Month: January 2005

High Level Diplomacy

I’m awfully glad that taxpayers are paying for the highest caliber of diplomats — intelligent, restrained, sophisticated. And with a wit that is just breathtaking. People who write things like this:

A friend of The Diplomad has provided us this letter which he “swears it’s real.” Of course, he also thought PanAm was a good investment . . . but, we can dream, eh?

Dear Concerned Citizen:

Thank you for your recent letter roundly criticizing our treatment of the Taliban and Al Qaeda detainees currently being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Our administration takes these matters seriously, and your opinion was heard loud and clear in Washington.You’ll be pleased to learn that thanks to concerned citizens like you, we are creating a new division of the Terrorist Retraining Program, to be called the “Liberals Accept Responsibility for Killers” program, or LARK for short. In accordance with the guidelines of this new program, we have decided to place one terrorist under your personal care.

[…]

Although Ahmed is sociopathic and extremely violent, we hope that your sensitivity to what you described as his “attitudinal problem” will help him overcome these character flaws.

Perhaps you are correct in describing these problems as mere cultural differences. He will bite you, given the chance. We understand that you plan to offer counseling and home schooling. Your adopted terrorist is extremely proficient in hand-to-hand combat and can extinguish human life with such simple items as a pencil or nail clippers. We do not suggest that you ask him to demonstrate these skills at your next yoga group He is also expert at making a wide variety of explosive devices from common household products, so you may wish to keep those items locked up, unless (in your opinion) this might offend him.

Ahmed will not wish to interact with your wife or daughters (except sexually) since he views females as a subhuman form of property. This is a particularly sensitive subject for him, and he has been known to show violent tendencies around women who fail to comply with the new dress code that Ahmed will recommend as more appropriate attire. I’m sure the women in your household will come to enjoy the anonymity offered by the bhurka – over time. Just remind them that it is all part of “respecting his culture and his religious beliefs” – wasn’t that how you put it?

Thanks again for your letter. We truly appreciate it when folks like you, who know so much, keep us informed of the proper way to do our job.

You take good care of Ahmed – and remember…we’ll be watching. Good luck!

Cordially…

Your Buddy,

Don Rumsfeld

How many of you vote that the first LARK letter go to Teddy Kennedy followed by one to Michael Moore? Kenneth Roth, Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, has certainly earned himself the right to participate in LARK, too.

Man is that some hilarious material, or what? I’m proud to pay his salary, I can tell you that. Especially in light of this:

Female interrogators tried to break Muslim detainees at the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay by sexual touching, wearing a miniskirt and thong underwear and in one case smearing a Saudi man’s face with fake menstrual blood, according to an insider’s written account.

[…]

In November, in response to an AP request, the military described an April 2003 incident in which a female interrogator took off her uniform top, exposed her brown T-shirt, ran her fingers through a detainee’s hair and sat on his lap. That session was immediately ended by a supervisor and that interrogator received a written reprimand and additional training, the military said.

In another incident, the military reported that in early 2003 a different female interrogator “wiped dye from red magic marker on detainees’ shirt after detainee spit (cq) on her,” telling the detainee it was blood. She was verbally reprimanded, the military said.

Sexual tactics used by female interrogators have been criticized by the FBI (news – web sites), which complained in a letter obtained by AP last month that U.S. defense officials hadn’t acted on complaints by FBI observers of “highly aggressive” interrogation techniques, including one in which a female interrogator grabbed a detainee’s genitals.

Yeah, it’s some kind of a wonderful free society when female interrogators are used as dominatrix whores to humiliate a bunch of unlucky putzes who were sold for 5 grand by an Afghan warlord who’s still laughing his ass off at how easy it was to get rid of his hated brother-in-law.

I’m awfully impressed with all these kinky sexual interrogation techniques they are using against Muslim males. Clearly, this stuff wasn’t thought up by a single group of fucked up prison guards from West Virginia. In fact, we know where it came from — the fascinatingly stupid neocon bible called “The Arab Mind”, a cartoon anthropological guidebook that says things like “the Arab view [is] that masturbation is far more shameful than visiting prostitutes”.

