Month: August 2006

Date Rape

by digby

David Gergen says:

Yes, I am biased in favor of my friend, but I also fear that if Joe Lieberman – a man, let’s remember, who was the vice presidential nominee of his party only six years ago – is purged from national leadership, that would send a message rippling through both parties: that in our new politics, working too closely with leaders across the aisle can be political suicide. It’s hard to believe that, despite all their frustration, that’s what Connecticut Democrats really want to say.

I’m just curious what message the Republicans have sent rippling through both parties for the last six years of strong arm, thuggish political rhetoric and legislative tactics?

Here’s a mild example of what the Democrats have been putting up with, from Gergen’s brother in arms, David Broder:

Since 1995, when Republicans took control of both sides of the Capitol, the negotiating sessions often have been limited to GOP senators and representatives, with the Democrats locked out along with the press.

That arrangement has been reinforced by the “Hastert doctrine,” the policy enunciated by House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert that he will bring to the floor only bills that are supported by the majority of the Republican caucus. Because of that policy, bipartisan coalitions have become rarities in the House. The emphasis now is entirely on shaping bills in conference that most House Republicans can embrace.

No judgment there about whether it’s good for the country to kill bipartisanship in a time of war. Just business as usual. IOKIYAR, I guess.

This stuff was going on throughout the first term, despite the disputed election of 2000 — a unique historical circumstance that one would have thought called for excessive bipartisanship — as you can see by this article:

Republicans, meanwhile, defended their handling of negotiations, saying too many voices — particularly those of lawmakers who do not support their policy goals — would yield cacophony, not compromise.

“You want to try to negotiate agreements with people who are going to vote for it and negotiate in good faith,” said John Feehery, spokesman for House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, R-Ill. “You need to be able to reach agreement, and you can’t have 6,000 people negotiating.”

In both the cases of Medicare (HR 1) and energy (HR 6), the Republicans have been largely negotiating without the participation of Democrats, who have been complaining for weeks about the process. But in recent days the conflict has escalated.

Getting rid of bipartisanship was a conscious governing philosophy. A great book has been written about it called “Off-Center: the Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy” Somebody should send Gergen and his pals a copy.

There are, of course, a million examples of power crazed, partisan actions on the part of the GOP congressional majority over the years (not the least of which was an impeachment.) And it’s not like they have been quiet about it. Here’s Tom Delay all the way back in 1991:

We have a small faction, and they are a minority, who believe they are there to govern. Then there is the majority of us who believe that indeed we are there to govern but more importantly we are there to be an opposition to the Democratic philosophy and the only way to do that is through confrontation.

It’s a real shame about bipartisanship going the way of the buggy whip, but blaming Democrats for it is laughable. If anything they hung on long after it was obvious that the Republicans were punking them over and over again. Rank and file Democrats have finally had it up to here and are sending a message to their party that they aren’t going to sit by and let it happen anymore. The country is in deep trouble and somebody has to step up and put a stop to this.

Naturally, now that the crooked Republicans have shown themselves to be miserable failures at every aspect of governing, which they have consciously done without Democratic input, the mandarins who have been conspicuously silent about the excessive GOP partisanship of the last six years (and the previous decade as well) are calling for comity. If Democrats win in November, I have no doubt we are going to read sanctimonious op-ed after sanctimonious speech about how the Democrats need to put all this unpleasantness behind them and run the congress in a bipartisan spirit to heal the country’s wounds.

It’s always the same old nonsense with these people. The Republicans run the country into the ground, treat the Democrats like enemies of the state and when they are finally done screwing things up (and exhausted from counting all the money they’ve stolen from the taxpayers)the Dems have to clean up their mess. And they’re supposed to be generous and kind and not embarrass anyone when they do it.

I have no doubt that’s what will happen again. But I’m not ready to make nice, not by a long shot. The internet is a powerful tool that keeps a record of every rotten thing these people have ever done and said and I will never let them forget it.

Update: McJoan over at kos today has a great quote:

“Bipartisanship only works when the other side compromises, too. Otherwise it’s just capitulation.”

That seems like an obvious point. Perhaps David Gergen can give us all an example of anything Joe Lieberman has been able to get the Republicans to compromise on in the last six years. In fact, I’d be interested in hearing about any Republican compromises with Democrats in the last six years. I’m sure there must be a few.

