Month: November 2005

Incompetent On All Levels

by digby

Those of us who’ve been writing about the torture regime for a long while already knew that the DOD had decided to use the SERE techniques to “interrogate” prisoners. This NY Times article reveals something about this I didn’t know before — the SERE techniques were developed for special forces to learn to resist the harsh torture techniques of the totalitarian communist regimes:

SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape. Based on studies of North Korean and Vietnamese efforts to break American prisoners, SERE was intended to train American soldiers to resist the abuse they might face in enemy custody.

[…]

The Pentagon appears to have flipped SERE’s teachings on their head, mining the program not for resistance techniques but for interrogation methods. At a June 2004 briefing, the chief of the United States Southern Command, Gen. James T. Hill, said a team from Guantánamo went “up to our SERE school and developed a list of techniques” for “high-profile, high-value” detainees. General Hill had sent this list – which included prolonged isolation and sleep deprivation, stress positions, physical assault and the exploitation of detainees’ phobias – to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who approved most of the tactics in December 2002.

[…]

the Pentagon cannot point to any intelligence gains resulting from the techniques that have so tarnished America’s image. That’s because the techniques designed by communist interrogators were created to control a prisoner’s will rather than to extract useful intelligence.

Can you believe it? It’s not just that torture doesn’t work generally, which it doesn’t. And it’s not just that torture is morally repugnant and stains all who are involved with it. It does. The most amazingly thing about this (Commie) torture regime is that it’s specifically designed to extract false confessions for propaganda purposes. Dear gawd, can they really be so incompetent that they didn’t understand the difference between creating propaganda and gaining intelligence?

Sadly, yes. I keep forgetting that the GWOT is really a massive mind-fuck for these deluded neocon fabulists. They have long been convinced that the major problem for the US is that the wogs think we are a bunch of weaklings. Here’s what Bush said about this just last Friday:

We know the vision of the radicals because they have openly stated it — in videos and audiotapes and letters and declarations and on websites.

First, these extremists want to end American and Western influence in the broader Middle East, because we stand for democracy and peace, and stand in the way of their ambitions. Al Qaeda’s leader, Osama bin Laden, has called on Muslims to dedicate, their “resources, their sons and money to driving the infidels out of our lands.” The tactics of al Qaeda and other Islamic extremists have been consistent for a quarter of a century: They hit us, and expect us to run.

Last month, the world learned of a letter written by al Qaeda’s number two leader, a guy named Zawahiri. And he wrote this letter to his chief deputy in Iraq — the terrorist Zarqawi. In it, Zawahiri points to the Vietnam War as a model for al Qaeda. This is what he said: “The aftermath of the collapse of American power in Vietnam — and how they ran and left their agents — is noteworthy.” The terrorists witnessed a similar response after the attacks on American troops in Beirut in 1983 and Mogadishu in 1993. They believe that America can be made to run again — only this time on a larger scale, with greater consequences.

This is the very heart of the neocon view of this issue. The United States has behaved like a bunch of bed-wetters for decades in the face of this horrific threat. The godfather Normon Podhoretz put it like this, in his remarkable essay called “World War IV”:

to the extent that American passivity and inaction opened the door to 9/11, neither Democrats nor Republicans, and neither liberals nor conservatives, are in a position to derive any partisan or ideological advantage. The reason, quite simply, is that much the same methods for dealing with terrorism were employed by the administrations of both parties, stretching as far back as Richard Nixon in 1970 and proceeding through Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan (yes, Ronald Reagan), George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and right up to the pre-9/11 George W. Bush.

Unsurprisingly, he traces our wimpification all the way back to 1970 when a couple of diplomats were killed in the Sudan by the PLO. If we’d nipped that damned Palestinian bullshit in the bud by dropping some well placed nukes where they were most needed (The USSR), the world trade center would be standing today. We’ve never been tough enough for these guys.

This is the consciousness that pervades the inner sanctum of the Bush foreign policy and defense cabal. (Or, at least, it did. It’s hard to know what they are thinking now.) But considering the way they arrange the world and its history in their strange minds, it’s possible that they didn’t stop to think what the torture regime they so eagerly adopted was actually designed to do before they gave the order to use it.

But, you cannot discount the idea that they may have consciously sought to elicit false confessions through some misplaced fourth generation “mindwar” wet dream in which we would psych out the terrorists by being so macho that they would run like rabbits back into their caves and spidey-holes. Who knows? These guys could have originally thought we could prove how tough we really are by showing footage of al Qaeda opeatives confessing to non-existent crimes on FoxNews. With Cheney and Rumsfeld in charge, it’s entirely possible that this whole torture regime may have sprung from a late night viewing of “The Manchurian Candidate” and “The Battle of Algiers” over cigars and a six pack of Zima. That’s about as strategically sophisticated as these guys get.

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Does “All Things Considered” Mean NPR Should Practice Fellatio On Creationists?

Pharyngula asks How could you, NPR? He’s right.

