Month: August 2005

The Appearance Of Winning

This cracks me up. In a story called “No Clear Finish Line” Peter Baker examines the fact that the administration is really becoming stuck in its Iraq policy as the country turns against the war.

Failure to meet the deadline, analysts say, would be a devastating setback to Bush and could accelerate the sense at home that the process is not going well. Alarmed by falling domestic support for the war, Bush aides resolved in June to rally the public by having the president take a more visible role explaining his strategy and predicting victory. Bush flew to Fort Bragg, N.C., to deliver a prime-time address pleading for patience, part of what aides said would be a sustained campaign.

But Bush then largely dropped the subject until yesterday’s meeting at the ranch, addressing the war mainly in reaction to the latest grisly events on the ground. In the ensuing vacuum, Rumsfeld and the U.S. effort in Iraq have come under increasing fire even from Bush supporters, such as Fox News talk show host Bill O’Reilly, Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol and the American Spectator magazine.

“The Bush administration has lost control of its public affairs management of this issue,” said Christopher F. Gelpi, a Duke University scholar whose analyses of wartime public opinion have been studied in the White House. “They were so focused on this through 2004. . . . I don’t know why they’ve slipped.”

Now let’s think about this. In 2004 what was going on? Oh that’s right. A presidential election. And who was running that election? Oh that’s right, Karl Rove. Hmmm — what’s happened since then that would put them so off their game?

And even more astounding, what could have happened in Iraq that made them lose control of the public affairs management? Could it be — reality?

Gelpi, if you recall, is one of the public opinion experts who told the president that people don’t care about why a nation goes to war, only if it can win:

In shaping their message, White House officials have drawn on the work of Duke University political scientists Peter D. Feaver and Christopher F. Gelpi, who have examined public opinion on Iraq and previous conflicts. Feaver, who served on the staff of the National Security Council in the early years of the Clinton administration, joined the Bush NSC staff about a month ago as special adviser for strategic planning and institutional reform.

Feaver and Gelpi categorized people on the basis of two questions: “Was the decision to go to war in Iraq right or wrong?” and “Can the United States ultimately win?” In their analysis, the key issue now is how people feel about the prospect of winning. They concluded that many of the questions asked in public opinion polls — such as whether going to war was worth it and whether casualties are at an unacceptable level — are far less relevant now in gauging public tolerance or patience for the road ahead than the question of whether people believe the war is winnable.

“The most important single factor in determining public support for a war is the perception that the mission will succeed,” Gelpi said in an interview yesterday.

[…]

In studying past wars, they have drawn lessons different from the conventional wisdom. Bush advisers challenge the widespread view that public opinion turned sour on the Vietnam War because of mounting casualties that were beamed into living rooms every night. Instead, Bush advisers have concluded that public opinion shifted after opinion leaders signaled that they no longer believed the United States could win in Vietnam.

Most devastating to public opinion, the advisers believe, are public signs of doubt or pessimism by a president, whether it was Ronald Reagan after 241 Marines, soldiers and sailors were killed in a barracks bombing in Lebanon in 1983, forcing a U.S. retreat, or Bill Clinton in 1993 when 18 Americans were killed in a bloody battle in Somalia, which eventually led to the U.S. withdrawal there.

The more resolute a commander in chief, the Bush aides said, the more likely the public will see a difficult conflict through to the end. “We want people to understand the difficult work that’s ahead,” said a senior administration official who insisted on anonymity to speak more freely. “We want them to understand there’s a political process to which the Iraqis are committed and there’s a military process, a security process, to which we, our coalition partners and the Iraqis are committed. And that there is progress being made but progress in a time of war is tough.

There is nothing that isn’t just a matter of PR and marketing to these people. Unfortunately when your soft drink tastes like horse piss, you have a problem no matter how resolute you are about saying it tastes good. Apparently they all agree that if the president just goes around singing “I’d like to build Iraq a coke” until you feel like jamming icepicks in your eardrums, everyone will be satisfied.

