Month: September 2003

Grand Strategy

Matthew Yglesias has such a good post up today — honest, heartfelt and smart. The discussion of his intellectual journey from cautious multilateral hawk to Grand Strategy neocon and back is one of the first pieces I’ve read that actually describes the salient difference between the two, and one which (for once) accurately describes the difference between most Democrats and the starry eyed idealists in the “grown-up” administration.

I certainly agree that Americans aren’t especially suited for unilateralism. Spartans we aren’t. We’ve got other things to do than fight an extremely expensive perpetual war for global dominance. And our president hasn’t exactly made a case for term sacrifice other than to shop til we drop.

However, I think he gives short shrift to the “much-maligned Clinton policy of crisis-management … keep the country strong, the alliances firm, and when something goes wrong to try to set it right.” I actually think it IS a grand strategy, in that it allows the US, through step-by-step example, education, commerce and leadership to lure the world to liberal democracy. It is the only way it will work in the long term. Force is on the menu, and will of course be necessary from time to time to protect ourselves or our allies. But, it alone cannot create the necessary environment for positive change.

The fallacy of the Bush Doctrine and the entire Neocon Grand Strategy lies in its internally illogical belief that democracy and freedom can be forced on others through the barrel of a gun.

It’s basically the difference between enticing someone into bed and raping them. They both end with the same basic act, but those who are the object of the first feel quite differently about the method of getting there than the second. It’s true that the charmed may feel manipulated, but they are unlikely to feel violated and angry. The difference, needless to say, is the difference between choice and coercion.

PoMo-tional Opportunities

According to Howard Fineman:

There is evidence everywhere that, at heart, George Bush’s re-election strategy will focus on touting his aggressive use of the American military abroad (and the government’s investigative powers at home) in the war on terror—while simultaneously (by presidential inference and surrogate attack) accusing Democratic opponents of being too wimpy by nature to handle the bad guys.

[…]

White House insiders I’ve talked to in recent days say, in sum, the following: that they plan to sell the president to the country based on what they see as his strength of character, his leaderly resolve and his sense of moral clarity—a man’s man, in other words.

That’s the main reason why I’m for Clark. Bush’s so-called strength is an image that’s been created out of whole cloth, with the willing acquiescence of a confused and shallow media. We should throw down the gauntlet and challenge this absurd perception. But, we have to do it right.

As much as I hate to deal with matters of life and death in this way, I’m afraid that we have no choice. The post-modern presidency isn’t really the problem. They’re simply taking advantage of the post-modern media.

This interesting book by Pippa Norris; The Virtuous Circle, Political Communications in Post Industrial Societies (pdf) discusses the current situation:

Focus groups and opinion polls can be seen as an effective way that parties can stay in touch with public opinion, and one which is more representative of the general electorate than reliance upon the opinions of local party activists.

Alternatively, the evolution of modern and post -modern campaigns can be seen as threatening the democratic process, widening the gap between citizens and their representatives. If parties and candidates adopt whatever message seems most likely to resonate with focus groups, if pollsters, consultants and advertisers rather than politicians come to determine the content of campaigns, and if ‘spin’ outweighs ‘substance’, then the serious business of government may be replaced by the superficial manipulation of images. ”Packaging politics”, Bob Franklin argues, “impoverishes political debate by oversimplifying and trivializing political communications.”

[…]

Some fear that the shift in campaign techniques may have a direct impact on civic engagement; if voters have become passive spectators of symbolic events staged in television studios rather than active participants in local party meetings and community campaigns. As discussed earlier, the most common concern is that post-modern campaigns turn off voters due the decline of face-to-face communications and the rise of practices such as negative news highly adversarial to government, horse-race journalism, and trivialization of campaign discourse.

The Dean and Clark phenomena are exceptionally good news, then. Instead of being passive spectators, the people have used one of the new technologies to facilitate the face-to-face communications that many believe are indispensable to counteract the increasingly deadening impact of the post-modern campaign.