The frightening thing is that presumably smart people actually believed that hard core terrorists would be so upset by masturbation and sexual humiliation that they’d crack like little bitty babies. The men and women in charge of our security are obviously puerile adolescents who think that “arabs” are so fundamentally different from us that they are a lesser species.

I think we might actually lose this thing. Thong panties and menstrual blood interrogation is so disturbingly on the wrong track that I think more Americans are going to die. These people are just too stupid, racist and deluded to understand what it’s going to take to win.

DNC Dance

For what it’s worth (which is nothing) I endorsed Dean for DNC chair many months ago. I felt that it was very important that Dean’s followers join the Democratic party with their full hearts because I thought the party needed them. I have long believed that the constant harping about hating the DNC and Democratic politicians by those of us on the left is doing almost as much harm to the party as what the Republicans have done. Indeed, it seems to me that those two forces have worked together in some ways to make it very difficult for some swing voters to vote for us. I believed that Dean as DNC chair might give people a reason to strongly defend the party for a change.

I have to say, however, that I’d be just as happy with Simon Rosenberg. His Plan sounds right on the money to me. If he does not become the chair, I certainly hope that he will remain influential in the party. These ideas are very thoughtful, forward looking and innovative. Whoever wins, I hope that this kind of thinking will lead the way.

Popular Kulturkampf

I missed this yesterday, but apparently the little mice in The Corner believe that lefties should be as dumb as the wingnuts who are embarrassing themselves with nonsensical cries of “liberal bias” because “The Passion” didn’t get nominated for Best Picture. The fact is that people who follow politics and popular culture (and don’t live in a right wing prayer group telephone tree) know how these things work and don’t pitch fits when the world works in thoroughly predictable ways.

For instance, people who read know that Michael Moore declined to submit “F9/11” for the “Best Documentary” category (in which he was the odds on favorite to win another Oscar) back in September because he was hoping to get a TV airing prior to the presidential election. The rules specify that you can’t air a documentary within nine months of it’s theatrical release to contend for a Best Documentary Oscar. Therefore, the only category for which his film could qualify was Best Picture, an extreme long shot.

The Academy can vote en masse for documentaries and it’s highly unlikely that the highest grossing documentary of all time would have been overlooked in that category. It is highly likely that he would have won that award. Therefore, it was actually quite a sacrifice on Moore’s part. Winning Oscars is no small thing and any filmmaker would love to have a couple of them on his mantle. He gave up what he knew was his best shot at winning — and getting a chance to make a big speech that would be heard around the world — in order to try to get his film seen by more people before the election.

He certainly has my gratitude for doing that, and for all he did during the campaign. I believe that he and many other representatives of popular culture helped our turn out. And for those who think we should distance ourselves from Hollywood, I can only laugh. Popular culture is our single most potent weapon in the post modern political world in which we live. It continues to prove day in and day out that the liberal consensus still exists in this country and that the way people actually live (as opposed to how they think they are supposed to say they live) is tolerant, progressive and as far from the cramped, hypocritical Republican worldview as can be.

But, we’ve barely scratched the surface of how to use it for partisan purposes. Any thoughts that we should leave Democratic politics completely in the hands of dry, boring wonks and political junkies is about the most obvious recipe for ongoing disaster I can see. In a world of millions of competing voices, we’d better find a better more hueristic way of translating the liberal consensus into political action or before we know it, the other side will have completely cowed the public into believed that up is down and wrong is right.

The other side has created its own blatantly partisan politico-entertainment sector with talk radio and FOX News. But they are a bunch of angry, ugly wankers. We can do much better than that if we put our minds to it. In fact, we must.

Do the Democrats have guys like these working for them? Do they think in these terms?

Mr. Schriefer said he and a team of White House big shots transformed Madison Square Garden into a giant TV studio, “stealing” elements from network TV newsmagazines, awards shows, David Letterman and Saturday Night Live. Mr. Bush’s intimate podium-in-the-round was designed by Joe Stewart, who has created set pieces for magician David Copperfield and Comedy Central’s The Man Show. The giant movie screen used for broadcasting video shorts and Reagan requiems was ripped directly from the Academy Awards. “We realized the big screen actually became a character in the whole thing,” said Mr. Schriefer.

