Month: August 2006

Behind Enemy Lines

by digby

I certainly hope it isn’t true that Joe Lieberman’s campaign is actively courting the College Republicans to help with their canvas this week-end. There are some groups that really should be beyond the pale.

Here’s a little refresher course in college Republican campaigning. From Franklin Foer’s great article on this year’s College Republican “elections”:

Behind the scenes, in the campaign war rooms, small armies of veteran Republican operatives and congressional staffers toil. That’s because there’s much more at stake in the elections than a swish post-college gig. After campaign finance reform, the College Republicans reinvented themselves as a big-time 527–a group legally allowed to spend an infinite amount of its own money on campaigns–with a budget of over $17 million. They have a massive network of operatives to send into the field to bolster candidates, and they have patronage to spread among friends and through direct-mail firms. In other words, it’s well worth tearing a Shermanesque path to the sea to control College Republicans, no matter the carnage–and no matter the expense. Michael Davidson said he spent an estimated $200,000–raised off high-rollers who normally sign checks to senators and presidential wannabes–trying to claim the grand prize.

But the significance of the crnc goes beyond that. The Committee is the place where Republican strategists learn their craft and acquire their knack for making their Democratic opponents look like disorganized children. Many of the biggest-brand Republican operatives–from Karl Rove and Lee Atwater, to Charlie Black and Roger Stone, to Jack Abramoff, Ralph Reed, and Grover Norquist–got their starts this way. Walking through the halls of the convention, it is easy to see the genesis of tactics deployed in the Florida recount and by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Republicans learn how to fight hard against Democrats by practicing on one another first. “There are no rules in a knife fight,” Norquist instructed the young conventioneers in a speech. And, while Norquist described a knife fight, the Gourley-Davidson rumble transpired around him.

[…]

… Gourley received the blessing of the outgoing chairman, Eric Hoplin. But, in reality, he had won the blessing of a force more powerful than a single politician. He had won the blessing of an entity that College Republicans speak of in hushed tones and that they compare to the Empire in Star Wars–the Establishment.

When College Republicans invoke the Establishment, they mean a clique of former College Republicans–now grown-ups playing politics at the highest level–who will trample anyone to maintain their clique’s control of the organization. Like all good cabals, it is hard to know exactly who belongs to the Establishment and how Machiavellian their meddling is. Before his tumble from grace, the lobbyist Jack Abramoff would lend College Republicans his skybox at the MCI center, donate money, and lead training sessions. (In 2002, the crnc paid Jack Abramoff for “accounting & legal services.”) Rove reportedly keeps tabs, and Norquist invites the group’s chair to attend his celebrated Wednesday gathering of conservative big shots. But the convention offered some more suggestive examples of the Establishment’s methodology. Just past 2 a.m. on Saturday, wavering delegates from Louisiana received calls from Morton Blackwell, the legendary veteran of the Goldwater and Reagan campaigns, urging them to vote for Gourley. It was a perfectly calibrated tactic. “A 19-year-old Republican will generally do whatever a demigod of the conservative movement like Morton tells them,” one Davidson supporter griped.

And they are even more likely to respond to entreaties from a congressman. Patrick McHenry, a dough-faced 29-year-old freshman representative from North Carolina and former crnc treasurer, went to war on Gourley’s behalf. “I got a call. They said, ‘The congressman is on the line,'” University of North Carolina junior Jordan Selleck told me. “He basically said that we’d be screwed if we didn’t switch to Gourley. Our careers in politics would be over.” As Jennifer Holder, who served as a state chair in the ’90s, lamented, “There are a lot of sharks infesting the kiddie pool.”

It’s offensive that these people are coming out to help Joe Lieberman win a Democratic primary, and every Democrat in Connecticut should be appalled. But it is plain stupid to let these people anywhere near a Democratic campaign. Joe’s consultants should be very wary.