Here’s the problem. People might be willing to stay the course and stick with the mission — if they knew what it fucking was. They’ve changed their rationale so many times that nobody has a clue. And people aren’t as dumb as these guys think they are. Setting phony “benchmarks” in a process nobody understands isn’t “winning.”

What does winning in Iraq mean? That we’ve created a beautiful Jeffersonian democracy in the mid-east that is so successful that everybody sees it and says “I want that too?” Or is it “training” the Iraqi forces to become the new strongman’s Gestapo? Is it an Islamic state along the lines of Iran? Or is it as David “let them eat cakewalk” Ignatius says, we will have won if Iraq finally gets down to having a functioning society 30 years from now?

Ridding the world of evil, or winning the war on terror, or spreading freedom and democracy are impossible to quantify. It’s undoubtedly one of the reasons why,as Wolfowitz put it so prosaicly, WMD was the only reason “they could all agree on.” (And then there turned out not to be any…)

You can’t convince people they are winning a war that has no real purpose and is unwinnable in any real sense. These are slogans not goals. The president can blather on forever about how resolute he is but unless he can convince people that he knows what winning is, and that it’s a cause the American people actually want to win (as opposed to installing a new Ayatollah in iraq)and that we are actually, you know, winning, it cannot work.

It was fine during the presidential campaign when people were making a one on one comparison and judged that he was the one they thought could “win” — whatever it was. Now that he’s out there on his own, he’s actually going to have prove it. And he can’t. Because I don’t think he gives a shit about freedom and democracy and wouldn’t have th first clue about how to define what winning in Iraq would be.

He’s probably going to declare victory and strut around in a codpiece sometime around election day. It bought him some time before — at this point I think all he cares about is getting through these next three years and then demanding blow jobs from the Carlyle Group for the rest of his life. The only winning he ever cared about was winning the last election.

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Gearing Up

Amanda Marcotte and quite a few others are upset that NARAL pulled their ad. But I think the ad did what it was intended to do. They were only running it in a couple of states, remember. It was designed to cause controversy. And it succeeded. Yesterday the story was on the front page of the NY Times.

They used the swift boat model. Oh yes, all the congoscenti are clutching their pearls and the anti-choice groups are running their own ads and everybody’s in a tizzy. But just as the swift boat ads were targeting veterans and military types who were possibly lulled into complacency by Kerry’s war record, NARAL is targeting pro-choice women who may not yet realize how high the stakes have suddenly become. They are trying to wake them up to the threat and sometimes it takes a firestorm to do that. The details don’t matter, it’s the headline and the image.

I don’t know if the tactic succeeded, but I don’t believe it hurt the greater cause any, despite the handwringing about its “intemperence.” (Where would we be if liberal pundits couldn’t call for the smelling salts everytime some liberals forget their manners.) They could put on a tea party and have everyone wear white gloves and the right would still say the feminazis are on the march.

NARAL is playing a rough game and they are willing to take some heat to do it. They give cover to pro-choicers in the Senate who feel they must pretend to be above such nastiness to do their solemn duty (although why the other pro-coice groups piled on is beyond me.) They’ll now put out a more “temperate” ad that will not inspire nearly the same level of vitriol — and the other side is running ads about ads, always a good thing. I think it was a pretty good play.

Let’s face some ugly facts. Roberts is almost assuredly going to be confirmed. I wish I had some hope that we could stop him — hell, I wish we could stop all of them. Not that we shouldn’t try, but unless something really shocking is revealed I just don’t see it. There is no way that the gang of 14 is going to go along with a filibuster on this guy and it will take pictures of him dressed in his Peppermint Patty costume with Karl Rove naked on a dog leash to get enough Republican defectors. (That would probably lock in their support, actually)

No, the point here is to punch hard for Rehnquist’s seat — the one that will swing the court definitively. I know we don’t want to have to face this, but the fact is that when we “lost” last November it always meant that a guy like Roberts, right wing hit man that he is, would probably be the best we could hope for. Which is nothing.

For the pro-choice advocates, the stakes could not be higher. If Roe vs Wade is overturned, they are looking at spending years — decades — fighting tooth and nail in places like Alabama, Missouri, Utah and Mississippi to try to win back for women the rights they have had for the last 30 years.