[…]

“We live in a time when there’s a real cross-pollination between politics and pop culture,” he said. “As Republicans, we’re often thought of as behind the curve in popular culture, and we don’t have to be, and we can certainly compete on that level just as well as the Democrats can.”

[…]

“If you think about what images you have in your head from the Kennedy years, it’s really not video — except one awful piece of video,” he continued. “It’s stills. They deliberately modeled the West Wing intro after that; they’ve modeled it after these famous photos of Kennedy, standing by the window and stuff like that. They clearly studied this. These are the images you have of the Presidency. So in that sense, if you’re trying to elicit an emotion more than tell a linear narrative, stills can work — with great words.”

The movie also used “rotoscoping,” the technique used in the Robert Evans documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture, that allows moving 3-D elements to be added to still photos. For instance, in the images from Yankee Stadium, they made the flash bulbs flash. They also used natural sound, “like a radio play,” said Mr. Stevens, “like an NPR story, so you’d hear these live sounds. You hear their breath and their footsteps. We wanted to get the other voices of the people in there — the firefighter. Those are obviously their real voices.”

Sure, Spielberg comes in and makes a nice film for Kerry, but he isn’t devoting his entire life to putting on the Democratic Show like these guys are. He doesn’t create a seamless road show from lighting to backdrop to sound to music that follows the campaign everywhere it goes that fellows like Stuart Stevens do. We are all aware of how they compose the shot to make Bush look more presidential and how they put the words they want people to absorb in a backdrop, but did anyone ever notice how they compress the sound at a Bush rally to sound as if the roar of approval builds to a frenzy? They are into all these details of presentation that we just seem to overlook. Our campaigns look old fashioned and ragged by comparison. Our TV pundits are tired and haplessly unprepared. We have no sense of drama as a party, as a movement. (This was, in my opinion, one of Clinton’s great gifts. For better or for worse, he was interesting.)

I’m hearing a little rumbling though that sounds promising and its coming from our own little corner of the political world. When an establishment expert like Stuart Rothenberg feels that it’s worth making derisive comments about you by calling you “clueless” and having an “exaggerated sense of your own importance,” you know that an upstart revolution is taking place.

Somebody isn’t being boring and that’s an excellent step in the right direction. Right now the left blogosphere is a nascent rag tag grassroots reform story that shows incredible energy and some long needed idealism. If Dean (or Rosenberg for that matter) becomes the chairman of the DNC, that’s the image this party is most likely to have going forward. I’d love to see a Democratic Stuart Stevens start working with this right now to market that energy and idealism to the public. We’re using media in a new way that’s fresh and exciting and it’s making the old guard nervous. Now that’s something we can work with. There’s a new revolutionary narrative emerging and if the Democrats are smart enough to see it, they’ll begin to build a popular culture presence right now to go with the substance of the reformation of the party. That’s how smart politics are played these days; you work on several different levels — it’s all part of the same thing.

And while Michael Moore is a flame throwing polemicist who serves a very particular function in this whole thing, he’s probably got some very good contacts in Hollywood who’d be more than interested in helping with this project. I would hope that any part of the Democratic establishment, new or old, that gets approached by people who know something about this stuff will listen. It’s one of the keys to our future.

Here’s another interesting article about how the two parties handle advertising. Very illuminating.

Update: To those who have written to me complaining that I have mischaracterized Michael Moore’s withholding his admission to the Academy Awards, here are the rules for submission to the Best Documentary Awards.

And as for your complaints that “F911” would not qualify as a documentary because it is not factual, bite me.

With Friends Like These

Nathan Newman and Atrios point to today’s NY Times analysis of Chile’s privatization scheme. It’s a very interesting article and one that will come as a huge surprise to anyone who was listening to NPR’s “The World” with Lisa Mullins on Monday afternoon and heard the glowing report on Chile’s program which then segued into an interview with an analyst/scholor Matt Moore from the “non-partisan” National Center For Policy Analysis who proceeded to say that privatization was working wonderfully well in the countries where it’s been tried. They provide some excellent lessons to be learned about how to properly privatize our system.

