Month: April 2006

Cost Effective Nativism

by digby

This is worthy of some serious push back from the blogosphere. For the past couple of days, the GOP has been circulating the fact that the Democrats refused to let the Republicans in the House strip their bill of the parts making illegal immigration a felony. This has been greeted with some “analysis” on the part of the media that the Democrats are just as hypocritical as the Republicans on the issue of immigration. The GOP is reportedly running ads on spanish language media saying Democrats voted for the bill to make illegal immigration a felony.

But that is misleading. Nathan Newman goes to the congressional record and finds out what the real argument on the House floor was when the amendment came up:

Mr. Chairman, under current law, illegal entry into the United States makes an alien subject to a Federal criminal misdemeanor with a maximum penalty of 6 months in prison…

In the base bill, the maximum penalty for illegal entry was increased to a year and a day, and the same penalty was set for unlawful presence, to make the enhancements for these offenses consistent with the other penalty enhancements of the bill.

The administration subsequently requested the penalty for these crimes be lowered to 6 months. Making the first offense a felony, as the base bill would do, would require a grand jury indictment, a trial before a district court judge and a jury trial.

Also because it is a felony, the defendant would be able to get a lawyer at public expense if the defendant could not afford the lawyer. These requirements would mean that the government would seldom if ever actually use the new penalties. By leaving these offenses as misdemeanors, more prosecutions are likely to be brought against those aliens whose cases merit criminal prosecution.

For this reason, the amendment returns the sentence for illegal entry to its current 6 months and sets the penalty for unlawful presence at the same level.

The Republican argument was that they wanted to make it a felony, but because it would enable the defendants to have a jury trial and have access to a lawyer, they were afraid that it would cost too much. They argued that they would get far more prosecutions against the “aliens” if they kept it at the misdemeanor level.

Now, we know that they were having second thoughts about this provision, probably doing some polling that it would inflame the latino community. And Democrats certainly did want to hang this bill around the GOP’s neck and succeeded in doing so. But the Republicans’ stated reasons for trying to withdraw it were hardly because it was wrong to use such harsh methods, only that it would cost too much and would allow the “aliens” to have a lawyer and a fair trial. The Republican party, as we know, is very much against that fundamental American principle these days. They know who’s guilty and they don’t need no stinkin’ judges or juries telling them otherwise. (Unless you’re one of the legions of Republican criminal suspects, that is.)

It would be very helpful if the Democrats got this out to the spanish language media too. This idea that the Democrats were the ones who voted against removing the felon language is becoming CW. There is no reason for them to take a hit with the latino community about this when we know that they were not really in favor of the felon language. As Nathan Newman says:

This is a bow to the impossibility of revving up millions of criminal trials, but it’s all about how to most effectively criminalize undocumented workers.

And by the way, isn’t it interesting that the Bush administration didn’t exactly put its foot down either. All it did was request that the penalty for the convicted felon be lowered to six months. And here I thought old George was such a big latino lover.

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The Neocon Beast

by digby

Thank you Matt Yglesias for reminding everyone that this push for Iran is part and parcel of neocon ideology and not just some reflex of George W. Bush’s messianic impulses.

… there’s a widespread view on the American right that it’s always a mistake to reach diplomatic agreements with “evil” regimes. There’s also a widespread view on the American right that, contra the examples of Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong, nuclear deterrence won’t work against “crazy” leaders. At the intersection of those two opinions is the conclusion that we ought to be very, very, very, very willing to use unilateral preventative military force against countries that have nuclear weapons programs or that we merely vaguely suspect of having nuclear weapons programs. Both of those ideas are foolish and dangerously wrong, but they’re also widespread — not private oddball notions of Bush’s. If liberals want to push this country’s foreign policy in a better direction over the next five-to-ten years, we need to attack the whole network of ideas (including a non-trivial number of ideas whose origins are inside the Democratic coalition) that gave us the Iraq War and that threaten to give us the Iran War.

