Month: October 2006

The American Theocracy Movement

by tristero

Sam Rosenfeld and Matt Yglesias are wrong. The movement to establish an American theocracy is serious, relentless, and very, very dangerous.

Need proof? Start by picking up a copy of With Liberty & Justice for All: Christian Politics Made Simple by the Reverend [sic] Joe Morecraft III. You will find there a succinct discussion of the rationales and reasoning behind the modern christianist movement. You will also encounter, in stark language, many ideas, such as “America is a Christian nation” that are currently being mainstreamed.

Then learn something about “intelligent design” creationism. I don’t mean the doctrine, which is simply worthless both as science or theology. I’m talking about the history, rationale, and culture (I use the term loosely) behind the movement. Read the Wedge strategy. Then, to get a sense of who is funding this, read Creationism’s Trojan Horse by Barbara Forrest and Paul Gross. If you think alarm bells about the theocracy movement are just hype, you will be shocked to discover that the alarm bells aren’t ringing loud enough.

ID creationism may be the wedge that theocrats are using, but it is hardly the only strategy. Go to Colorado Springs or Springfield, MO and attend some megachurch ceremonies. I’m talking about places where christianism is a lifestyle, 24/7, where the churches have elaborate multi-media services and a Starbucks on the premises:

The megachurches thus become part church, part shopping mall and part country club. One in Tacoma, Washington, even has its own Starbucks. Brentwood Baptist Church in Houston has a McDonald’s on its 111 acres. The Prestonwood Baptist Church, near Dallas, boasts 15 baseball fields, a Fifties-style diner and a food court. New Birth Baptist Church, also in Texas, offers web links to “antiques”, “dining” and “health and fitness”.

In addition to the megachurches, there are 31 “gigachurches” in the US, which are defined as those that at least 10,000 people attend every Sunday; 73 per cent of all these are in Bush-Cheney territory in the South or West. Some offer bookstores and health clubs on their premises. The Lakewood Church, yet another in Houston, describes itself as a “non-denominational charismatic church” and has a congregation of 25,000 every Sunday. It says it will soon have more than 30,000 people attending the remodelled, $73m former “Compaq Centre” that was previously home to the Houston Rockets, a basketball team.*

Sam Rosenfeld sets up an utterly false dichotomy between the notion that christianists are rubes who have been suckered and christianists as malevolent force. Merely because there are some high-level Bush officials, like Rove, who think Robertson is nuts, doesn’t show that the “religious” right has been suckered. Look at the faith-based programs. Look at the infiltration of science/health programs with christianist propaganda. After all, this is a country which, until Bush, wouldn’t have dreamed of selling in a national park bookstore, a history of the Grand Canyon that claimed it was only 6,000 years old.

True, christianists have not gotten from Bush everything they’ve wanted. So they’ve been screaming bloody murder at their “betrayal.” That hardly means they are in retreat. They have advanced far in the past 6 years. Now, they are simply honing their strategy for the next step.

Christianists, however, have succeeeded in mainstreaming the notion that religion belongs in politics. It doesn’t, not in America, so it’s quite a step to have the churches in this country so well organized to push a christianist agenda and even endorse (wink, wink, illegal tho it may be) candidates. It’s quite a step to have mainstream national politicians trumpet their piety – as if that is some kind of qualification for running a country – with an intensity that I can’t recall in the races of the past thirty or forty years.

To pooh-pooh the influence of christianism on American politics, as Rosenfeld does, requires ignoring the plain and simple fact that General Jerry Boykin, a man suffering from paranoid delusions that Satan is hovering over battlefields and who is clearly in need of psychiatric help, still has a job. And not just any job; he is one of the pointsmen in the hunt for al Qaeda and bin Laden.

Sigh. Once again, intelligent liberals are making the dangerous mistake of attributing their own intellectual acumen and worldview to other Americans, who think and live very differently than themselves. I share with Yglesias and Rosenfeld a thorough disgust with both the ideas and the lifestyle of the christianists. I find it hard to believe they take their theology seriously as a religion: as Yglesias points out, it’s nuts to believe in an absurd religion that consigns Gandhi to hell. And like them, I find the unique cultural trappings of christianism – the crass materialism and cynical marketing of religious belief – repulsive. How can anyone be suckered into this bullshit?