I know that some people think that’s a radical and unlikely outcome, and I can’t figure out why. It is quite clear that a fairly large number of states are going to make abortion illegal and very quickly too. While some Democrats blithely discuss whether it wouldn’t really “be better” if the states handled abortion and allowed the local people to decide such a thing (never mind that the woman who needs an abortion and can’t just jump on a plane to California will just have to take one for the team) for pro-choice advocates it means that they are going to have to ramp up their advocacy to unprecedented levels, hire huge staffs to begin the legal challenges and defenses that are going to be required in probably at least 25 legislatures and courts.

They are rallying their troops in hopes that they will be able to stop that horrid eventuality, but if they can’t they are going to need lots and lots of help and they know it. And all the while the constitutional right to privacy that undergirds the entire panoply of reproductive freedom issues is going to remain under assault.

I would suggest that any young lawyers out there who are sympathtic with this cause study up on the history of abortion law in your state and begin to think about strategies. It’s highly unlikely that Roe vs Wade is going to stand. No matter how much people believe that keeping it legal is a masterful Rovian strategy to keep the rubes hungry, they are going to have to deliver someday. They will do it by throwing it to the states. The rubes will then be more than thrilled to keep fighting for the fetus there.

Update: I just realized that none other than Bob Novak, who must be back on his meds (or I need to go on some) more or less agrees with me that this isn’t really about the Roberts nomination and that NARAL is playing a longer game.

The current hard count for Roberts is 60 senators. That would be more than enough to confirm him and barely enough to end a filibuster. But it is not enough to further the grand strategy for a conservative court. At least 70 votes for confirmation may be needed to make it comfortable for President Bush to name somebody at least as conservative as Roberts to the next vacancy, which soon may be in the offing.

The 30-second television ad aired nationally by NARAL Pro-Choice America this week claimed that Roberts as a young Justice Department lawyer supported bombing of abortion clinics. In fact, he worked on a brief intended to protect peaceful picketing. NARAL’s approach was not meant to sway the Senate but to pick off nervous Democrats and perhaps a Republican or two, keeping Roberts as close to 60 votes as possible. The president and his closest advisers then would have to ask themselves: If a nominee as squeaky clean as John Roberts cannot do better than this, can we risk nominating another conservative for the next vacancy?

For those of you playing at home, if Novakula is right we have at least 14 5 Democrats who are going to vote for Roberts. I say “at least” because it’s theoretically possible that a Republican or two (or Jeffords) might not. There will be no filibuster.

Novak is probably right that in that case, barring a shocker, this is all about keeping the vote low enough that Bush doesn’t think he can nominate Randell Terry next time. The best we can hope for is to play at the very margins. Depressing.

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When Will Iraq Be Free?

An e-mail from Rick Perlstein and some of the comments from others to my post below, have made me realize that there is a corollary to The Question:

George Bush said that Casey Sheehan died in a noble cause. We know that this noble cause was not to “disarm Sadam Hussein” because Saddam Hussein had already been disarmed. Perhaps some thought that he hadn’t and so pushed for war, but that is not noble. That’s a terrible mistake.

We know that this noble cause was not to fight terrorism. There was no terrorism in Iraq, it had no association with 9/11 and they knew it. The terrorist mastermind of 9/11 remains at large — his number two guy just put out another video. By all accounts the invasion of Iraq has inspired terrorist recruiting. And terrorists just attacked London, the capital of our closest ally. Perhaps some thought that invading a country that had nothing to do with terrorism in order to fight terrorism was noble, but it isn’t. That’s a horrible delusion.

So, we are left with the final reason. We are there for the noble purpose of bringing freedom to the middle east.

The question then becomes: Have we brought freedom to Iraq?

It is occupied by a foreign power and is dividing and sub-dividing among ethnic and religious factions that are killing Americans and each other. And they are very likely to put in place religious laws that will make half of the country, along all religious and ethnic lines, demonstrably less free than they were under Saddam. Our occupation is creating conditions that make freedom more unlikely than if we leave. As president Bush famously said, “they’re not happy they’re occupied. I wouldn’t be happy if I were occupied either.”

