Month: May 2004

Big Baby

Another round of applause for David Brock’s Media Matters. They are now running a TV spot in DC highlighting Limbaugh’s putrid statements about the torture scandal.

You really need to check out Limbaugh’s latest on MM every day and circulate it widely. I’ve always known that the best way to expose the right was simply by letting normal people see what they actually say.

He’s never had to answer for the nonstop lies and character smears of the last 12 years. He isn’t handling the pressure very well. All these tough guys on the right who enjoy seeing a grown man cry must be loving Rush these days:

They can’t destroy me, folks. The media didn’t make me. The media can’t destroy me. The media didn’t make me who I am. I did that along with you. So if the media didn’t make me, if the media didn’t — if they’re not responsible for building me, they can’t tear me down. They can try.

And I don’t know that that’s what they’re doing, but nevertheless, don’t sweat it. That’s — I just — I felt compelled to answer this, because there must have been over the last three or four days a whole bunch of e-mails from people who think I ought to be angry about it and want me to fight back and this sort of thing. And I’ve also learned that over the years, that fighting back is not the right way to handle this. You just keep doing what you’re doing. Just be who you are and let that be the fight.

Don’t — if you start responding to these people, that’s all you’re going to end up doing, which is why I was reluctant to even do this. But I wanted to do it one more time, get it out of the way, get it on the record. And let’s just see how much of this, this total explanation, including the context of the Skull and Bones comment, let’s see how much of this ever shows up in any of these places which have used that quote as a means to be critical, disparaging, discrediting, whatever.

The context is that a pill popping fascist gasbag who popularized Republican hatespin and character assassination is getting a taste of his own medicine. He’s been spewing this stuff for years. Finally somebody is calling him it. Bravo.

Children’s Crusade

Maureen Dowd has an unusually good column up in which she reports something I hadn’t heard before:

In a public relations move that cheapens the heroism of soldiers, the Pentagon merged the medals for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, giving the G.W.O.T. medal, for Global War on Terrorism, in both wars to reinforce the idea that we had to invade Iraq to quell terrorism.

Can you believe that crap? I realize that we are always calling things “Orwellian” but actually dubbing Afghanistan and Iraq as the Global War On Terrorism makes the slightly Nazi-esque term Homeland Security sound a little bit delicate.

More importantly, this is another one of those never-never land dipshit political moves that piles one disasaterous decision on top of another. In honor of Karen Hughes, we’ll call them Catastrophies With Consequences.

Dowd continues:

The truth is that our invasion of Iraq spurred terrorism there and around the world.

That initial deception — and headlong rush to throw off international conventions and old alliances, and namby-pamby institutions like the U.N. and the Red Cross — led straight to the abuse of Abu Ghraib. Now the question is whether the C.I.A. tortured Al Qaeda operatives.

Officials blurred the lines to justify ideological decisions, calling every Iraqi who opposed us a “terrorist”; conducting rough interrogations, perhaps to find the nonexistent W.M.D. so they would not look foolish; rolling all opposition into one scary terrorist ball that did not require sensitivity to the Geneva Conventions or “humanitarian do-gooders,” to use the phrase of Senator James Inhofe, a Republican.

One of my arguments against the invasion was the entirely predicatable blowback. It seemed to me that after 9/11 and the whole worldwide Jihad thing that we should be a little bit more cunning and wily and a little less full of shit.

I could never see the logic in unnecessarily opening this Iraq front, particularly when it was obvious that it was going to make matters worse without any discernible benefit. We had enemies enough already and smarter and simpler ways to combat terrorism than crashing around the mid-east like an uncontrolled, enraged beast.

And it doesn’t take a Phd from the University of Chicago to realize that when you go around making things up— like we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq “because of terrorism” — there might be some glitches in the president’s crusade for peace, love and understanding. Politicians should remember that children are listening. And I’m talking about fully grown Americans who may be confused by the president’s clear message that we invaded Iraq to liberate a bunch of terrorists.