There has been a substantial amount of brainwashing done on the American public that needs to be immediately countered. These ideas have been floated in the media as American policy for years now. It doesn’t sound in the least bit jarring or inappropriate to many of the public. After all, Bush’s biggest applause line — and one that every American probably heard hundreds of times — of the last campaign was:

Do I forget the lessons of September the 11th and trust a madman, or do I take action to defend this country? Given that choice, I will defend America every time

Iran is a member of the axis ‘o evil. It is, therefore, already presumed to be batshit crazy and the new president has certainly helped with his holocaust denial and loony rhetoric. It will not be that difficult for Bush and his minions to transfer their earlier madman images to Iran.

The idealistic portion of the neocon fantasy has probably been discredited: creating democracy from the ground up through unilateral invasion and occupation is now seen as a non-starter by everyone but George W. Bush. But the dark side of the PNAC wet dream is alive and well. They are still convinced that there is only one way for America to maintain its hegemony (and by God it must be maintained) and that is for it to militarily dominate the world. Furthermore, they believe that they must constantly demonstrate American military might to sustain the world’s belief in its overwhelming power. After out little boo-boo in Iraq, it may now be important to these people that we demonstrate our awesome, unmatched air power. Eventually a little nuke action might be necessary too. The only way to protect America from the boogeyman is to prove over and over again that we are willing and eager to use force.

We may very well have a president named John McCain after 2008, or some other Republican with a chip on his shoulder. They don’t have to be card carrying neocons to buy into this notion. The Bush administration is still busily dismantling the post WWII system and Pax Americana, so far, is the only thing ready to take its place.

Democrats have a lot of good ideas, but until they develop a cogent narrative to counter the dominant neocon story, we are going to be in danger of this “madman” rhetoric rearing its ugly head every time the Republicans need a little boost in the polls or feel it’s time to show some muscle and remind everyone who’s in charge. Is there anyone besides the brunch bunch at AEI who thinks that’s going to keep this country safe?

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Iran Is No Cuban Missile Crisis

by tristero.

There is a meme going around that Iran is the Cuban Missile Crisis in slow motion. Short version: bullshit.

How do I know? Am I a scholar on the subject? No. But I’ve done a lot of deep research on the Missile Crisis and I know a lot more than David Ignatius does about it.

True: Ignatius doesn’t distort history as willfully, deliberately, and maliciously as David Irving does. And I am not comparing him to Irving. But I am hard-pressed to remember the last time I read any history in a so-called mainstream media outlet that was so consciously, consistently, and dangerously misleading as the following excerpt, and that is saying a lot:

Kennedy’s genius was to reject the Cuba options proposed by his advisers, hawk and dove alike, and choose his own peculiar outside-the-box strategy. He issued a deadline but privately delayed it; he answered a first, flexible message from Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev but not a second unyielding one; he said he would never take U.S. missiles out of Turkey, as the Soviets were demanding, and then secretly did precisely that. Disaster was avoided because Khrushchev believed Kennedy was willing to risk war — but wanted to avoid it.

I started to annotate this but gave up because there simply isn’t a single clause that has any undistorted truth to it. I am not kidding, I have rarely been so overwhelmed with the task of debunking rightwing stupidity. But in this case, I’d have to write some 10,000 words to start to straighten out all the errors, sins of omissions, idiotic conclusions, and bizarre misapprehensions in this paragraph. This is such sheer crap I don’t know where to begin and therefore I won’t waste my time.

Anyone who doesn’t believe that what Ignatius wrote really is willfully malicious garbage crafted with ruthless cunning at the molecular level is invited to learn about the Missile Crisis first by going to democracy arsenal’s takedown which is where I found the link to Ignatius. Then, you might want to click on this link which links to a pdf of speech I gave in October, 2002 contrasting Bush and Kennedy the first time Bush’s lying acolytes tried to make this analogy. For those who are really interested, get a copy of The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis and read the whole thing.* Or you can try this excellent sort-of-summary of the tapes, Averting ‘The Final Failure’: John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings

Then you can read Bobby Kennedy’s Thirteen Days but whatever you do, don’t base your opinions on the Costner movie, which, like Stone’s JFK, is just a Hollywood film. Also, read One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Kennedy, and Castro, 1958-1964 the Secret History of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

That will serve as a brief (no irony) introduction to the Cuban Missile Crisis; I’m sure some of you folks have other books you like as well. For those who are new to the subject, once you start to learn what actually happened during the Missile Crisis you’ll understand why I simply can’t believe that the Washington Post permitted Ignatius’s column to run: “inaccurate” is a gross understatement. The hiring of Ben Domenech is beginning to seem more and more like a conscious decision to ruin their reputation and not a dumb, aberrant mistake.

Like I said, I’m no scholar. But I have researched some subjects in considerable depth and seriousness, including the Cuban Missile Crisis. Reading Ignatius’s column gives me considerable insight as to how a serious scientific expert like NIles Eldredge or Richard Dawkins must feel when they first encountered “intelligent design” creationism. Ignatius’s column should be simply beneath notice. But someone who is far more sanguine about these things than I really should notice and carefully dissect all his misrepresentations. And he should be very detailed and cruel so Ignatius never dares to touch the subject of the Missile Crisis again. The kind of bullshit he is peddling could get a lot of innocent people killed.

*Note: Eric Alterman has pointed out that this edition – edited by Ernest May and Philip Zelikow, the latter a counselor to Secretary Rice – is often inaccurate. I bought a far more expensive scholarly edition of the tapes and checked. Alterman is correct. But for non-scholarly purposes, my opinion is that the May/Zelikow is more than adequate.

A Tiny, But Telling, Bush LIe?

by tristero

So I’m reading this obit about William Sloane Coffin in the Times, and when I was least expecting it, I run into Crawford’s Own Messiah:

Another Yale man of the time, President Bush, has spoken of a less affectionate memory: After Mr. Bush’s father lost a Senate race in 1964 to Senator Ralph Yarborough, Dr. Coffin told the young man, then a freshman, student that he knew his father and that the better man had won. (Dr. Coffin disputed the anecdote.)

Awwww, poor George. But then I started to think: Who y’gonna believe? So I thought I’d do some elementary googling.

Those who only care about Big Issues can safely skip this post. But for some reason this story gnawed at me a bit. Perhaps it just seemed so childishly wrong to have read about poor little W in the obit of a man who truly did great things (and a few he had the character to understand he would regret doing until he died). I’m not sure Bush lied here, but…well, here’s what I found.

The earliest telling of this anecdote that I found was 1998 in the NY Times:

Several months after his father lost the 1964 Texas Senate campaign to Ralph Yarborough, the incumbent Democratic populist, Bush said he met Yale’s prominent campus chaplain.
”I ran into William Sloane Coffin, who was the preacher at Yale, supposedly the guy that was there to comfort students,” said the Governor. ”I introduced myself and he said, Yeah, I know your father, and your father lost to a better man.”

Even today, 33 years later, Bush is clearly offended by the statement, and it is one of the many reasons, he says, that he couldn’t wait to get back to Texas, after his graduation in 1968: ”Texas people are more polite. I don’t think a Texan would do that to a son.”

No mention is made of Coffin’s denial. By the way, taken as whole, the Bush puff piece from the Times is a nauseating read. Bush, jokingly described as a “grizzled veteran of the sexual revolution.” Ah, ha ha ha! Like he survived a war rather than (perhaps) managing to avoid the clap as he plowed his way through as many availabe partners he could, which the Times couldn’t quite come out and say that bluntly because, well, because then people might think Bush was a fetid swamp of immorality no different than President You Know Who. But I digress.

Another interesting occurrence is this 1999 Bush puff from WaPo

When George W. Bush arrived in New Haven in the fall of 1964, his father was in the closing days of his first political race. Running against Sen. Ralph Yarborough, a liberal Democrat, he was the beneficiary of the largest Republican turnout in Texas history that November, but it was not enough. Riding the coattails of his fellow Texan, Lyndon B. Johnson, Yarborough defeated his Republican challenger by 300,000 votes.