So, I ask these people who can so easily dismiss all the earlier reasons they fervently believed demonstrated that invading Iraq was a noble and just cause: If we haven’t yet brought freedom to Iraq, when will Iraq be free?

I certainly hope that nobody is going to say that Casey Sheehan died so that Iraq can spend the next thirty years in a civil war, as the Marie Antoinette of the beltway, David Ignatius, suggested. He believes that America’s noble cause will be a success if we turn Iraq into Lebanon circa 1975:

The alarm bells are ringing in Iraq this summer. I don’t agree with Gaaod that it’s time to abandon Iraqi democracy. And I don’t think the Bush administration should jettison its baseline strategy of training Iraqi security forces to take over from U.S. troops. But Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s trip to Iraq this week carried the implicit message that America’s time, money and patience in Iraq are not endless. The Iraqis must step up and find their own solutions.

Wise observers see new cause for anxiety. John Burns of the New York Times suggested last Sunday that an Iraqi civil war may already have begun, in the Sunni suicide attacks against Shiite targets and in the anti-Sunni death squads that are said to have been organized by Shiite militias. Michael Young, the opinion editor of the Beirut Daily Star, wrote a column yesterday, “Preparing for a shipwreck in the Middle East,” in which he cautioned: “The American adventure in Iraq — creative, bold and potentially revolutionary — threatens to sink under the weight of a Sunni insurgency that has fed off the Bush administration’s frequent incompetence in prosecuting postwar stabilization and rehabilitation.”

A useful rule about Iraq is that things are never as good as they seem in the up times, nor as bad as they seem in the down times. That said, things do look pretty darn bad right now, and U.S. officials need to ponder whether their strategy for stabilizing the country is really working.

Pessimists increasingly argue that Iraq may be going the way of Lebanon in the 1970s. I hope that isn’t so, and that Iraq avoids civil war. But people should realize that even Lebanonization wouldn’t be the end of the story. The Lebanese turned to sectarian militias when their army and police couldn’t provide security. But through more than 15 years of civil war, Lebanon continued to have a president, a prime minister, a parliament and an army. The country was on ice, in effect, while the sectarian battles raged. The national identity survived, and it came roaring back this spring in the Cedar Revolution that drove out Syrian troops.

What happens in Iraq will depend on Iraqi decisions. One of those is whether the Iraqi people continue to want U.S. help in rebuilding their country. For now, America’s job is to keep training an Iraqi army and keep supporting an Iraqi government — even when those institutions sometimes seem to be illusions. Iraq is in torment, but the Lebanon example suggests that with patient help, its institutions can survive this nightmare.

I’ll probably be dead by the time Iraq would get through the next 35 years of bloodshed, along with hundreds of thousands of much younger Iraqis and Americans who will be killed before their time, so I won’t be able to celebrate the noble success of keeping institutions, as opposed to people, alive.

Spencer Ackerman in TNR said it best:

In this blithe description, fifteen years of carnage and atrocity followed by a further fifteen years of foreign domination was merely a prelude to the hopeful scenes of Martyrs’ Square. (Hey, you need martyrs, right?) It’s a debatable contention whether the “national identity” of Lebanon survived, though sectarian loyalty certainly deepened. What aren’t debatable contentions are that 100,000 people didn’t survive, nearly another million were displaced, and one of the world’s premier jihadist networks, the still-powerful Hezbollah, was born. These aren’t footnotes, and I have a feeling that the participants of the Cedar Revolution would never dream of treating them as such.

So, yes, an Iraqi civil war–which could be as bad as, or even worse than, Lebanon’s civil war–really is the end of the debate about whether the decision to invade Iraq was justified. (As TNR editorialized a year ago: “Iraq’s political future could well be decided by guns rather than ballots. If another dictator murders his way to power, or the country dissolves into violent fiefdoms, the war will have proved not just a strategic failure, but a moral one as well.”) Sure, something would follow a civil war, but our enterprise won’t and shouldn’t be judged by that far-distant outcome. Instead, it should be judged by the path that led, under U.S. auspices, to widespread sectarian violence.