Let’s Get One Thing Straight

The wing nut talking points, after an obligatory “yeah, yeah, it’s icky yada, yada, yada” is that the victims of the bad apples at Abu Ghraib were the worst of the worst, the terrorists, the murders, the ones who are trying to KILL YOUR BABIES in their sleep, so let’s not get our panties in a bunch because this is war, mister!

Inhofe: “The idea that these prisoners — you know, they’re not there for traffic violations. If they’re in cell block 1A or 1B, these prisoners — they’re murderers, they’re terrorists, they’re insurgents. Many of them probably have American blood on their hands. And here we’re so concerned about the treatment of those individuals.”

It has been noted elsewhere that the Red Cross report and The Taguba report estimated that somewhere between sixty and ninety percent of the prisoners held at Abu Ghraib were innocent.

Inhofe said several times over the last few days that the innocent were processed and let loose immediately but numerous news reports say they were generally held for about three months before they were freed with some cigarettes and $10.00.

Unsurprisingly, Inhofe is full of it. But, like our president, I doubt that he reads anything but his picture Bible and The Moonie Times so he is unaware that there have been a number of news accounts over the past week or so from those who are in the pictures and they are not terrorists, insurgents or murderers. They are poor innocent schmucks who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. The fact that they are free today should suggest that they were not the “worst of the worst,” who, if you believe the president in his State of the Union address are either in custody or “have met a different fate. Let’s put it this way — they are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies.”

The NY Times had this on May 5:

The shame is so deep that Hayder Sabbar Abd says he feels that he cannot move back to his old neighborhood. He would prefer not even to stay in Iraq. But now the entire world has seen the pictures, which Mr. Abd looked at yet again on Tuesday, pointing out the key figures, starting with three American soldiers wearing big smiles for the camera.

“That is Joiner,” he said, pointing to one male soldier in glasses, a black hat and blue rubber gloves. His arms were crossed over a stack of naked and hooded Iraqi prisoners.

“That is Miss Maya,” he said, pointing to a young woman’s fresh face poking up over the same pile.

He gazed down at another picture. In it, a second female soldier flashed a “thumbs up” and pointed with her other hand at the genitals of a man wearing nothing but a black hood, his fingers laced on top of his head. He did not know her name. But the small scars on the torso left little doubt about the identity of the naked prisoner.

“That is me,” he said, and he tapped his own hooded, slightly hunched image.

[…]

He was arrested in June at a military checkpoint, when he tried to leave the taxi he was riding in. He was taken to a detention center at the Baghdad airport, he said, and then transferred to a big military prison in Um Qasr, near the Kuwaiti border. He said he had stayed for three months and four days.

The treatment in Um Qasr, he said, “was very good,” adding: “There was no problem. The American guards were nice and good people.”

After the three months, he said, he was transferred to Abu Ghraib, a sprawling prison complex 20 miles west of Baghdad, where Mr. Hussein incarcerated and executed thousands of his opponents.

[…]

Finally, after an ordeal of what Mr. Abd believed to be about four hours, it was over.

The soldiers removed the beds from their cells, he said, and threw cold water on the floor. The prisoners were forced to sleep on the ground with their hoods still on, he said.

“I was so exhausted, I fell asleep,” Mr. Abd said. “These were the same walls where Saddam Hussein used to interrogate people. We thought we would be executed.”

But the next morning, he said, doctors and dentists arrived to care for their injuries. Beds and pillows were brought back in. They were fed. Everyone was nice, Mr. Abd said. Then at night, the same crew with “Joiner” would return and strip them and handcuff them to the walls.

About 10 days after it started, the nightly abuse ended, for no explained reason. “Joiner” just stopped coming to the cell block, and about a month later, Mr. Abd and two others among the seven were transferred to a civilian Iraqi prison in Baghdad.

It is a horrible story that is well documented in the Taguba report and verified by people who saw it. This innocent man was caught up in a Kafkaesque nightmare(or perhaps Saddamesque nightmare is the correct term)

It’s interesting that Inhofe and Limbaugh and the rest who are trying to concoct some sort of narrative that their non-sadist base can live with, are unaware that this fellow claims that he was never interrogated, thus supporting the yesterday’s fading talking points about “bad apples.” Of course, the soldiers involved are now saying that the pictures of the torture were ordered up by their superiors as part of some sort of psy-op interrogation plan, so who knows?