I, like most Americans, am not an expert on social security privatization schemes around the world and were it not for the fact that this is a hot topic on blogs and liberal news sites, I would not know that the benign sounding National Center For Policy Analysis was a group devoted to private sector solutions to everything under the sun. I urge you to check out it’s web site, particularly the social security page,linked above. This think tank’s spiel is one of the most dishonest I’ve yet come across in the Right Wing Noise Machine. It goes out of its way to advertise itself as being devoted to debating both sides of the issue and then it proceeds to egregiously propagandize for Republican policies.

Apparently, the leftist socialist NPR (and BBC) didn’t bother to investigate what their neutral non-partisan guest has ever written, because he was presented as a neutral policy analyst and his views went completely unchallenged. (He does sound like such a nice boy.)

Here’s the link to the program (scroll down to the “Other Models Interview 5:00”).

This is the type of thing that’s going to kill us if we don’t deal with it. This guy sounded completely reasonable. The lead in story about Chile’s wonderful privatization scheme sounded completely reasonable. But, it was completely bullshit and it was on NPR, not Limbaugh or Fox. We should scream bloody murder that they would use this obviously agenda driven think tank for “non-partisan” analysis.

We are all agog at the Maggie Gallagher and Armstrong Williams payola scandals. And it is outrageous (but not surprising) that the Republicans have become so greedy that they are dipping into taxpayer funds to propagandize. It’s not like they don’t have enough millionaire GOP money floating around for just that purpose.

But the idea that these pundits’ failure to disclose is the real problem is to swat ineffectually at flies. The real problem is that guys like this Matt Moore routinely fail to disclose that they are working for a Republican Policy Shop and that the so called liberal media is either too stupid or too lazy or too sympathtic to disclose it themselves. All you have to do is google the name of the think tank and you come up with this from the People For The American Way, which should at least make a journalist sit up and do some investigating if nothing else:

National Center for Policy Analysis

12655 North Central Expressway, Suite 720

Dallas, TX 75243-1739

www.ncpa.org

Established: 1983

President/Executive Director: John C. Goodman

Finances: $5,237,217 (total expenditures in 2001)

Employees: 22

Affiliations: NCPA is a member of the State Policy Network, a network of national and local right-wing think tanks, and of townhall.com, a right-wing internet portal created by the Heritage Foundation.

Publications: NCPA sponsors two of its own syndicated columnists: Pete du Pont (Scripps Howard) and Bruce Bartlett (Creators Syndicate). Bartlett’s column appears under contract twice a week in the Washington Times and in the Detroit News.

NCPA’s Principal Issues:

# A right wing think tank with programs devoted to privatization in the following issue areas: taxes, Social Security and Medicare, health care, criminal justice, environment, education, and welfare.

# NCPA describes its close working relationship with Congress, saying it “has managed to have more than a dozen studies released by members of Congress – a rare event for a think tank – and frequently members of Congress appear at the NCPA’s Capitol Hill briefings for congressional aides.”

# Right-wing foundations funding includes: Bradley, Scaife, Koch, Olin, Earhart, Castle Rock, and JM Foundations

# In the early 90s, NCPA created the Center for Tax Studies. NCPA’s website describes the inspiration for the Center: “Very few think tank studies are released by members of Congress.”

Does that sound non-partisan to anyone? Are these “studies” considered to be non-partisan?

This is happening all over television and radio. Those of us who are sophisticated in these matters know how to peg guys like this Moore based upon his pitch. But if you are average Joe Democrat last Monday afternoon listening on NPR, your trusted source of non-right wing news, you would have no way of knowing that this guy was completely in the tank.

This is our problem folks. This crap is seeping out of the right wing echo chamber and it’s infecting people who don’t believe in their philosophy. That’s the percentage we are losing in these close elections.