If we invaded Iraq to liberate it only to watch it decend into chaos,sectarian violence or fundamentalist theocratic rule (which we will, of course, eventually escape because as Don Rumsfeld says, “our patience is not infinite”) then invading Iraq will finally, definitively not be a noble cause. Freedom may be untidy — this is a bloody misbegotten mess. It is possible that this will not happen. But each day that goes by the odds are getting worse. And in every measurable way so far, the Iraqis in their everyday lives are less free than they were before. They are in constant danger of being killed in random and not so random violence over which they have no control. Violent anarchy is not freedom.

Oh, and by the way, Islamic fundamentalist terrorism continues unabated.

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The Question

I’ve been wondering what it is about Cindy Sheehan that’s gotten under people’s skin. Her loss is horrible and everyone can see that she is deeply pained.(Only the lowest, cretinous gasbags are crude enough to attack her in her grief.) She’s a very articulate person and she’s incredibly sincere. But she’s touched a deeper nerve than just the personal one.

A couple of months ago, when the Downing Street Momos came out and the media elite pooh poohed them as nothing but old news, I wrote a post called “The Elephant”:

…the Downing Street Memo gives the press the chance to ask, finally, why we really invaded Iraq.

Have any of you been at a social gathering in which this question comes up? Have you felt the palpable discomfort? Nobody really knows. Those that adhere to the “CIA fucked up” rationale can’t explain Downing Street. Those who think you had to back the government in a time of war, are visibly discomfitted by the fact that we never found any WMD. Flypaper is crap…

Yes, we already knew the intelligence was fixed, we knew they understood that Saddam was no threat, we knew they lied to the American people and we knew that they intended to go to war no matter what.

But we still don’t know for sure why they did all that. Until we do, I don’t think we will be able to figure out how to deal with it.

I asked “why did we invade Iraq” and commenters had dozens of possible reasons. Everybody “knows” why Bush did it — oil, revenge, imperial ambition, because he could etc, etc etc. There are many possible reasons and perhaps the truth is that there wasn’t one reason. But we really don’t know.

Atrios posted a question from a reader around that time about the same subject in which he or she asked:

…Can’t someone come up with a pithy sound bite that captures this and makes it accessible to a non-political, non-foreign policy public? I love your indignation and your explanations, but I have a hard time seeing this go anywhere without a talking point that even a Democratic senator can remember.

That’s what Cindy Sheehan has finally been able to do. And it’s why she’s driving the Republicans crazy.

I said I want the president to explain what was the noble cause that my son died in, because that’s what he said the other day when those 14 marines were killed. He said their families can rest assured that their sons and daughters died for a noble cause. And I said, “What is that noble cause?”

It is not an academic exercise for her. She lost her son — and she’d like to know why. Nobody can explain to her — or to any of us — why we invaded Iraq and why people are dying. They said it was to protect us — but it wasn’t a threat. Then they said it was to liberate the Iraqi people, but Saddam and his government are a memory and yet the Iraqi people are still fighting us and each other. Our invasion of iraq has inspired more terrorism, not less. Oil prices are higher than they’ve ever been. The country is swimming in debt. People are being killed and maimed with the regularity of the tides.

And everybody knows this. Deep inside they know that something has gone terribly wrong. We were either lied to or our leaders are verging on the insanely incompetent. That’s why when Cindy Sheehan says that she wants to ask the president why her son died — in those simple terms — it makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. It’s not just rhetorical.

She literally doesn’t know why her son had to die in Iraq. And neither do we.

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And I Thought That Horse Story Was Bad.

TBOGG “just made America throw up a little in its mouth.”

I may never recover.

Love Those Nurses

Poor Arnold. He’s working so hard to “get dah special intests oud of Sahcramento” that he hardly has time for anything else. He needs to have some fun.