Now, Inhofe and his cronies can say that there is no proof (except for the matching scars and paperwork proving his incarceration at the same time.) But, there is more:

From the Washington Post May 6, 2004:

Hasham Mohsen Lazim traded used tires for a living in the Shiite slum of Sadr City. He had been in trouble only once in his life, he said, a desperate time six years ago when he deserted Saddam Hussein’s army to support his wife and four small children.

Then on one warm night in August, a taxi ride home ended in a U.S. Army holding cell, the first stop in what he described as a hellish four-month journey through the U.S. military prison system in Iraq. His experience veered between anguish and confusion, abuse and fury, before culminating in a series of pictures, broadcast worldwide in recent days, that memorialized his 24-day stay in the grimmest precincts of Abu Ghraib prison.

“Something awful happened to me,” Lazim said during a two-hour interview broken by long pauses of silent despair. “I will never forget it until the day I die.”

The story is very much like the NY Times account. It is hard to see how they could have come up with so much detail that matches the reports, the pictures and the testimony of Americans who were questioned for the investigation.

He too is now free, which puts the lie to this latest attempt to defend the indefensible. If he was a terrorist with American blood on his hands, I don’t think it’s likely that he’d have been set free to kill some more.

Inhofe and his crew of sadistic freepers had better have a back-up plan.

x-posted on American Street

Boo Fucking Hoo

Media Matters reports that the poor lil’ thin skinned bullyboy doesn’t like being monitored.

From Monday’s show:

[Feminazi] Limbaugh on prisoners getting “a taste of [their] own medicine”

CALLER: When I saw those pictures — the Iraqi supposedly torture pictures — I felt no shame. The only thing I could think is, they’re getting a little taste of their own medicine, and those Iraqi women must be cheering.

LIMBAUGH: Made that point last week, but it didn’t go over well with Rush Monitors. I did — that’s — made that point. That point has not been quoted. I said, you know, this might not be bad — oh, it’s gonna happen again — I said, if you look at the role Iraq — Arab men make their women play — the roles they play, the roles they have to live — to, to, to make American prison guards females and to give those women utter power over Arab men — some might call that torture, some might call that decent punishment, some might say here’s a taste of your own medicine. This is what you’ve been doing to your women for time immemorial, only now the tables are turned. But all that’s been lost because [with a slight lisp] “This is horrible. This is, this is disgusting. This is outrageous. This is mean.”

Limbaugh on Democrats and the media

I’m gonna submit here — and I don’t care who quotes me on this, and I don’t care where they repeat it — there’s a lot of acting going on here, and there’s a lot of false phony concern for these Iraqi detainees. This is not about people genuinely outraged about this. …

The Democrats and the media don’t give a rat’s rear end about what happened to those prisoners. All this is, is the latest weapon they can use politically to harm Bush, which is why they’re trying to harm me, in fact. It’s all political. They don’t give a hoot about those prisoners. …

Limbaugh on Media Matters for America’s monitoring

You know, isn’t it interesting folks, I’ve been around here for fifteen and a half years. I’ve never been so often quoted on a single story. I think what happens is that the media has come across a new website that’s supposedly chronicling what I say, and they all go there and they read it and they see and then they take the propaganda of that website and repackage it and call it news. And they leave the context of my remarks out. For example, nowhere where I’ve been quoted have I been quoted as saying that I think what happened there is not good. I don’t support it, and I don’t encourage more of it. I have not said that — or I have said that, they’ve not quoted me on that. There’s a number of things that they’ve left out, uh, most of it context. Uh, but it’s just, it’s amazing, all these years they could just tune in to my show and listen, but no, that’s too tough. But now there’s just a central clearinghouse for out-of-context quotes from this program. They can go there and present as news, even though it’s just repackaged propaganda.