I suppose the miracle is that we are able to keep 49% in this environment. It’s a testimony to the tenacity and intelligence of busy American liberals that they continue to be able to sort through this mess. But, we have got to start cleaning it up. This bought and paid for right wing media and their dishonest shills are the single most dangerous thing we face going forward.

Let Sleeping Dogs Lie

Just in case there’s anyone out there who holds with the ridiculous notion that Daniel Patrick Moynihan was anything other than an incoherent, self-serving (drunken) twit in his later years as the Lion of The Senate, read this.

He gave more aid and comfort to the enemy over the years than Joementum could ever dream of giving. It’s not surprising that they would exhume him now to serve his usual role as facilitator of GOP criminal ravishment. It’s what he specialized in.

Bizarre Reaction

James Wolcott points out that Chatty Kathy Lopez at The Corner thought Junior was in an especially good mood today. I agree. He seemed downright jovial. Wolcott also notes that this joviality was just a tad inappropriate since it was only hours since we’d heard that 31 American soldiers had been killed in a helicopter crash. (But then, Bush has always had a macabre bent. After all, he thought mocking Karla Faye Tucker was a real laugh riot.)

Wolcott notices something about Bush that I haven’t seen anyone else mention and it’s something that drives me completely nuts.

When Bush did address the soldiers’ deaths, he said that we “weep and mourn” when Americans die, but as he was saying it his hand was flatly smacking downwards for emphasis, as if he were pounding the table during the business meeting, refusing to pay a lot for a muffler. The steady beat of his hand was at odds with the sentiments he was expressing–he didn’t look or sound the least bit mournful or sombre.

Somebody, somewhere (Karen?) told Junior that he would sound authoritative if he said…each…word…in….a…sentence…with…equal…emphasis. Unfortunately, he does it all the time and it makes him look like a halfwit with a wierd anger management problem. Actually, now that I think about it, it’s probably the way he talks naturally.

And listen, the story today is going to be very discouraging to the American people. I understand that. We value life. And we weep and mourn when soldiers lose their life. And — but it is the long-term objective that is vital, and that is to spread freedom. Otherwise, the Middle East will be — will continue to be a cauldron of resentment and hate, a recruiting ground for those who have this vision of the world that is the exact opposite of ours.

Hand slapping on podium for emphasis, words clipped and distinct, pissed demeanor, impatient tone. “Have you got that you little bastards? Now go clean your rooms.”

He’s the Dad who is always mad. So when the press brought up the fact that today had the highest single daily death toll in Iraq thus far, he was irritated. He told America to stop that crying or he’d give them something to cry about, damn it.

He was in a good mood all right. If he could have kicked the dog he would have been walking on air.

Ezra’s new (Type)Pad

It appears that Ezra Klein of Pandagon has taken up residence at a new address. He and Jesse were probably getting a little old for roommates anyway. And from what I can tell, Jesse’s doing just fine carrying on on his own. Man, that youthful energy is just amazing.

When I look at these guys’ output I wonder what in the hell I did with my time when I was their age? Well, I was awfully busy. It was the 70’s sexual revolution and all that.

(Who’m I kidding? But weed was cheap…)

In my humble opinion, Ezra’s one of the best bloggers around. He’s a very smart writer, but what I really like about him is that he’s a moderate with a heart. You don’t find those around Ye Olde Blogopheyre too often. There are plenty of moderates, of course, but they tend to be technocrats and wonks. Ezra’s politics combine centrist instincts with emotional exhiliration and idealism. I find that very intriguing. Check it out.

PoMo Politics

Matthew Yglesias understands how the game needs to be played. I hope that the Democrats in Washington are listening because this is very important. Regarding this clumsy “reframing” that Luntz and his fellow propagandists are doing with “personal accounts” it should be clear by now to all Democrats that relying on the media to “see though” these gambits if only we present them with the facts is a fools game. This is postmodern media we’re dealing with here. We must present an alternate reality, which they can then use as our version of the truth. Only then they can be manipulated into using the correct frame-up:

This calls, basically, for someone at the DNC (or DSCC or AFL-CIO or MoveOn or wherever) to hire someone to do some focus groups and come up with a serviceable term that focus groups even worse than private accounts. Then you send around a memo getting all Democrats to start calling them “X accounts” while the White House calls them “personal accounts.” Then “private accounts” will look like a decent compromise and it may well get back in the stories.