Sticky Fingers! Arnold wants $100k To Hang Out at Rolling Stones Concert With Him

Dear Boston Rolling Stones Fans,

This Sunday Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger will join you at the Fenway Park concert. His guests, likely to include some of MA’s biggest corporations and most devoted Republican funders, will be paying $100k to hang out with the Governor. Isn’t ticket-scalping illegal? The ‘cheap seats’ will be section B4–this is where the little corporations (those only coughing up $10k of their shareholders’ money) will be seated. Turn and say hi. And know that the money raised is going to cut school funding, attack nurses and other union members, subsidize drug companies, and restrict choice/privacy rights.

Dear Mick–how about changing “My Sweet Neo-Con” to “My Sweet Schwarzen-Con?”

Best,

California’s Nurses

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Be Sure To Wear Red

Hey, what’s a little Triumph Of The Will march among friends? Christopher Hayes contributing editor, In These Times, says:

Yesterday we learned that the Department of Defense is planning a massive “America Supports You Freedom Walk” for the fourth anniversary of 9/11. Bracket for a moment the heinous company in which this this places the Bush administration (Cuba, Iran, and China, just to name a few of the regimes that regularly utilize state-sponsored marches and rallies as propaganda tools), and bracket for a moment the fact that this march for “freedom,” which will take place on public streets, apparently requires participants to register with the DoD. There’s one aspect of this whole mess I’m surprised hasn’t received more attention. Check out this paragraph from the Pentagon’s press release:

“The walk was made possible with the help of several local in-kind supporters, including Stars and Stripes newspaper, Pentagon Federal Credit Union, Subway, Washington Post, Lockheed Martin, WTOP, ABC/WJLA-TV Channel 7 and News Channel 8, and the Washington Convention & Tourism Corporation, according to the Freedom Walk Web site.”

I count four different media outlets in that list. Funny, I thought it was the role of the press to challenge not collude with the government when it attempts to disseminate propaganda. And propaganda this is, let’s be very clear. One supposes that the suits at the Washington Post Company who OK’ed the partnership with the DoD figured the sentiment of “supporting the troops” is so anodyne as to be wholly uncontroversial, akin to news anchors wearing flag pins on their lapels. If the rally were sponsored by some independent group of citizens, that’d be one thing (though still strange), but it is being organized by the United States military, the same entity currently administering and promoting an increasingly unpopular war, one that remains the single biggest news story in the nation and the subject of much public debate. This is a not a “support the troops” rally but rather, a “support the war” rally. Media outlets simply have no business granting their imprimatur to such a crudely political stunt.

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Step Into The Shower My Boy

Not only do they not have a sense of humor, they have no talent. And they’re proud of it. Here we have Karl Rove’s special Christian blowjob purveyor, Tim Goeglein, making the assertion that liberals choose different professions than conservatives because a couple of Democratic friends of his said at a dinner party that they wanted their kids to be writers or editors. He finds this surprising because his Republican friends want their children to be doctors, lawyers or businessmen.

I was under the impression that lawyers were mostly Democratic scum, but whatever. And what’s with all this elitist ejamacated bullshit? I thought the salt of the earth Republicans wanted their kids to be real men — soldiers and athletes, and real women — wives and mothers.

The point apparently is that liberals are the girlie-men artists, writers and musicians, while the Republicans are the manly men who run the world with their huge penises.

The article then goes on to interview conservative writer Mark Helprin who complains that the NY York review of books always mentions that he’s a Republican, but never mentions that Norman Mailer is a Democrat. I guess it never occurs to him that the fact he is a Republican is the most distinguishing thing about him while Mailer is well — a literary genius and American icon. (Who would happily kick his ass, even today, I have no doubt.)

The erudite Helprin then says:

“The arts community is generally dominated by liberals because if you are concerned mainly with painting or sculpture, you don’t have time to study how the world works. And if you have no understanding of economics, strategy, history and politics, then naturally you would be a liberal.”

On the other hand, if you are concerned mainly with drinking til you puke and branding the asses of your frat brothers, you are a conservative hero.