Imagine that. Rush says he’s being quoted out of context with repackaged propaganda when his words are repeated verbatim. He says that nobody is quoting all the stuff where he condemns the torture. All they do is report stuff like this, taken from the same show yesterday:

Limbaugh on sincerity of public outrage

How many of you went out to social occasions over the weekend and this subject, this story came up? And how many of you wanted to really say, “I don’t see the big deal here. This is war. These are people who tried to kill Americans.” But you didn’t say it or some variation of that because you were afraid because you were with a bunch of people who were start yelling at you that you for being insensitive or coarse or crude or whatever, so you said what you thought you had to say in order to get along during a controversial situation if this conversation came up wherever you were.

How many of you did that? How many of you did that? Admit it to yourself you don’t have to raise your hands out there. I’m not, we’re not counting hands out there. I want you to think about it because the fact of the matter is I think that’s what most people are doing. I think most peo –that’s where my optimism and faith in the people of this country remains steadfast. I don’t think most people are that outraged by this. I don’t thi — let’s put it this way, I don’t think the public outrage nowhere near matches what we watched on television on Friday and yesterday exhibited by these holier than thou sanctimonious elected officials who are themselves acting and saying what they think you their voters want them to say and what you their voters expect to hear. …

Folks, somebody asks what you think of this prisoner thing, just tell them the truth, and I guarantee you more people you tell the truth will say, “Yeah, I agree with you” than you know…

He’ll be back on the little blue babies soon if people don’t show some compassion and let him off the hook. Rush is not supposed to be called on his outrageous talk. He is supposed to be allowed to brainwash his 20 million dittoheads daily without interference. This is upsetting him.

More To The Story

I watched the video of Berg’s beheading and it literally made me sick to my stomach. Do not watch it. It’s a barbaric, horrible display of inhumanity. I wish I hadn’t seen it. I’ll never forget it.

The story surrounding Berg is getting very strange indeed. I don’t know what is wrong, exactly, but something is. The government is not being straighforward about the circumstances and it’s very wierd:

An American civilian who was beheaded in a grisly video posted on an al-Qaeda-linked Web site was never in U.S. custody despite claims from his family, a coalition spokesman said Wednesday.

[…]

The video posted Tuesday showed a bound Berg in an orange jumpsuit — similar to those issued to prisoners held by the American military at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He was sitting in front of five men, their faces masked, as one read an anti-American text.

[…]

But unanswered questions remained about Berg in the days before he vanished, as well as where and when he was abducted.

Berg, who was Jewish, spoke to his parents March 24 and told them he would return home on March 30, according to his family in suburban Philadelphia.

But Berg was detained by Iraqi police at a checkpoint in Mosul on March 24, was turned over to U.S. officials and detained for 13 days, the family said. His father, Michael, said his son was not allowed to make phone calls or contact a lawyer.

Coalition spokesman Dan Senor told reporters that Berg was detained by Iraqi police in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. The Iraqis informed the Americans, and the FBI questioned him three times about what he was doing in Iraq.

Senor said that to his knowledge Berg “was at no time under the jurisdiction or detention of coalition forces.”

Michael Berg told The Associated Press, however, that U.S. officials were “playing word games.”

“The Iraqi police do not tell the FBI what to do. The FBI tells the Iraqi police what to do. Who do they think they’re kidding?” the elder Berg said.

Calls by the AP to police in Mosul failed to find anyone who could confirm Berg was held there. The U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority runs Iraq, controlling not only the police, but the military and all government ministries.

FBI agents visited Berg’s parents March 31 and told the family they were trying to confirm their son’s identity.

On April 5, the Bergs filed suit in federal court in Philadelphia, contending their son was being held illegally by the U.S. military. The next day, Berg was released. He told his parents he had not been mistreated.

Berg’s father blamed the U.S. government for creating circumstances that led to his son’s death, saying if his son had not been detained for so long, he might have been able to leave Iraq before the violence worsened.

[…]

Asked for details about Berg’s last weeks in Iraq, Senor replied: “We are obviously trying to piece all this together, and there’s a thorough investigation.” He said he was reluctant to release details but did not say why.

“The U.S. government is committed to a very thorough and robust investigation to get to the bottom of this,” Senor said, adding that “multiple” U.S. agencies would be involved and that the FBI would probably have overall direction.

