt to micromanage ongoing armed hostilities since the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War challenged President Abraham Lincoln.

Murtha's plan did not surprise Republicans. They were poised to contend that his proposed amendment to the supplemental appropriations bill would effectively cut off funding for the war, confronting moderate Democrats elected after promising voters they would support the troops.

More troubling is Novak's use of the term "micromanage." This is the GOP talking point du jour. Don't discuss the power of the purse, talk instead about Democrats micromanaging the war and usurping the power of the commander in chief. My question is, how is appropriating funds "micromanagement?" Wouldn't Democrats, if they really wished to micromange the war, be creating logistics plans? The fact that they are using the only tool available to them, funding, is telling. They are precisely exercising their Constitutional role. But Novak has a hard-on for Bush so he whines about micromanagement. Not only are the Democrats weak, but they are small too.

Finally, there is the flat-out lie that the Democrats won in 2006 by promising to support the troops. In Novak's universe, there is no lapse of public support for this war. Unless he meant that supporting the troops means removing them from the middle of a civil war. But I doubt that. Novak wants the Democratic victory to be based on Republican premises. But if that were the case, why didn't the GOP win in November? Novak is just making shit up to support his contention that the Democrats are weak, small, and yet somehow bound by the terms of debate established by the GOP.

bad analysis = bad opinion

UPDATE: This post at Daily Kos tracks the Murtha smear in a variety of news sources. Read the clip of the actual Murtha proposal at the end and ask yourself about the ethics of the people smearing him. Apparently they don't want a well-trained and well-equipped military but one that is broken down, demoralized and stuck in the middle of a civil war. If that isn't reprehensible, then I don't know what is.

Posted by morte at 11:53 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Civil and law abiding, with a delicious sense of humor.

Several questions arise from this.

1. Why does right-wing "humor" often involve the murder of their enemies?


2. Why, when called out on their calls to murder their enemies, do right-wingers back peddle and say it was "just a joke?"


3. Why are the commenters on right-wing blogs more than happy to suggest further people to murder?


4. Why isn't the "liberal media" discussing the frequent calls of popular bloggers to murder people?


5. Why instead of being critical of right-wing calls to murder their enemies do the media instead write flattering stories about them?

Obviously something is broken.

Posted by morte at 11:31 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Bush Compares Revolutionary, Terror Wars

''Today, we're fighting a new war to defend our liberty and our people and our way of life,'' said Bush, standing in front of Washington's home and above a mostly frozen Potomac River.

''And as we work to advance the cause of freedom around the world, we remember that the father of our country believed that the freedoms we secured in our revolution were not meant for Americans alone.''

Is it 2008 yet?

Posted by morte at 11:20 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Propagandist Brit Hume accuses John Murtha of being senile.

I think this deserves something special. Something...Cheney

Morte to Brit Hume: Go fuck yourself.

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The Rumsfeld Doctrine in action.

It just sickens me.

Posted by morte at 1:54 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

See, that wasn't too hard. You bring someone on your show. He lies about something. Next week, you inform your viewers that they lied. Truth is served. And if Fox News can do it, so can the rest of you.

I'm not asking for much, just the arbitration of facts.

Posted by morte at 1:48 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The day before the 2004 elections, the professor whose class I was attending wrote the following on the board:

opinion ≠ analysis

Pretty obvious, but he used it to bound debate in a class discussion about who would win the election and why. The point of the exercise was to get us thinking like political scientists or analysts rather than mere political participants with an opinion. I think what we're seeing in the news media as a result of the influence of bloggers is the beginning of a shift in emphasis from opinion to analysis. That's not to say that opinion is irrelevant, but rather the pattern that has been set is one of uninformed opinion backed by made-up "facts" used by lazy journalists to support their predjudices. Again, I don't care if opinion makers have predjudices about politics--we all do--I care when those predjudices are projected to make it appear as though a majority agrees with them or that some other group--in the majority or minority--is somehow less American.

Glenn Greenwald explores this topic by taking on David Broder, arguably the most significant opinion maker in the country, by easily demonstrating how false Broder's claim that

You will find no one in the White House or on the Republican side of the House or Senate who thinks I have been propping up the Bush presidency. I have been a persistent critic of him and his policies. The notion that I am invested in him is bizarre--unless it is meant to suggest that anyone who would rather see his country and his president succeed than fail is "invested" in him.

The meta question behind this involves what role journalism plays in democracy. It turns out that this is a complicated question because the relationship between the news and the public is not simply dissemination-reception. First of all, there are different levels of political awareness. Most people would be unable to follow what I write about on this blog on a daily basis because they do not follow politics and the news closely. Its not that people are stupid and can't follow the story but rather that they need a primer. It's like coming in in the middle of serialized television show or series of books. You have to know what preceded the episode you are presently viewing. Or, to use a different example, following a baseball season. If you don't know the players, the coaches, the trades, the win-loss records, etc., you are going to have to spend half the season just getting acquainted with those statistics before you can really carry on a conversation about baseball. Politics is no different, although I would argue that unlike entertainment and sports, which are tivial, politics involves all of us and the form of society we are to live in. I think that's of vital importance to us all. And in order to talk about these things we need good information. And the most current of that information is going to come from the news. Thus without quality news, democracy suffers (if that is the sort of society you wish to live in). I don't think it's an accident that the First Amendment singles out "the press" to be protected from government. That institution (if you want to call it that) is not only bound up historically with the revolutionary origins of our republic, but was understood by those wise Enlightened men to be critical to checking tyranny, as much as the separation of powers itself. But they also knew it had to be independent from government to accomplish this.

This is why I refer to our current news institutions as "sycophantic" or "stenographic." When the relationship of the news to government is to uncritically repeat what has been said, this leads to the propping up of power, which is precisely the point Greenwald is making about Broder. Furthermore, opinion makers themselves retain a vested interest because they have staked their career and reputation on the veracity of government officials. If Broder had been more critical of the Bush administration in general (Greenwald points out Broder's rejection of specific parts of the Bush agenda), then he would be on much firmer ground to say he has been a persistent critic of the president. The very fact that he has to defend his supposed criticism--and lie about it in the process--is evidence of a fall from the standards journalists supposedly set for themselves. Criticism shouldn't be some sort of virtue, it should be part of the job. Kowtowing to power is demeaning. It is not worthy of a press corps who has been afforded protection by the First Amendment. And I hope the power of technology and critical analysts like Greenwald is working slowly to reverse it.

...to clarify a point, good journalism doesn't immediately mean good democracy. Most people are still going to follow the news as often as they vote: not very often. I don't know how to get people interested in the society they live in, but at least for those of us who do, it would be nice to have a functioning press corps that lives up to its obligations rather than simply being a conduit for elites to converse with one another.

Posted by morte at 5:43 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The Onion, Wednesday: Bush Cuts Off Diplomatic Relations With Congress

US News Thursday: Conservatives to Bush: Issue More Executive Orders

It's remarkable that satire has been one step ahead of reality during the Bush years, going back to the timeless classic from none other than the Onion in 2001: Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over'

Links courtesy of Kos and TP

Posted by morte at 5:31 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Why is Michelle Malkin on the TV? If a Democrat or a liberal said that they were mistrustful of the Bill of Rights on the TV, wouldn't they be summarily lynched by aghast conservatives?

Follow up question: Why do "conservatives" hate America?

Posted by morte at 5:22 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

McCain's website is still ugly, so it must be intentional. Speaking of the trivial, McCain skipped today's Iraq vote to campaign against the truly pressing issue of our time: premarital sex.

I know Saint McCain is just pandering to the fundies, but come on. Or, as Atrios asks

I know it will never happen, because it would cause David Broder to faint, but any politician or public figure should be asked if they, in fact, saved themselves for marriage, and whether they were abstinent between their multiple marriages.

Morte to the fundies: grow up.

Posted by morte at 5:14 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I underestimated John McCain. He really is a maverick. So much so that his campaign website is in black and white!

I'm sure this glitch will be fixed before anyone reads this, so while we're on the subject, did you know that John McCain is such a maverick that he's going to miss tomorrow's Senate vote on the war?

Taste, feel, love the Maverick.

Posted by morte at 1:52 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

See, it doesn't kill you to admit you were wrong.

Posted by morte at 1:49 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Niall Ferguson asks:

To be fair, the generals have a point. Compared with the Cold War, the war on terror is a drop in the bucket in relative terms. Between 1959 and 1989, U.S. defense spending averaged 6.9% of GDP. Since President Bush entered the White House, it has risen from 3% to just 4%. Nevertheless, the United States' enemies since 2001 have been mere gnats compared with the mighty Soviet bear, while the U.S. economy has enjoyed remarkably rapid growth since 1990. It still seems reasonable to ask why, with an annual budget equal to the GDP of Holland, the U.S. military can't pacify Iraq.

It will clearly take more time for the Army and Marine Corps to master this new kind of warfare, though they're certainly trying. There is, however, an alternative option to this hard slog — and it is evidently an option that Bush finds tempting. Why not revert to fighting the easier kind of asymmetrical war the U.S. is equipped to fight by launching airstrikes against Iran?