But the fact that I find christianism utterly repulsive when it’s not just silly doesn’t take away from the fact that many, many Americans are deeply attracted to it. Many more Americans have trouble distinguishing between the more diluted versions of christianism and their own desire to have a meaningful place for religion and national pride in their lives.

It is a serious mistake to underestimate these people. They have more cash, and more followers than we do. More importantly, they know, as we yet don’t, that they are in a culture war. And they know, as incredible as it surely sounds to Rosenfeld and Yglesias, that the culture war is a continuation of the ancient struggle between the priests and the philosophes and ideals of the Enlightenment. Go ahead, Matt and Sam, read what they actually say. Listen to their speeches. That’s what this is about.

In 2002/2003, some liberals – but not this one – were bamboozled by the so-called “seriousness” of respected, brilliant minds like those of Wolfowitz and Perle. The notion that they were dangerous extremists who would lead the country into a catastrophe was extremely hard for some intelligent people to accept. It is dismaying to see that happening again with christianism. Yglesias and Rosenfeld fail to understand, as many liberals have over the past 25 years, that these people are serious and their influence over American life has grown exponentially over the past 6 years. Santorum may no longer have a Senate seat come November 7, but don’t kid yourself. To christianists, that simply means that Santorum will be moved to a different battlefied.

One final thing. Dobson, et al, have been whining non-stop that they are not being taken seriously by the Bush administration, (a perception that, amusingly, both Yglesias and Rosenfeld seem to agree with, albeit with a different sense of whether that’s a good thing). LIke everything else Dobson utters, it is utter crap. It’s all of a piece with the kind of wingnut bitching that always casts the right as the beleagured good guys against the evil liberals. It’s the “mainstream liberal media” myth all over again.

Don’t you believe it. The “religious” right is on a major roll.

The notion that America was founded by christianists is now so widespread that scholars have been working overtime churning out books to remind this country that there is absolutely no truth to the meme. The war against fucking continues unabated, with serious people actually debating the utility of abstinence-only sex education and the “ineffectiveness” of condoms. The assault on embryonic stem-cell research is a national disgrace. And most important of all, the meta-myth of christianism – that a good leader should not listen to reason but to his heart – is so much the norm in America’s concept of politics that very few dare question it in public. Indeed, Bush may not be a perfect christianist, but he embodies their ideal of leading from the depths of a soul at one with God.*

Sam and Matt, the religious right has declared war on you and me, a war they are preparing to win. And they can. They are armed and very dangerous. And they will surely succeed if you, and others with more influence, continue to underestimate their power and fail to grasp their alarming growth and their intentions. They cannot be dismissed as mere kooks. They cannot be ignored. They must be confronted and loudly denounced whenever they rear their ugly heads in national discourse. I don’t have words strong enough to say how urgent I think it is for you to educate yourself on exactly who these people are and what they want. Don’t wait until they are even stronger. We need your voices in strong opposition. Hell, guys, you need your voices, even if you don’t know that yet.

*And that is why I think of christianism as a particularly obscene form of blasphemy.

Bizarroworld

by digby

From The Democratic Strategist

In the final three weeks of the campaign, longtime leading Democratic strategists such as Stan Greenberg and James Carville urge the party to maximize the once-in-a-generation opportunity the 2006 election offers Democrats by reaching out for every seat that is even conceivably contestable. Netroots newcomers, however, are not so ambitious, preferring to see the Democrats focus their attention on locking in their potential gains rather than reaching too far and “blowing it.”

That reflects an ironic turn of events for internal Democratic Party strategic debate. Netroots newcomers, throughout 2000, 2002 and 2004, complained bitterly about the cautiousness of Democratic campaign insiders in Washington. Now the tables are turned. Political guru Charlie Cook calls it a generation gap in perceptions of what is happening in 2006. Old-timers who lived through 1974 and 1994 have felt all year that 2006 could develop into an enormous, earthshaking Democratic sweep — they’d seen this kind of thing before, and this felt like that. Netroots activists, in contrast, have not seen that kind of sweeping election victory before?their experience has been largely a series of narrow, nail-biting elections with winners and losers determined by a handful of seats in a 50-50 political world.