Update II: Joe Gandelman of The Moderate Voice, examines various lessons people might take from the race if Lamont wins on Tuesday. One of them is this:

Bipartisanship Has Limits: If Karl Rove’s strategy has been to paint the United States’ security in danger if Democrats win control, and accuse Democrats who raise questions about the war as wanting to “cut and run” (event it is conceivable that someone supported the war but has very serious questions about its conduct), then it doomed Lieberman’s brand of bipartisanship. Rather than cultivate cooperation, Bush’s “your either with us or against us” has been applied to domestic politics and it sabotaged Lieberman’s cooperation with Bush would be perceived by many in his party.

That would be my take.

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Syriana Part II

by digby

Juan Cole has posted a fascinating piece about oil politics and the events in the middle east. I am not any kind of expert on the subject (not that I’m necessarily an expert on any subject about which I regularly pontificate) so I cannot judge how realistic the scenario is in its details. But from a gut instinct and common sense point of view I have have always known that we would not be spending so much blood and treasure in the middle east if it wasn’t the richest oil region in the world. We just wouldn’t. This is the new Great Game.

One point that Cole makes that I think is quite interesting is that there is some new belief that actual physical control of the oil fields, for both economic and practical reasons, may now be necessary. If that’s the case, I finally understand why the powers-that-be insist on those permanent bases in Iraq.

Anyway, it’s a very intriguing article. I’ll be curious to read some opinions from those of you who know more about this than I do.

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They Were Only Following Orders

by digby

There is a lot of chatter in the blogosphere about this article in the Washington Post this morning. It’s filled with interesting quotes (and analysis) but there is only one that I think is really important because it signals that at least some members of the Democratic establishment have figured out the right way to frame this race. And it’s very simple:

Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said Friday he is not worried about the fallout from the Senate primary on House races, arguing that the message from Connecticut is that anyone supporting Bush’s war policies is in deep trouble. “What’s playing out here is that being a rubber stamp for George Bush is politically dangerous to life-threatening,” he said.

It isn’t just the war or the unpopular Bush — it’s his Republican majority enablers in the congress. The record is clear and damning. Failing to do their constitutional duty, the GOP Eunuch Caucus has rubber stamped every failed policy he put forward. They are as responsible for this mess as Bush is. The chickens are coming home to roost.

Update: Great minds and all that. Atrios sees it similarly.

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Respite

Last night I took a cruise up the East River to Randall’s Island to see the Dave Matthews Band. DMB was preceded on stage by Gov’t Mule and the sensational Warren Haynes, and before them by Bela Fleck and the Flecktones. DMB was fantastic, but that lead electric guitar of Warren Haynes took me back to my teen years. Simply exquisite. Tonight I get to repeat the experience, except it will be David Gray playing immediately before DMB rather than Gov’t Mule.

I remember a couple of years ago when Digby saw Kraftwerk in concert. Tristero’s music speaks for itself, literally. But what about everyone else? If you could get your hands on any ticket, who would you see? What music defines you?

C’mon Hullabaloovians, declare yourselves.

Dupes

by digby

More insider Democrats helping their “friends” across party lines.

Some of Hollywood’s most reliable and generous donors to the Democratic Party — Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and media mogul Haim Saban — are endorsing Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s bid for reelection.

Their support is partly a matter of friendship over partisanship. But it could deal a blow to the governor’s main opponent, state Treasurer Phil Angelides, by signaling to other Democrats that it’s acceptable to embrace a Republican.

“It starts with a personal relationship. They are friends,” said Andy Spahn, a spokesman for both Spielberg and Katzenberg.

The two men also like Schwarzenegger’s plans to tackle global warming and fund schools. But further, Spahn said, “they are receptive to the governor’s taking a less partisan approach to the job and a more inclusive approach to government.”

Yeah, sure he does. That’s why he’s a member of the most polarizing party in American history.

And anyway, isn’t this what he promised the first time and then spent the first two years of his term stabbing nurses, firemen and cops in the back? Yeah, I thought so.

Any big shot Democrat who wants to support Arnold should ask him nicely to run as an independent instead. He has more money than God so he doesn’t need the support of the GOP. If he’s so inclusive and non-partisan, there’s no reason for him to be a partisan of any kind.

However, as long as he’s a member of the Republican party he’s affiliated with George W. Bush and everything he and the conservative movement stands for. He will be dragged out as their Blue State pet as an example of their “big tent” whenever they want to hide their ugly rightwing faces for national consumption. In this partisan day and age, no Democrat in good conscience should support that.

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Order The Pink Slips

by digby

Jane has an interesting post up today about the odd choice of the Lieberman campaign to run against the “crazies” and the blogs instead of Ned Lamont. It ended up creating a thoroughly incomprehensible caricature of him as a wealthy, country club, angry hippie, which I don’t think makes much sense to the voters of Connecticut.