There are several things that are exceedingly sleazy about this report that you won’t learn from the NPR story, but PZ Meyers will tell you. First, Sternberg is an Old Earth Creationist. Second of all, the reporter, Barbara Hagerty, has connections to nutty Howard Ahmanson, a follower of the racist Rushdoony who also advocated a US theocracy, and Ahmanson is a major funder of the “intelligent design” creationism con developed at Discovery Institute.

Most importantly, the paper which Sternberg published, and sparked the controversy was, as PZ writes, “an excellent example of garbage pseudoscience that was slipped through the peer review process with the aid of a little cronyism from the acting editor, Sternberg, and is representative of the level of trash we get from the Designists…And in particular, this kind of bad science is being peddled for political ends, which makes it especially pressing to deplore it.”

Exactly.

The report claims that untenured professors who believe in “intelligent design” creationism risk not getting tenure. I certainly hope that’s true.

But to NPR, that’s a restriction of academic freedom. I fail to see how. Look, if a young astronomy professor believed the moon was made of green cheese, she shouldn’t get tenure, either. And there is just as much evidence that the moon is made of green cheese as there is for “intelligent design” creationism: none at all.

NPR should be ashamed of itself.

[NOTE To “intelligent design” creationists who wish to argue with me that it actually is a scientific idea: Please go to Pharyngula and argue with Dr. Myers. When you convince him that you are right, by all means let me know and I will be happy to dicuss your ideas. Until then, bugger off.]

Rinse And Repeat

It is vitally important to distinguish between the methods used to establish that a fact is a fact and the tactics used to persuade the larger public to accept that fact. They are not one and the same.

For example, it is beyond dispute, by reasonable people, that contrary to the assertions of Bo and Ti of the Heaven’s Gate cult, there really was no UFO hiding behind the tail of Comet Hale-Bopp. However, if you had a child who was in thrall to these dangerous crazies, no amount of logic or reason would convince them otherwise:

The New Yorker…reported on a camera shop in Southern California that had sold an expensive 3 1/2″ Questar Maksutov-Cassegrain telescope (a favorite of amateur astronomers for decades) to two of the Heaven’s Gate cult members, who said that they wanted to see the UFO following Hale-Bopp. They came back weeks later to return the telescope, disappointed that it could not reveal the UFO and was thus obviously a defective instrument.

So how do you save your child from such crazies, when they are beyond reason? Well, you don’t have too many choices. Most boil down to, “Shut up and get in the car. We’re taking you away from these idiots before you piss your life away. Get in the car, now.” And some people get so desperate they kidnap their kids and hire a deprogrammer to reverse the brainwashing.

Now all this raises a host of ethical questions which can keep the blogosphere humming till the pixels all come home. But let’s change the example slightly. What happens when an entire country is convinced there’s a UFO behind Hale-Bopp? Abandoning the metaphor, how do you bring the country to its senses when it’s been programmed to trust the serial lies and distortions of a compulsive liar of a president?

That is the tactical problem that many of us* have faced since the fall of 2000, when Bush’s Texas-sized lies and distortions went global and the American people, bless their trusting hearts, fell for ’em. Reason, ultimately, is not that effective on people whose brains have been set to refuse admittance to reality. Sooner or later, you need to follow a variation of Sean-Paul’s intelligent advice:

The President is a liar. The Democrats did not have the same intelligence as the White House did.
And that’s all any Democrat has to say. Don’t try to explain it. Don’t let the Republicans misdirect you into the details or distract you in any way. Just keep hammering the same line over and over and over because the public already knows it’s true: The President is misleading the American people. The Democrats did not have the same intelligence as the White House did.
Rinse and repeat all the way to 2006.

Again, establishing a fact is not the same as persuading others to accept that fact. The fact – the president is a liar – has long been established. Now, how do you get others to accept it? Say it: The president is a liar. Say it again: The president is a liar. And when someone demands proof, you repeat: The president is a liar.

Now, suppose they say, “But you’ve shown me no proof. That’s just your opinion. Prove it.” Now what? You say, “The president is liar.”

Now to us liberals, this may appear at first to be a bit, how shall I say it, irrational and unfair. It is not. First of all, the person you are trying to convince is perfectly capable and in fact probably has read many of the same articles you have read, in which the lies of Bush are so painfully apparent. Their ability to reason is skewed, not their ability to read. Attempts to “set their reason straight” by advancing reasoned arguments merely reinforces the delusion.

The important thing to remember is that a deeply-held delusion is invested with deep emotional attachment. One’s self-esteem, one’s positive opinion of oneself, has become deliberately entertwined with maintaining that delusion at all costs. Dangerously so. It is that emotional attachment you must confront. When that has been dealt with, the ability to reason is freed to arrive at the obivious conclusion: The president is a liar.

Now in dealing with someone on the emotional level, there’s no reason to be cruel, but you need to be firm. You need to weaken, in the face of enormous resistance, the emotional glue that binds the deluded to his/her delusion. You don’t humiliate as in, “Schmuck! Any moron can see the president is lying through his teeth. WTF is wrong with you?” That further binds the delusion to the person’s sense of self, which now feels attacked and therefore becomes defensive. Instead, you simply repeat, “The president is a liar.”