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I Never Said That

by digby

Via TBOGG I see that another crazed neocon is having a public breakdown. Here’s Michael Ledeen:

The greatest failure of our leaders, with rare exceptions, is their refusal to see the war plain, which means Iran and Syria (might as well call them “Syran,” since they operate in tandem, with Tehran pushing most of the buttons). It was never possible to “win in Iraq” so long as we insisted on fighting in Iraq alone. You can not win a regional war by playing defense in one country. It was, and remains, a sucker’s game. Syran pays no price at all for killing our kids and our allies in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now in Gaza and Lebanon/Israel.

Syran reasonably concluded that there was no price to pay for killing us, and so they predictably expanded the scope of the war. Our leaders do not see this whole; they see each component as a separate issue. They see that Hezbollah is an Iranian entity. They see Iranian Revolutionary Guards officers at work in Lebanon and Iraq. They know the best weapons in the war come through Syran and in many cases are manufactured by Syran. Any logical person has to conclude that you cannot win this war without defeating Syran.

Did you get the impression from that statement that he thinks the US should be fighting Iran and Syria? I know I did. But apparently that’s completely incorrect. He writes just two paragraphs later in the same article:

Meanwhile, a collection of frauds, writing in places like Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and Mother Jones, continuously recycles a story saying that a neocon (code for “Jewish”) conspiracy duped Bush into going to war in Iraq, and is now arranging the invasion of Iran. Documented lies, like those peddled by Joe Wilson to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, are treated as reliable. Fantasies about American armed forces operating covertly in Iran, like those written by Seymour Hirsh, get taken seriously. And people like me are accused of masterminding the whole thing, even though I oppose a military campaign against Iran.

TBOGG points out that’s technically correct. He is agitating for war with Syran, which is not the same as agitating for war with Iran at all. It has two different letters in it, you see.

I would say this the latest evidence of a broad neocon crack-up, but you can’t really use Ledeen as any kind of a guage. He has always been looney tunes. Remember, before the Iraq war he was agitating for war with Islamofascist France and Germany. (Oh excuse me — Islamofascist Fermany, not the same thing at all.) He’s a little excitable:

Assume, for a moment, that the French and the Germans aren’t thwarting us out of pique, but by design, long-term design. Then look at the world again, and see if there’s evidence of such a design.

Like everyone else, the French and the Germans saw that the defeat of the Soviet Empire projected the United States into the rare, almost unique position of a global hyperpower, a country so strong in every measurable element that no other nation could possibly resist its will. The “new Europe” had been designed to carve out a limited autonomy for the old continent, a balance-point between the Americans and the Soviets. But once the Soviets were gone, and the Red Army melted down, the European Union was reduced to a combination theme park and free-trade zone. Some foolish American professors and doltish politicians might say — and even believe — that henceforth “power” would be defined in economic terms, and that military power would no longer count. But cynical Europeans know better.

They dreaded the establishment of an American empire, and they sought for a way to bring it down.

If you were the French president or the German chancellor, you might well have done the same.

How could it be done? No military operation could possibly defeat the United States, and no direct economic challenge could hope to succeed. That left politics and culture. And here there was a chance to turn America’s vaunted openness at home and toleration abroad against the United States. So the French and the Germans struck a deal with radical Islam and with radical Arabs: You go after the United States, and we’ll do everything we can to protect you, and we will do everything we can to weaken the Americans.

The Franco-German strategy was based on using Arab and Islamic extremism and terrorism as the weapon of choice, and the United Nations as the straitjacket for blocking a decisive response from the United States.

He’s so nuts even the Committee on a Present Danger won’t take him — and they let Ron Silver join.

Be sure to check in with TBOGG regularly as he follows Pamela Atlas Shrugged on her Tits On A Blintz tour of Israel. It’s not to be believed.

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See What His Friends Are Saying

by digby

Since for the first time in recent memory Joe Lieberman has gone silent on foreign policy it falls to intrepid blogofascists like myself to seek guidance about his thoughts from other sources. One place to look are the think tanks and policy organizations to which Joe belongs.

Here’s one called The Committee on the Present Danger. “What?” you say, “that group of rightwing fanatics from the 50’s and 70’s who agitated against detente and wrongly claimed that the Russians were on the verge of killing us all in our beds any day?” Well, not exactly. This is the new CPD, revived after 9/11 to find and replace the word “communist” with “terrorist” in all the wingnut demagoguery manuals.