It’s insane, yes, that the very term invented by proponents of private accounts is now considered to be off-limits. But that’s the game. If you want to work the refs, you’ve got to work the refs. “Forced savings accounts” strikes me intuitively as something that focus groups won’t like, but actual research should be done.

I’m sorry it has to be this way. But I’m even sorrier that we still don’t seem to get that we have to modernize our strategy in this fundamental way.

It doesn’t really matter if the The New York Times understands that the Republicans are changing their marketing slogans. I’m sure it’s very edifying to know that some smart people in the press are not impervious to

reason at least some of the time. What really matters, however, is that they use the marketing slogans we want them use.

Once again, the Republicans left us a very useful blueprint for how to derail a major initiative like this. The Clinton Health Care Plan. Their frame was “government run health care”, “they want to choose your doctor” “they’ll make going to the doctor like going to the DMV or the post office.” The took their favorite boogeyman and used it to completely distort the plan in a simple, creepy way.

Is there any reason that we shouldn’t use similar scare tactics about taking your guaranteed retirement money and letting Wall Street to play with it? Nope. And once we do that, the press will be obliged by its he said/she said “objectivity” to not only choose the term “private accounts” to split the difference between what the two parties want, they will also be obliged to report our demagoguery along side Bush’s demagoguery. Let the best scare tactic win.

Reason, logic and objectivity are required for good governance. In the current environment they are antithetical to good politics. They take up too much time. They lack the sensation and visceral knee jerk identification that’s needed to capture the public’s attention. We need to be able to explain our positions but we have to be operating on other more subjective levels if we expect to win these things.

Social Security seems to be going our way but I am far from sanguine that we’ve got it in the bag. Rove is very good at pushing past people’s instincts and creating a new reality. He does it by manipulating the media with relentless pressure and exerting a masterful command over the presentation. He succeeds by wearing down both the media and his opponents and tying them up in knots with a cacophany of noise while competing and illogical assumptions are set forth with visual clarity. He knows his optics.

Yesterday he composed a ridiculous but compelling tableau in which Bush was seen showing his compasionate conservatism by illustrating that private accounts would benefit African Americans because they have shorter life spans. Now, anybody with a brain knows that this life span data is based upon the fact that blacks have higher infant mortality and young deaths due to violent causes. In fact, African Americans who reach 65 can be expected to live very close to the same life span as whites. But, who’s going to listen to that except a bunch of political junkies who are already convinced? All that mattered was that there was a big picture in the Times this morning showing Bush sitting at a table with a group of black leaders talking about social security. He’s reaching out to “the other side.”

But it’s not blacks he’s trying to reach. It’s whites who like the idea that privatization is good for poor people but haven’t quite found a good argument that supports it. This pitch allows Bush supporters to hoist liberals with their own petard by saying they are racists who want to keep blacks from getting their fair share. This kind of sophisticated obfuscation comes as second nature to Republicans these days. We are seeing it in both the Gonzales and Rice debates on Capital Hill right now.

Dave Johnson wrote a fascinating must read piece today called “How Republicans Win” that addresses some of this:

The Republicans win because the modern Right has developed around the core idea of persuading people to support their ideology, which then leads to support for their issues and candidates. In other words: marketing. The Right developed this persuasion capability in reaction to the dominance of the existing “liberal establishment.” Because of this, most of their organizations are designed as advocacy and communications organizations, with the mission of reaching the general public and explaining what right-wing ideas are and why they are better for people. Today’s Progressives, on the other hand, think there already is a public consensus supporting their ideals and values, so they have not developed a culture that is oriented around persuading people, and their organizations are not designed at their core to persuade the public to support them.