But, if anyone believes that this is going to supplant the powerful mainstream news media by 2004 they are living in dreamland. For the coming election (and perhaps for the foreseeable future) political campaigns will have to be run, at least in part, as product marketing — “packaging politics” as it’s referred to above. As long as huge sums of money are at stake in elections, as long as human beings are more engaged in their day to day lives than in the abstract and complex issues of national governance and as long as television remains the public’s primary entertainment and information medium, we are going to have to recognize that symbols, archetypes, images, soundbites, brands and metaphors are the means to sell the message.

And, I think we need to relax a little bit about it. Post modern communication isn’t immoral and it isn’t stupid. It’s just fast, fleeting and simple. The problem is that policy, politics and governing aren’t.

I don’t think there’s any turning back. We must accept this new reality and learn to work with it, while we try to balance it out with sincere grassroots democratic efforts like the Dean Meet-ups and the draft Clark campaigns. If we fail to do both we will lose, and the simple reason is that the other side is doing it already.

The hard core of the Republican party are, by and large, very amenable to appeals to authority. The dominance of talk radio and fundamentalist pulpits and it’s insularity from the chaotic give and take of real debate give the dittoheads the illusion of winning without ever having to fight.

But, the GOP’s dirty little secret is that they know that the majority of Americans are not by nature authoritarians — they are individualists and communitarians. This goes back to the puritans and pioneers who settled this country. And it is why they have used the post modern media to portray the Republican Party caring about such formerly local concerns as education and why they spend so much time promoting their brand-name-in-a-suit as a particular archetype — a manly, maverick warrior. The Party is branding itself as the New England Town Meeting meets the Western ideal and the Southern Cavalier.

They are remarkably successful at this largely because the post modern media is set up to deal with images, sensation and speed and the Republicans are willing and able to give them what they need. Not surprisingly they have also figured out that in this fast and fleeting post modern media world, dishonesty and rank manipulation are more possible than they’ve been since Hearst practically ran US foreign policy.

Unfortunately, it is happening at the very time when a radical ideology has overtaken the GOP that literally threatens American democracy and national security. This is the kind of dangerous confluence of events from which unanticipated, cataclysmic political changes are made.

We simply must become more sophisticated in our thinking about these issues. We have to realize that it is not enough to have the best ideas, the best policies or even the best candidate. We have to come to terms with the fact that in this high speed post modern world, we must begin to sell our politics in a post modern way.

In a world where a sub-sentient, fratboy can be successfully marketed as a strong, decisive leader to a significant number of independents and Democrats, I think it’s obvious that the Republicans are on to something.

Unless Clark turns out to be a complete bumbling idiot on the trail (which would be very surprising) I believe he is the best positioned, by way of image, biography and association (“packaging”) to expose the Bush “mystique” as nothing more than a chimera and at the same time begin to revitalize the outdated image of the Democratic party.

I’d like nothing more than to reject this simplistic formulation and have the candidates run solely on the issues. But, the brutal politics of the last ten years have convinced me that we must learn to compete in the post modern media. I’m not interested in tilting at windmills while the power crazed modern Republicans turn the country into a functional one party state.

No Cigar

TAPPED says:

One doesn’t exactly expect last night’s Democratic debate to receive fair treatment at the hands of the National Review Online, but Michael Graham’s attack on Howard Dean goes beyond the anticipated:

Gov. Dean’s claim that what he wants more than anything as president is to “restore the honor and dignity and respect that this country is owed around the world” may not inspire the typical union member or soccer mom, but to the internationalists of the far Left, it was right on key.

If only the “far Left” is interested in making America honored and respected around the world, then Tapped thinks a lot of new members are going to be signing up for the “far Left,” including members of the Bush administration who are currently begging for help in various foreign capitals. It’s especially odd because Dean’s closing statement included a remark far more worthy of criticism:

Over a decade ago, the Soviet Union collapsed and the Berlin Wall came down without America firing a shot. And that was for two reasons. The first was that we had a strong military, and that’s important. But the second is that on the other side of the Iron Curtain most people wanted to be like America and they wanted to be like Americans.

And in the two and a half years into this presidency, you would be hard-pressed to find a majority in any country in the world where people wanted to be like Americans again.

TAPPED says the North Koreans probably would. That’s true, but the North Koreans live in hell.

*And did everyone notice that FoxNews cut away before the closing statements in the debate were even finished to have their partisan spinners immediately spin it in the most negative fashion they could find?