Senor said that in Iraq, Berg had no affiliation with the U.S. government, the coalition or “to my knowledge” any coalition-affiliated contractor. But Senor would not specify why Iraqi police, who generally take direction from coalition authorities, had arrested him and held him.

Police in Mosul “suspected that he was engaged in suspicious activities,” Senor said, refusing to elaborate. Berg was released April 6 and advised to leave the country, Senor added.

Michael Berg said that in early April, his son refused a U.S. offer to board an outbound charter flight because he thought the travel to the airport — through an area where attacks had occurred — was too risky.

State Department spokeswoman Kelly Shannon said that on April 10, Berg told a U.S. consular officer in Baghdad that he wanted instead to travel to Kuwait on his own.

Berg apparently had an Iraqi in-law in the Mosul area, according to emails to his family.

Brig. Gen Mark Kimmitt said the only role the U.S. military played in Berg’s confinement was to liaise with the Iraqi police to make sure he was being fed and properly treated because “he was still an American citizen.”

This man was apparently just wandering around Iraq trying to find work on his own, unaffiliated with the US government. I had no idea that Americans could even go to Iraq on their own. If I recall correctly, Democratic lawmakers had a difficult time getting permission to go to Iraq over the last year, but perhaps that was because of security concerns.

I don’t know what all this means. It’s possible that it’s just a strange and bizarre series of events that ended in horror. But you have to wonder why the FBI was supposedly answering to the Iraqi police in Mosul while the US military who supposedly control the country are denying that they had Berg in custody when it is pretty clear that they did. Something isn’t right and from the way this AP report reads, this reporter agrees.

Outrage At The Outrage

Although Inhofe did not directly challenge American policy dictating adherence to the Geneva Convention in Iraq, he did stress the pre-eminence of aggressive intelligence-gathering when confronting terrorism.

“We’re in a different kind of world than we’ve ever been in before,'” he said during the interview. “And I believe that we need to be tougher than we have ever have been before … and it’s imperative that we get intelligence.”

At a time when the Bush administration has issued a series of apologies for the mistreatment of Iraqi captives, it might be easy to assume that Inhofe is consciously challenging the White House from its right flank. But the Oklahoma senator insists that he is stoutly supporting the administration and beleaguered Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Asked about his inflammatory opening statement to the committee, Inhofe said confidently, “I’m sure that the president was glad that I did it.”

I’m sure he was. The man who mocked a condemned prisoner begging for her life by pursing his lips and saying “Oh, please don’t kill me,” is definitely a kindred spirit.

Where Are They, Damn It!

Following up my post below, in reading today’s NY Times description of the disagreement between general Taguba and Stephen Cambone yesterday at the hearings, I was reminded of something. First, here’s the relevant excerpt from the Times:

[Taguba] told the Senate Armed Services Committee that it had been against the Army’s doctrine for another Army general to recommend last summer that military guards ‘set the conditions’ to help Army intelligence officers extract information from prisoners. He also said an order last November from the top American officer in Iraq effectively put the prison guards under the command of the intelligence unit there. But the civilian official, Stephen A. Cambone, the under secretary of defense for intelligence, contradicted the general. He said that the military police and the military intelligence unit at the prison needed to work closely to gain as much intelligence as possible from Iraqi prisoners to prevent attacks against American soldiers. Mr. Cambone also said that General Taguba misinterpreted the November order, which he said only put the intelligence unit in charge of the prison facility, not of the military police guards.

Many of you will recall the following passage from Time Magazine last July:

Meeting last month at a sweltering U.S. base outside Doha, Qatar, with his top Iraq commanders, President Bush skipped quickly past the niceties and went straight to his chief political obsession: Where are the weapons of mass destruction? Turning to his Baghdad proconsul, Paul Bremer, Bush asked, ‘Are you in charge of finding WMD?’ Bremer said no, he was not. Bush then put the same question to his military commander, General Tommy Franks. But Franks said it wasn’t his job either. A little exasperated, Bush asked, So who is in charge of finding WMD? After aides conferred for a moment, someone volunteered the name of Stephen Cambone, a littleknown deputy to Donald Rumsfeld, back in Washington. Pause. ‘Who?’ Bush asked.

