Month: October 2006

I Know You Are But What Am I

by digby

I just heard two wingnut congressmen on Hardball advance the new GOP talking points and they are doozies:

“The issue is not Denny Hastert. The only issue now is what did the Democratic leadership know and when did they know it? Nancy Pelosi and Rahm Emmanuel need to go under oath before the ethics committee and clear their names.”

It’s such a wild Hail Mary that you almost have to admire it.

Here’s more on this:

House Republicans sought to put Democrats on the defense over the Foley House page scandal Friday, asking House Minority leader Nancy Pelosi, D-California, Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Illinois, to appear before the House Ethics Committee investigating the matter.

Vice Chairman of the Republican Conference Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Georgia, along with several of his GOP colleagues, said the page scandal “should not be a partisan issue,” in a letter to the top Democrats.

“Just as it must be determined whether any Republican Members or political operatives were aware of and attempted to conceal Mr. Foley’s activities, it must also be determined whether any Democrat Members or political operatives were aware of, and attempted to conceal these same activities,” Kingston wrote in the letter.

(This reminds me of a post I did a long time ago called “Projection Politics.”)

I’m listening to Chris Cannon on CNN now try to explain why he said that the “kids are precocious.” As he digs himself ever deeper with this “hoax” excuse, he seems to be saying that kids “know more today” and that parents should help them understand what their boundries are. I love Republican moralists, don’t you? The precocious kids are the ones who should be taught to draw the line. What more can you do?

Meanwhile, Cannon is hedging on Hastert — it’s “highly premature” to suggest that he should resign. Oh my.

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Accidental Truth

by digby

“If they throw Denny Hastert off the sled to slow down the wolves, it won’t be long before you’ll be crying, ‘Hey, you’ve got to throw somebody else over because they knew about it too,'” Baker said.

Out of the mouths of poohbahs. Just how many of these guys knew about it, Jim?

Maybe we could save some time here if all the members of the GOP who knew that a congressman was preying on teenage boys and covered it up just took responsibility for their massive error in judgment and resigned. I have little doubt that would mean the Democrats would have a majority before the first vote was counted — but maybe it would be better for them to take the high road after rolling around in the gutter like this.

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Wingnut Kumbaaya

by digby

Following up on this Beinert nonsense to which Ezra and Atrios link today, may I just point out that while the right is outraged about a German opera company omitting a scene offensive to Muslims, they don’t seem to be in the least bit concerned about a similar issue quite a bit closer to home:

American Family Association Chairman Donald E. Wildmon says NBC will not air the scene showing Madonna being crucified in the upcoming November special.

“NBC does not want a fight with AFA and the Christian community,” said Wildmon. “NBC may wiggle and wobble, but in the final analysis, they will not show that scene. We expect a public announcement from NBC canceling the scene within two weeks.”

According to New York Daily News, the NBC network is retreating from an earlier announcement of its plan to air a two-hour concert special featuring Madonna hanging on a cross wearing a fake crown of thorns.

NBC Entertainment chief Kevin Reilly had said earlier Madonna considered the scene mocking the crucifixion of Christ the highlight of her show. “We (NBC) viewed it and didn’t see it as being inappropriate.”

Beinert says:

Many liberals seem unable to conceive of a struggle in which the Republican right is not an enemy but an ally. But there are such struggles, and, without today’s activist liberals, they will be harder to win. Free speech is under threat, and Idomeneo should be the last straw.

No, we are able to concieve of a struggle in which the Republican right is an ally, but we’re not morons and know exactly what these people are about and it isn’t free speech. That’s hilarious.

Their willingness to support similar repression in their own backyard proves that this sturm und drang over the Duetsche oper is plain old wingnut anti-muslim bigotry. As Ezra puts it: “They’re doing it because it furthers their other political ends.” (And he’s right in saying that to join this particular free speech crusade is to also advance a foreign policy goal that’s extremely dangerous.)

But were it simply a matter of principle as they say it is, if they were to condemn NBC (if they do choose to cut the scene) — or dozens of other instances of corporate repression of speech deemed offensive to Christians because of pressure from the Christian right — perhaps I’d be more inclined to link hands and welcome them as members of the ACLU. Until then, I tend to think that a coalition of right and left to defend free speech is going to be defined as forcing Europeans to engage in inflammatory speech against Muslims even if they don’t want to. Maybe we could start closer to home with a project to protect free speech from Donald Wildman and James Dobson, build up some wins, and then work our way toward free speech repression in foreign countries after that. I’m ready if they are.

Update: I’m reminded in the comments of the uproar over the play “My Name Is Rachel Corrie” last year in which the right wingers took the other side:

The play opened last year in London to rave reviews and sold out audiences. It was scheduled to come to New York and open tonight at the celebrated off-Broadway New York Theatre Workshop.

But there will be no opening night.

In late February, the theater announced it was indefinitely postponing production of the play due to the current political climate.