Yet the risks of such an attack are sobering indeed. The backlash on the ground in Iraq — and elsewhere — would be ferocious. There is no guarantee that the Iranian nuclear program would suffer more than temporary disruption. And the political effects in Iran (to say nothing of the rest of the Middle East) would be to strengthen the radicals around President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the very moment when they seem to be losing popular support. There is, in short, a real danger that a preemptive strike against Iran could turn Goliath into Samson, bringing the temple of Dagon crashing down on everyone in the Middle East, including Samson himself.

Posted by morte at 3:29 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

It wouldn't surprise me if it were true, but this is really something Congress should be investigating. And needless to say, I have little confidence that our stenographic media elite will be asking the hard questions about this.

Posted by morte at 3:23 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

This is what responsible government looks like:

WASHINGTON, Feb. 15 -- The Senate will convene in an unusual Saturday session to vote on the same resolution under debate in the House that expresses disapproval of President Bush’s troop buildup, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic majority leader, said today.

Posted by morte at 2:52 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Is it fair to demonize the entire GOP for the ignorant remarks of one man? Maybe not. But I don't hear a rising chorus of his Republican colleagues denouncing him either. And until I do, I'm content with calling the GOP the party of bigots, among other things.

UPDATE: Think Progress has more. Apparently Goode thinks 60% of the American public are traitors. A real class act.

Is it 2008 yet?

Posted by morte at 2:44 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Doesn't want the House Speaker to feature C-Span clips of chamber proceedings on her new blog because that would be too partisan.

Why do they hate America? Why do they hate Democracy? And why don't they come out and say that they want to live in a dictatorship?

Ladies and Gentlemen, your Republican Party.

Posted by morte at 12:38 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Perhaps you've heard about Fox's answer to "The Daily Show." Try watching a clip. It isn't funny. The punchlines are puntuated by a laugh track. And it has nothing to do with the fact that I'm a liberal. Humor works when it is observant of reality. John Stewart and Stephen Colbert are funny because they are observant of reality. The conservative attempt doesn't reference reality but rather the conservative alternative reality. So essentially you have to believe in that alternative reality in order to join in with the laugh track. And that is why it is not funny to anyone else. I could care less if Fox produces this show for it only strengthens my argument that other news orgs should do everything possible to differentiate themselves from the pariah Fox "news." And as the above link points out, hiring someone who actually criticizes the administration has been profitable. Gee, who would have thought there would be an audience?

It's a start, at least...

UPDATE: Fox is so confident in their creation that they only ordered two episodes to be produced.

Posted by morte at 11:52 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

This introspection at Eschaton (and Kos) about religion is rather similar to my own impressions. I too grew up in a household with no emphasis on religion. My parents were into some new age spirituality in the 1970s but that was about it. I was first exposed to God through one of my childhood friends whose family was/is catholic. I was aware of my father's feelings on the Church--basically they were thieves--but I did end up attending a mass or two when I would sleepover at my Catholic friend's house on a Saturday. I even took communion once. But obviously there was no spirituality in the process for me. I was just curious what all the fuss was about. When I matured I became interested in religion academically, considering at several points a minor in religious studies. But always I felt anthropologically detached from the study of religion. I understood the history and practice but I never became a believer. And today I see no possible way I could ever profess faith in anything. Even Buddhism, which has a pure philosophical appeal to me, could never become part of my identity. I think I'm past the point of devoting my life to any spiritual path.

I realize I'm in a minority in this country and in this world, but I've never felt antagonism on account of it. I will continue to be critical of religious leaders who use faith to divide people because such a tactic is antithetical to religion itself. Religion is designed to bring people together and closer to God or the Truth, is it not? So I'll never have respect for religious militants who think they are instruments of God's will and use such absurd notions to justify violence against their fellow man. But beyond the nutcases, I think religion is essentially a permanent fixture in social life, and thus should be discussed, debated and argued like any other social issue. What makes religion exceptional for most people is the notion that it is beyond debate, that it is literally the word of God. I think the only justifiable position to take, given the diversity of religions in the world, is to acknowledge that they are all right or all wrong. Elevating one over the other leads to predictable conflict.

That said I continue to find the history of religion fascinating, particularly the fact that many of the world's great religions emerged at the same time. That is not coincidental and leads me to conclude that it is part of the development of civilization, indeed inseparable from it, to some degree. Whether we will come to the point of abandoning religion altogether is impossible to predict, but on balance, a mostly secular society is the trend the world is heading in, despite all the noice made by social conservatives in the United States and abroad. And as for using religion in politics, I'm not bothered by it so long as it is used to unite, rather than divide, people.

Posted by morte at 11:20 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Despicable and pathetic. I'm in no mood to take this shit today.

Posted by morte at 10:47 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I thought Brooks' column in the Times today looked fishy but since it's behind a firewall, I didn't bother digging any deeper. Turns out my hunch was right.

The very existence of such shit infuriates me. The gist of it is, "liberals whine, and I am always right." Judge for yourself, but that is the impression I got. Sometimes I forget that in the midst of a declining conservative party, there is still a quite healthy "conservative" propaganda machine to deal with, wedged deep within the "liberal" media.

Well, back to work...

Posted by morte at 10:36 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Republican strategy for debating Iraq: talk about something else.

Democratic strategy for debating Iraq: have the debate.

That House GOP memo should be held up every day until 2008 to remind people which party has America's interests and priorities in mind.

Posted by morte at 2:32 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Nowhere to be found on the Left. Abundant on the Right.

So that's what it feels like to be in the conservative movement's alternative reality...

Posted by morte at 2:29 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Why do they hate America? And why would they attribute words to one of greatest presidents which he never spoke?

These people are immoral, intellectually dishonest, bloodthirsty, bereft of ideas and dangerous. But I don't think they are treasonous. For you see, I don't think criticizing the president, especially when it is your Constitutional mandate to check the executive branch, is treason. Its American. Neocons don't believe in America. They believe in raw power that prostrates itself before their genius. Well I got news for these fanatics: that's not America.

Posted by morte at 2:05 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Thomas Schaller argues today that:

According to the latest Gallup survey, Republican self-identification has declined nationally and in almost every American state. Why? The short answer is that President Bush's war of choice in Iraq has destroyed the partisan brand Republicans spent the past four decades building.

That brand was based upon four pillars: that Republicans are more trustworthy on defense and military issues; that they know when and where markets can replace or improve government; that they are more competent administrators of those functions government can't privatize; and, finally, that their public philosophy is imbued with moral authority. The war demolished all four claims.

The bind Republicans are in might be inescapable because of the way the movement has shaped the party. Despite hypocrisy in practice, conservatives are supposed to be guided by principles. Worse, those principles have been twisted by the dominant Republicans in the party and its ideological surrogates. The result is that the party cannot easily reject Bush without also rejecting conservatism (again, Gingrich is the one to pull off this stunt). This is why the party is still largely behind the president--they have nowhere else to go or are unwilling to do so. If this continues through the 2008 election, I can comfortably predict that the GOP will be the minority party for at least a generation.

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When the science in question doesn't involve global warming or climate change, Michael Crichton can be a reasonable man. Credit where credit is due.

Posted by morte at 4:31 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Courtesy of Steny Hoyer (PDF) and TPMCafe. When I read something like this I actually feel bad for the GOP. I really do. How are we as a nation supposed to deal with the myriad problems facing us in the immediate to long term when one of the two dominant political parties is concerned solely with winning and losing power? In other words, I want a responsible and principled opposition party to debate with, not this reprehensible bunch of fear-mongering extremists who answer only to authority and power. Really, this is quite sickening to me. Well at least this resolves the question of defining conservatism for 2008.

New motto for the 2008 GOP Party Platform: Fighting the Clash of Civilizations so you don't have to.

Posted by morte at 4:05 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I have a lot to say about this interview with Thomas Homer-Dixon at Alternet. Mostly this is because he so clearly expresses what I know to be true about the direction our world is heading in. The big picture has always motivated my thinking about politics and the reason I chose to study the conservative movement in the first place was my need to understand the roots of organized opposition to change. The Homer-Dixon interview does not discuss conservative politics, but it touches on nearly everything else. You really should read the whole thing (its not very long) but I am going to excerpt some parts of it here. Regarding the primacy of energy he says

Energy is kind of a master resource. If we have enough cheap, high quality energy, we can cope with a lot of our other problems. But once energy becomes a lot more expensive, then the combination of climate change and water scarcity will be that much harder to deal with.

We've created a food system, a water system, and cities that are fundamentally dependent upon a resource that is not indefinitely available.

In his book "The Flat Earth," [The World is Flat] Thomas Friedman says we're moving to a frictionless global economy where everybody can compete on an equal plane. But that's only the case if we have abundant cheap energy. As energy becomes more expensive, people will start moving production closer to consumers. It won't make sense to have your production facilities in China if you're selling your goods in the United States. You're going to want them at least on the Mexican border.

At the end of my book I spend a fair amount of time talking about the importance of value change. We need to move away from what I call strictly utilitarian values which focus on simple likes and dislikes that emphasize consumption of material goods, towards moral values, and even what I would call existential values. These relate to what we consider to be the good life, what brings meaning into our lives, what kind of world do we really want for our children and our children's children. These are fundamentally values conversations.