Not long afterward, Bush decided to look up someone has father had told him he should go see, one of his contemporaries, the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, the Yale chaplain later famous for his anti-war activities.

The greeting he received was hardly what he expected. “I knew your father,” Bush remembers Coffin saying, “and your father lost to a better man.”

Coffin says he has no recollection of his conversation with Bush and says if it happened, he was making a joke. But for Bush it was a jarring signal that Yale was going to be different, a place where he might not effortlessly fit in, where his father’s values were not universally admired.

“You talk about a shattering blow,” said Barbara Bush in a recent interview. “Not only to George, but shattering to us. And it was a very awful thing for a chaplain to say to a freshman at college, particularly if he might have wanted to have seen him in church. I’m not sure that George W. ever put his foot again [in the school chapel].”

And now, Coffin is permitted a denial (Note: there may be an earlier denial, possibly in a letter to the Times, but I didn’t find it) or a dismissal of the thing as a joke. Apparently, Coffin liked to joke around with Yale students so that’s plausible.

But the story’s not adding up as a joke, and oddly enough, Barbara Bush’s seeming confirmation of Bush’s little diss tale is one of the reason the story rings more and more false. Y’see, Bush the Elder (falsely being remembered as the “Good” Bush, rather than the Truly Awful But Probably Not As Dreadful As His Sons Bush) and Coffin were often friends as well as often enemies according to this biography. Indeed Bush The Elder told his son to say hello to Coffin. All this makes me think that if this incident actually happened, then I would imagine that George would have taken a break from all his balling and instead bawled his eyes out to Mama who would have cried to Papa who, in a huff would have gotten on the horn to Coffin and complained. Especially since both George and the Reverend were Skull and Bones (as later was George). And Coffin would have remembered this. Yes, it’s still possible that Coffin forgot. It just doesn’t seem that likely, given how well everyone knew each other, and how influential they were, even in 1964.

What’s also interesting , en passant, is that in this biography we encounter a taste of Bush the Elder’s Texas-style polite, gentlemanly style of campaigning:

In 1964, Bush ventured into conventional politics by running against Democratic Senator Ralph Yarborough, making an issue of Yarborough’s vote for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which almost all Southern politicians (including the Republican Sen. John Tower of Texas) opposed. He called Yarborough an “extremist” and a “left wing demagogue” while Yarborough said Bush was a “carpetbagger” trying to buy a Senate seat “just as they would buy a seat on the New York Stock Exchange.” Bush lost in the 1964 Democratic landslide.

But I digress.

Needless to say this story has been repeated by the right many times. Here’s John Tierney, but without extending the courtesy of Coffin to reprint his denial:

[George W.] soured on the Northeastern establishment his freshman year, when Yale’s famously activist chaplain, William Sloane Coffin, brusquely informed him that his father had lost to “a better man” in the Senate race in Texas against Ralph Yarborough.

To sum up, I dunno if this story is true, but if my life depended on it, I’d say Bush was flat-out lying about Coffin. The story is too pat. For Bush is too innocent a victim of a devilish East Coast liberal lefty whatchamacallit. (Let’s pass over that Young Churchill himself was born in Connecticut.) And it seems to me highly unlikely that any chaplain, even one that prided himself on his hail-fellow-well-met attitude with students would say this.

But again, I don’t know. I”d be curious to hear from anyone who knew Coffin and could speak about his personality. Or anyone who has some information on this little incident. It’s not that important in the scheme of things, but if I’m right and Bush lied about it, it tells us a great deal about his character, namely the extremes he will go to claim victimization. And if the story is true, it does provide insight into the pathological length of time Bush will hold a personal grudge and the truly troubling extremes to which he amplifies what was surely a petty poke in the ribs at Bush The Elder from a longtime friend into a 33 year-long angry, hurt-filled obsession.

To bring all this up to the present: Whether the story is a lie or true, just imagine in either case how psychologically unbearable it must be right now for him if he would dare to peek out of his bubble and realize that he’s loathed by most of the world. The poor guy, it must be eating away at him all the time. No wonder he can’t bear to read newspapers.