WTF?

Everybody’s Talkin’

Kos posted this interesting California based poll on the recall showing Bustamonte holding on to his lead.

I would trust the California polls over the national polls on this question. This is a very fluid political situation in a very unusual state. The California pollsters are invariably closer to the mark here than any of the big national guys.

I have to say that in the last few days of doing business around LA, I have had (and overheard) more conversations with strangers about politics than I can remember since the Nixon years. (The impeachment featured a lot of covert whispering. You never knew when you were going to be confronted by a rabid, out of control, wing-nut Clinton hater … plus the pornographic Starr Report was often “inappropriate” in public.)

I’m hearing almost across-the-board derision about Arnold, some of it disdainfully humorous and some plainly insulted by his lack of preparation.

This is all anecdotal in the extreme, I know, so take it with a grain of salt. It’s just unusual in my experience for people to be so openly engaged.

I also happen to live just 4 blocks from Ahnuld’s campaign headquarters. You’d think at least a handful of his supporters would show up from time to time in the local Starbuck’s talking up their guy while standing in line for their soy latte’s. I haven’t heard anything but loud, vociferous Arnold bashing throughout the neighborhood. If Ahnuld can’t get the desperate, brown nosing, Hollywood opportunist contingent behind him, he’s got problems.

I also think Davis is making some headway with his “hair shirt and humility” tour. He looks tan and almost human. But I believe that the biggest thing that will help him was the appearance of Howard Dean, calling the GOP out. If it’s followed up with more of the same from other candidates, along with the Big Guns — Bill, Hill and Al — I think he might pull it out.

The Democrats are starting to get riled up.

Kaleidoscope Eyes

RJ, over at Let The Record Show, found this unbelievable analysis of Junior’s speech on MSNBC.

Now the 2004 election — little more than a year away — is shaping up as a referendum on Bush’s doctrine of pre-emptive war, the argument that he made in the year leading up to the invasion of Iraq that it would be too dangerous for the United States to wait until Saddam Hussein’s regime had developed weapons of mass destruction.”

RJ says:

…is that what Bush said? No, what he said was that Saddam had endless supplies of WMD, poised at the ready, to attack us at any moment. The press are shaping up to be the chief revisionist historians.

That’s for sure. Get a load of this bucket of crud, from the same article:

It will also be a referendum on America’s uncomfortable role as custodian of Iraq, a country whose citizens seem increasingly ungrateful for having been liberated from Saddam’s tyranny.

You invade and occupy a country that’s been tightly controlled and highly repressed for 30 years, all hell breaks loose, the “uncomfortable custodians” stand around like a bunch of raccoons caught in the garbage and the citizens seem increasingly ungrateful for having been liberated.

The bastards.

The prism of Sept. 11 remains the key to understanding Bush’s policy. He believes he is deterring future attacks, not inviting more of them, by pursuing the occupation.

It seems to me that if Operation Iraqi Flytrap was his secret cunning plan all along, then he’d have been wise to have kept his piehole shut about it. Unless the terrorists are blind and deaf they’re on to his little scheme now. Golly, I sure hope they don’t decide not to cooperate. That would be bad.

(What’s really weird is that the writer understands what the “prism” of 9/11 is. It’s something about tilting the windmills of Rummy’s mind where he left the cakewalk in the rain. I think.)

The electoral question for Democrats is: How can their presidential candidate profit from Bush’s agony in Iraq?

Those Democrats are always trying to profit from Bush’s agony. It’s so, like, totally unfair.

Supreme Commandante Flightsuit Arbusto would never, ever try to profit from the agony of others. Ever.

The assumption among all the Democratic contenders is that NATO countries and nations such as Morocco would be willing to chip in troops — if only a president other than Bush would ask them.

Morocco? WTF???

And yeah, maybe if the guy asking wasn’t the smirking asshole who just told everybody in the world who didn’t jump to attention when he whistled that they were “irrelevant” and “corrupt” they might chip in troops. Golly, they might even get some weird ferriners like Canada to join in.

The Democratic candidate will be at something of a disadvantage because Bush can control the timing of events, such as strikes on terrorist havens or announcements of the capture of key terrorist leaders.

uh huh. You betcha. Good point.