What has struck me the most as I watched this campaign unfold from afar, is just how inept the Lieberman campaign has been on almost all levels. He had the money and the incumbency and the professional big time advisors and he ran a campaign that was almost laughably lame. I think it just shows, once again, that the tired, uncreative, tone deaf Democratic consultants are a big part of the problem for the national Democrats. If this is what the establishment produces you can see why we have lost everything.

For instance, is it even remotely understandable why, in the final week-end of the campaign, it was Atrios who dug out statements by Lieberman from 2003 in which he quite aggressively challenged Bush on the war? Why in the world didn’t the Lieberman campaign have that appearance in an ad running on a loop?

It’s probably because Mr Contrarian, having done a 180 on those views since then, nixed the idea for unfathomable reasons. But if somebody had dug that footage up and circulated it to the powers that be in the Democratic party, there undoubtedly would have been pressure brought to bear for him to use it — and endorse it. Maybe that happened, but I doubt it.

All Lieberman had to do in the early going was ignore the sniping, distance himself that schmuck in the white house and it would have been very difficult for Lamont to get enough traction to get this far. Perhaps it would have happened anyway, but I have my doubts. In fact I sincerely believed when this whole thing began to bubble to the surface that the point of this challenge was to get Joe to distance himselof from that schmuck in the white house and keep him on the reservation. I never dreamed he’d be so stubborn about something so obvious.

And now to find out that he had originally been critical and then changed his mind (because of what is speculated to be petulance about his treatment in the 2004 presidential campaign) is stunning to me. I’m actually beginning to wonder if deep down Joe wanted out anyway. (Or perhaps he really does want Rumsfeld’s job.)

In any case, this is a primer on how to screw up an election by Democratic Insiders Inc. Again.

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Shakedown

by digby

Wow. If anyone has ever wondered exactly how the K Street scams work, Brent Wilkes, Duke Cunningham’s pal (along with a bunch of other greedy Republican bastards) spills his guts to the NY Times:

Offering a rare insider’s view, Mr. Wilkes described the appropriations process as little more than a shakedown. He said that lobbyists close to the committee members unceasingly demanded campaign contributions from entrepreneurs like him. Mr. Wilkes and his associates have given more than $706,000 to federal campaigns since 1997, according to public records, and he said he had brought in more as a fund-raiser. Since 2000, Mr. Wilkes’s principal company has received about $100 million in federal contracts.

Mr. Wilkes described the system bluntly: “Lowery would always say, ‘It is a two-part deal,’ ” he recalled. “ ‘Jerry will make the request. Jerry will carry the vote. Jerry will have plenty of time for this. If you don’t want to make the contributions, chair the fund-raising event, you will get left behind.’ ”

And yet the country has yet to be convinced that the Republicans are far more likely to steal their tax money and use it to enrich themselves than Democrats. The facts are the facts, but years of “tax and spend liberal” cant has been so internalized that even when the graft and corruption is right in plain sight, people won’t belive it.

Of course, one of the unspoken truths about “tax and spend” is what they leave unsaid — tax and spend on the wrong kind of people. There are an awful lot of Americans who are not nearly as offended by a bunch of fat cats stealing hundreds of millions in defense contracts as they are at the idea of those “something for nothing” folks in New Orleans signing up for a free FEMA trailer. That’s the American lizard brain the Republicans know and exploit so well.

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Slacker In Chief

by digby

Ok, so I’m reading a story in the Washington Post about George W. Bush’s annual August vacation and the fact that he’s only taking ten days (like most American working stiffs) instead of the usual month or more:

Bush’s scheduled week and a half in Texas is a far cry from last year’s working vacation, which was shaping up as the longest presidential retreat in more than three decades before it was rudely cut short by Hurricane Katrina after nearly a month.

The image of Bush on an extended stay away from the White House while Katrina flattened much of the Gulf Coast and left New Orleans engulfed by floodwater proved to be a defining moment of his presidency.

The image of a president who critics say is aloof from details and too eager to delegate was only driven home when he ordered Air Force One to fly low over the stricken region so he could get a bird’s-eye view of the destruction as he returned to Washington.

[…]

Bush is not the first president to be criticized for spending time away from Washington. More than a century ago, Ulysses S. Grant was pilloried for his retreats to the Jersey Shore. President Bill Clinton often spent vacations at friends’ homes in places such as Martha’s Vineyard and twice vacationed in Jackson Hole, Wyo., a locale his political handlers said would play well among swing voters.