Seriously, he’s right, though. Anyone who studies fine arts is by definition someone who knows nothing of economics, strategy, history and politics. Especially if they waste time reading that limp wristed, know-nothing William Shakespeare. None of the great poets, painters and sculptors ever depicted historical scenes or figures so you can surely skip that useless drivel. The classics, of course, have nothing to teach about any of this. It’s a good thing that generals and leaders of all stripes have scrupulously avoided reading them over the years because the last thing we need is some mincing bookworm running things.

Economics, I agree, are not a big part of the liberal arts curriculum, but “Atlas Shrugged” certainly is, and sadly for humanity, I suspect that that is the first and last econ book that most conservatives ever cracked. Unfortunately, some of them get it confused with their other favorite novel, the Bible.

So, he’s right. We know nothing of the world and that is why we are liberals. Unlike the Republicans who believe the Bible is literally true and that the scientific method is religion. We should definitely leave the running of the world to those folks.

Truly, I’m beginning to think this is a mass form of male panic. Everything has been reduced to prancing queers and the manly men who are bravely fighting them back. The social re-ordering wrought by the gay and women’s movement over the past 40 years has obviously been too much for certain people whose brains are unable to deal with rapid change. They are short circuiting. Maybe we should think about putting Viagra in their kool-aid or something.

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Pro Choice Veterans For Truth

I am with Brad Plumer on this argument about NARAL. NARAL has a specific agenda and its only hope of keeping that agenda as strong as possible is to keep the Democratic party on the straight and narrow on abortion rights. From their perspective, it makes a lot of sense to endorse an occasional blue state pro-choice Republican — certainly against an anti-choice Democrat.

Brad says:

Call me cynical, but I don’t believe for a second that modern-day Democrats would think twice about selling out a constituency or interest group for the sake of electoral gain. Not a warm and fuzzy picture of the home team, but there you go. The moment NARAL gives the party reason to take pro-choice constituents for granted, they’ll get shafted. Look at black voters, or unions, over the past decade. Look at how the religious right has been roundly abused by the Republican Party. (When’s that gay-marriage amendment coming? Oh right, never. Chumps. Now keep voting for us.) Parties always pander towards groups that are in danger of defecting; they know they can screw over the loyal core somewhat, so long as there are no consequences. Unless NARAL shows that there are consequences, such as endorsing a pro-choice Republican in a blue state, they’ll get taken for granted. Maybe that’s due to sexism on the part of the Democratic leadership, but mostly it’s just the way coalitions work.

Now some have argued that NARAL should line up behind the party simply because any Democratic majority in Congress would best protect abortion rights. Kos: “When Democrats regain power, choice, the environment, worker’s rights — the whole gamut — will be protected.” I’m sorry, but bullshit. Hark back to 1976, when both houses of Congress, controlled by Democrats, passed the Hyde Amendment restricting federal funding for abortions. Gerald Ford signed it into law, but it was Jimmy Carter who had heartily endorsed the bill, and was ready to make it a campaign issue. A major, major victory for pro-lifers all-around, perhaps one of their biggest to date.

I understand that we all need to stick together, but if I were NARAL I’d be getting very, very concerned about some Democrats’ willingness to “soften” their stance on the issue of choice because it’s allegedly hurting the party — you know, moral values and all that. I might just think it’s smart to show some muscle. There is no way I’d blindly trust anyone in this environment to fight this battle for me.

There is a great example of how this works over the long haul and it comes from the grandaddy of all single issue groups — the NRA. They are certainly an indispensible and active part of the GOP coalition as they’ve always been, but they have plenty of Democrats on their side now too. And they did not get to where they are by being good little GOP soldiers. They fought every single battle on the gun issue alone and they insisted on every candidate they backed being on board. When they started their campaign it was not the default mainstream position in either party.

And they backed plenty of Democrats over Republicans if they had to. Sometimes they backed the losing candidates because they were in urban elections where the Republican couldn’t win without endorsing gun control. And if there ever existed a red state Republican who was for gun control you can bet that the NRA would back a Democrat who was against it — even if control of the Senate depends on one seat (which is not the case for Chafee.) In Illinois, for instance, Governor George Ryan was elected to office in 1998 over an NRA-backed Democrat. In the last election they didn’t endorse either senate candidate in Oklahoma because both had a 100% rating with the NRA. The issue was off the table and so were they. More often they support NRA Republicans over NRA Democrats, but that’s just smart politics considering who presently owns the government. They keep focused like a laser on what matters to them and they have done this during good times and bad for the GOP.