Joe, along with Republicans Jon Kyl, George Schultz and James Woolsey is on the board of directors. (Woolsey likes to pretend he’s a Democrat but if he’s a Democrat I’m Angelina Jolie’s baby.) There are many other important luminaries involved with this group, such as Laurie Myelroie, the highly influential neocon nutball who hallucinated that Saddam Hussein was responsible for everything from the first World Trade Center bombing to male pattern baldness. There’s Ken “Cakewalk” Adelman, Newtie Gingrich and Victor Dave Hanson, who thinks the world is just one big Hollywood movie set. The list is very long. Here — read it and weep.

There are no voices of sanity, of course, nobody who was right about Iraq or who has even the slightest bit of pragmatic realism about the threat of terrorism. They would not want to break their unbroken record — after all, neocons have always been wrong about everything.

But Joe is not just a member, as I mentioned — he’s on the board of directors. He’s a honcho, the lone elected Democrat. So, I think it’s fair to assume that since he has placed his vaunted reputation so prominently on display for this group, he must sign off on their official statements. I was, therefore, very interested to see that the CPD quite recently put out a paper on Iraq. The specific date is unclear but it mentions the death of al Zarqawi which would make it mid-June at the earliest.

Perhaps this will clear up where Joe stands on the issue since he is refusing to talk about it on the campaign trail:

Several events combine to present an opportunity for significant forward movement in Iraq. They are completion of the Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s cabinet, the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the launching of Operation Together Forward to curb terrorist/insurgent activity in Bagdad (49,000 Iraqi soldiers and police and 7,200 Coalition forces) and the possibility of a reconciliation process to abate the Sunni insurgency.

[…]

The unity government is finally in place, nevertheless, much work lies ahead for the new Iraqi government. Sectarian militias must be disarmed, corruption in government must be tackled and eventually eliminated, the country’s oil production must increase; and gradually but steadily Iraqis must take over reconstruction projects.

The threat to stability remains, posed by insurgent diehards loyal to Saddam Hussein as well as the remnant of al-Qaeda in Iraq and allied jihadis. The former seek restoration; the latter seek a much broader goal: regional and ultimately world domination for ther radical islamist ideology, with Baghdad as the center of a new caliphate. The death of Zarqawi and the apparent resulting recovery of a “trove” of intelligence data may result in a sharp reduction of al-Qaeda in Iraq’s operation. Time will tell.

RECOMMENDATIONS

Following is a summary of the Committee’s recommendations for moving forward in Iraq:

* Define the threat to stability to include Saddam Fedayeen insurgents, in addition to al-Qaeda in Iraq and its jihadi allies:

* Heighten and highlight divisions between the two groups;

* Redefine victory as the crippling of both Saddamist insurgent groups and al-Qaeda in Iraq and the training of Iraqi forces to deal with whatever remnants of them remain. In pursuit of that goal, use all possible means to drive wedges between the enemy groups;

* Continue efforts to suppress — and, if possible — eliminate the operations of radical Islamist jihadis;

* Support the new government;

* Seek ways to encourage the Ayatollah Sistani to exert maximum influence to damp down sectarian militias;

* Keep a strong US military presence in Baghdad and other places where insurgent sectarian violence is a serious problem — until the situation improves;

* Encourage iranian Kurds to continue their opposition to the oppressive theocratic regime in Tehran;

* Tighten security of Iraq’s eastern border with Iran to stem the flow of arms and explosives;

* Develop and iraqi Oil Fund in such a way that every citizen of the country can share directly in its greatest asset.

It seems to me that the only substantive recommendations here beyond “stay the course” and “support the government” are their blatant recommendation to “redefine” the enemy as “Saddam Fedayeen” and “redefine” victory as being the defeat of these alleged Saddam loyalists. They want to bring back the boogeyman.

Nowhere is there any mention of civil war. But these guys aren’t stupid, they know there is one. I can only surmise that the CPD sees a way for Bush to gain domestic support by saying that we are still fighting the monster Saddam’s henchmen who are trying to reimpose the tyrannical regime from which we bravely liberated the Iraqi people. It’s quite clever. It has Newtie written all over it.