My difference with [Jared] Diamond is that I don't think we're going to really begin those conversations in a proper way until we face some crises or breakdowns. In other words, my impression of his argument is that collapse is something we have to avoid, in all cases and in all forms. On the other hand, I believe there is a spectrum of forms of collapse. At one end is the ideal, optimistic future where we solve all our problems and we live happily every after. At the other end is catastrophic collapse. We have tended not to fill in all the spaces in between, but that's actually where things might be very interesting. There may be some forms of disruption and crisis that will actually stimulate us to be really creative. Most importantly, they may allow us to get the deep vested interests that are blocking change out of the way.

The key thing though -- and this is where I think that Jared Diamond's argument just doesn't give us the purchase that we need -- is that we have to keep the breakdown from being catastrophic. There has to be enough resilience in the system, enough information, enough adaptive capacity that things can be regenerated. With catastrophic breakdown, recovery is often impossible.

There will be times of frustration and fear and anger on the part of many people when fundamental verities and patterns of life are suddenly challenged. They'll be scared. And in those moments, extremists can take advantage of the situation and push our societies in directions that are very bad. Those of us who are nonextremists need to be prepared to push in other directions and create something that's good.

The most salient point Homer-Dixon makes, however, is that we ought not be afraid of discussing these things. Leaders should have the courage to talk about them openly. This builds support for programs and policies that can ameliorate our crises and avert disaster. We can control our destiny, but we must be willing to do it.

Posted by morte at 2:55 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

And like the brain-eaters of countless horror movies, the Pelosi "planegate" story refuses to die.

Cancer of the Republic.

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St. John McCain panders to the fundies.

In other news, dog bites man.

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Sycophantic journalism at its finest. Sample:

Romney has chiseled-out-of-granite features, a full, dark head of hair going a distinguished gray at the temples, and a barrel chest. On the morning that he announced for president, I bumped into him in the lounge of the Marriott and up close he is almost overpowering. He radiates vigor.

UPDATE: I should add that this works both ways. Barack Obama, despite attempts to smear him based on religion and race, has largely enjoyed an extended media honeymoon since he delivered his address at the 2004 DNC. And while my partisan preferences are clear, I feel Obama successfully combines gifted oration with solid policy preferences. This is something I think Romney lacks. He has empty rhetoric and has clearly tried to rewrite his policy preferences to appease the social conservatives that will be voting in the GOP primaries. On the basis of this I think Obama is sincere whereas Romney is not, and that makes all the difference to me.

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Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds has a solution to our Iran problem:

This has been obvious for a long time anyway, and I don't understand why the Bush Administration has been so slow to respond. Nor do I think that high-profile diplomacy, or an invasion, is an appropriate response. We should be responding quietly, killing radical mullahs and iranian atomic scientists, supporting the simmering insurgencies within Iran, putting the mullahs' expat business interests out of business, etc. Basically, stepping on the Iranians' toes hard enough to make them reconsider their not-so-covert war against us in Iraq. And we should have been doing this since the summer 2003. But as far as I can tell, we've done nothing along these lines.

how we once again see conservatives (or in Reynolds' case "libertarians") displaying an almost childlike faith in the competence, honesty, and efficacy of the federal bureacracy insofar as that bureacracy is tasked with dishing out lethal force that they would never in a million years ascribe to, say, the people in charge of the Endangered Species Act.

Reynolds teaches law professionally. Privately, he advocates breaking the law. I do not understand this mindset. Here's Reynolds' response to a critical reader who brings up some of the points I note above:

Actually, I was trying to suggest something well short of massive air strikes, invasion, or giving them the full Atrios treatment. Nor do I think that targeting actual wrongdoers is the same as the 9/11 attacks. But if civilization will not allow itself to respond to the barbarians who are making war on it -- complete with a nuclear weapons program that violates the "international law" usually invoked with such vigor where U.S. actions are concerned, and the fomentation of widespread murder throughout the region -- then civilization will not persist, and barbarism will flourish. Mr. Hovaness will be happy to know, however, that the Bush Administration seems to share his views, as it has done essentially nothing in response to Iranian depredations for nearly four years. I suspect that we will come to regret that limp response, but I hope that Mr. Hovaness is right, and sweet reason will prevail throughout the region despite U.S. inaction.

I note, however, the complete absence of moral outrage aimed at the Iranian mullahocracy.

God bless you, Glen Reynolds, for protecting us from those godless heathens who would destroy us.

Ladies and Gentlemen, this is what it means to be a conservative in America today.

Glenn Greenwald, at his new home, has more.

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Still beating a non-story to death. Why don't they just come out and say that the Democrats are the spawn of Satan. Such candor would be a relief.

Posted by morte at 10:47 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Abused and cheapened by yet another GOP candidate.

"With freedom, nothing can hold us back. Freedom has made the American dream possible. Freedom will make the new American dream possible."

Can someone translate this for me? Are we currently not free? What is the "new" American dream? And what happened to the old American dream?

For what it's worth, I believe "freedom" to be the most abused and ill-understood concept in American politics. The way it is used today, particularly by the GOP, is little better than Mel Gibson's scream at the end of Braveheart: a naive cry for the power of individualism.

I call it tyranny of the individual.

Posted by morte at 10:39 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Ditto what Josh says. Even if America's Mayor could overcome the inevitable policy conflicts he would have with the GOP's influential social conservative base (and I'm not convinced he will), hitching one's fortunes to Bush-style agressive and unthinking foreign policy would be a disaster in the general election. I have argued that 2008 will be a referendum on conservatism, and furthermore, that conservatism itself will be variously defined by the candidates vying for the nomination. There are really only two options: either run with or run against Bush conservatism. Running with it means you're instantly at a disadvantage with the majority opinion in the country. But it might net the nomination within the confines of a GOP primary. Running against Bush conservatism, however, is tantamount to saying that Bush is not a real conservative. That, I think, would have greater general appeal, but could go either way within the GOP primaries. This is precisely why I have argued for so long that Gingrich is a viable candidate, if not the eventual nominee. Gingrich's triangulation, unlike McCain's (attempting to run against both Bush and the Democrats), has the luxury of being unbound to a recent legislative record. Thus Gingrich can afford to be theoretical without being hypocritical or self-contradictory. He will be, in essence, a pure conservative.

McCain is running against Bush on the premise of "I will be a better Commander-in-Chief." Gingrich will run on the premise of "I will be a better conservative." And I remain convinced that conservative credentials will go a long way in the GOP primary, even at the level of abstraction. Giuliani won't be able milk his 9/11 image forever, even amongst conservatives who are still locked in a mindset forged that morning. The War on Terror is a dead letter and smart candidates would do well to distance themselves from it and offer an alternative. McCain has tried that and failed. Giuliani thinks he can run on his 9/11 persona forever. Only Gingrich--setting aside for the moment other conservative candidates in the field--will be able to provide both conservative credentials and run against Bush effectively in my view. But that depends on whether you agree that conservatism is in an identity crisis, and further whether that crisis is simply definitional or one of image management. For progressives, it seems like the "real" face of conservatism has been bubbling ever closer to the surface ever since Goldwater was routed in 1964. Now that the Republicans have been turned out of office en masse in 2006, we--and the voting public--might finally see the true face of conservatism, public and unvarnished. If they choose to use political tactics to hide it, they will betray their claims to moral and intellectual superiority, as well as any claim to a majority of the American people's sentiments.

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Blogger UggaBugga rounds up some discussion of Kristol the Younger's comments on Obama and Slavery ("he'd be for it!). I didn't discuss it in detail myself, preferring to call Kristol an "asshole" and leave it at that. But let's look in more detail at what he said:

KRISTOL: We’re electing a war president in 2008. If I can go back to Obama and Lincoln for just one second, Lincoln’s “house divided” speech in 1858 was a speech saying we cannot live as a house divided on slavery. And he implicitly says we’ll have to fight a civil war if necessary on this.

Obama’s speech is a “can’t we get along” speech — sort of the opposite of Lincoln. He would have been with Stephen Douglas in 1858. Let’s paper over these differences, rise above politics and all get along. That’s not Giuliani’s mode. And I think in a war context, social conservatives want to win the war against Islamic jihadism.

It beats me. Further evidence that "social conservatives" are living on a different planet than the rest of us. In their world, there is no compromise, only unending war against pure evil. Sort of "GI Joe foreign policy" meets "Lord of the Rings." And that tells you all you need to know about the intellecual, emotional, and moral security of the neocons and their "social conservative" brethren.

Posted by morte at 1:38 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Shorter Michael Novak: since our calculations for energy consumption don't take into account that produced by beasts of burden, the US actually is using less energy than the underdeveloped world.

Makes the dinosaur flatulence theory of global warming sound enlightened by comparison.

Posted by morte at 11:19 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Reduced to arguing that global warming is the byproduct of dinosaur farts.

The denial, the ignorance, is astounding. And pathetic.

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Lord William Kristol continues to dazzle us with his insights.

I wonder how much Fox pays this asshole to make bad historical analogies.