This is pure speculation, but it is worth looking into what those interrogators were after in Abu Ghraib. Cambone framed it yesterday as “trying to prevent attacks against American soldiers.,” which, I supose, you could interpret in a number of ways. But, if the focus was finding the non-existent WMD, then you’d have to ask whether the man whose “chief political obsession” was finding them gave the order to take off the gloves.

All The Way To The Top

The lawyer for one of the acused soldiers just said on MSNBC that the military was using the pictures to “break” prisoners who they suspected of knowing where the weapons of mass destruction were.

If that is the case, then I think Rumsfeld and the White House knew about the torture and may have ok’d it directly.

I had thought that the abuse was centered on intelligence about the insurgency, in which case it was feasible that it was something that got out of hand on the ground. But, the lack of WMD is the worst and most embarrassing of the myriad Bush failures, and a particular hobby horse of micro-managers Cheney and Rummy. If that was the focus of the interrogations then I think it goes all the way to the top.

A Respectful Dissent

I’m going to go out on a limb and disagree a bit with two of my favorite bloggers who also happen to be the most popular bloggers in the blogosphere. Let it never be said that I am a scared bunny Democrat.

First, let me just agree that deep sixing the idea of ideological purity in favor of partisanship is a really good one. We must accept that in order to win the presidency and achieve a majority in the congress the Democratic Party is going to have to welcome all stripes of Democrats, even the hated DLC. It’s a fact of life kids.

On the other hand, Kos says:

We have become a party of appeasers, afraid to respond lest the Rove boogeyman jump out of the bushes and bite them in the rump. Dean helped kickstart a change in our party’s culture, but it has temporarily receeded as the Kerry people consolidate their victory and take over the party apparatus. Kerry has rightly kept quiet as Bush digs his own grave, but where are our attack dog surrogates? Where are our Democrats being Democrats?

This, I think is unfair. They are out there every day doing exactly what we are exhorting them to do:

Sen. Edward Kennedy launched a blistering election-year attack on the Bush administration’s candor and honesty Monday, saying President Bush has created “the largest credibility gap since Richard Nixon.”

The Massachusetts Democrat said that Iraq was never a threat to the United States and that Bush took the country to war under false pretenses, giving al Qaeda two years to regroup and plant terrorist cells throughout the world.

“Iraq is George Bush’s Vietnam,” Kennedy said at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.

Responding to the criticism, Bush campaign spokesman Terry Holt called the veteran lawmaker the “lead political hatchet man” for Sen. John Kerry’s campaign, adding that if it had been up to Kennedy, “Saddam Hussein would not be in prison but would still be in power.”

[…]

Cong. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.), a member of Congress since 1971 and a Korean war combat veteran, today called for the impeachment of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld unless he resigns or President Bush removes him from office…

I think America and the world want us to show the outrage not with rhetoric but with action! And, if the President does not fire Secretary Rumsfeld, or if he does not resign, I think it is the responsibility of this Congress to file articles of impeachment and force him to out of office. Then, the whole world will know – not just the military – not just Americans, but the whole world will know what we stand for!”

[…]

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) will unleash a broad indictment of the Bush administration’s Iraq policies at a speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors today.

Her speech will be a stinging rebuke of the process that led to war, the White House’s immediate reconstruction plans and its schedule and strategy for transferring sovereignty in just 74 days.

[…]

While campaigning for John Kerry in Georgia today, Senator Max Cleland made the following statement in response to the right wing attacks:

For Saxby Chambliss, who got out of going to Vietnam because of a trick knee, to attack John Kerry as weak on the defense of our nation is like a mackerel in the moonlight that both shines and stinks.

[…]

MARGARET WARNER: Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin went to the Senate floor this morning to slam what he called “the Republican attack machine on John Kerry.”

[…]

The fact that the media doesn’t cover these thing widely (or that the blogosphere doesn’t give a shit either) doesn’t mean they aren’t doing it.