Because of their different experiences, netrooters have dismissed talk of a sweep as so much old-timer mysticism. Old-timers have been unable to believe the netrooters do not see what is clearly before their eyes. As a result of their different experiences, netrooters are also more focused on carefully bringing home every victory that’s clearly in reach and leaving nothing to chance in any race, while the old-timers are wondering whether a bank would loan the DNC $5 million or $10 million against future contributions to expand their reach from 30 targeted seats to 50. Old-timers are also speculating about whether they should count as won the top ten prospective take-overs and shift resources from those seats to the Tier 3 opportunities.

Whichever direction the party takes in the final weeks — whether a cautious, button-down strategy designed to make no mistakes and lose no birds in the hand, or a more “all-in,” go-for-broke strategy that seeks every possible bird in every possible bush — one outcome is certain: A very different, more mainstream, more suburban and small-town, greatly expanded House Democratic caucus will present a new face of the Democratic Party to the country as the 2008 Presidential election gets underway on November 8.

Huh?

Well, that sure is going to come as a helluva surprise to all those netroots leaders who have been begging the establishment to expand the field for some time now, raised a bunch of money for candidates the house and senate election committees had given up for lost and then initiated a successful campaign to pry last minute money out of some cash hogs who refused to step up. If anybody objected to the party borrowing 10 million dollars it was only because there were a bunch of safe Dems sitting on cash they weren’t using. WTF?

I’m not quite sure what to think about this freakishly incorrect scenario. Part of me thinks it’s better if it continues, since it portrays we ignorant netroots as being a staid “buttoned down” faction. The last I heard we were the unhinged hippies dragging the party over the leftist cliff and the good boys and girls of the DLC choir were valiently beating us back.

But I don’t think the other half of this will fly for a moment. The “old timers” are a bunch of swashbuckling risk takers? It’s hilarious. These are the same people who were telling candidates not to talk about Iraq just a couple of months ago.

I have to assume that this is some sort of positioning for credit although it’s not even slightly believable. But it does indicate that the establishment is now trying to hook themselves some of that hot and sexy netroots image. And who can blame them?

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Who You Gonna Call?

by digby

Let’s say you have a problem. You have the choice of two people to solve the problem — the one who caused the problem, refuses to admit it even is a problem and won’t change anything even as the problem grows worse — or the other one. Which do you choose?

That’s the simple logic of this election.

There are, of course, many affirmative Democratic messages necessary for the future. But right now, this is it.

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The Wills Article

by tristero

Below, Digby linked to an article by Garry Wills which details the extent the US government has been undermined by christianists with the help of the Bush administration, its ranks fully penetrated by political activists whose agenda is to establish an American theocracy. The article seems, for the most part, very good. The reason I haven’t mentioned it, although I read it several days ago when my paper copy of New York Review of Books came is because there is a very unfortunate error of fact in the discussion of “intelligent design” creationism. In addition there is a minor factual error and a misleading emphasis. I alerted NY Review of these errors, and also notified a scholar of ID creationism, but the errors persist in the online version that they posted.

Wills writes

The Discovery Institute claims that it is a scientific, not a religious, enterprise, but that claim was belied when one of its internal documents was discovered. It promised that the institute would “function as a wedge…[to] split the trunk [of materialism] at its weakest points” and “replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.” The institute is mainly funded with evangelical money, and its spokespersons are evangelicals—one, Philip Johnson, says he was inspired by Unification Church founder Sun Myung Moon to “devote my life to destroying Darwinism.”

1. In fact, it was not Johnson but Jonathan Wells who said that. As it happens, Wells is a “senior fellow” at the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture (which changed its name to the Center for Science and Culture).

2. CRSC is one part of the Discovery Institute but Wills conflates DI with CRSC, as do many authors. This is not a major error. I don’t know, however, if DI’s money comes entirely or mainly from religious groups (and have to rush out now before I can check). CRSC, however, has, shall we say, interesting funding (see below).