Eventually, the repetition will permit the idea to seep enough into their consciousness to make the deluded start to wonder whether it is worthwhile investing their sense of self so deeply in someone who just may be, in fact, a liar. Your clue that this is happening is a change in the way the way the discourse is conducted. Instead of, “Oh yeah? Prove he’s a liar!” you’ll start to hear things like, “I guess he did cherrypick the intelligence a bit and in a sense, that’s a lie. But you don’t think Bush made stuff up out of whole cloth, do you?”

At which point, you respond, “The president is a liar” but, as Sean-Paul says, don’t go into the details. Remember, they’ve already heard them but they can’t reason about them properly yet and the problem they are having is emotional, not intellectual. They’ve started to wake up, but they are still entangling their own sense of integrity with Bush’s.

It’s only when they respond, “Okay, he’s a liar. He lied and manipulated intelligence to get us into the war. But we have to support Bush now if we are not going to embolden the enemy” that you ease up slightly. You say, “The president is a liar. He lied to your face. Over and over. He lied to the soliders who are now fighting for their lives over there. The president is a liar. You owe him nothing. He owes you the truth.”

Dig?

*Yes, many of us were quite immune from the start to the Bush administration’s assault on reality. While I can’t help feeling that maybe we are a bit smarter than the rubes, reason informs me it’s not that simple. For one thing, some very smart people – eg Kevin – were gulled for the longest time, before they finally woke up, and I’m certain that on any fair intelligence test Kevin would trump me easily. I think it’s more the draw of the cards. For example, Lincoln was a tee-totaler, but unlike the moralizing prigs that surrounded him, he didn’t believe his alcoholic abstinence showed strength of character. “I never had a taste for it,” was about all he said.

Likewise, I think that we never had a predisposition to believe what government officials say. And while I think that’s a good thing, all in all, I can also understand where that kind of skepticism, carried to an extreme, can lead into trouble. It is for that reason that I am not opposed to having those more gullible – like George Packer – publish their thoughts for serious consideration. But it stands to reason that those of us who are more skeptical must also be provided a seat at the table of mainstream discourse. The fact that we are not is an exceedingly dangerous situation as it skews the spectrum of acceptable opinion far too much towards unquestioned belief in a government’s willingness to be honest.

Miserable Failure For Rice, Again

Rice Fails to Broker Deal on Monitoring Gaza Extremists

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice pressed Israel and the Palestinians today to accept a compromise proposal over who should monitor the passage of potential extremists in and out of Gaza, but she failed to achieve a breakthrough to end a bitter two-month-old impasse on the issue.

Between the failure of the recent Latin America adventure and the Middle East Democracy Conference , it looks like Amercian diplomatic efforts by Rice and Bush are batting 0.

I wonder why? Surely they’re not mistaking the moral superiority of American values for unbridled, dangerous arrogance. I mean, it’s so obvious we’re the best and everyone in the world envys us and wants to be an American or live like an American. What is their problem?

Cleared

Via Talk left, I see that Murray Waas is reporting that Richard Shelby has been cleared by the Senate ethics committee of leaking classified information to the press. This doesn’t mean he wasn’t guilty, merely that he didn’t break any Senate ethics rules. Of course, if the Shelby Amendment had not been vetoed by President Clinton, Shelby would have likely faced serious jail time for what he did.

I wrote a long post about Shelby the leaking Republican hypocrite a year or so ago. During the Clinton years the Republicans were all hopped up about leaking classified information. Today, not so much.

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Shuffling Toward Their Revolution

In today’s LA Times, Gregory Rodriguez says “Blame it On The Boomers” hypothesizing that we boomers have been arguing amongst ourselves since we were kids and are responsible for the polarization of American politics:

While it is amusing to caricaturize all boomers as pot-smoking, free-loving veterans of Woodstock, one only needs to glance at Supreme Court nominee Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s 1971 Princeton yearbook photo to recall that there were plenty of clean-cut young people who preferred to lead traditional lives.

As in any revolution, the values revolution of the 1960s propelled Americans into two different directions. While many embraced the new values of the era, just as many preferred the old ones. Then there were those, like President Bush, who indulged in the permissiveness of the times only to reverse course later and champion the virtues of tradition.

[…]

Clearly, the boomer generation is not the first to divide over conflicting political visions. But unlike others, boomers cannot look to a shared sacrifice or experience that provided them with a sense of common values and shared purpose. On the contrary, the political consciousness of the boomers was forged by terribly divisive battles over Vietnam, the civil rights movement and Watergate.

If the 2004 presidential election between John Kerry and George W. Bush taught us anything, it was that the wounds of Vietnam and the 1960s have still not healed. As a result, the 1960s generation has come to power remarkably split, and this division has paralyzed American politics

Rodriguez also says, “perhaps the most profound political division in the country is generational. No, not young versus old this time, but rather baby boomer versus baby boomer.”