Kos:

And it’s not just them. The whole party apparatus, from top to bottom, is afraid. No Democrats talk about taking back the House. “Not until 2012” I’m told. And it’s just recently that Democrats have started talking optimistic about the Senate, even though it’s been ours to lose for a while.

Republicans are always confident of victory, even when they have little chance in hell. It’s a problem when those idiots take us to war based on lies and best-case scenarios and all, but politically, it works. Our side needs a little backbone. It needs a little optimism. It needs to remember that the (D) next to their name means something larger than “little (R)”.

This has nothing to do with ideology, whether you are a moderate or progressive or conservative or whatever. It has everything to do with establishing a clear and confident party identity. We still don’t have one, and we won’t have one so long as the party continues to run scared anytime a Republican says “boo!”.

Our entire Party “apparatus,” from top to bottom, is afraid. We have no backbone. We have no identity. Other than that, though, we are clearly the best qualified to run the country while the world is blowing up around us.

Why would Americans who are not already partisan Democrats vote for a Party whose rank and file members believe they have no identity and who run scared of Republicans, much less Osama bin laden? I’m not even sure why I would vote for such a party and I’m as partisan as it gets.

But then, I don’t actually see the Democratic Party this way. Basically, it is assumed that the Party is a big loser because we are a bunch of sissies when in fact, the Democratic party won the last 3 presidential elections and is out of power in the congress by a mere handful of seats. And the fact that we aren’t in the oval office today and aren’t in control of the Senate is not because we are cowards.

But, there are reasons, and it behooves us to figure out what they really are.

Here’s David Brock from his interview yesterday in Salon:

One of the most frightening experiences I have had in recent years in talking with rank-and-file Democrats is the extent to which they unconsciously internalize right-wing propaganda. To add insult to injury, too many Democrats have a tendency to blame the victims of these smears — their own leaders — rather than addressing the root of the problem. For instance, when Senator Daschle made the factual statement that “failed” diplomacy had led to war with Iraq, right-wing media accused him of siding with Saddam Hussein. The ensuing controversy caused many Democrats to think Daschle had put his foot in his mouth.

Check out Buzzflash on any given day over the last two years and you will find some kind of nasty, demeaning over-the-top headline about Daschle. When he came out swinging, it was “Finally, Daschle shows some cojones,” even though he often came out swinging. And there was almost no understanding of the fact that a legislative Party leader has to be more than just a liberal partisan. His job also requires him to help red state Senators get re-elected. I know that isn’t something we liberals are happy about, but it is a reality and Daschle deserved a lot better from the left wing of his own party.

My fellow Democrats, this endless criticism of the Party for being too timid is naively playing into their hands. The problem is not the Democratic Party. It is the Republican Party and the media that serves them. This “Democrats are a buncha pussies” meme comes right out of the Mighty Wurlitzer.

The Party’s identity is as clear as its ever been. It’s the party of fairness, freedom, opportunity and equality for all Americans, not just the few. That this has been distorted by 30 years of highly focused GOP propaganda is not surprising. But, this is what we’ve stood for since FDR and the only thing that’s happened is that the Republicans have managed to convince a whole lot of people that Democrats are too cowardly to keep their towns and country safe, it is in their best interest for rich people not to pay taxes and that they won’t be able to practice their religion if civil society doesn’t become more religious.

This whole “we have met the enemy and he is us” business is looking inward when the most important thing we can do is start to look outward and deal practically and pragmatically with the real problem we are confronting — an American public that is incresingly subject to right wing propaganda and a media that is more than happy to give it to them.

I don’t have a problem criticizing outrageous examples of appeasement in the Party, like those of Lieberman and Miller. They are what they are and we have nothing to lose by exposing them. Neither do I have a problem criticizing Kerry or his advisors on strategy or policy. That’s politics.

But, what I object to is criticizing the character of the Democratic Party in general and insulting the characters of Democrats specifically, who don’t need to be called cowards all the time when they are in there fighting the good fight while we sit safely behind our keyboards and monitors dispensing advice.

There are real problems to be solved if we do win this election. And it is going to be very tough to do what needs to be done in the current environment.