Posted by morte at 3:04 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Back to the Future, starring Dick Cheney.

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Actually, very similar to yesterday's question of the day.

"Why would a news organization hire feature a journalist who can't do basic research?"

I'm still awaiting an answer.

Posted by morte at 2:54 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Why would a news organization hire a journalist who can't do basic research?

Seems like a reasonable question to me...

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Does it strike anyone else as odd that both HRC and Barack Obama decided to officially announce their campiagns on a Saturday? There must be a reason, perhaps a different reason for each of them, which eludes me.

Posted by morte at 10:27 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

This post on Crooks and Liars deserves discussion. It addresses some controversial comments made by Washington Post blogger William Arkin that resulted in a deluge of ad hominem attacks. This passage likely set them off:

These soldiers should be grateful that the American public, which by all polls overwhelmingly disapproves of the Iraq war and the President's handling of it, do still offer their support to them, and their respect.

Instead, I'm trying to make sense of the worldview of those who have responded. For the critics, I have become the enemy and have been demonized. In that process, I have ceased being a person, an individual, or a human being, all essential to justify the campaign to annihilate me. I'm not trying to offer myself up as victim here, nor do I expect the critics to change their view. I'm merely pointing out the process and the implications of the dehumanization.

So what do you think? Arkin's plea for civility (one I share--you commenters can be brutal and seem to forget that there are real people behind the words you're reading) suggests that a civilized exchange is a lost art. Is it the anonymity of the internet? Is it that certain topics are just too provocative to discuss calmly? Or have we collectively forgotten our manners?

"He came in here and he trashed the place," says Washington Post columnist David Broder, "and it's not his place."

Matt Drudge rules our world . . . With the exception of the Associated Press, there is no outlet other than the Drudge Report whose dispatches instantly can command the attention and energies of the most established newspapers and television newscasts.

But this isn't the kind of civility I'm talking about. I would like to seriously examine the "worldview," as Arkin call it, of the anonymous internet commenter. Largely, it is crude. And ignorant. And to my eyes, barely literate. It should be obvious, but the only comments worth looking at seriously are those that have something substantive to say. Otherwise, you're not really making a criticism. When I discovered my open letter to Congress on the Al Jazeera website, I stopped reading after the first five comments or so. Most were incoherent. Half of them were in caps, which I thought by now everyone knew was the internet equivalent of shouting. And if they were aware of that, why did they shout? Why the anger? Why did no one ask who the hell I was and why my letter was posted on the site? Actually, I'd like to know myself, as I have yet to receive a reply from Al Jazeera on the matter (I emailed them immediately). My point is that I am unknown to these people, both personally and professionally. All they had as a basis of criticism was that letter. And based on that I was accused of being in bed with Israel; an ignorant American; ignorant of Iran's role in Iraq; praised for having "woken up" to the lies, etc. One commenter even bragged about US helicopters being shot down by the "freedom fighters" in Iraq. Others gave praise. I found all of this strange because the subject matter of my letter was rather narrow: induce Congress to accept its constitutionally-designated role in the making--and preventing--of war. I did not directly address other issues. But I'm certainly not taking any of the personal attacks seriously, nor do I care if some anonymous commenter thinks I'm a Zionist.

I guess what I'm saying is that the dehumanizing tone of anonymous internet commentary, while regrettable, is probably inevitable, and need not be taken too seriously. Substantive attacks aren't necessarily civil either, but that's a whole lot better than insubstantive ad hominem attacks. Call me anything you want; if you bring up a reasoned point, I'll come up with a response. It's that simple. I don't think anyone yet can quite come to a comprehensive interpretation of what impact the internet and blogs will have on our political discourse. Anyone who claims to have it all figured out is a liar. Suffice it to say, not all commenters are bad, and not all are good. I'll judge them, like everything, on the merits.

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Coming soon to Fox News.

At a media conference in New York yesterday, Mr. Murdoch said the Fox Business Channel would be “more business friendly than CNBC,” which he said was quick to “leap on every scandal,” according to a report on his remarks by BusinessWeek.com, whose parent, McGraw-Hill, sponsored the conference.

In a separate interview, Mr. Ailes elaborated. “Many times I’ve seen things on CNBC where they are not as friendly to corporations and profits as they should be.”

He added: “We don’t get up every morning thinking business is bad.”

The quick strikes by Mr. Murdoch and Mr. Ailes at their largest competitor suggest that the News Corporation will use the same take-no-prisoners tactics in the business area that Fox News Channel used in going after its biggest rival, CNN.

Asked whether that meant that Fox would go easy on its reporting of the type of corporate scandals like Enron and WorldCom that cost individual investors millions of dollars when those companies collapsed, Mr. Ailes replied: “We will be as ruthless in our coverage of business scandals as we have always been.” He said that while thousands of companies have publicly traded securities, “only 9 or 10 are in trouble” at a given time.

Posted by morte at 2:48 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday I linked to a story about Condi's sudden amnesia regarding Iranian overtures to diplomatic relations in 2003. She said she did not remember the fax in question. Well, here it is (courtesy MSN/Newsweek via TPMMuckraker). This, I think, is very telling of the foreign policy mindset in this administration. Diplomacy is the art of avoiding war. In more stable relationships diplomacy deals with trade negotiations and the like but the first utility of diplomacy is preventing war. Given that the Bush administration does not negotiate with what they perceive are evil regimes, doesn't that imply that they want war with those regimes? Think back to Iraq. The weapons inspectors did not find any evidence of threatening WMD programs in Iraq but the adminstration went to war anyways, assuming that Saddam cleverly hid away or moved those weapons out of the country. The UNSC resolutions, the weapons inspections, those were all just smoke to make an illegal invasion seem legitimate. And worse, it was pressing: we were imminently threatened. But all along the plan was clear: make war on Iraq. The diplomatic efforts, such as they were, had no bearing on the foreign policy of the administration. And now the same thing is happening with Iran. Ignoring these diplomatic overtures is more than being mistrustful of the Iranian regime. It is an acknowledgement that the administration has only one foreign policy option in mind: making war with Iran.

I'm more than sickened by this. It is outrageous. It is, frankly, evil. This administration has ZERO moral credibility. Zero. And yet they are making moral judgments from a position of perceived strength. It's more than hypocritical. And mark my words, if the US bombs Iran, there will be nuclear weapons involved. How ironically macabre. And George W. Bush will be the second president in US history to use nuclear weapons on civilians. Oh, right, we'll be using "low-yield" nukes against military targets. "Bunker busters" far from the civilian population. I feel so much better in that knowledge.

They have got to go. We have war criminals making decisions. I am appalled. And I hope I'm wrong. But Iran is not a threat. Just look at how quickly Jacques Chirac backtracked when he said that Iran with one nuclear weapon would not be "very dangerous." Well, he was right. But the climate we live in is predicated on the notion that one madman with one nuke is a threat to the entire world. Bullshit. Are we really that cowardly? Do we lash out reflexively and unthinkingly at the very thought of an unfriendly nation possessing one nuclear weapon? Strong leaders would not feel threatened. And they would defuse the situation. But we do not have leaders. We have people who want to bomb a country back to the stone age because they feel insecure ("Anyone can go to Baghdad. Real men go to Tehran"). That's not leadership. That's cowardice.

Posted by morte at 1:11 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Why does anyone publish Jonah Goldberg?

At least he's not shrill about global warming. He merely thinks that addressing the problem will single-handedly destroy the world economy so we shouldn't bother. Ok. That's...responsible. Call it the Alfred E. Neuman defense.

But apparently people publish Goldberg because he is so, so, smart. So smart that he said:

Anyway, I do think my judgment is superior to his when it comes to the big picture. So, I have an idea: Since he doesn't want to debate anything except his own brilliance, let's make a bet. I predict that Iraq won't have a civil war, that it will have a viable constitution, and that a majority of Iraqis and Americans will, in two years time, agree that the war was worth it. I'll bet $1,000 (which I can hardly spare right now). This way neither of us can hide behind clever word play or CV reading. If there's another reasonable wager Cole wants to offer which would measure our judgment, I'm all ears. Money where your mouth is, doc.

Preface: of course there can be liberal arrogance. But that is really a separate topic. I'm trying to answer what makes someone like Goldberg so certain of themselves and so mistrustful of learned authority. It would be nice if I could simply ask Goldberg why he is a conservative, what brought him to that set of beliefs, but I'll have to rely instead on what he has written as an indication of his thinking. The core conservative belief, I would argue, is belief in an objective moral order and Truth. The consequences of this belief are that truth is not something to be worked towards but to be found. Truth merely needs to be discovered. And once it is, you need merely repeat it. All other subjective knowledge is irrelevant. Here's a Goldberg column titled, "In Defense of Elitism:"

I may have gotten the details a bit off here, but the substance is obviously true. Some things are better than other things. Some cultures are better than other cultures. Some things are more worth studying, celebrating, and emulating than other things. Or as the late William Henry III put it in his wonderful book, In Defense of Elitism, "It is scarcely the same thing to put a man on the moon as to put a bone in your nose."

No doubt, if I were to say this in an Ivy League faculty room today (or yesterday, or last year, or ten years ago) it would be considered scandalous — not because it isn't true, but because it is.