But does anyone believe that even though they are a single issue “special interest” that the NRA doesn’t help the Republican party in the most substantial way possible? They’ve pretty much killed us in the rural areas and turned the red states blood red. They’ve won. Except in big cities, this issue is dead. Republicans have nothing but respect for them — even if they backed a Democrat or two along the way. They know what they brought to the party.

Interest groups have always been around they can be very helpful to the political party that hews most closely to their agenda, as we’ve seen with the NRA. In fact, virtually everybody is a special interest of some kind — even bloggers, who are now representing the “netroots” who have their own concerns and issues they want addressed. These interest groups have infrastructure and loyalty — two things we still need. If there are certain people for whom choice is the defining political cause of their life, we want them. But no organization is going to be able to — or want to — sell their members a candidate who does not agree with their defining cause. They lose their credibility when they do that and then they lose their organization. We can’t afford to lose any sympathitic institutions– we barely have any as it is.

NARAL feels threatened and rightfully so. There are a lot of Democrats who seem to be awfully willing to consider jettisoning their cause. They are exercising their clout among pro-choice believers. And we need some people who are independent of the party apparatus to do certain things like this:

An advertisement that a leading abortion-rights organization began running on national television on Wednesday, opposing the Supreme Court nomination of John G. Roberts Jr. as one “whose ideology leads him to excuse violence against other Americans,” quickly became the first flashpoint in the three-week-old confirmation process.

Several prominent abortion rights supporters as well as a neutral media watchdog group said the advertisement was misleading and unfair, and a conservative group quickly took to the airwaves with an opposing advertisement.

[…]

A conservative group, Progress for America, said it would spend $300,000 to run ads, beginning Thursday, on the same stations on which the Naral ad is appearing. “How low can these frustrated liberals sink?” its advertisement asks.

Oh boo fucking hoo. I’m trying to remember how many veterans groups denounced the swift boat ads. Funny, I can’t think of any. Yet, the first thing out the timorous non-NARAL pro-choice community is how “intemperate” the ad is.

You want to see some aggressive progressives — here they are. NARAL. Fighting for what they believe in. They are getting this issue on the front page of the NY Times and they aren’t backing down. Good for them.

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Logical Dumbness

Bob Somerby has made a rare mistake in logic and since it is so rare, I feel compelled to point it out. He says:

For the record, we still haven’t seen a single scribe note the obvious problem with the Palmeiro story—the fact that you’d never take a heavy-duty roid in a year when you knew you’d be tested. What’s the missing piece of the puzzle? Sports scribes seem determined not to ask. But then, the human ability to look past the obvious has driven a wide range of public discussions in the years since we started THE HOWLER. Despite iconic claims about “man, the rational animal,” dumbness is part of our human inheritance.

For some reason Bob does not ascribe the same observation here to Palmiero. It’s true that dumbness is part of our human inheritance, which is why is just as possible that Raffy stupidly took steroids in a year he was going to be tested as it is that the press has not thought to wonder if Raffy could really be that stupid.

It has to be pointed out that drug tests are given all the time to people who know they are going to be tested — and they test positive. I can’t explain why they think they can get away with it, but they do.

Certainly Palmiero would have been dumb to take steroids right now, but he’s a major league player under a huge amount of pressure to perform. Maybe he got some bad information and thought this particular drug wouldn’t register. Maybe he was told by his team that they’d overlook it. It’s also possible that he was set up or the test was wrong. But really, it’s fairly common for people to fail scheduled drug tests, and for the most obvious reason of all — because they took drugs.

I don’t know if he did it or not. But I don’t think that the logic that it would be a dumb thing to do is a very convincing reason to flay the press for not being more skeptical of the charges. People do dumb things all the time. Especially the press — and sometimes even star athletes.

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