President Lyndon B. Johnson spent 474 days at his Texas spread during his five-plus years as president, far surpassing the 370 days that Bush has spent in Texas since his election, according to U.S. News & World Report. White House aides are quick to point out that Bush remains in command even when he is far from the Oval Office. He continues to receive his normal security briefings and holds meeting with top aides and foreign leaders during his working vacations. The president also likes to use his down time to mountain-bike around his 1,500-acre ranch and to do chores such as clearing brush.

“We’ve reached a point in the modern presidency where any vacation the president takes hurts in some way, because the world and the media move so fast,” Fleischer said. ” . . . The normal things that everyone else does, if the president does it he gets criticized.”

While Bush plans to curtail his long stretches away from Washington this year, he still plans to spend most of the coming month out of town. He has planned long weekends at Camp David and the Bush family compound in Kennebunkport, Maine, for August, before returning to Texas before the Labor Day weekend.

So, Grant, Johnson, Bush and Clinton all spent lots of time away from Washington and got criticized for it. Isn’t that what you just read?

Unfortunately, it is really a game of “what’s wrong with this picture?” Bill Clinton took fewer vacations than any other president. I know it doesn’t specifically say he took long vacations or many vacations like all the other presidents mentioned in the article, but the context certainly suggests that he, like Grant, Johnson and Bush was criticized for doing so. That is incorrect.

(He was criticized for choosing his vacation locale for political reasons, it’s true. But I’ve always wondered why nobody ever thought that the Disney McRanch movie set that Bush bought in 1999 might have been chosen for political reasons too. Nope, not a word.)

Anyway, for the record, Clinton may have been a lot of things, but a lazy shirker like Bush he certainly wasn’t:

As of December 1999, President Bill Clinton had spent only 152 days on holiday during his two terms, according to CBS News. A former staffer noted Clinton was such a workaholic that “it almost killed Clinton to take one-week vacations during August.” In 2000, Clinton cut his summer vacation short to just three days, so he and his wife could concentrate on her Senate race and fundraising for Democrats. While we couldn’t find the exact tally for Clinton’s last year in office, it’s reasonable to expect he didn’t increase his vacation rate. And in barely three years in office, George W. Bush has already taken more vacation than Clinton did in seven years.

As of now, Bush has already spent more than a whole year (370 days) of his first six years as president on vacation.

This is another example of the false equivalence that’s making a mockery of modern journalism. They could have stuck with Lyndon Johnson as the example of a lazy Democratic president who couldn’t stand being in Washington. Hell, he was even a Texan. But they had to stick Clinton in there, out of context and without offering the similar criticism that should have been leveled at Bush since 2000 and wasn’t. I guess it’s a law or something.

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Who’s The Boss?

by digby

Roy at Alicublog made me depressed. I guess we citizen journalists aren’t taking over the planet next February as planned. Damn. There was supposed to be money in it.

In the course of bursting my little bubble, he mentions a New Yorker profile(pdf) of Hugh Hewitt written by Nicholas Lemann, well known journalist and current Dean of the Columbia School of Journalism. I missed this article when it came out and couldn’t quite believe what I was reading.

Hugh Hewitt is a hardworking, intelligent entrepreneur and a fine cigar smoking gentleman and scholar to boot. Not that he’ll get any credit for it:

I can competetently predict is that after this article appears activists on the left will put Hugh Hewitt forward as an example of the well-oiled quality of the Republican media operation, because of the efficiency and prolixity of his efforts to disseminate the party’s message. If bloggers can respond to political developments within seconds, it must be OK for me to speen up the cycle of discourse just one more click and defend Hewitt in advance against this as yet unmade charge. Hewitt is definitely a Republican, but he is no mere mouthpiece. He says that he has spent a total of five minutes off the air with Karl Rove(to disagree with a possible change in the tax treatment for clerics), that he never reads the e-mails that endlessly flow from the Republican National Committee, and that he is now involved, through an outfit called Not One Dime More, in a campaign to dissuade people from contributing to the National Republican Senatorial Committee (because some of its candidates supported the filibuster compromise.) What Hewitt demonstrates about journalism is that journalism-as-politics is rapidly expanding its size and reach, especially on the conservative side. What he demonstrates about politics is not that the Republicans have a wonderously efficient message machine but that there are a lot of smart and very determined conservatives who are starting up new organizations and signing up more converts. And the Democrats aren’t going to beat them by streamlining the delivery of their message.