It’s still about Young vs Old — young boomers vs old boomers.

It’s not just that liberals and conservatives of my generation preferred to live different lifestyles. It’s that the largest age cohort in history had some choices to make — and those choices shaped our leadership class in very different ways. The young liberals were combative and revolutionary in their zeal — idealistic and naive also. The conservatives were those who identified with the conformity of their elders, withdrawn, inward and repressed. They have devolved into revolutionary zeal as they aged.

I am very interested in this topic and took a stab at writing about this a while back:

We are dealing with a group of right wing glory seekers who chose long ago to eschew putting themselves on the line in favor of tough talk and empty posturing — the Vietnam chickenhawks and their recently hatched offspring of the new Global War On Terrorism. These are men (mostly) driven by the desire to prove their manhood but who refuse to actually test their physical courage. Neither are they able to prove their virility as they are held hostage by prudish theocrats and their own shortcomings. So they adopt the pose of warrior but never actually place themselves under fire. This is a psychologically difficult position to uphold. Bullshitting yourself is never without a cost.

And I think there is an even deeper layer to this as well and one which is vital to understanding why the right wing baby boomers and their political offspring are so pathologically irrational about dealing with terrorism. Vietnam, as we were all just mercilessly reminded in the presidential election, was the crucible of the baby boom generation, perhaps the crucible of America as a mature world power.

The war provided two very distinct tribal pathways to manhood. One was to join “the revolution” which included the perk of having equally revolutionary women at their sides, freely joining in sexual as well as political adventure as part of the broader cultural revolution. (The 60’s leftist got laid. A lot.) And he was also deeply engaged in the major issue of his age, the war in Vietnam, in a way that was not, at the time, seen as cowardly, but rather quite threatening. His masculine image encompassed both sides of the male archetypal coin — he was both virile and heroic.

The other pathway to prove your manhood was to test your physical courage in battle. There was an actual bloody fight going on in Vietnam, after all. Plenty of young men volunteered and plenty more were drafted. And despite the fact that it may be illogical on some level to say that if you support a war you must fight it, certainly if your self-image is that of a warrior, tradition requires that you put yourself in the line of fire to prove your courage if the opportunity presents itself. You simply cannot be a warrior if you are not willing to fight. This, I think, is deeply understood by people at a primitive level and all cultures have some version of it deeply embedded in the DNA. It’s not just the willingness to die it also involves the willingness to kill. Men who went to Vietnam and faced their fears of killing and dying, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, put themselves to this test.

And then there were the chickenhawks. They were neither part of the revolution nor did they take the obvious step of volunteering to fight the war they supported. Indeed, due to the draft, they allowed others to fight and die in their place despite the fact that they believed heartily that the best response to communism was to aggressively fight it “over there” so we wouldn’t have to fight it here.

These were empty boys, unwilling to put themselves on the line at the moment of truth, yet they held the masculine virtues as the highest form of human experience and have portrayed themselves ever since as tough, uncompromising manly men while portraying liberals as weak and effeminate. (Bill Clinton was able to thwart this image because of his reputation as a womanizer. You simply couldn’t say he was effeminate.)

Now it must be pointed out that there were many men, and many more women, who didn’t buy into any of this “manhood” stuff and felt no need to join in tribal rituals or bloody wars to prove anything. Most of those men, however, didn’t aspire to political leadership. Among the revolutionaries, the warriors and the chickenhawks, there were many who did. Indeed, these manhood rituals are more often than not a requirement for leadership. (Perhaps having more women in power will finally change that.)

The only political aspirants among those three groups who failed to meet the test of their generation were the chickenhawks. And our problem today is that they are the ones in charge of the government as we face a national security threat. These unfulfilled men still have something to prove

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I agree with Rodriguez that the boomer cohort bears some responsibility for the polarization of America. The liberal boomers are responsible for the polarization of the first 20 years of our generation’s adulthood — the last 20 years are the responsiblity of the conservatives.

We liberal baby boomers were massively full of shit in many ways when we were trying to change the world. But then we were young. The conservative boomers have no such excuse. Last night I heard Tony Blankley on the Mclaughlin report say something like “we needed to completely dismantle the middle east in order to remake it.” I haven’t heard a liberal spout such crazed revolutionary crapola since Jimmy Carter wore sideburns. I have a feeling that if Tony had spent a little more time in dorm room bull sessions drinking Gallo and smoking pot instead of nursing his rightwing resentment, he might have gotten over such hairbrained notions sometime before he turned 50.

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Spinning The Bloviators

Back in 1998 and 1999, it seemed a day didn’t go by when the Washington punditocrisy didn’t tell the American people that the American people were appalled by Bill Clinton’s lying, skirt chasing ways and that he would never survive and that the impeachment was a result of a national disgust with his behavior. If the news media had a vote, George Stephanopoulos,Bob Barr, Tim Russert and Henry Hyde would have marched down to the White House to demand Clinton’s resignation for the good of the country. Even today we have David Brooks and countless other gasbags still selling the hogwash that Clinton was enormously unpopular during Monicagate, despite the fact that his approval ratings consistently hung around 60% throughout the scandal and actually increased after he was impeached. It was the Republicans who lost seats during this period.