Democrats harbor deep distrust of what they see as Bush’s manipulation of the terrorism issue.

So, Bush controlling the timing of strikes at terrorist havens or capture announcements wouldn’t be objective evidence of his manipulation of the terrorism issue. Democrats just see it that way. Interesting.

But as commander-in-chief, Bush will not always be the master of events — sometimes he’ll be at their mercy. He may again feel compelled to come to the American people and argue that their own survival is at stake in Iraq.

Ok. So, he’s not just keeping these evil villains from attacking us on our homeland. He’s keeping them from annihilating us. Except when he’ll be at their mercy. Then he’ll again be compelled to argue that our very survival is at stake.

In Iraq.

Smoking mushrooms on a cloud in the prism of 9/11, apparently.

Kookoocatchoo.

Field Of Dreams

If you build it, they will come.

“There’s a reason that foreign fighters are coming into Iraq. There is a reason that we’re seeing evidence — not really yet completely clear evidence — of terrorists trying to operate in Iraq.”

“They know that this is the central battle in the war on terrorism.”

Condi Rice

Boy them Bushees shur r smart. Thank the gud Lord the Ayrab terrists finely kno wear thuh centrul battel is. Now we kin meat ’em on thuh battelfield and Genrul Bush kin kill ’em. Then we wull be saf.

thanks to bayard in the comments section

The Big Speech

Steno Sue’s involvement is the big clue.

Josh Marshall wrote about this piece in the Washington Post last night and this morning amends his impression of the importance of the story:

Two points seem clear to me.

1) The chaos in Iraq has opened the place up to serious infiltration by all manner of bad-actors from around the region — a development which is not a justification for administration policy, but an example of its failure.

2) The administration is far from weaned of its propensity for using manipulated or just plain bogus intelligence to advance its policy or cover its tracks. One veteran journalist/sage whose take on things I never discount tells me this morning: “Yes, the more I think of it, the more the timing is suspicious, and reminiscent of the last Sept. 11 ‘celebration.’ Ridge saying there is a new Al Q threat in the US (but not issuing an alert, because they know that alerts are now politically counterproductive). The Wolfowitz opeds on terrorism. I’d watch for Bush to make a reference to the Post article, or at least to its contents, in his speech tonight. The main difference this year is that they are using the Post rather than the Times to do their leaking.”

Sounds right to me.

“Terrorists are in Iraq just like we always said.”

“Iran also harbored them.”

” They killed 3,000 Americans.”

“We will kill them before they come over here and kill us all in our beds.”

“The UN must give us lots of money.”

“Support the troops.”

“I have a big codpiece.”

“May God bless the United States of America”

The Postman

Dwight Meredith writes in:

I saw your post on the Big Meanies. Now you have to admit that it would be unpatriotic and just wrong during a time of war to refer to the President and his party as “spineless” or as a “shitstain,” or as the “Coward-in- Chief” or as the “Waffling Asskisser-in-Chief.” Real Americans who love their country do not criticize the President at a time of war, right?

See also: Spoons, Sullivan, Levy, Drezner and, most importantly, the Manchester Union Leader.

Yes. Those Democrats are way out of line.

I just happened to see Bob Novak make his patented wail about the terrible “Bush Bashing” on Capitol Gang. (He says it at least once a week in response to virtually any criticism of Junior.) He was very unhappy when Mark Shields reminded him of the Marquess of Queensbury rules under which the Republicans operated during the Clinton years.

He disingenuously replied, in typical weaselly GOP fashion, that he was talking about presidential debates and that Bob Dole had criticized Steve Forbes. Then he stuck out his lower lip and pouted for the rest of the show.

(On the Estrada abomination, when it was pointed out for the 6,456th time that the Republicans also blocked Clinton’s judges, Kate O’Beirne made the usual tiresome argument that the big difference is that they’d never used the filibuster. As usual, it’s the breaking of arbitrary dealines and bureaucratic procedures that really makes the difference to Republicans. Principles, apparently, are for losers.)