I feel sorry for him. Not.

The Iraqi Document Dump

by tristero

Whad’ya know? Turns out the Iraqi document dump was “seeded.” Imagine that.

Maybe not outright forgeries as I speculated, just enough stuff to mislead and misrepresent. Nevertheless, I continue to urge everyone on the right to devote all their resources to careful study of this archive. And to take as much time as they think they need to get it absolutely right.

Trailers Were Reported Debunked By Early June, 2003

by tristero

There’s a lot of hoo-hah regarding the trailers found in northern Iraq and claimed as WMD labs by Bush during the spring of ’03. Josh Marshall thinks the trailer stuff wasn’t publicly debunked definitively until after July 17, 2003.** Not quite. True, “administration heavies” kept on lying, but serious doubts surfaced in the American press about a week after Bush’s lie, and the British press reported on a study a week after that. No reporters bothered to keep the story in the news or follow up with some hard questions. As you remember back then, only third-rate minds questioned the wisdom of the Iraq invasion or refused to trust what Bush and Blair told us. Here’s the chronology:

May 27, 2003: A secret Pentagon-sponsored study concluded the trailers weren’t evidence of WMD.

May 29,2003: Bush lied, oh excuse me… Bush, not informed abouty this study, said “We have found the weapons of mass destruction.”

Now, when did suspicions surface publicly that this was hogwash? Within days.

June 7, 2003: From the New York Times, in an article co-authored by Judith Miller no less, “American and British intelligence analysts with direct access to the evidence are disputing claims that the mysterious trailers found in Iraq were for making deadly germs.”

June 15, 2003: The Guardian reported that “An official British investigation into two trailers found in northern Iraq has concluded they are not mobile germ warfare labs, as was claimed by Tony Blair and President George Bush, but were for the production of hydrogen to fill artillery balloons, as the Iraqis have continued to insist.”

So, at least one month before the senate debate Josh refers to, both the British and American press had reported on grave misgivings and then followed up reporting on actual conclusions that the trailer wmd fable was hokum. But apparently, no one bothered, except for a few bloggers, to pick up and repeat the story.

And because no one – repeat, no one -in the press thought these reports were of any major importance to the unfolding story of Spring 2003 – a story of triumph over evil and the promise of freedom and democracy for Iraq – the administration felt no obligation to call any reporters’ attention to them. And that means that Tenet possibly wasn’t even asked any questions, let alone hard questions, during the 5 hours of closed testimony he gave on July 15, 2003 about those trailers. And that permitted Senators Durbin and McConnell later that day to mention the trailers as if they were real evidence of wmd and perpetuate the prevailing myth that substituted for the reality of Spring, ’03.

One simply couldn’t ask for a better example of the failure of the mainstream American press to focus on the important stories of their time. While Josh himself mentioned the Observer article it was within the context of a widening British scandal over no wmds. As for the June 7, 2003 Times article mentioning doubts about the trailers, Josh completely missed it, apparently. *

Now let me make this clear. This post really is not about Josh Marshall but about a criminally mendacious American president and the larger American press which failed, simply failed, to see what was in front its face until it was too late. Josh has done, is doing, will do great, great work – I could go on but everyone reading this already knows what I’d say about the importance both of TPM and TPM Cafe, not to mention Josh’s articles. They are all invaluable, even if we take issue with them strongly sometimes. This is about the wider failure of the press.

For the life of me, I failed to see then, and fail to see now, why the fact that Bush lied about the trailers wasn’t headline news in June, 2003. The country wasn’t ready for the truth? Of course it wasn’t, because the press had stopped doing its job in November, 2000, when the election was stolen. And that just walks the question back. Why wasn’t the country ready for the truth in November, 2000? Because the press covered the 2000 election campaign in an utterly incompetent fashion. And, herdlike, everyone in the press – Krugman the only serious exception – chose to ignore what was staring them in the face. It was too uncomfortable to believe that a major presidential candidate would blatantly lie about his economic program, or that that same candidate actually would steal an American election. It was too painful to imagine that as president, that same incompetent liar would neglect the most dangerous threats to America, an incompetence so spectacular that a bunch of ignorant fanatics could pull off a still unbelievably horrible series of terrorist attacks. It was simply beyond the pale to imagine that this same unspeakable bastard would then lie the United States into a bogus war, causing the deaths of thousands upon thousands of people, American and Iraqi alike, and mind-boggling anarchy.