This line of thinking is the entire basis of Goldberg's claim that he has a superior grasp of the big picture in Iraq. That is why he made his bet with Cole. Unspoken is the loophole that allows Goldberg to evade admitting fault: the Iraqis are savages, and that is why they are in a civil war, do not have a viable constitutional arrangement and why most people think it was a mistake for the US to invade. Convenient, no? And slippery. Needless to say, this same sort of thinking infests the neoconservative mind. This is why attaching oneself to absolute truth is dangerous. It ultimately leads to dead-ends in the face of evidence to the contrary and its adherents are forced to reduce their arguments to a defense of Western culture. And even here the picture becomes confusing. Another key conservative belief is that liberalism leads to totalitarianism. Goldberg's unfinished book, in fact, is titled, "Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton." As I've discussed before, most people are unable to recognize that totalitarianism is not an ideologically-dependent form of government. There can be left-wing (Stalin) and right-wing (Hitler) totalitarian regimes. Goldberg is either ignorant of this or being intellectually lazy. His argument is essentially a rehash of Hayek's from 1944: state planning (whether by Nazis or Soviets), particularly of the economy, leads to a totalitarian state. So why does Goldberg confuse the issue by bringing up fascism? Clearly he has no understanding of what fascist movements represent. But since he's oh-so-clever, he calls modern American liberalism "liberal fasicism." That makes no sense. It's incoherent. Fascism is all but defined by its opposition to liberalism, socialism and communism. It is born precisely from dissatisfaction with the late-19th century liberal state that was widely perceived, in the wake of the first World War, to have been responsible for the war. Communism offered an alternative as well, but the two postwar movements were quite different. That the two culminated in totalitarian regimes in Germany and Russia tells us something very basic, in fact: totalitarianism is the antithesis of liberalism. Goldberg is either purposely or unknowingly ignoring that conclusion. He is not addressing his topic in a comprehensive and, dare I say, scholarly fashion. And that speaks volumes to why he thinks his judgment is superior to Cole's: he is a conservative with his chubby little hands on the Truth and Cole is just a liberal fascist savage elitist...or something.

It's totally incoherent. Goldberg can string sentences together in such a way that his rather mediocre mind is disguised. But there you have it. My analysis of conservative arrogance. So why should you trust me? You don't have to. Maybe I've made some assumptions of my own. But I'm open to new information. I've made an effort--within the confines of a frickin' blog entry--to make an argument based on evidence. I never claimed it was comprehensive, but I trust it is a lot more convincing than Goldberg's facile claims to the Truth.

Posted by morte at 11:49 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Following up on my last post yesterday, this non-story about Speaker Pelosi using military aircraft to travel between Washington and California is really starting to piss me off. Forget about the double-standard for a second (the practice was initiated by Pelosi's Republican predecessor). Forget that explanations have been issued by Pelosi herself and the House Sergeant-at-arms. Forget even that the White House press secretary, and hence the White House itself, has said this is a non-story (link).

The media keeps talking about it as if it were valid news. Its even more prevalent than Anna Nicole Smith dying. What conclusion am I to draw from this? Why do these news outlets feel the need to continue talking about it? The only conclusion one can reach is that these news outlets--rapidly losing respectability--are taking cues directly from Pelosi's political opposition. These are surrogate political operatives. Like the Swift Boaters, these people are not formally connected to the GOP but do their dirty work with zeal and never tire of it. Now in this case, as with the Edwards/bloggers brouhaha, the Democrats did the right thing and fought back. But the stories never quite die, kept on life support by what the right wing calls the "liberal media."

Let Fox and Drudge and Rush and the rest of them have their fantasy world. But the television networks, newspapers and the cable news networks (might be a losing battle on that front) supposedly have journalistic standards. It's time for them to start adhering to them. Can't they see that they're being used as instruments to spread political misinformation? They're either willing accomplices or too incompetent to be in the news business. Either way, it is serious problem that damages our democracy.

Put two and two together: today's conservatives have no interest in democracy, which is why they use media as an instrument of power. And the media are playing along. Wake up for christssake!

UPDATE: I guess I was wrong about the Pelosi non-story being bigger than some blond woman dying. Think Progress has some details.

UPDATE II: Glenn Greenwald reminds us why our news no longer functions to inform.

For the last 15 years or so -- since the early years of the Clinton administration -- our public political discourse has been centrally driven by an ever-growing network of scandal-mongers and filth-peddling purveyors of baseless, petty innuendo churned out by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge, various right-wing operatives and, more recently, the right-wing press led by Fox News. Every issue of significance is either shaped and wildly distorted by that process, or the public is distracted from important issues by contrived and unbelievably vapid, petty scandals. Our political discourse has long been infected by this potent toxin, one which has grown in strength and degraded most of our political and media institutions.

For anyone who thinks that that is overstated, the definitive refutation is provided by ABC News Political Director Mark Halperin and The Washington Post's former National Politics Editor John Harris, who provided this description in their recent book about how their national media world operates:

Matt Drudge is the gatekeeper... he is the Walter Cronkite of his era.

In the fragmented, remote-control, click-on-this, did you hear? political media world in which we live, revered Uncle Walter has been replaced by odd nephew Matt. . . .

Matt Drudge rules our world . . . With the exception of the Associated Press, there is no outlet other than the Drudge Report whose dispatches instantly can command the attention and energies of the most established newspapers and television newscasts.

So many media elites check the Drudge Report consistently that a reporter is aware his bosses, his competitors, his sources, his friends on Wall Street, lobbyists, White House officials, congressional aides, cousins, and everyone who is anyone has seen it, too.

This is why our political process has been so broken and corrupt. The worst elements of what has become the pro-Bush right wing have been shaping and driving how national journalists view events, the stories they cover, and the narratives they disseminate.

What kind of government and political system -- what kind of country -- is going to arise from a political landscape shaped by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge, Sean Hannity, Fox News, Michelle Malkin, and their similar right-wing appendages in talk radio, print and the blogosphere? Allowing those elements to dominate our political debates and drive media coverage guarantees a decrepit, rotted, and deeply corrupt country. That is just a basic matter of cause and effect.

Posted by morte at 10:20 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

What Yglesias says. Its high time respectable news outlets--and I only offer "respectable" tentatively--stopped promoting "news" from conservative fantasyland. Good news outlets have good editors who can distinguish between a news scoop and a scoop of bullshit. And as Yglesias notes, its not that the stories are silly--which they are--but that they damage progressive politics. Let conservatives have their alternative media. I could care less. But respectable news outlets need to be more discriminating and start taking their responsibilities as gatekeepers seriously.

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And the right-wing flips out over climate change again, which isn't news.

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Setting aside for a moment the utility of the science, consider that the enormous price tag of this proposed 20 mile long, high-speed particle accelerator ($6.7 billion) is still less than the $8 billion we spend each month in Iraq.

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Arguing that Democrats will retain House majorities in 2008, political handicapper Stuart Rothenberg notes:

The war could continue to pose problems for the Republicans in 2008, and if so, that would minimize the chances of a snapback. Even though Bush will not be on the ballot in 2008, he still could be a factor that undercuts the appeal of his party and enhances Democratic prospects up and down the ballot. If independents continue to reject the GOP, Republican candidates will have a hard time reclaiming districts that they lost last year.

Posted by morte at 10:43 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

What is brave about five senators who voted against debate on the Iraq resolution demanding the leadership allow debate on the Iraq resolution?

Particularly shame on Hagel and Smith. They took strong stands against the administration after the elections. Now its clear they weren't sincere. Fortunately it looks like the latter's chances of representing my home state in the Senate are getting slimmer by the day.

Posted by morte at 10:39 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Never forget that we are currently ruled by children.

What is it going to take for people to start asking why no one in the Bush administration wants to do their jobs?

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I think I referenced this Vanity Fair article about the neocons last week. Think Progress picks up a good quote from that story that bears repeating here. I have no love for Grover Norquist (the guy who said "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.") but I do admire his ability to be frank about the movement he has had a hand in sustaining. About the neocons he said:

"Everything the advocates of war said would happen hasn't happened," says the president of Americans for Tax Reform, Grover Norquist, an influential conservative who backed the Iraq invasion. "And all the things the critics said would happen have happened. [The president's neoconservative advisers] are effectively saying, 'Invade Iran. Then everyone will see how smart we are.' But after you've lost x number of times at the roulette wheel, do you double-down?"

Posted by morte at 4:35 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

"Debate about the war in Iraq hurts the morale of the troops in the field and emboldens the enemy." That's not a verbatim quote from anyone in particular (to my knowledge), but it is a distillation of how neoconservatives frame discussion about Iraq. This is certainly the Cheney posture, the Kristol argument, and the Lieberman insult (my personal choices for the most dispicable public figures who want war, war, war). So it is amusing that the Secretary of Defense does not share this view. Of course, Gates was chosen to be the anti-Rumsfeld, to the be the straight-talking realist to help us extricate ourselves from Iraq. Wasn't that also the whole point of the Iraq Study Group? To give Bush a way out of the mess he created (not that he deserves to be let off the hook)? But he has rejected the Group's recommendations, and clearly the role Gates plays is not advisory. Bush is still listening to Cheney, to the neocons, and their great need to swing their cocks around the globe.