It’s this kind of thing that proves that the beltway courtiers truly live in a bubble. Politicians and strategists simply have to stop listening to them and listen to the rest of the country.

For instance, Media Matters discusses how two NPR reporters mischaracterize Tim Kaine’s position on abortion:

For the second day in a row, National Public Radio’s (NPR) Morning Edition misrepresented Virginia Governor-elect Timothy M. Kaine’s position on abortion. On November 10, NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson falsely described Kaine — who supports legal access to abortion — as “pro-life.” On November 11, NPR religion correspondent Barbara Bradley Hagerty drew a false dichotomy between Kaine’s position on abortion and that of the Democratic Party. Bradley labeled Kaine “an unusual candidate,” claiming that “he opposes abortion in a party that supports it.” In fact, while Kaine has expressed opposition to abortion as a matter of personal faith, he made it clear during his campaign that he supports legal access to abortion and highlighted the issue as one distinguishing him and his Republican opponent, former Virginia attorney general Jerry W. Kilgore.

Bradley went a step beyond Liasson, asserting that Kaine’s position on abortion was the opposite of his party’s position. Bradley’s and Liasson’s mischaracterization has the effect of advancing the notion, promoted by Republicans, that Kaine won because he ran on a “strategy sharply at odds with the approach of leading national Democrats.” That assertion — which is The Washington Post’s paraphrase of RNC chairman Ken Mehlman’s characterization — may or may not be true as a general matter, but what is not true is that Kaine’s position on abortion is the opposite of his party’s. The Democratic Party supports access to legal abortions; Kaine supports access to legal abortions. While Democrats may differ over the degree to which they think that abortion should be regulated, they belong to the party that supports abortion rights, while the GOP opposes them.

Kaine’s position on abortion was also John Kerry’s position on abortion. There are many pro-choice Democrats, a lot of them Catholics, who would not personally have an abortion or want one of their loved ones to have one but they are pro-choice because they believe that this is a personal matter and that abortion should not be illegal. That is the very essence of the pro-choice stance — being allowed to make your own decision free of state interference, subject to certain agreed upon, constitutional restrictions. Why the pundits don’t understand the meaning of the word “choice” is puzzling considering how hilarious they found it when Clinton parsed the question about the meaning of “is.” Choice is a pretty clear cut concept not subject to tense or time.

These reporters mischaracterize not only the position of the Democratic Party, but they mischaracterize the position of the American people. If you watch the bloviators on any given show or read the op-ed pages of major newspapers, you would think that all Democratic politicians must be personally for “abortion on demand” and that the majority of the country disagrees with them. Being pro-choice is spun as a dramatically unpopular position that is costing the Democrats elections. And just as the punditocrisy was completely out of step with the country on the Lewinsky matter, they are out of step with the country on this:

From Donkey Rising, here’s the disconnect:

It’s Definitely a Pro-Choice, Pro–Roe v. Wade Country

Lest we harbor any doubt about that, as debate on the Alito Supreme Court nomination heats up, consider these data.

1. In a SurveyUSA fifty-state poll, 56 percent nationwide described themselves as pro-choice, compared to 38 percent who said they were pro-life. Only thirteen states were pro-life; the rest were pro-choice and include Pennsylvania (+7), Michigan (+13), Montana (+11), Ohio (+10), Iowa (+15), Arizona (+17), Minnesota (+17), New Mexico (+17), Wisconsin (+18), Florida (+22), Colorado (+27), Oregon (+29) and Nevada (+32).

2. In a recent Gallup poll, the public, by 53 percent to 37 percent, said the Senate should not confirm Alito if it was likely he would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade.

3. The Pew poll cited above asked two slightly versions of a question on whether Roe v. Wade should be overturned. The replies averaged 61 percent to 29 percent against overturning Roe v. Wade.

4. In Washington Post/ABC News poll cited above, 64 percent said that, if a case testing Roe v. Wade came before the Supreme Court, the Court should vote to uphold it, compared to just 31 percent who believe the Court should vote to overturn it.

30% believe that Roe should be overturned! Ferchistsake, why are we even talking about this except to say that our politicians should run as supporters of Roe vs Wade, period. It isn’t even controversial.

Yet, if you listen to Cokie and Monsignor Tim and read the various scribblers on the op-ed pages around the country you would think that this is the Democrats’ biggest problem.

The allegedly liberal beltway gasbags and stenographers are being spun just as they were spun by the Republican establishment back in the Clinton era. We must get our politicians and strategists to stop listening to them. They are killing us.