In short, it doesn’t matter what the public is ready for, or what the press corps as a whole thinks is important to report. It’s what the real story is. Hersh understands this. Danner understands this. Fisk, too, and a few others. Unfortunately, aside from these few, and what appears to be somewhat more aggresive reporting, what happened with the trailer story is still happening. Even now, the American press as a whole simply is not reporting the real story of this administration when it’s still news.

And that brings me to my point from yesterday. Man, I hate to be a prick about this, but let’s get serious here. We are talking about the very real possibility of Bush launching a first-strike nuclear war. Dammit, we should be pricks about it. Okay, Josh hasn’t mentioned the tactical nukes yet in Hersh’s article – nor did he find time to read Hersh’s article right away. Big deal – it’s not his job and he’s chasing other stories in far more detail than I ever will. The problem is that the nuclear war plans angle has disappeared from the mainstream news. Just like the exposure of Bush’s lies about the trailers disappeared. The only thing bloggers can do to influence the discourse, and that only rarely, is to keep the salient parts of a story alive until the msm picks up on it.

The fact that Bush is seriously planning to start a nuclear war must not be permitted to drop out of sight. If it is ignored, chances are we will learn that the first 21st Century nuclear war – but not the last – will have started when we weren’t looking. Bush isn’t going to ask for authorization to use nuclear weapons. He isn’t even going to ask authorization to attack Iran. It is going to happen and if they are very nice, they’ll boast about it afterwards to the right reporters. The use of nukes will ooze out, contributing to the anomie and “whatever” attitude that Bush has cultivated towards news about his behavior.

Unless the press holds Bush’s feet to the fire and refuse to let this story suffer the same fate as the story about the trailers, we will slouch into Armageddon. It is sheer moral cowardice to ignore this, or minimize its importance. Hersh may be wrong – he’s been wrong before. But as far as I know, he’s never been wrong about the dangers of the Bush administration. The press must press the question: Does Bush plan to start a nuclear war?

*UPDATE: Thanks to DM and others, I realized I had made a careless mistake and misclicked 2002 instead of 2003 when researching the TPM archives. I deleted the erroneous sentence, which followed this one. Nevertheless, while Josh Marshall did address the issues of wmd lies in the summer of ’03- I never said he didn’t – he did apparently miss the Judith Miller co-authored Times article raising doubts about the trailer story. In any event, I apologize for the inadvertent error, and specifically to Josh.

**UPDATE: To make a subsidiary point clearer than it was in my post, I don’t think the question Josh posed in his original post is all that important. The administration is – that’s right, is – in no hurry to report its mistakes. In truth, no one should expect any administration to be that willing. Since the press in this country ignored the stories after one or two articles, the administration never bothered to make an issue out of it and it wasn’t a pressing matter for them to inform Congress. Perhaps a lawyer can tell me whether they were even obligated to inform Congress about this.

The real story here is not, per Josh, that Bush was dilatory. It’s that the US press was. And they are being so again regarding Bush’s desire to start a nuclear war.

30,000 Subpoenas A Year?

by tristero

It truly is obscene to label the so-called “Patriot Act”an act of patriots:

After fighting ferociously for months, federal prosecutors relented yesterday and agreed to allow a Connecticut library group to identify itself as the recipient of a secret F.B.I. demand for records in a counterterrorism investigation.

The decision ended a dispute over whether the broad provisions for secrecy in the USA Patriot Act, the antiterror law, trumped the free speech rights of library officials. The librarians had gone to federal court to gain permission to identify themselves as the recipients of the secret subpoena, known as a national security letter, ordering them to turn over patron records and e-mail messages.