I also received a very interesting e-mail from a reader responding to my post of the other day about Paul Wolfowitz’s shameless patriotic pandering. She says:

Wolfowitz gets all weepy in the WSJ about Christy Ferer going to Iraq to thank the troops for fighting terrorrism. Left out of Wolfie’s article and your comments was the fact that Ferer’s late husband, Neil Levin, was a Pataki patronage appointee as insurance, then bank superintendent before getting the plum and quite-high-paid job as head of the Port Authority. He died in the World Trade Center attack.

Wolfowitz used one Republican-connected WTC widow to add cheap emotion to his atrocious op-ed, but most of the rest of the WTC survivors are a lot less thankful for what the Bushies have done to them, their families and their country. And, naturally, you don’t see them getting a government-subsidized, spin-producing trip to Iraq. Hopefully, we will see them embarrassing the Bushies and their New York bootlickers like Pataki at next year’s convention.

I have felt for a long time that the most potent political force in America right now are the families of 9/11. It’s a lot to ask, considering what they went through, but I hope they realize that they have in their hands the ability to change the course of American history.

Nobody can touch them, not even Karl Rove or Tom DeLay.

Gotterdamerung

This single act of hubris may be Karl Rove’s downfall.

It’s dicey to try to create a soviet style propaganda film in this post-modern, ironic day and age.

It’s just plain stupid to make a laughably bad one.

….they actually have President Timothy T-Ball saying, “People can’t have an AWOL president!”

unbelievable.

Bobo’s Shame

I said below, that I wondered if Bill Kristol was having trouble looking himself in the mirror these days and then lo and behold, I come across this transcript of David Brooks, fellow “reasonable, temperate, believable” conservative, on The News Hour and I realize that somebody is giving out mind altering drugs at Gertrude and Irving’s kaffe klatches. Something is seriously wrong with these people. Get a load of this pile of road apples (emphasis throughout is mine):

DAVID BROOKS: The story that was in the Washington Post by a great reporter by the name of Tom Ricks was that Colin Powell had gotten together with the joint chiefs gone around Rumsfeld, gone to the White House, and persuaded that. My reporting has persuaded me, though Ricks is a fantastic reporter, that that was not true.

JIM LEHRER: Rick covers the Pentagon for the Washington Post. He is a superb reporter.

DAVID BROOKS: And I’m convinced it started with the president who may….

JIM LEHRER: Started with the president…

DAVID BROOKS: After the bombing of the U.N. building, decided to internationalize it, went through an interagency process. Paul Wolfowitz played a key role. I was — read documents given to Donald Rumsfeld before any of the Colin Powell meetings allegedly took place in which Rumsfeld signed off on the U.N. wording of the U.N. Resolution. I think this all preceded any end run around Donald Rumsfeld. I think it started with the president and was worked by the administration for some of the reasons Mark talked about–

JIM LEHRER: Do you agree with what Mark said? The policy is in tatters and that’s why they had to–

DAVID BROOKS: They made an adjustment. It evolved in the way they planned months ago. That’s their line. I believe what happened was they realized things were going badly — not only because they didn’t have enough troops and I don’t think we are ever going to get French troops. They hoped to get Pakistani, Indian, and Turkish troops. But because they need more money and I think that’s an underreported part of the story, they need more money to support Iraq and that’s not going to come from France or Germany or those countries – it’s going to come from the IMF and the World Bank and the Treasury Department played a major goal in going to the U.N. so they could hopefully get some money from those institutions.

JIM LEHRER: The Treasury said, hey, wait a minute, we can’t afford this on our own.

[…]

DAVID BROOKS: Let me disagree in part. This is so important, this is the future of American foreign policy for a generation. We should not think dollars and cents here. We should think like George Steinbrenner when he buys a slugger, he buys six sluggers because he is just going to throw a lot at the problem. I’m afraid the Bush administration and the Congress is thinking dollars and cents when this has to be done right for the Iraqi people. We need to spend what we need to spend. We can talk about the tax cuts and how we are going to fund it later. But I think the administration so far is being penny pinching and not spending what it needs to get the electricity up, to get all the other problems solved that can be solved with money, of which a lot of them can be.

JIM LEHRER: Do you think politically they can get away with that? Do you think the American people would support what you just said whatever it takes, do it?