To me this is just further evidence that Bush is a dangerous man who does not take seriously his responsibilities. He's not listening to his advisors but instead signs onto a plan that lets him "choose" victory. As to the "debate" over Iraq, I'll leave the last word with Montana's new senator:

On the Senate floor a few moments ago, Jon Tester said that he's traveled all around his home state of Montana, and "not a single person told me we should debate about whether or not to have a debate on Iraq."

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You've seen it time and time again. Democrats who don't stand up to right-wingers hell-bent on destroying them. And what message does that send? I'll tell you what it says: "Democratic candidate X can't even stand up to his political opposition. How can you expect him to stand up to terrorists?" It might be a bullshit argument, but the message is all too clear. Josh Marshall calls this the "bitch-slap theory" of politics. And the sad thing is that it is happening to the John Edwards campaign right now. 22 months before the election. And it has already caused a rift within the community most likely to support Edwards. And all it would take to defuse the situation would be for Edwards to give a hearty "fuck you" to the professional character assassins who are doing this. I hope to God Clinton and Obama show a bit more fortitude than this.

UPDATE: I'd like to add also, without getting into the details, that if John Edwards thought hiring bloggers to work on his campaign would increase his standing with the "netroots," then he should have been prepared to receive criticism from his opponents. Bloggers are crude at times. That doesn't have to be a liability, but Edwards should have known that going into it. And it makes him look even weaker once he starts to buckle under the assault of the right wing. Remember, these people are ruthless. They aren't interested in building alliances or making America better. They want to win, they want control, and they will stop at nothing to get the job done. All Democrats would be wise to heed this advice.

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Sigh. As I discussed yesterday, many pundits are bad because they provide bad analysis. Like clockwork, here's an example. David Ignatius:

Somehow, after four years, the debate on Iraq is still animated by wishful thinking. The White House talks as if a surge of 20,000 troops is going to stop a civil war. Democrats argue that when America withdraws its troops, Iraqis will finally take responsibility for their own security. But we all need to face the likelihood that this story isn't going to have a happy ending.

I think the prevailing image of dirty pacifist hippies so pervades the minds of people who think about politics that they will never understand what being against this war is all about. And until that changes the elite media are going to continue being blind to their role in bringing this war about in the first place.

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Senator Joe Lieberman:

"I think we have to start thinking about a war on terrorism tax," Lieberman said during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Bush's defense budget. "I mean, people keep saying we're not asking a sacrifice of anybody but our military in this war and some civilians who are working on it."

McCain told me that one explanation for Lieberman's obdurate support for the President was politics. Lieberman, he implied, had invested too much in his advocacy of the war to back away now. "It might be that Joe was assaulted so harshly in the campaign that he felt that if he showed any chink in his armor, people would exploit it," he said. "You could do the commercial yourself." He added, "I think Joe has been critical. But you know, he’s a much nicer man than I am, so maybe it’s just that."

(link courtesy of AMERICAblog and Daily Kos. Title for this post unintentionally ripped off from AMERICAblog).

Posted by morte at 12:38 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Chris Matthews is fed up with conservative populists too.

Join the club, pal.

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Someone out there decided that my open letter to Congress needed wider exposure. While Googling myself, I found the letter at Al Jazeera's web site (link). I have contacted them to find out who posted the letter there without my permission, even though I appreciate the promotion.

To be honest, I have mixed feelings about my writing here gaining wider exposure. On the one hand, I'm quite proud of some of the more lengthy articles I have produced. But on the other hand I have also been rather harsh with some of the media and political figure with whom I disagree. I'm not apologizing for anything I have written here, and have no interest in whitewashing my record. I guess what I'm saying is that I was unprepared for wider exposure. It seems that preparatory period has now expired.

Posted by morte at 11:52 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I don't want to get into a long discussion about money and politics. What I would like to discuss is a reframing of the debate. Every now and then in American politics, something happens that makes politicians start talking about campaign finance reform. Usually loopholes are "found" in the law or some monied interest is exacting too much influence and the result is bipartisan legislation that "solves" the problem of big money in politics. And then a few election cycles later, the process repeats itself.

I don't think I need to state the obvious, but I will: there's always been big money in politics. Its not new. And there have always been reform movements. But as one of my former professors used to say, when you've got a Congress made up overwhelmingly of lawyers, lawyers who need to finance their own reelection as often as every two years, they're going to write the law in such a way that they will still be able to attract big dollars while putting on airs of getting big money out of politics. I tend to agree with this assessment. So the question becomes, is there a way to lessen the influence of money on politics?

I think there is. But it won't be reform of the existing system but rather a transition to a viable public financing system. Take a look at this proposal in Salon. The idea is that every voter contributes $50 into an election fund that is distributed to all federal elections. Specifically:

It's here that we come to what's great about the Ackerman-Ayres plan: It offers the public a reason to support public financing. Today, people have no say in how their $3 is spent. Under the new plan, anyone who registered to vote would receive $10 to donate to House candidates, $15 to Senate candidates and $25 to presidential candidates. They could make their pledges essentially any way they chose. They could fund long shots or front-runners, spend their wads in the primary or the general election, in their home state or across the nation. They could split their allotments among dozens of contenders or just choose one Senate candidate, one House candidate and one presidential candidate. They could not cheat and spend the money on dinner. The $50 would be issued as a kind of electronic voucher that would expire on Election Day, and Ackerman and Ayres suggest that people could register their donations using the Web, ATM machines or even their electronic food stamp cards.

About 120 million people voted for president in 2004. At $50 each, that would be $6 billion in public financing available for candidates, more than enough to fund big campaigns. As a comparison, all federal candidates -- for the House, the Senate and the presidency -- spent a combined $4 billion in 2004, most of it raised from private donors. Such sums would profoundly alter the political process. Today, Ackerman and Ayres point out, many Americans participate in politics only at the end of a long campaign, if they do at all. Fifty dollars isn't a fortune, but it's more than most voters give. By pooling the money, candidates would be forced to recognize issues of real importance and campaign in places they might otherwise deem pointless to visit. In search of donations, Republicans might even come to San Francisco.

One criticism of this plan would be that it curtails free speech; specifically it would violate the decision reached in Buckley v. Valeo (1976), which established that using money to influence elections is a form of free speech. But the Ackerman/Ayres plan recognizes this and has a remedy:

The plan wouldn't prevent you from giving a politician more than your government-issued $50. You could still make additional private contributions. Indeed, the professors call for raising significantly the current contribution limit of $2,300 per donor per candidate. The new caps would be $5,000 for House candidates, $32,000 for Senate candidates and $100,000 for presidential contenders (with a cumulative cap of $100,000 to all candidates). But that's where Ayres and Ackerman's second innovation, the "secret donation booth," comes into play.

Imagine that you are a politically connected Hollywood producer, and Hillary Clinton calls you up and asks you for $50,000. What do you do? In truth, you'd rather give to Barack Obama, whom you consider more electable, but you don't want Clinton to know that. After all, what if she wins? Then you'll never see the inside of the Lincoln Bedroom. So you tell Clinton that you're definitely on her side. Fortunately, under the Ackerman-Ayres plan, you'll make your check out to the Federal Election Commission, not Clinton. The FEC will wait five days before adding your money to Clinton's account. In those five days, you could contact the FEC and redirect the money to Obama if you chose. And regardless of which candidate ultimately gets the money, its origin will be masked. The FEC will distribute the cash to the candidate's account anonymously, in pieces, over several days, using a secret algorithm to vary the pattern by which it deposits the money. So even though you promised the New York senator your support, she'll have no way of knowing whether you really went through with it. You could send your money to Obama and Clinton would have no way of knowing whose side you were actually on.

The professors compare their anonymous donation mechanism to an electoral innovation that we now think of as sacrosanct -- the secret voting booth. Early American elections were conducted in the open, a situation that led to a rash of vote buying. But in the late 19th century, as states switched over to secret ballots, the practice of bribing people to vote a certain way dropped dramatically. Today only a foolish candidate would pay you to vote for him. You could take his money and swear on your mother's grave that you'll vote accordingly, but once in the privacy of the voting booth, you can do whatever you please.

Posted by morte at 10:49 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Is there anything about the American form of government that George Bush respects?

When this administration is finally over it's going to be difficult to find anything positive that it contributed to the United States or the world.

Posted by morte at 10:39 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

This blog hereby endorses Michael Weiner for the GOP nomination for President. Weiner's tireless crusade to rid America of gays, muslims, liberals, and all weak foreigners has earned him a coveted number three radio spot behind Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. Weiner, who goes by the radio name, Savage, hosts the Savage Nation radio broadcast. He says his campaign mantra will be "Borders, language, Culture."

Man, is 2008 going to be fun!

Posted by morte at 4:11 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Last month, I wrote:

Let me be blunt. If George W. Bush preemptively strikes Iran, the Congress of the United States of America should immediately draw up Articles of Impeachment. There is no other way to reign him in and I will not stand by while he thrusts the United States into another pointless military conflict with a nation that has not attacked us. That is my position. Mr. President, you either obey the rule of law and the will of the people or you will be stripped of your office. I wish I had more to make this threat credible, but words are all I have.