3. Unfortunately, Wills actually minimized the alarming character of the people funding ID by labelling them simply “evangelicals,” which encompasses everyone from Tony Campolo to Pat Robertson. In fact, much of the original funding for the marketing of “intelligent design” creationism came from none other than Howard Ahmanson, a disciple of Rousas John Rushdoony. Rushdoony, of course, is a “Christian Reconstructionist,” an open advocate of replacing the American Republic with a theocracy. My source is Barbara Forrest and Paul Gross’s excellent Creationism’s Trojan Horse. Forrest was one of the main witnesses in the Kitzmiller case.

As far as I can tell, the other incidents Wills discussed that I’ve heard about are accurately portrayed.

Obviously, I’m not happy drawing attention to flaws in an article by an author I admire and the thrust of whose argument I fully agree with. But they are there and readers should know about them.

We Are The Realists

by digby

Maybe I’m out of stem with other liberals but this doesn’t ring true to me. From a new Greenberg Quinlan Rosner research strategy memo on National Security:

Don’t let anti-Bush reflexes undermine Democrats’ heritage of internationalism. Over the longer term, Democrats can only retain national leadership and the public’s trust if we promote a strong, idealistic, and outward-looking vision of America’s purposes in the world. Anti-Bush passion may be enough to drive big gains in 2006. But Democrats cannot afford to let anti-Bushism morph into anti-internationalism. For example, it is troubling that, according to a poll conducted by the German Marshall Fund, a majority of Democrats — the party that helped bring down apartheid in South Africa and Pinochet in Chile — now rejects the idea of promoting democracy abroad. Similarly, there are worrisome signs that many Democrats now doubt our ability to improve the world; in the August Democracy Corps survey only a 49-46 percent plurality of Democrats agreed that “America’s power is generally a force for good in the world,” and fully 60 percent of liberal Democrats chose the alternative statement, that “America’s power generally does more harm than good when we act abroad.” As The New Republic’s Peter Beinart and others have argued, it will be important for Democratic leaders over the coming months and years to push back against such beliefs and to mobilize support within the party’s base for a serious international agenda that includes combating jihadist ideology and violence, stemming WMD proliferation, strengthening NATO and our other alliances, supporting the spread of liberal democracy and human rights, and tackling global environmental and humanitarian challenges.

I suspect there is an impulse to pause and take a breath with “democracy promotion” since it’s been so bastardized by the neocons these last few years, but I don’t get the sense that liberals want to withdraw from the world. What they want is a greater emphasis on international cooperation in dealing with these challenges instead of this militaristic (and yes, imperialistic) view that America must exert its power unilaterally. I don’t think there are very many liberals out there who don’t see every challenge on that list as something that must be dealt with — it’s the how, not the if.

After watching the Bush administration turn the US into a pariah nation in six short years we liberals recognise that we have some work to do to earn the world’s respect and regain our leadership role. We will not have national security or global stability without it. Pretending that we are the same nation that sat atop the rubble of WWII is a foolish naive dream as much as the neocon Pax Americana was.

Liberals are the new realists (in the dictionary, not policy-school sense.)We’re not about withdrawing from the world but we recognise that the Bush years have tainted our place in it so badly that the world has withdrawn from us. It’s going to take more than evoking the ghost of George Kennan to get our honor back — and we have to smart enough to be careful about how we do it.

Democrats need to dig deeper than “democracy promotion” and create a better argument if they want to prevail on national security. It shouldn’t be too hard. The whole damned world hates us now and if that isn’t a Republican failure I don’t know what is. Let’s start from there.

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The Wrong Lesson

by digby

Many bloggers have pointed out that Jim Webb’s novels are on the professional reading list of the US Marine Corps, which would indicate that the adults in the military aren’t too shocked by the sex scenes.*

But there is something disturbing on that reading list, which is that the top recomendation for staff sergeants and first lieutenants — the leaders who generally have the most face to face contact with the locals — is that piece of trash “The Arab Mind.” I had thought that it was only considered a bible by the senior brass. I didn’t know they were having the troops read it too. No wonder things have gone so badly.

This is another in a long line of errors, but it points to one of the biggest motivations for this invasion and occupation — racism. There were far too many people who were willing to believe that when it came to teaching the world who’s boss, any arab would do. This book helped create the sense that arabs are all alike and that they are just a little bit less evolved than we purebred (hah!) Americans.