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Showing His Colors

In the post below I write a little bit about how the Nixonian politics of resentment are at the heart of the Republican electoral success these past 35 years. I mention the fact that it is crippling oppugnancy that is their achilles heel. Here’s an article in this week’s LA Weekly by Lou Dubose the author of “Boy Genius” in which he speculates that Rove got himself in trouble before the Grand Jury because he is an arrogant prick. He bases this on Rove’s past performance the few times he’s ever allowed himself to go under oath. It seems that he always lies:

In the course of questioning, Rove told the attorney representing the trial lawyers that he had a firm agreement with the governor to recuse himself from anything having to do with tobacco. A “Chinese wall” separated his tobacco consulting from his work for Bush. The lawyers knew the answers to some of the questions before they asked them. They knew that Rove had been involved in polling funded by the tobacco lobby. One of the polls was a piece of political trash, a push poll asking respondents how they would vote if they knew the Democratic attorney general had provided financial support to Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan — which he never had. The day the results were released, Rove attended a tobacco-lobby meeting and immediately took the poll to Bush chief of staff Joe Allbaugh.

Caught in a lie about keeping Bush and Big Tobacco separate, Rove retreated. Rather than give it to Bush, he delivered the poll to Allbaugh, he said, knowing Allbaugh would throw it away without looking at it. The answer didn’t wash. Rove was not a party to the lawsuit, so he faced little immediate risk. But the trial lawyers had what they wanted. When Bush, acting in his capacity as governor, set out to take their fees away from them, they could stand before federal Judge David Folsom in Texarkana and point to the intellectual author of a lawsuit that would ultimately embarrass Bush.

There was a second case in which Rove was under oath before the Texas State Senate when he was appointed to a University Board of Regents:

Appearing before the Senate Nominations Committee, Rove again was both unprepared and dishonest. Since 1986, Rove had been providing tips and information to an FBI agent named Greg Rampton, who was conducting serial investigations of the finances of statewide Democratic officeholders. On one occasion Rove even announced in Washington the coming indictments of two lieutenants of Democratic Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower in Austin — more than a week before the Department of Justice unsealed the indictments.

Rove had met Rampton under unusual circumstances. In 1986, as a Democratic opponent was closing in on Rove’s candidate, the incumbent governor, Rove held a press conference to announce that a bug had been planted in his office. It was a brilliant tactic, pointing to the Democratic challenger’s desperation. Special Agent Greg Rampton investigated the bugging and no charges were filed. A source close to the Travis County district attorney told me they investigated before the FBI and concluded it was a political stunt. Rove or someone working for him had had his own office bugged. Five years later, stumbling under questioning from a Democratic senator, Rove said he didn’t exactly know Rampton. When pressed, he resorted to a Clintonesque parsing of terms: “Ah, senator, it depends. Would you define ‘know’ for me?” He then qualified his response, saying he wouldn’t recognize Rampton “if he walked in the door.” His dishonest response provided Senate Democrats a sufficient pretext to deny Rove his university board position.

I remember when I read Murray Waas’ report of Rove’s testimony to the grand jury thinking that he was incredibly obtuse if he behaved as arrogantly as it seemed he had:

… Rove also adamantly insisted to the FBI that he was not the administration official who leaked the information that Plame was a covert CIA operative to conservative columnist Robert Novak last July. Rather, Rove insisted, he had only circulated information about Plame after it had appeared in Novak’s column. He also told the FBI, the same sources said, that circulating the information was a legitimate means to counter what he claimed was politically motivated criticism of the Bush administration by Plame’s husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.

Rove and other White House officials described to the FBI what sources characterized as an aggressive campaign to discredit Wilson through the leaking and disseminating of derogatory information regarding him and his wife to the press, utilizing proxies such as conservative interest groups and the Republican National Committee to achieve those ends, and distributing talking points to allies of the administration on Capitol Hill and elsewhere. Rove is said to have named at least six other administration officials who were involved in the effort to discredit Wilson.

In Rove’s world this is normal behavior. In the real world, disseminating derogatory information about a man and his wife for political purposes is something that even if you do it, you do not argue that it is “legitimate.” Normal people would have the decency to be a little bit chagrined by these actions, even if what they did was not strictly illegal.

I wonder if he had the nerve to repeat to the middle aged African American women of the DC Grand Jury that he went after Wilson purely because he was a Democrat. I wouldn’t be surprised. That powerful Nixonian ressentiment almost surely came through in any case. It’s who he is. To a group of average citizens serving on a Grand Jury, this powerful man serving in the white house describing such behavior as being perfectly normal must have sounded terribly distasteful.

Fitzgerald, of course, has seen it all before. But he had to have hated seeing this powerful jerk admit that this government believes this behavior is business as usual. Plame was, after all, a CIA employees and these powerful politicos at the very least, acted with a total lack of responsibility or integrity in trafficking her name around for political purposes. And he knew from the get, of course, that Rove was one of Novak’s sources. If he said all that stuff as clearly and as obviously as the Waas article says he did, then Patrick Fitzgerald had no problem figuring out Karl Rove’s motive.