So, here’s the question: Does Joe Lieberman agree with the conclusions and recommendations of the Committee On the Present Danger’s latest report on Iraq? Does he agree with Newt Gingrich that the US should take sides in Iraq’s civil war?

Oh what a tangled web these neocons weave. Do you think they have the slightest idea anymore who’s on first?

Blaming The Victims

by digby

E.J. Dionne ends an otherwise good column with this:

If Lieberman survives this primary, it will be thanks to voters who would gladly have cast a protest ballot against him but never really wanted him to lose. Such voters — and, yes, I identify with them — are frustrated with Lieberman’s accommodationism but like and respect him and hope he might learn something from Lamont’s challenge.

A Lieberman loss next week could also create distracting problems for Democrats. Lieberman has said he would run as an independent if he lost the primary. This would divert national attention from the Democrats’ central goal of making this fall’s elections a referendum on Bush and the Republican Congress.

I suppose it might, but that no reason to succumb to Joe’s blackmail. “Vote for me or I’ll take the party down with me” hardly seems like an honest way to win an election.

Dionne says he personally knows and likes Lieberman. Perhaps he and all the other DC insiders who are so worried that this Lamont challenge will end up hurting Democrats in the fall should have a talk with Joe. After all, whether or not there is a “distraction” is entirely in his hands.

It’s possible that people felt at the beginning that they wanted to push Lieberman back from the brink (or at least get him to shut his piehole about how swimmingly the war is going) but instead of listening he got defensive and angry and attacked his own party. Contrary to what Dionne says, I think most people who are going to vote for Lamont in the primary have now seen a side of Lieberman that is not so freindly and congenial — and they are quite happy to have him lose for real. He has acted like a bit of an ass, after all.

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Down On The Hezbos

by digby

Didja know that Rush calls Hezbollah “Hezbos”? He does. And he’s teaching his dittohead followers all kinds of good stuff about what’s going on in the Middle east and what we should do about it:

We’ve got the Hezbos, who have in interesting fashion, and I think the same thing is being attempted in Iraq, and it poses the same kind of trouble, or the same kind of challenge. The Hezbos have pretty much made — and we’ve heard the puff piece stories. Oh, they’re wonderful humanitarians, the Hezbos, why, the social services they provide the general population, why, they’re doing such wonderful things, they care about people, they passed out health care and whatever the hell it is. Well, what they’re doing is making the general population of these countries dependent on them, and as such, that is how they secure — it’s either through blackmail or genuine support, but it’s how they get the support of the general population centers. You also have the Israeli factor in that. These are Arabs absolutely, so there are a number of factors in it.

But the one thing that has really changed in warfare, from World War II forward — and I know that tactics change, but strategy doesn’t. The Art of War by Sun Tzu is still something that’s regarded as timely, even though it’s thousands of years old. The one thing that you just don’t do these days is kill civilians. It used to be the name of the game in war. And it was done on purpose. Now, it was done to end wars, and it was done to achieve decisive victory, and it was done to save the lives of your own troops in the field. All of those things were factors.

So we had this episode at Qana. You know who really killed those people are the Hezbos. Hezbollah killed those people. Hezbollah put those people in that building and brought the rocket launchers in close by, knowing full well that the launcher would be targeted. That building didn’t fall for eight hours after it was hit. What do you bet that the Hezbos finished the job that the Israeli bomb did not actually complete? What do you bet they killed their own people for the PR aspect? These people cannot compete militarily with any industrialized nation, so they have to fight the PR and the spin war. And it is amazing to me to see how easily the duped US and world media is.

[…]

Every bit of it is staged and the still photographers know it. Yet they send these pictures out without saying all of this is being staged for us. They send these pictures out as though they are in a timeline of an exact sequence, which they are not, which you will see when you read it. So the point is, Israel is probably not even killing all these civilians. I asked the other day, when you have the Hezbos who don’t wear uniforms, how do you know what civilian deaths are versus Hezbo deaths, how do you know who’s who there? You don’t.

Man. Denial is a river in Egypt, but apparently it runs right through Rush’s addled brain. Are people buying this?