This is terribly unfair to the iraqis and it’s unfair to the troops. They should remove that book from the reading list or at least provide some other books on the subject and some guidance. They should not give it to sergeants and first lieutenants and then just tell them to go forth and deal with the Iraqis. It’s akin to giving them bad body armor. (Oh wait … )

* I’m reminded of Ross Perot, who went to the Naval Academy but left the service prematurely because he couldn’t take all the cursing.

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Stepping On Our Dreams

by digby

Many people seem to be convinced that the key to this election is going to be conservative Christians staying home. I don’t think so. James Dobson and his ilk are out there telling them to hold their noses and vote for the lesser of two evils and they will do it — at least for now. And the southern Kristallnacht Republicans will vote for their tribe no matter what.

This, in my view, is the Republican party’s big problem — the suburban, educated voters:

The M.B.A.’s have had it. The engineers are fuming.

For as long as anyone here can remember, Bellevue has been a stronghold of socially liberal Republicanism. First, it was a prosperous Seattle bedroom community, then a technological boomtown, where employees of Microsoft and Internet start-ups consistently voted for fiscal restraint and hands-off government.

But now, voters here are accusing the party in power of overspending and overreaching — and when they do, they sound like people who write manifestos, not software code.

“I’m a mild-mannered guy,” Michael Mattison, a partner in a software venture development firm, said as he stabbed a piece of halibut in the sunlit dining room of a local bistro. “But we can no longer be subdued.”

Bellevue has been growing more Democratic for several years, thanks to an influx of liberal voters and a professional class that is changing teams. This year, Bellevue may send its first Democrat to Congress. Darcy Burner, who even supporters admit is inexperienced, may unseat Representative Dave Reichert, a well-liked, longtime public servant, simply because constituents want Democratic control of the House of Representatives.

“I am a Republican and have traditionally voted that way,” Tony Schuler, an operations services manager at Microsoft with a Harvard M.B.A., said as he sat with his wife, Deanna, in their home above Lake Sammamish. But Mr. Schuler abhors what he sees as a new Republican habit of meddling in private affairs.

“The Schiavo case. Tapping people without a warrant. Whether or not people are gay,” he said. “Let people be free! It’s not government’s job to interfere with those things.”

In Bellevue, the professional is political. Rather than religion or culture, what unites the diverse population — a quarter of residents are foreign born — are the values of their workplaces: technological innovation, accuracy, efficiency.

And this year, one issue incenses them above all others: restrictions on embryonic stem cell research.

It is a matter of concern across the country, even across parties. But for many engineers and their ilk, restriction of stem cell research is what gay marriage is to conservative Christians, a phenomenon so counter to their basic values that they cannot vote for any candidate who supports it. After all, for Bellevue’s professionals, science is not only a means of creating wealth but also an idealistic pursuit, the most promising way they know of improving the human condition.

I think that is one of the most interesting observations I’ve read in a while (certainly in the New York Times.) The Republicans and the Christian Right are leading America on a backward march into the Dark Ages — and that is stepping on our dreams. As a culture, we have always been idealistic about progress and inspired by new discoveries to improve the lot of the human race. We’re about invention and reinvention. It’s one of our best qualities.

These people are telling us that those days are over. We have to depend upon brute force, superstition and ancient revelation. Science is dangerous. Art is frightening. Education must be strictly circumscribed so that children aren’t exposed to ideas that might lead them astray.

It’s a pinched, sour, ugly vision of America. For those who believe that their time on earth is all about waiting for The Bridegroom, perhaps that doesn’t mean much. But for the rest of us, things like scientific breakthroughs or artistic achievement are inspirational, soaring emotional connections with our country and our fellow man. It makes us proud. The dark-ages conservatives want to take that away from us.

This country has been divided at 50/50 for some time. That probably cannot continue much longer and a real majority will emerge before long. Tax-cuts have held together the GOP coalition up to now, but their dark vision of the future may be the thing that finally drives the suburban, educated voters to our side of the ledger for a long time to come. We’re the ones with the progressive dream of the future and that’s as American as a Big Mac and fries.