As Brock warns in his excerpt:

With the right-wing media now a seemingly permanent and defining feature of the media landscape, if Democrats cut through the propaganda and win back the White House in 2004, they still face the prospect of being brutally slammed and systematically slandered in such a way that will make governing exceedingly difficult. There should be no doubt that the right-wing media’s wildings of 1993 — which led to Clinton’s impeachment four years later — will be replayed over and over again until its capacities to spread filth are somehow eradicated.

This is the central political problem of our times, not the alleged cowardice of the Democratic Party.

It’s not smart to help them spread their memes. Nor is it a good use of our energy and passion to put a reformation of the Democratic Party at the top of the agenda as if we were a hundred votes shy of a majority in the House and under the thumb of a filibuster proof Senate.

We’ve been out of the White House for only four years and even that was the result of masterful GOP manipulation of the media and their unprecedented willingness to use the levers of power (and the threat of civil insurrection) in Florida and the Supreme Court.

We are not in the wilderness, we are in a death match for the soul of the United States of America at a time of enormous instability in the world (made far, far worse by Republicans) and a usurpation of democracy at home (at the hands of Republicans.) Our character isn’t the question in this political battle. Theirs is.

And I would suggest that one of the first things we need to do a lot more of is what Atrios advises instead of calling Democratic politicians cowards all the time:

… the best way to encourage them is to support them when they go out on a limb.

So It Begins

A video posted Tuesday on an Islamic militant Web site showed the beheading of an American civilian in Iraq and said the execution was carried out by an al-Qaida affiliated group to avenge the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers.

The video showed five men wearing headscarves and black ski masks, standing over a bound man in an orange jumpsuit — similar to a prisoner’s uniform — who identified himself as Nick Berg, a U.S. contractor whose body was found on a highway overpass in Baghdad on Saturday.

“My name is Nick Berg, my father’s name is Michael, my mother’s name is Susan,” the man said on the video. “I have a brother and sister, David and Sarah. I live in … Philadelphia.”

After reading a statement, the men were seen pulling the man to his side and putting a large knife to his neck. A scream sounded as the men cut his head off, shouting “Allahu Akbar!” — “God is great.” They then held the head out before the camera.

Berg was a small-business owner from the Philadelphia suburbs, his family said Tuesday.

Berg’s family said they knew their son had been decapitated, but didn’t know the details of the killing. When told of the video by an Associated Press reporter, Berg’s father, Michael, and his two siblings hugged and cried.

“I knew he was decapitated before. That manner is preferable to a long and torturous death. But I didn’t want it to become public,” Michael Berg said.

The video tape included a statement by one of the executioners:

“For the mothers and wives of American soldiers, we tell you that we offered the U.S. administration to exchange this hostage with some of the detainees in Abu Ghraib and they refused.”

“So we tell you that the dignity of the Muslim men and women in Abu Ghraib and others is not redeemed except by blood and souls. You will not receive anything from us but coffins after coffins … slaughtered in this way.”

The video bore the title “Abu Musab al-Zarqawi shown slaughtering an American.” It was unclear whether al-Zarqawi — a lieutenant of Osama bin Laden — was shown in the video, or was claiming responsibility for ordering the execution.

I guess this puts to rest the meme that the torture was a brilliant tactical maneuver that scared the quivering Arabs into compliance.

But, I fear that not only Iraq is going to end up in a civil war from all these mistakes. The US may end up having another one of its own, as well. I think it’s fair to say that the sadistic wing nut contingent is going to explode over this.

I continue to be amazed at those starry-eyed neocons like David Brooks who aparently made it through half a century on this planet without realizing that a war of choice is antithetical to the goal of spreading freedom and democracy by virtue of the fact that war itself is defined by violence and inhumanity on a grand scale. Why they didn’t see this very elementary contradiction in their grand plan I will never know. (Perhaps it is no accident or conspiracy, after all, that conservative intellectuals aren’t successful in academia. Perhaps it’s simply because they are not very bright.)

We are now into a cycle of revenge that is unfortunately going to be stoked rather than redirected by the moron in the White House.

Get ready for some Western aphorisms. I can feel them coming on. Ride ’em Cowboy.