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Deconstructing Jane

I read this morning that Warren Beatty is “taking credit” for Schwarzenneger’s defeat last week:

Warren Beatty, the veteran Hollywood actor who helped to deliver the first big blow to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s political career, said last night that the Terminator star had got his come-uppance for fooling voters.

Four days after California voters rejected a series of reforms put forward by the Republican governor, Beatty boasted that his own high-profile eve-of-poll campaigning had helped to save America from the ripple effect of Mr Schwarzenegger’s “reactionary measures”

He also said,”Actors do not necessarily make good politicians.” That’s certainly true, but you have to wonder sometimes whether actors even make good activists.

I have always had a soft spot for the earnest do-gooding that leads famous entertainers to potentially derail their carefully crafted images by getting involved in partisan politics. It’s much safer to become the spokesperson for a popular cause like literacy or fundraise to find the cure for a dreaded disease. Hollywood executives are notoriously gun shy when it comes to any controversy other than the tittilating “bradnangelina” style tabloid gossip that entertains the masses. If someone becomes too unpopular or controversial he or she can lose work and money. It’s risky.

Beatty was always the most savvy of Hollywood activists. He used his celebrity to glamourize politics and used his activism to make him something more than just a pretty face in Hollywood. The glamor project didn’t do much to help the cause (in fact it probably hurt it), but the political activism actually helped his career immeasurably by giving him the substance and clout to do political projects, something that a good looking playboy would not normally be allowed. I think his contribution to progressive politics was far more substantial in the entertainment arena than in the political arena and ultimately I think that’s where show biz activists can really make a difference. It’s helpful that they raise money and awareness of partisan politics, but if you can make a musical recording, movie or television show that imparts liberal attitudes and philosophy, you have done far more long-lasting good than any rabble rousing speech could ever do. And it’s not something that anyone else can do — use art and pop culture to awaken people’s political instincts. That actually takes talent.

The most famous Hollywood activist, and the one who still creates hysteria on the right is, of course, Jane Fonda. In an era of liberal, even radical, show business activists, she was the living symbol of everything the conformist right hated about the left. Rick Perlstein reviews the new biography of Fonda in this edition of The London Review of Books in which we find that Jane was actually quite a serious, sedulous worker bee rather than a shrieking Commie Diva. But she became a very special, very famous object of ire for very complicated reasons. And she was the focusof some very special government treatment long before she ever went to Hanoi:

Another important detail: opposing the war, at this particular time, was not a radical thing to do. Vietnam was widely recognised across the political spectrum as a disaster.

[…]

The security establishment began its battle against Fonda almost as soon as she started speaking out. Teams of FBI informants reported her every word, combed her speeches for violations of the 1917 Espionage Act, which criminalises incitement to ‘insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny or refusal of duty in the military’, and ‘disloyal, profane, scurrilous or abusive language about the form of government of the United States’. She proved a disappointment. Profanity was not her style. As for incitement, we learn from one informant – a chaplain’s assistant – that she thought it ‘would not help the cause of peace’. He added that nothing she said ‘could be construed to be undermining the US government’.

The government got desperate. At Cleveland airport the FBI arranged for her to be stopped at customs. During her interrogation she pushed aside agents who refused her access to the bathroom, so they arrested her for assaulting an officer. She had in her possession mysterious pills marked B, L and D, so they also charged her with narcotics smuggling – for carrying vitamins to be taken with breakfast, lunch and dinner. Her daughter was followed to kindergarten. (America needed to know: did her school teach ‘an anti-law enforcement attitude’?) They investigated her bank accounts. They tapped their network of friendly media propagandists, like the future Senator Jesse Helms, then a TV editorialist, who supplied an invented quotation that still circulates as part of the Fonda cult’s liturgy. Supposedly asked – it isn’t clear where or by whom – how far America should go to the left, she said, according to Helms: ‘If everyone knew what it meant, we would all be on our knees praying that we would, as soon as possible, be able to live under . . . within a Communist structure.’ A death threat against her was sent to Henry Fonda’s house with a demand for $50,000. He took the letter to the same FBI office that was directing the campaign against his daughter. ‘The FBI files reveal no effort to find the sender of the letter,’ Hershberger remarks.

The campaign appears to have been co-ordinated with the White House, and underway long before Fonda went to Hanoi. Hershberger is an assiduous researcher, but she could have got a better idea of the extent of this co-ordination by studying the Nixon Oval Office tapes at the National Archives. On 2 May 1970, Nixon told his aides that protesters were to be accused of ‘giving aid and comfort to the enemy’. On 9 May, Nixon’s enforcer Chuck Colson told the FBI to send its Fonda files directly to the White House. ‘What Brezhnev and Jane Fonda said got about the same treatment,’ an aide later recalled.