For example, everyone used to think that it is moral to help the poor or protect the environment, so there are organizations that are designed to do that. Then along comes the right, funding organizations designed to convince people it is wrong to do these things. The result today is that on one side you have organizations trying to help the poor, protect the environment, etc. On the other you have organizations telling people what those organizations are doing is wrong. But now you have no one explaining to people that it is GOOD to help the poor and protect the environment so over time support for helping the poor obviously will erode and eventually the organizations that help the poor will be in trouble and have little public support.

I agree that this is the process and the end result, but I would argue that the right has done this not by persuading people to their ideology but by persuading them that Republican ideology is the one they already have.

They tell people that they are helping the poor more by bleeding government programs. (Remember, faith based programs arebetter at helping those in need because they offer the spiritual dimension.) They call their anti-environmental programs “healthy skies” and they refuse to do more than literally phone in bromides about a “culture of life” to their anti-choice base. This was a lesson they learned during the Gingrich years when they precipitously lost favor when they were honest about their agenda. With Bush, they learned the lesson that they needed to couch their ideas in liberal rhetoric in order to win. I believe this is born out by the fact that the polls show not only that Republican voters have a completely different set of priorities than the president for whom they voted, but they actually believe that the president holds their views even though he clearly doesn’t.

The most recent PIPA poll confirms this:

Bush supporters also have numerous misperceptions about Bush’s international policy positions. Majorities incorrectly assume that Bush supports multilateral approaches to various international issues–the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (69%), the treaty banning land mines (72%)–and for addressing the problem of global warming: 51% incorrectly assume he favors US participation in the Kyoto treaty. After he denounced the International Criminal Court in the debates, the perception that he favored it dropped from 66%, but still 53% continue to believe that he favors it. An overwhelming 74% incorrectly assumes that he favors including labor and environmental standards in trade agreements. In all these cases, majorities of Bush supporters favor the positions they impute to Bush. Kerry supporters are much more accurate in their perceptions of his positions on these issues.

That takes nothing away from Johnson’s larger point about the Republican success at marketing. In fact, it confirms it. The Republicans are so good at this that they’ve been able to convince large numbers of people that they are something they’re not, even in the face of absolute facts that refute it.

This is a masterful use of marketing and it’s one that we need to recognise and begin to use ourselves. The good news is that the liberal consensus remains intact (if somewhat tattered) and if we are smart enough to expose the other side for the hucksters they are and reaffirm our committment to the values we and most of the country hold dear it shouldn’t be too hard a sell.

We’ll have to get past the media, however, and takes us back to Yglesias’ point. We won’t get there by refusing to play the game. We have to get better at manipulating the press and that means understanding the pressure they are under from the right and giving them something to use as a counterpoint so they can say they are “objective.”

Personal Accounts vs Mandatory Gambling = privatization.

Hello, Hello, I’m At A Place Called Vertigo

Thanks to all who wrote in concerned about my 10 day hiatus, but all is well. A slight glitch in the real life, nothing terribly serious, just time consuming. I’ll be back in force just as soon as I catch up with the blogdrama of the day.

Until then, can we all agree that Commander Codpiece’s Sermon on The Steps was just a teensy weensy bit silly? I occurs to me that the neocons are a lethal combination of the worst traits of both sides of the political spectrum — starry-eyed kumbaya idealists who think the best way to make the world see things their way is by kicking the shit out of it. It figures. The original neocons were a bunch of embarrassed ex-communists who eventually left the Democratic party because the party refused to start WWIII so they could prove their manhood. Now, in their dotage, they are getting their wish. They shoudda had a Viagra.

Flyboy

I’m given to understand that Junior wears these silly costumes as a courtesy because they are the uniforms of individual military units and they inscribe them with “Commander In Chief” and the presidential seal and all kinds of filligreed decorations over which he has absolutely no control (being only the commander in chief and all.) It’s kind of like that “Mission Accomplished” sign. The troops just get overzealous and embarrass the president over and over again with their devotion.

So, does the flight crew of Air Force One also have a special uniform that somebody in the crew (maybe the flight attendant?) designed especially for the president?

Or is it possible that Karen Hughes sewed this one up her very own self? I’d be curious to know.