It was unclear what impact the government’s decision would have on the approximately 30,000 other such letters that are issued each year. Changes in the Patriot Act now allow the government discretion over whether to enforce or relax what had been a blanket secrecy requirement concerning the letters…

Ms. Beeson said yesterday that she believed the government’s decision to drop the appeal was politically timed.

“The issue over whether the government was using its Patriot Act powers to demand library records was one of the hot-button issues in this debate,” she said. “And our clients could have been extremely powerful spokespeople in opposing the reauthorization of the act, because they had actually received one of those national security letters.”

Now that the debate in Congress is over, she said, “There’s no longer any reason to keep our clients quiet.”

By the way, the reason they dropped their objections is that the prosecutors had made a little boo-boo, inadvertently revealing the name of the group, the Library Connection, in court filings, which led to the name being published in the NY Times.

UPDATE: The original title of this post was “30,000 Subpoenas A Year To Libraries?” Several commenters noted that the article simply says that 30,000 subpoenas a year, in the form of “national security letters” are sent out. It is, as I read it, vague as to whether those are all sent to libraries. However, once you folks pointed it out, I obviously misread it: 30,000 subpoenas to libraries would be incredible even by the incredible standards of the Bush administration. I apologize for the mistake.

Politics Lost

by digby

Feel the magic. Joe Klein has a new book coming out in which he excoriates the rich insider Democratic consultants. Apparently, Klein thinks the Democrats should listen to rich insider Democratic pundits instead.

He writes:

Roger Ailes was right when he predicted at the beginning of the television era that in the future all politicians would have to be performers.

How interesting. What to make of the fact that two paragraphs later he says this:

…let me give 2008 a try. The winner will be the candidate who comes closest to this model: a politician who refuses to be a “performer,” at least in the current sense.

Whatever. Klein criticizing the Democratic consultants is like Charlie Manson criticizing Richard Jeffrey Dahmer as far as I’m concerned.

Eric Alterman reported on a foreign policy discussion that he and Klein attended yesterday:

It was a useful discussion with many useful tributaries and give and take with the audience and we all felt better for it.

That is right up until the very last moment when, after someone brought up the question of the whether the Democrats will be able to present an effective alternative to Bush in the next election, Joe Klein shouted out, “Well they won’t if their message is that they hate America – which is what has been the message of the liberal wing of the party for the past twenty years.”

This is the man who is lecturing the Democratic party about losing politics.

He also appeared last night on Charlie Rose in an otherwise quite interesting round table about Democratic foreign policy and he refined his point a little:

I think the problem for Democrats now is this: there are some well-informed and intelligent and tough centrists, but there are challenges coming from two separate directions. One is coming from the left of the party which ever since Vietnam has assumed that any use of American force overseas is immoral.

And the more serious threat — and this threat is coming to both parties — and this is coming from below, it’s this populist threat that I think is absolutely significant in this country and this is people who just want to make the world go away — they want to pull the troops out of Iraq and not think about the consequences, who are anti-immigrant, anti-Chinese economic competition and just want to make the world go away.

That’s his analysis. The party’s big challenges are finding a way to deal with the pacifist left and the threat “from below” of the the barbarian populist hordes. What ever are the intelligent, well-informed, tough centrists supposed to do with these horrible people?

He sounds quite frightened of the Democratic voters who are getting sick and tired of being told that we should shut up and listen to people who seem intent upon helping the right use “values” and national security to bludgeon this country into accepting a religious police state.

It shows what a philistine he really is that he conflates pacifism with “hating America” which he quite obviously does. Pacifism is a respectable philosophy that has been a part of the American (hell, the Christian) experience forever. And it, at least, has some intellectual coherence, unlike this hawkish/centrist mish mash of nothingness you find among the so-called liberal hawks.

But most Democrats are not pacifists, even the liberals he seems to loathe with such a passion. Most of us simply do not believe that the United States’ security, “honor” or credibility has been well served by hardliner hawks who are in a constant state of hysteria agitating for war all the time to prove the country’s military prowess. They’ve been doing this as long as I can remember and it’s always been absurd.