He continues:

Until civilians — frankly, I’m not sure how many of them are actually just innocent little civilians running around versus active Hezbo types, particularly the men, but until those civilians start paying a price for propping up these kinds of regimes, it’s not going to end, folks. What do you mean, civilians start paying a price? I just ask you to consult history for the answer to that. It’s not their fault, Rush, it’s not their fault! No. Not saying that it is.

But as long as you’re going to allow these people to hide behind baby carriages and women and children and mosques and so-called apartment buildings, and if you’re going to launch military strikes at military targets, which Hezbollah is not doing — 120 rockets into Israel yesterday. Nobody has a care in the world, nobody has one word of condemnation for that. We don’t know what targets were hit, we don’t know how many people died. The Israelis are not parading their victims around on TV for propaganda purposes. As long as we are going to pussyfoot and patty-cake around, we’re not going to get anywhere, we’re not going to make any real progress.

We may delay the inevitable, we may get ceasefire after ceasefire after ceasefire, but we’re not going to deal with the root cause of the problem. And as such, your kids and grandkids are going to be saddled with that at some point when they assume responsibility for the fate and future of the country.

So, the pictures of the dead are all phony, staged propaganda but the civilians need to be killed anyway in order to get to the root causes of the problem — which I understand to be too many living arabs. If we don’t kill them now, our kids and grandkids will have to kill their kids and grandkids later.

This blatant genocidal bloodlust has become de rigeur on the right now. It’s on talk radio, TV and in the columns of respectable newspapers. They don’t even pretend to be civilized anymore. Maybe it’s just the SOS, but I’ve got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. I don’t ever remember this kind of stuff being openly bandied about like it’s normal. And those who did, like Curtis LeMay, didn’t have audiences of 25 million listeners to spew their bilge to.

But hey,what do we expect? Once you explode the taboo against torture, can genocide be far behind?

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Scorecard Politics

by digby

Here is an excellent article in Salon by Colin McEnroe about Lieberman, well worth sitting through to ad to read in full. I’d like to highlight just one little piece of it:

Covering Lieberman is a good way to understand how misleading a voting record can be. (Are you listening, Courant editorial board?) Most members of Congress vote with their parties the preponderance of the time. There are other questions to ask. Did he vote differently on a much-more-important earlier amendment or cloture motion? Did he wait until it was clear his vote wouldn’t hurt the other side? Are his public pronouncements strangely different from his votes?

This is a prime reason why the special interest groups are so ineffectual. They’ve gotten so lazily dependent upon their “scorcards” they can’t even feel it when they are being slowly stabbed in the back. They simply aren’t asking the right questions.

This article lays out all the gripes that Connecticut, a liberal state, has against old Joe and it’s quite an indictment. But what it comes down to is that he’s always tried to have it both ways. He rhetorically reinforces all the destructive GOP memes, hedges his bets on important votes and even though (like most politicians) he generally votes with the party he’s effetively working for the other side a good part of the time. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that being a member of the minority party in the Senate for most of his career means that he’s had a lot of free votes that don’t mean diddly.

Rhetoric, on the other hand, is one of the few powers a minority party has as it tries to persuade the country to come over to their side and put the opposition on the spot. Helping the majority make its case is one of the most destructive things Joe does. Democratic partisans have been complaining about it for years and so apparently have his constituents.

I would even go so far as to say that it is exactly this kind of jarring incongruity that has made the voters feel uncomfortable voting for Democrats generally and it’s the biggest failing of the DLC experiment which Lieberman embodies. Indeed, it’s what people say over and over again: they don’t know what the party stands for. Why would they? You have leaders like Lieberman constantly trying to have it both ways. It’s confusing and it makes people uncomfortable — and it finally made some of the voters of Connecticut uncomfortable enough that they decided to look for someone who reliably and consistently reflected their views.

Update: Here’s Lamont on tonight’s Colbert Report, from Crooks and Liars.

I couldn’t get the video at first and so only listened. I was struck, as I was during the debate, that there is something in Lamont’s delivery/cadence/accent that is reminiscent of JFK.

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