DAVID BROOKS: Everybody from Howard Dean to Jesse Helms or whoever is on the right now says we cannot cut and run. We cannot fail at that. Democrats have different ideas how to proceed, but everybody agrees except for Dennis Kucinich, that we cannot cut and run. This has to work out or else U.S. national interests will be harmed across the board.

(ed. How fucking convenient this argument is. “We’ve made this mess and now there’s no choice but for you to help clean it up.” That may be true, but it certainly doesn’t make a very good case for leaving this miserable failure of a president in office any longer than we have to.)

[…]

MARK SHIELDS: This is not a mistake but an error of historic proportions.

JIM LEHRER: Do you agree with that?

DAVID BROOKS: No, absolutely not. They made some misjudgments; they thought there were going to be refugees, that there were going to be food shortages, there turned out not to be, but they under-estimated the extent of Baathist terrorism after the war and now they’re making adjustments by bringing in other troops, by reconfiguring the troops and most importantly by training the Iraqis. One of the problems that has been going on in the past several months since the war is that you walk into the headquarters where Paul Bremer sits, there are no Iraqis there. The Americans are running the government as if there are no Iraqis. And it’s important, and they’re beginning to make this adjustment, too, which is giving Iraqis real power, and that’s another thing they’re changing.

[…]

DAVID BROOKS: Some people, some of your friends pretend they listen to you and don’t. This administration listens to you but pretends they don’t. They pretend they are so far above their critics they don’t have to hear but then they’re really listening.

Good boy, Bobo. Now, sit up pretty.

First, David Brooks should no longer be considered reasoned, temperate or anything else after this completely ridiculous attempt to paint President Vacuous as somehow leading the administration to change course. This is about as believable as Timothy Bottoms’ version of Bush as John Wayne saying, “If some tinhorn terrorist wants me, tell him to come and get me! I’ll be at home! Waiting for the bastard!”

Everything we know about Bush suggests that he would rather chew straight pins than change course. It will take a lot more than Brooks’ word to make me believe that he “led” the administration to do anything other than help him hitch up his codpiece.

And, I suppose that Thomas Ricks might have been fed a bill of goods by the Joint Chiefs and Colin Powell, but let’s just say that since it’s the White House that’s got a credibility gap the size of the grand canyon, I’m going to go with the Republican generals rather than Karl Rove and the editorial board of the Weekly Standard.

This absurdity of the Treasury Department making the case for the UN because of the need to secure loans from the IMF and the World Bank is simply crapola. They have been in Iraq since May making assessments and have been expected to make the necessary loans from the get-go. We have more than a little influence with that group. If there has been an impediment it comes from the Republican party. All they needed to do was have John Snow walk over to the capital building and chat up Jim Saxton.

This is all part of the absurd new meme being tossed about by Wolfowitz and others that this appeal to the UN was part of their plan all along and everything is going just swimmingly. The IMF and the World Bank said early on that they would need some indication that the UN recognized the new government of Iraq. Now, Wolfie and his minions are saying that this UN move is just a natural and expected step in the way to bringing the flowers of democracy to Iraq. In fact, we’re ahead of schedule!

Meanwhile, the bombing and killing of American troops and UN workers and clerics and innocent Iraqis, and the pourous borders and the missing WMD and Saddam sending out tapes exhorting people to resist — IS IRRELEVANT! Commander Codpiece’s astute and unique grasp of foreign policy nuance and concerns in the treasury department are the reason we’re going back to the UN after calling them a bunch of useless losers just a few months ago.

Yeah.

David Brooks is a shill. He pretends to be (slightly) disagreeing with the administration and speaks in measured tones, but in the end, he manages to get every single image and talking point out there that the administration wants. Even “Bush the crackerjack leader among men.” How impressively servile.

All liberals should be put on notice to find another “reasonable” conservative that we can trot out when some mannequin like Paula Zahn asks if there are any conservatives they like. (Besides, as Paula did when Al Franken named Brooks, the media starlets are likely to confuse him with David Brock, so it doesn’t really work anyway.)

I nominate Joe Lieberman.

Finally, you’ve got to love Bobo’s inability to name a far-right fringe politician now that Jesse Helms has retired. It’s hard, I know.

It’s hard because there is no far-right “fringe” in Washington anymore.

They’re all in the administration and the Republican leadership.