The vast majority of the country supported the Afghanistan operation, as did most of the world. But the left and the rest of the world checked out over Iraq, and obviously not because we believed that all use of American force is immoral — it was because the plan was fucking hallucinatory. If there were intelligent, well-informed, tough centrists around you sure as hell didn’t find them in the DC wading pool where Joe Klein was climbing into George W. Bush’s codpiece as fast as his chubby little arms and legs would carry him. There were plenty of smart, well-informed tough liberals around the country, however, who understood that the Iraq war was a huge strategic error from the first moment the administration began doing the war dance.

Speaking only for myself, I do find the Bush Doctrine of preventive war to be immoral. Torture too. I also think it is wise to participate in international institutions and follow international law so that people around the world can have some confidence that we will not use our awesome power capriciously. Superpowers need to behave in a predictable, responsible, thoughtful, mature fashion lest ambitious enemies get the idea that we don’t have control of the situation. When we fuck up, the ramifications are huge and very dangerous. We simply cannot afford to play out starry eyed neocon experimental fantasies because the opportunity presents itself. The stakes are much too high.

This is a complicated subject and one which we all debated in the run up to the last “preemptive” war that was sold as necessary to prevent a catastrophe that was not imminent, but inevitable. We later found out the war was not only strategically unsound, as we all knew, but that the future threat assessment was based on lies.

But even if we were to accept this doctrine as being useful some time in the future (which I don’t) I think we can all agree that this administration has zero credibility. They are the last people on earth we or anyone else can trust to launch a “pre-preemptive” strike against anyone. That’s not pacifism, that’s common sense.

As for Klein’s fear of the populist hordes, well Jesus: is he really surprised that many working people are “anti-chinese competition?” What in the hell did all the smart, well-informed centrists think was going to happen when the manufacturing base was decimated and the Republicans engineered income inequality not seen since the gilded age? (And he should thank his good friends on the right for pulling out their dog-eared nativist playbook. They’ve always found it’s more convenient to blame the local brown foreigners than blaming free trade/free lunch utopians like Joe Klein.)

It’s not that these populist hordes want the world to just go away. They want guys like Klein to just go away and stop blowing smoke up their asses about how much better off they are when their jobs are outsourced and how glorious it is to get your kid killed in a useless war.

As much as I agree that the Democratic strategists are lame, I actually think that the liberal punditocrisy is a bigger problem. They spend all their time kissing up to the right, disparaging elected Democrats and mischaracterizing the real concerns and beliefs of the grassroots of the party.

By the way, Klein’s book is called (get ready)…

Politics Lost: How American Democracy Was Trivialized By People Who Think You’re Stupid

I would have thought he’d save that one for his autobiography.

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Flashback

by digby

Saturday, November 5, 2005;

President Bush has ordered White House staff to attend mandatory briefings beginning next week on ethical behavior and the handling of classified material after the indictment last week of a senior administration official in the CIA leak probe.

According to a memo sent to aides yesterday, Bush expects all White House staff to adhere to the “spirit as well as the letter” of all ethics laws and rules. As a result, “the White House counsel’s office will conduct a series of presentations next week that will provide refresher lectures on general ethics rules, including the rules of governing the protection of classified information,” according to the memo, a copy of which was provided to The Washington Post by a senior White House aide.

Since Bush himself did not attend, one assumes that he believes selectively and secretly declassifying national security information for political purposes is adhering to the “spirit as well as the letter” of all ethics laws and rules.

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How To Make A Tactical Nuclear Weapon

by tristero

The military scientists, engineers and war geeks have it all wrong. It really doesn’t take much effort to make a tactical nuclear device. In fact, it’s actually a rather straightforward two-step process:

1. Take one nuclear weapon with the destructive power of as many Hiroshima bombs as you like.

2. Add the word “tactical” to the description.

Voila! You now have a tactical nuclear weapon that magically always hits its target and only kills evil people, leaving all the good people alive and perfectly healthy.