What to do? Congress should not wait. It should hold hearings on Iran before the president orders a bombing attack on its nuclear facilities, or orders or supports a provocative act by the U.S. or an ally designed to get Iran to retaliate, and thus further raise war fever.

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has warned the administration that it had better seek congressional authorization for any attack on Iran. But we need Senate and House hearings now to put the Bush administration on notice that, in the absence of an imminent military attack or a verified terrorist attack on the United States by Iran, Congress will not support a U.S. military strike on that country. Those hearings should aim toward passage of a law preventing the expenditure of any funds for a military attack on Iran unless Congress has either declared war with that country or has otherwise authorized military action under the War Powers Act.

The law should be attached to an appropriations bill, making it difficult for the president to veto. If he simply claims that he is not bound by the restriction even if he signs it into law, and then orders an attack on Iran without congressional authorization for it, Congress should file a lawsuit and begin impeachment proceedings.

Hold hearings on Iran. Force the administration to justify its actions and explain its intent. It's the moral thing to do. It's the legal thing to do. It's the politically smart thing to do. Hell, it's even the cynical thing to do. If Bush starts bombing Iran next month--which I would morosely say is highly likely--there will be a complete loss of faith in the government by at least 60% of the country. And under those circumstances, bad things happen to democratic republics.

Posted by morte at 2:08 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Can somebody, please, come out and state the obvious, that we are not at war with an ideology that can destroy us? Lieberman:

"I've had a lot of disappointments along the way here," Lieberman said. "So why do I trust President Bush in spite of the mistakes that were made, consequential mistakes? Because having watched him, having talked to him, I believe that he understands the life-and-death struggle we are in with the most deadly and unconventional enemy, Islamic extremism. And that he has shown himself, notwithstanding all these mistakes, willing to go forward with what he believes is right for the security of the country, regardless of what it has done to his popularity."

With all respect, the other proposals represent the beginning of a retreat. Of a defeat. And I think the consequences for the Middle East, which has been so important to our national stability over the years, and to the American people, who have been attacked on 9/11 by the same enemy we are fighting in Iraq today, supported by a rising Islamist radical superpower government in Iran.

In another conversation, he told me that he was reading "America Alone," a book by the conservative commentator Mark Steyn, which argues that Europe is succumbing, demographically and culturally, to an onslaught by Islam, leaving America friendless in its confrontation with Islamic extremism.

"The thing I quote most from it is the power of demographics, in Europe particularly," Lieberman said. "That’s what struck me the most. But the other part is a kind of confirmation of what I know and what I’ve read elsewhere, which is that Islamist extremism has an ideology, and it’s expansionist, it’s an aggressive ideology. And the title I took to mean that we Americans will have ultimate responsibility for stopping this expansionism."

Lieberman likes expressions of American power. A few years ago, I was in a movie theatre in Washington when I noticed Lieberman and his wife, Hadassah, a few seats down. The film was "Behind Enemy Lines," in which Owen Wilson plays a U.S. pilot shot down in Bosnia. Whenever the American military scored an onscreen hit, Lieberman pumped his fist and said, "Yeah!" and "All right!"

Posted by morte at 12:56 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Here's the question: "Question: Do you think it's been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the Earth is warming because of man-made problems?"

95% of Democrats said yes, down from 98% last year. 84% of Republicans said no, up from 77% last year.

Despite my earlier efforts to answer the question, I still fail to see how denying global warming is a "conservative" issue.

Posted by morte at 11:55 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I don't intend to offend or be crude, but why don't these people just come out and say that they don't like the niggers?

Racism in this country never really went away, it just became less overt. So with the retreat of formal racism and the public usage of words like "nigger," new codewords were introduced to replace the N-word ("states' rights" is my favorite). This was and is a conscious strategy to make bigots look like reasonable people. You know who isn't fooled? The subjects of racial epithets. That's why, despite the latter's outreach, Blacks still do not trust Republicans with their vote. Black voters in America know full well the codewords used to talk about them because they know the Southern wing of the Republican party enjoys disproportionate influence within the party. But of course it is the GOP that often accuses Democrats of being racists, and complain about being shackled by some vague PC code of ethics. Bullshit. Conservatives (and the Rpublican party) chose to censor themselves to make a wider appeal. And if they are really being straightjacketed by political correctness, why don't they say whatever they want, including the N-word? I think we might be getting to that point with the proliferation of angry white "conservative" media figures who barely conceal their bigotry, xenophobia and nativism. And even if they don't actually believe the hate they spew, then they are guilty of pandering to those elements that exist in all societies. It isn't pretty. But there you have it. And it will help to erode the appeal of racial "conservatism" in America.

*By the way, this whole brouhaha began when a Democrat, Joe Biden, kicked off his presidential campaign with comments that Barack Obama was the first African-American candidate who was clean and articulate (dig up the actual quote if you want; there's no way to spin it positively). My point isn't that racism or assumptions about race are strictly the purview of the GOP or conservatives but that the GOP actively panders and caters to those elements. Its part of their strategy, and has been since 1968 (some would argue since 1964). Individual politicians, regardless of party, doubtless have certain beliefs about race that are unsavory, but that is quite different from an explicit (or well-guarded) party strategy to get votes based on race.

Posted by morte at 11:25 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

One can reasonably ask, how much influence do pundits really have on politics? Can't we all make informed decisions on our own? Isn't my opinion as valid as the next man? And so forth. Atrios takes up some of these issues in explaining why he picks on Joe Klein so frequently. Since I myself single out certain pundits (Tom Friedman, David Brooks, David Broder, George Will and William Kristol) regularly, I thought Atrios' conversation would be a good place to start. He writes:

I'm sure most readers know why I highlight the absurdity that is Joe Klein on a regular basis, but maybe I should explain. The institution of Elite Punditry is premised on the notion that there are smart people with good judgment who have the unique ability to distill the complexity of the world, and nuance which is potentially not present in straight news stories, into an understandable narrative. Their role isn't simply to opine, but to provide guidance and analysis - tempered by that supposed good judgment - for people who presumably have less time than they do to sort through the all of the news of the day. And, at times, especially when they go on the teevee on roundtable or other situations when there are a variety of viewpoints being expressed, they are there to represent, if not parrot, an ideological position. So, when Shields and Brooks go on the Newshour every Friday their role is, in part, to represent the liberal and conservative viewpoints at least in broad terms.

Klein has failed on all of these counts. On Iraq, he failed to have, or at least express, good judgment. On the teevee where he plays "the liberal," he not only didn't take the anti-war position, he actually took the pro-war position.

Even worse than that, he wants to absolve himself of any responsibility, undermining the entire premise of Elite Punditry - That Words Mean Things and They Matter. If Joe Klein thinks there should be no accountability for the positions held by Elite Pundits, that their influence is unimportant and irrelevant, then it isn't clear what exactly they're for. His judgment sucks and that doesn't matter, Klein seems to think. He had a chance to take a stand when it mattered, and he didn't, and that doesn't matter, Klein seems to think.

Fine. So why the hell should anyone listen to him?

Posted by morte at 11:02 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

By blocking debate on Senate Iraq Resolution yesterday, Republicans (and Joe Lieberman) demonstrated that they are willing to own this war and are not yet willing to make a principled stand, regardless of past rhetoric. Daily Kos highlights two of these "independent" Republicans who have strong words but little "stomach" when it comes to actual voting. Both Hagel (R-NE) and Smith (R-OR) are up for reelection, but Smith is the only one of the two who is really in danger. Two other Republicans on the line for 2008, Collins (R-ME) and Coleman (R-MN) voted with the Democrats but they were the exceptions. The bottom line is 18 Senate Republicans up for reelections in 2008 voted to stop debate and hence endorsed the war, the surge and Bush. Some of them are endangerd, some are not (here's one breakdown). To me, this indicates a strong probability that the Democrats will expand their majority in the Senate and the antiwar sentiment will carry over to the House and, of course, the presidency. I could care less if Republicans want to fall on their sword. Let them. I do find it odd that there is still such unity on Iraq on the GOP side of the aisle, and not even the spectre of reelection is enough to persuade these legislators to budge. If things continue this way, the GOP could very well be damaged for over a decade on this one issue alone. It will be fun to make predictions about specific seats changing hands once we're actually in 2008, but for now the foundation is being set. Bush won't budge, the Republicans won't budge, and with public opinion so thoroughly against the policies of each, electoral disaster awaits.

Posted by morte at 10:44 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

TPMCafe links to an editorial from Terence P. Jeffrey of Human Events, one of the oldest publications of the would-be conservative movement (there wasn't a movement when the magazine started). Offering further evidence that 2008 will be a referendum on conservatism itself, the editorial has this to say about America's Mayor:

By advocating abortion on demand and same-sex unions, Rudy is doing something far more egregious than, say, defacing a New York subway train. He is defacing the institution that forms the foundation of human civilization.

That is not conservative.