Ok, I don’t even know what “streamlining the delivery of their message” would entail and Lemann doesn’t explain anywhere in the article so I have no idea what he’s talking about. But his misunderstanding of the way the Right Wing Noise Machine really works is astonishing.

Guys like Hewitt don’t dance to the Ken Mehlman’s tune; if anything, it’s the other way around. The RWNM is a subsidiary of the big money conservative movement not the Republican party. In fact, the Republican party itself is just the political arm of the big money conservative movement.

All those “smart, determined conservatives” who are starting new organizations and making more converts are funded by a network of wealthy benefactors. They are not required to make money (I guess they are considered the loss leaders of the oligarchy) and their function is to simultaneously write the word and spread it. They’ve been fairly successful recently at making a market for their work, but it’s still not big enough to sustain it. With the exception of actual political campaigns (at which point they actively coordinate with whichever strategic electoral wizard they’ve anointed), after 30 years of listening only to each other there is no need to explicitly inform anyone of the company line. They know it without having to be told.

I suppose you could call that “journalism.” I call it “propaganda” and I’m stunned that Nicholas Lemann, of all people, hasn’t figured out how this thing works by now. But when you hear some of Hewitt’s interviews with DC journalists it’s clear they haven’t figured it out either.

Update: Andrew Sullivan has been having an ongoing feud with Hewitt. As it happens, as part of an argument about Mel Gibson, of all things, Hewitt makes my point for me today:

I am a defender of the president, though not when I think he or his Adminstration makes an error like the ports deal or the briefs in the Michigan affirmative action cases. Sullivan’s frenzied, sometimes even hysterical attacks on pundits and analysts who admire the president and his team are the means to understanding Sullivan. He is consumed by Bush hatred. So much so, in fact, that he has branched out into hating those who not only don’t hate Bush, but admire him.

I do believe that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell, Gonzales and Ashcroft have run the global war on terror about as well as it could have been run, and their commitment to its prosecution has been unyielding. I admire their courage and their consistency. This presidency is already among the most significant of our nation’s history, and like Reagan’s, will be admired for generations long after the Bush haters have been forgotten.

It stands to reason that he’s going to be the keeper of the Bush flame. Somebody has to do it and he is, after all, the man who made his bones working as Nixon’s assistant after his disgrace. I guess he got the short straw at the Wednesday meeting.

But let’s not forget that just because Hewitt says he’s a free thinker, it means he is. He has been in the tank so long he doesn’t even know how much internalized rightwing propaganda is splashing around in his brain.

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Small-d Fever

by digby

Harold Meyerson writes:

Many of my fellow pundits read all kinds of sinister meanings into Lieberman’s pending defeat, including a purge of moderates from Democratic ranks. But, as Michael Tomasky demonstrated a couple of days ago, the moderate forces within the Democrats’ Senate delegation are still very much alive and well. Next Tuesday, in fact, Connecticut Democrats will be doing exactly what small-d democratic theorists would have them do: decide an election by opting for one clear policy alternative, as personified by one candidate, over another personified by the incumbent.

From a big-D Democratic perspective, Connecticut’s Democrats are doing what Democrats are hoping a clear majority of voters everywhere will do this November: reject incumbents who have supported the failed policies of this administration, the war most particularly. Far from being some kind of martyr to the fickleness of Democratic voters, Joe Lieberman has actually turned himself into one of the first victims of the popular groundswell against Bush and his war.

The question is, why would any influential Democrat choose to support Lieberman’s independent bid to maintain his seat, which the senator has said he’ll wage if loses the primary? By late Tuesday night, Lieberman will not only be the party’s foremost outlier on the question of the war. He will also likely be the rejected incumbent of an overwhelming majority of his state’s Democrats. For any prominent Democrat to continue to support Lieberman under those conditions is to tell the party rank-and-file that its votes don’t matter when they dethrone the longtime friends or associates of Democratic higher-ups.

That’s right. And conversely, if Lamont wins and the Party does the right thing and supports him, it will galvanize the base going into the fall. This is a catalyzing event in an election that could be a tsunami or just a little lapping wave over the feet of the body politic. I would hope the party pooh-bahs recognize this for the opportunity it is.

Update: The scuttlebut is that all this talk of Lieberman abandoning his ground game is bs. The Lamont people still need people on the ground for the canvas so if you are in the area and can make it, head up there this week-end.

For those outside the region, Move-on is sponsoring a phone bank. You can use those free week-end minutes for a good cause.

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