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They Don’t Miss A Trick, Do They?

by tristero

Please understand that I think the Dems, in reality, have no incentive to backpedal or go soft on the egregiously awful, even criminal, behavior of our Republican overlords. They should hold them accountable via robust investigations, oversights, and when called for, indictments. That said, in reality there are many obstacles to doing so. The worst, of course, is that the US has a juvenile delinquent for a president who has been double-daring his opponents to make explicit the constitutional crisis he began during the Florida election debacle of 2000, and which he has renewed over Schiavo and the filibuster “nuclear option.” Rightly or wrongly, the Democrats will not act in such a way as to force a serious public showdown over Bush’s crackpot notion of the “unitary executive” (ie, the idea that the Constitution makes a Republican president an absolute monarch).

But there is another reason the government will remain seriously dysfunctional for a long time (and for you cynics who think government ipso facto is incompetent, far more dysfunctional than it was under previous presidents, and far more dysfunctional than it has to be). This outrage is a good example of why:

Congressional Democrats say a new government publication being sent to all Medicare beneficiaries inappropriately favors private insurance plans over the traditional government-run program.

The publication, the 2007 Medicare handbook, “presents a misleading and biased view of Medicare coverage and options,” the Democrats said last week in a letter to Michael O. Leavitt, the secretary of health and human services.

Beneficiaries use the handbook as an authoritative guide. It has become more important in the last few years as Medicare has become more complex, with new insurance options and a prescription drug benefit offered by scores of competing private insurers.

“The 2007 handbook strongly favors health maintenance organizations, preferred provider organizations and other private Medicare Advantage plans over the traditional Medicare fee-for-service program,” the Democrats said in the letter.

[boilerplate and vaguely worded denial from the Bush administration.]

Managed care plans often have networks of doctors and hospitals, and beneficiaries may have to pay higher fees, exceeding what they would pay under traditional Medicare, if they go outside the network. In traditional Medicare, patients can choose from a broader range of doctors and hospitals, although a small number of doctors say they do not take Medicare patients because they consider the payments inadequate.

Get it? Not only is this disgraceful in itself, it only one of many such incidents that we know of. There’s the advocacy of utterly bogus abstinence-only sex education (pdf) as well as false information being provided by federally funded pregnancy centers (pdf). But it’s not only health, of course. Who can forget George Deutsch insisting that NASA scientists take into account “intelligent design” creationism arguments when discussing the Big Bang? And let’s also recall that until Bush came into power, FEMA was a well-respected agency.

In short, the rightwing assault on the US government since 2000 has been comprehensive and unrelenting. The Bush administration has not only mis-managed from the top, but has deliberately degraded the efficiency and integrity of government at the midlevel as well. It will take years, many years, to remove the godawful incompetents Bush has brought into bureaucracies.

And for the libertarians out there, let me be clear. I don’t mind in the slightest having my tax dollars going to support Medicare. But I very much mind having my tax dollars wasted on ideological propaganda designed to undermine Medicare by misrepresenting its benefits and limitations in order to benefit the rich.

Update: Digby here. Sorry to intrude, but I have to add this link to Gary Wills’ phenomenal article this week-end in the NY Review of Book on this very topic: A Country Ruled by Faith. (Let’s just say Amy Sullivan won’t be pleased.)

carry on.

Pig Slap

by digby

Did he really say this?

Down in Wyoming, U.S. Rep. Barbara Cubin got into some hot water when, after a debate, she threatened Libertarian candidate Thomas Rankin, who has multiple sclerosis and uses an electric wheelchair. She reportedly said to him, “If you weren’t sitting in that chair, I’d slap you across the face.”

She later apologized, saying she may have been influenced by listening to too much Rush Limbaugh. Last week, Limbaugh said he would slap actor and Parkinson’s disease sufferer Michael J. Fox, “if you’d just quit bobbing your head.”

I knew that he was a degenerate pig, and his comments have all been disgusting on this subject, but I hadn’t heard he went that far. Does anyone know if that’s true?

*And that woman deserves to lose, both for what she originally said and the idiotic excuse she came up with.

Update: Doh. That’s what I get for taking the quote from another blog and not reading the whole article. It’s a satire.

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Using Our Religion

by digby

Readers urged me to write about this today and it is worth some discussion:

The federal government is investigating the takeover last year of a leading American manufacturer of electronic voting systems by a small software company that has been linked to the leftist Venezuelan government of President Hugo Chávez.