Rudy will not win the Republican nomination because enough of the people who vote in Republican caucuses and primaries still respect life and marriage, and are not ready to give up on them — or on the Republican party as an agent for protecting them.

Posted by morte at 10:19 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Not only was Condi the worst National Security Advisor ever, her successor is an even bigger joke. Reacting to questions about the NIE report released today, Hadley had this to say:

"One of the things you should conclude from this NIE," Hadley said, "is the best plan is to have this plan succeed."

Takes your breath away, doesn't it? This is the guy in charge of national security. Do you feel any safer?

Posted by morte at 12:37 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

About a month ago, I asked what makes the global warming deniers so crazed when the topic comes up. Why do they have such a visceral reaction? Why do they believe it is an elbaorate hoax and conspiracy hatched by liberals? What are they so afraid of? I think the key to understanding this paranoia is the effect that meaningful environmental legislation would have on certain assumptions about American power in particular and state sovereignty in general. Demagogues like Rush Limbaugh use propaganda to craft a narrow brand of sycophantic and unquestioning jingoism amongst their adherents. And part of this unquestioning jingoism is accepting that the United States, under "conservative" leadership, has absolute moral authority and power to will in the world. When mouthpieces like Rush criticize the president, for instance, they criticize him for not going far enough. Not being "conservative" enough. And in questions of foreign policy this means exercising American power wherever we see fit, with no restraints. I do not think Rush has a detailed vision for the world other than it being dominated by the United States. And in order for the United States to be dominant it cannot have any challengers. Whether our would-be competitors are made allies, puppets or eliminated outright does not matter. They need only be subservient to us. This is what really roils nativist fanatics like Rush, when some other authority challenges us in a way that we cannot confront militarily. I'm speaking of course about international organizations that attempt to exercise some authority over the will of sovereign states. Rush doesn't want to take orders from the UN for this reason, even though no one actually takes orders from the UN. But this is conspiracy. It doesn't matter that the UN Charter specifically states that state sovereignty is paramount. It doesn't matter that the UN has no army to enforce its will. It doesn't even matter that the UN lacks a legislative apparatus entirely; these inconvenient facts are irrelevant to the paranoid narrative that we are at the threshold of being consumed by a nefarious world government.

There's a reason why Rush is often all you can find on the radio in America's most sparsely populated areas. This is the "real" America that is far removed from "coastal elites," Hollywood and Wall St. Rush is spewing pure populist BS to large swathes of the country where you will find militias, white supremecist groups and seperatist movements. I'm not condemning the entire state of Montana, or Idaho, or the Dakotas (nor singling them out). I'm suggesting that these elements are out there and they are specifically non-urban and highly mistrustful of government, even their own. They might feel better with an evangelical in the White House but they fear the leviathan taking their freedom more than anything. What the presence of global warming does to this mindset is suggest encroachment; powerful, unaccountable organizations telling people what to do and how to behave. To these people, global warming isn't a global problem that requires rapid response and shared sacrifice, it is an encroachment on their personal freedom. And that is why they react so viscerally to the evidence. They see elites--scientists, politicians, Hollywood, Al Gore, the UN--dictating behavior. The scientific evidence is about as relevant to them as the fossil record is to a creationist. It is a completely different reality.

I do believe that this sentiment is a distinct minority, however. I think on the whole, the public is concerned with and wants to confront global warming, even if they are unwilling to make their own sacrifices or if they incorrectly believe that there is a "debate" on the issue. But people like Rush and Sen. Inhofe represent that small faction that is, essentially, unreasonable. I do not think there is a way to convince them that addressing global warming is not a coup against the United States by a global conspiracy. That is regrettable for a republic that was founded, notably, on the basis of reason. A group of gentlemen got together and created a republic. An oversimplification for sure, but indisputable. The alternative narrative sees the American project as destiny. God's nation. Born to lead the world and crush tyranny. The realities of problems like global warming are viewed as a threat to this vision. And that is why it invokes such a visceral response.

And sadly, I take no pleasure in having answered my own question because I don't much like the answer I found.

Posted by morte at 11:26 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

One of the hacks at National Review's Corner (the one who thinks Bush should nominate Rick Santorum (R-Unemployed) to the Supreme Court in the event of another vacancy), thinks "nominating" Rush Limbaugh for a Nobel Peace Prize--in protest to Al Gore's nomination--is "brilliant."

As Atrios (who I shamelessly ripped this off from) points out, there is no open nominating process for Nobel Prizes.

I swear to you they live in a different universe. Up is down. Black is white. 2+2=5...

Posted by morte at 2:31 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

My open letter to Congress wasn't explicitly addressed to the Democratic majority, but I implied as much while trying to be as concise and formal as possible (crudeness or civility can be utilized to make a point, depending on the recipient). And as such, it really is the burden of the Democrats, as the leadership, to prevent Bush, who is reckless and lawless, from dragging the United States over the abyss. It is a matter of political will. That is the final obstacle. And as such, Democrats will pay a political price in 2008 not for Iraq, but for Iran. Scott Ritter:

The conference room was packed with more than seventy Representatives and their staffs. I provided an opening in which I stressed that the case being made against Saddam Hussein and Iraq, centered as it was on the issue of WMD, did not hold water. I chastised the Republican lawmakers with a warning: If they continued to support the policy of confronting Saddam's Iraq over a trumped-up charge, they would not only get America involved in a war it could not win but would end up destroying the credibility of the Republican Party, and turn control of the Congress, and eventually the Presidency, to the Democrats. There were questions asked, and answers given, and in the end most thanked me for what they called an "illuminating" meeting.

Then they proceeded to do nothing.

If I were to address a Democrat Theme Team equivalent, I would focus my effort on trying to impress them with the issue that will cost them political power down the road. This issue is Iran. While President Bush, a Republican, remains Commander in Chief, a Democrat-controlled Congress shares responsibility on war and peace from this point on. The conflict in Iraq, although ongoing, is a product of the Republican-controlled past. The looming conflict with Iran, however, will be assessed as a product of a Democrat-controlled present and future. If Iraq destroyed the Republican Party, Iran will destroy the Democrats.

I would strongly urge Congress, both the House of Representatives and the Senate, to hold real hearings on Iran. Not the mealy-mouthed Joe Biden-led hearings we witnessed on Iraq in July-August 2002, where he and his colleagues rubber-stamped the President's case for war, but genuine hearings that draw on all the lessons of Congressional failures when it came to Iraq. Summon all the President's men (and women), and grill them on every phrase and word uttered about the Iranian "threat," especially as it has been linked to nuclear weapons. Demand facts to back up the rhetoric.

Summon the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), or any other lobby promoting confrontation with Iran, to the forefront, so that the warnings they offer in whispers from a back room can be articulated before the American public. Hold these conjurers of doom accountable for their positions by demanding they back them up with hard fact. See if the US intelligence community concurs with the dire warnings put forward by these pro-war lobbyists, and if it doesn't, ask who, then, is driving US policy toward Iran? Those mandated by public law and subjected to the oversight of Congress? Or others, operating outside any framework representative of the will of the American people?

Democrats should seek immediate legislative injunctions to nullify the War Powers' authority granted to the President in September 2001 and October 2002 when it comes to Iran. Congress should pass a joint resolution requiring the President to fully consult with Congress about any national security threat that may be posed to the United States from Iran and demand that no military action be initiated by the United States against Iran without a full, constitutionally mandated declaration of war. Those who embrace the notion of a unitary executive will scoff at the concept of a Congressional declaration of war. They hold that the power to make war is not an enumerated power per se. While statutory authorization (i.e., a formal declaration of war) is enumerated in the Constitution, the reality (as reflected by the current War Powers Act) is that the powers of bringing America to a state of war are not so much separated as they are linked and sequenced, with Congress exercising its control over budgetary appropriations and the President through command.

There may well be merit to this line of argument. But one thing is perfectly clear: Only Congress holds the power of the purse. While a President may commit American forces to combat without the consent of Congress (for periods of up to 180 days), he cannot spend money that has not been appropriated. There is, in the passing of any budget, inherent authority given to the President when it comes to national defense. However, Congress can, if it wants to, put specific restrictions on the President's ability to use the people's money. A recent example occurred in 1982, when Congress passed the Boland Amendment to restrict funding for executive-sponsored actions, covert and overt, in Nicaragua. While it is in the process of getting a handle on America's policy vis-à-vis Iran, Congress would do well to pass a resolution that serves as a new Boland Amendment for Iran.

I implore of this Congress: stand up to George Bush!

Posted by morte at 2:06 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Because they're perfect--morally, intellectually, presciently--we know their fundamental assumptions are not incorrect, only how fallible mere mortals implement their grand, grand designs. Blogger Uggabugga collects some "new" thinking from the increasingly incomprehensible neoconservatives. With all this new thinking, is it any wonder that Lord William Kristol says things like:

This is the Congress at its worst. John Warner does a great puff piece, my senator from Virginia, what do they want us to do in the Senate? Do nothing? Absolutely right. Absolutely right. Support the troops. Appropriate the funds. Let Petraeus have a chance to win this war. Don't pass a meaningless resolution that Joe Lieberman said is non-binding, but symbolically symbolically, it can only encourage our enemies.