Perlstein goes on to ask “why the obsession?” He answers by noting that this happened in 1970 a “moment of maximum danger” just as Nixon was revealed to have expanded the war into Cambodia, and that it was through heretofore loveable figures like Fonda and Dr Spock that the public and, more problematic, soldiers themselves would be turned against the war. This is surely true. Tom Joad’s daughter coming out against the war had to feel threatening. (The blacklist, after all, had only broken 11 years before. This played into their darkest paranoid fantasies about Hollywood.) But I think a great part of it was simple sexism and confused sexual feelings. As Perlstein points out, Barbarella was a favorite GI pin-up girl. As the US showed itself impotent in Southeast Asia, the jerk-off fantasy of millions of young men was basically calling them losers to their faces. I’ve long thought that the irrational anger at Jane Fonda, then and now, has had the character of some sort of primal hatred that cannot be explained by politics alone. I think she’s seen by certain American males as a female praying mantis.

However interesting all this psychological and political deconstruction of the Jane Fonda phenomenon is (and it’s fascinating) what Perlstein nails in this piece is something that is overlooked and terribly important if we are to understand modern politics:

It’s remarkable how many things that we think of as permanent features of American culture can be traced back to specific political operations by the Nixon White House. We now take it as given, for example, that blue-collar voters have always been easy pickings for conservatives appealing to their cultural grievances. But Jefferson Cowie, among others, has shown the extent to which this was the result of a specific political strategy, worked out in response to a specific political problem. Without taking workers’ votes from the Democrats, Nixon would never have been able to achieve the ‘New Majority’ he dreamed of. But to do so by means of economic concessions – previously the only way politicians imagined working-class voters might be wooed – would threaten his business constituency. So Nixon ‘stood the problem on its head’, as Cowie says in Nixon’s Class Struggle (2002), ‘by making workers’ economic interests secondary to an appeal to their allegedly superior moral backbone and patriotic rectitude’. (One part of the strategy was arranging for members of the Teamsters to descend ‘spontaneously’ on protesters carrying Vietcong flags at Nixon appearances. Of course it’s quite possible that the protesters too were hired for the occasion.) It’s not that the potential for that sort of behaviour wasn’t always there. But Nixon had a gift for looking beneath social surfaces to see and exploit subterranean anxieties.

That is the nub of Republican success, whether it was exploiting the sexual anxieties of displaced insecure males in a newly feminized workplace, or convincing conservative evangelical voters that “liberals” were trying to repress their religion and force them to adopt lifestyles they found repugnant. Nixon wasn’t the first dirty politician in American history, but he was the most successful at discerning the churning undercurrent of fear and anger in a rapidly changing society and using his personal brand of dark political arts to exploit it. The conservative movement of Barry Goldwater made a Faustian bargain with the Nixonian black operatives more than 35 years ago. The natural result of that soul selling deal is George W. Bush and Karl Rove.

Until we recognize that the modern Republican Party is the party of Richard Nixon and that the allegedly masterful Rovian vision of a permanent political majority is a rather simple outgrowth of Nixon’s uncanny understanding of how to exploit the dark side of populist fear and loathing, we will continue to be stymied. It won’t be enough to discredit George W. Bush and his cock-up of an administration. They will simply say he wasn’t the “real thing” and move past it like rapacious sharks, doing what they’ve been doing to the last 35 years. We have to come to grips with the fact that they have built their party by wrangling a free-floating resentment and anxiety and turning it into a political formula. It wasn’t an accident and it wasn’t the result of peering into a crystal ball. It was the result of counting the votes available and developing a strategy for getting enough of them to gain power.

And they were very successful at doing it. They are great at campaign politics. The problem is that they built a political machine so captive of business interests and so bereft of pragmatic policy acumen that they are unable to govern. And like the great Godfather of the modern Republican party, their propensity for crude revenge and crippling oppugnancy tripped them up.

I urge you to read Perlstein’s entire review. Jane Fonda is more than gal with a good figure and a good haircut. And she’s more than a radical Hollywood activist, work-out goddess or trophy wife. She’s the quintessential sin-eater who absorbed all the seething animus toward the agents of change in latter 20th century American society. She was the perfect target of Nixon’s seething resentment strategy. It’s a testament to her strange power that they still hate her so, even today.

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Bulletin From The Department Of Miserable Failure, Mideast Democracy Division

Mideast Democracy Summit Ends With No Deal

A U.S.-backed summit meant to promote political freedom and economic change in the Middle East ended Saturday without agreement, a blow to President Bush’s goals for the troubled region.

A draft declaration on democratic and economic principle was shelved after Egypt insisted on language that would have given Arab governments greater control over which democracy groups receive money from a new fund.

[snip]

The White House had hoped the conference would showcase political progress in a part of the world long dominated by monarchies and single-party rule, and spread goodwill for the U.S.

[snip]

The disappointing outcome at the conference followed a rocky summit a week ago in Argentina, when Bush got a cold shoulder from some Latin American leaders, failed to win consensus on a free trading bloc for the Western Hemisphere and endured biting criticism from anti-U.S. protesters and Venezuela’s leftist president, Hugo Chavez.

This is Rice’s failure, as well as Bush’s. Something to remember as the myth of Condi the Competent remains uncontested in the msm.