The inquiry is focusing on the Venezuelan owners of the software company, the Smartmatic Corporation, and is trying to determine whether the government in Caracas has any control or influence over the firm’s operations, government officials and others familiar with the investigation said.

The inquiry on the eve of the midterm elections is being conducted by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or Cfius, the same panel of 12 government agencies that reviewed the abortive attempt by a company in Dubai to take over operations at six American ports earlier this year.

The committee’s formal inquiry into Smartmatic and its subsidiary, Sequoia Voting Systems of Oakland, Calif., was first reported Saturday in The Miami Herald.

Officials of both Smartmatic and the Venezuelan government strongly denied yesterday that President Chávez’s administration, which has been bitterly at odds with Washington, has any role in Smartmatic.

“The government of Venezuela doesn’t have anything to do with the company aside from contracting it for our electoral process,” the Venezuelan ambassador in Washington, Bernardo Alvarez, said last night.

(Right. This is worthy of investigation but the president of Diebold saying he was determined to deliver Ohio to Bush in 2004 was just a figure of speech.)

The fact that the government is investigating Hugo “sulphur” Chavez’s alleged interest in election machines may very well be part of an emerging post-election GOP narrative. I have believed that Republicans might claim vote fraud in this election for some time. I wrote back in June:

The Republicans have figured out something that the Democrats refuse to understand. All political messages can be useful, no matter which side has created it. You use them all situationally. The Republicans have been adopting our slogans and memes for years. They get that the way people hear this stuff often is not in a particularly partisan sense. They just hear it, in a sort of disembodied way. Over time thye become comfortable with it and it can be exploited for all sorts of different reasons.

In this instance, there has been a steady underground rumbling about stolen elections since 2000. Now, we know that it’s the Republicans who have been doing the stealing —- and the complaining has been coming from our side. But all most people hear is “stolen election” and they are just as likely to paste that charge onto us as they are onto them. It’s like an ear worm. You don’t know the song its from, necessarily, but you can’t get it out of your head.

We have created an ear worm that the Republicans are going to appropriate — and they will use it much more aggressively and effectively than our side did. They are already gearing up for it. As I mentioned a month or so ago, Karl Rove was at the Republican Lawyers Association talking about how the Democrats are stealing elections:

QUESTION: The question I have: The Democrats seem to want to make this year an election about integrity, and we know that their party rests on the base of election fraud. And we know that, in some states, some of our folks are pushing for election measures like voter ID.

But have you thought about using the bully pulpit of the White House to talk about election reform and an election integrity agenda that would put the Democrats back on the defensive?

ROVE: Yes, it’s an interesting idea. We’ve got a few more things to do before the political silly season gets going, really hot and heavy. But yes, this is a real problem. What is it — five wards in the city of Milwaukee have more voters than adults?

With all due respect to the City of Brotherly Love, Norcross Roanblank’s (ph) home turf, I do not believe that 100 percent of the living adults in this city of Philadelphia are registered, which is what election statistics would lead you to believe.

I mean, there are parts of Texas where we haven’t been able to pull that thing off.

(LAUGHTER)

And we’ve been after it for a great many years.

So I mean, this is a growing problem.

The spectacle in Washington state; the attempts, in the aftermath of the 2000 election to disqualify military voters in Florida, or to, in one instance, disqualify every absentee voter in Seminole county — I mean, these are pretty extraordinary measures that should give us all pause.

The efforts in St. Louis to keep the polls opened — open in selected precincts — I mean, I would love to have that happen as long, as I could pick the precincts.

This is a real problem. And it is not going away.

I mean, Bernalillo County, New Mexico will have a problem after the next election, just like it has had after the last two elections.

I mean, I remember election night, 2000, when they said, oops, we just made a little mistake; we failed to count 55,000 ballots in Bernalillo; we’ll be back to you tomorrow.

(LAUGHTER)

That is a problem. And I don’t care whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat, a vegetarian or a beef-eater, this is an issue that ought to concern you because, at the heart of it, our democracy depends upon the integrity of the ballot place. And if you cannot…

(APPLAUSE)

I have to admit, too — look, I’m not a lawyer. So all I’ve got to rely on is common sense. But what is the matter? I go to the grocery store and I want to cash a check to pay for my groceries, I’ve got to show a little bit of ID.

Why should it not be reasonable and responsible to say that when people show up at the voting place, they ought to be able to prove who they are by showing some form of ID?

We can make arrangements for those who don’t have driver’s licenses. We can have provisional ballots, so that if there is a question that arises, we have a way to check that ballot. But it is fundamentally fair and appropriate to say, if you’re going to show up and claim to be somebody, you better be able to prove it, when it comes to the most sacred thing we have been a democracy, which is our right of expression at the ballot.

And if not, let’s just not kid ourselves, that elections will not be about the true expression of the people in electing their government, it will be a question of who can stuff it the best and most. And that is not healthy.

QUESTION: I’ve been reading some articles about different states, notably in the west, going to mail-in ballots and maybe even toying with the idea of online ballots. Are you concerned about this, in the sense of a mass potential, obviously, for voter fraud that this might have in the West?

ROVE: Yes. And I’m really worried about online voting, because we do not know all the ways that one can jimmy the system. All we know is that there are many ways to jimmy the system.

I’m also concerned about the increasing problems with mail-in ballots. Having last night cast my mail-in ballot for the April 11 run-off in Texas, in which there was one race left in Kerr County to settle — but I am worried about it because the mail-in ballots, particularly in the Northwest, strike me as problematic.

I remember in 2000, that we had reports of people — you know, the practice in Oregon is everybody gets their ballot mailed to them and then you fill it out.

And one of the practices is that people will go to political rallies and turn in their ballots. And we received reports in the 2000 election — which, remember we lost Oregon by 5000 votes — we got reports of people showing up at Republican rallies and passing around the holder to get your ballot, and then people not being able to recognize who those people were and not certain that all those ballots got turned in.

On Election Day, I remember, in the city of Portland, Multnomah County — I’m going to mispronounce the name — but there were four of voting places in the city, for those of you who don’t get the ballots, well, we had to put out 100 lawyers that day in Portland, because we had people showing up with library cards, voting at multiple places.

I mean, why was it that those young people showed up at all four places, showing their library card from one library in the Portland area? I mean, there’s a problem with this.

And I know we need to make arrangements for those people who don’t live in the community in which they are registered to vote or for people who are going to be away for Election Day or who are ill or for whom it’s a real difficulty to get to the polls. But we need to have procedures in place that allow us to monitor it.

And in the city of Portland, we could not monitor. If somebody showed up at one of those four voting locations, we couldn’t monitor whether they had already cast their mail-in ballot or not. And we lost the state by 5,000 votes.

I mean, come on. What kind of confidence can you have in that system? So yes, we’ve got to do more about it.

Nobody can ever accuse these Republicans of not having balls. It’s really breathtaking sometimes. This is not an isolated remark. Here’s an excerpt from yesterday’s Chris Matthews show:

MATTHEWS: … What did you make—we just showed the tape, David Shuster just showed that tape of a woman candidate in the United States openly advising people in this country illegally to vote illegally.

MEHLMAN: It sounds like she may have been an adviser to that Washington state candidate for governor or some other places around the country where this has happened in other cases with Democrats.

But the fact is, one thing we know, the American people believe that legal voters should vote and they believe that their right to vote ought to be protected from people that don‘t have the right to vote.

Rove was talking to the Republican lawyers association, many members of which specialize in “voter fraud,” and may very well be preparing to challenge every close race and file spurious complaints to Alberto Gonzales’ Justice Department.

And even if they didn’t, be prepared to hear all of our complaints about election stealing yelled back at us if they lose. They are not afraid to take somebody elses talking point and use it to their advantage. It’s one of the things they do best and because a lot of people don’t pay close attention it will sound perfectly reasonable to them that the Democrats stole the election.

Just something to think about as we look to the morning after election day.

One other thing Rove said during that talk before the GOP lawyers:

Well, I learned all I needed to know about election integrity from the college Republicans.

I don’t doubt it for a moment.

*note: the excerpt of my original post has been altered a little bit to include more of Karl Rove’s comments.

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