The theater’s artistic director James Nicola told the Guardian of London: “In our pre-production planning and our talking around and listening in our communities in New York, what we heard was that after Ariel Sharon’s illness and the election of Hamas, we had a very edgy situation.” Nicola went on to say, “We found that our plan to present a work of art would be seen as us taking a stand in a political conflict, that we didn’t want to take.”

But the theater has been accused of political censorship. The co-creator of the play, Alan Rickman responded by saying, “This is censorship born out of fear” and that the theater had effectively canceled the play.

I’m sure Peter Beinert will be shocked to learn that free speech advocates, Little Green Footballs, didn’t step up to protest this kind of political pressure. After all, he may not know that Rachel Corrie is called “pancake girl” by the LGFers and any play that might show her in a good light would be considered treason.

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Bad Teens or Bad Adults?
by poputonian
From today’s NYT:

Evangelicals Fear the Loss of Their Teenagers

Genuine alarm can be heard from Christian teenagers and youth pastors, who say they cannot compete against a pervasive culture of cynicism about religion, and the casual “hooking up” approach to sex so pervasive on MTV, on Web sites for teenagers and in hip-hop, rap and rock music. Divorced parents and dysfunctional families also lead some teenagers to avoid church entirely or to drift away.
…
The board of the National Association of Evangelicals, an umbrella group representing 60 denominations and dozens of ministries, passed a resolution this year deploring “the epidemic of young people leaving the evangelical church.”

Among the leaders speaking at the meetings are Ted Haggard, president of the evangelical association; the Rev. Jerry Falwell; and nationally known preachers like Jack Hayford and Tommy Barnett.

They passed a freakin’ resolution?
John Adams speaking of the Clergy in 1765:

… they even persuaded mankind to believe, faithfully and undoubtingly, that God Almighty had entrusted them with the keys of heaven, whose gates they might open and close at pleasure; with a power of dispensation over all the rules and obligations of morality; with authority to license all sorts of sins and crimes; with a power of deposing princes and absolving subjects from allegiance; with a power of procuring or withholding the rain of heaven and the beams of the sun; with the management of earthquakes, pestilence, and famine; nay, with the mysterious, awful, incomprehensible power of creating out of bread and wine the flesh and blood of God himself. All these opinions they were enabled to spread and rivet among the people by reducing their minds to a state of sordid ignorance and staring timidity, and by infusing into them a religious horror of letters and knowledge. Thus was human nature chained fast for ages in a cruel, shameful, and deplorable servitude to him, and his subordinate tyrants, who, it was foretold, would exalt himself above all that was called God, and that was worshipped.

Degenerate Politics

by digby

I think one of the things that is most depressing about these Foley revelations and cover up is that Bush was able to force through that stomach churning torture legislation before it broke. I doubt that he could have done it in the political environment this week. Too bad about the constitution. So much for those unalienable rights. But it’s all of a piece, isn’t it?

This is all illustrative of a depraved, degenerate, exorbitantly hypocritical Republican culture, led by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Matt Drudge, that excused Abu Ghraib as blowing off steam and who today are pushing the idea that one of the boys who exchanged IMs with Foley was playing a “prank” on the congressman and it was all in good fun.

These are people who sell t-shirts for “Club Gitmo” and who deride the victims of Katrina. They call Native Americans, “monkeys” and “troglodytes.” Limbaugh, Coulter, Savage, Beck, O’Reilly etc appeal to the indecent, immoral, hypocritical, cruel and ultimately, cowardly side of human nature. This is their leader:

From: “Devil May Care” by Tucker Carlson, Talk Magazine, September 1999, p. 106

“Bush’s brand of forthright tough-guy populism can be appealing, and it has played well in Texas. Yet occasionally there are flashes of meanness visible beneath it.

While driving back from the speech later that day, Bush mentions Karla Faye Tucker, a double murderer who was executed in Texas last year. In the weeks before the execution, Bush says, Bianca Jagger and a number of other protesters came to Austin to demand clemency for Tucker. ‘Did you meet with any of them?’ I ask.

Bush whips around and stares at me. ‘No, I didn’t meet with any of them,’ he snaps, as though I’ve just asked the dumbest, most offensive question ever posed. ‘I didn’t meet with Larry King either when he came down for it. I watched his interview with [Tucker], though. He asked her real difficult questions, like ‘What would you say to Governor Bush?’ ‘What was her answer?’ I wonder.

‘Please,’ Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, ‘don’t kill me.’

I must look shocked — ridiculing the pleas of a condemned prisoner who has since been executed seems odd and cruel, even for someone as militantly anticrime as Bush — because he immediately stops smirking.

‘It’s tough stuff,’ Bush says, suddenly somber, ‘but my job is to enforce the law.’ As it turns out, the Larry King-Karla Faye Tucker exchange Bush recounted never took place, at least not on television. During her interview with King, however, Tucker did imply that Bush was succumbing to election-year pressure from pro-death penalty voters. Apparently Bush never forgot it. He has a long memory for slights.”

They always seem to have an excuse for breaking civilized taboos against brutality and cruelty and they appear to revel in ritual humiliation of those weaker than themselves. (Check out the look on George Allen’s face when he calls that kid a “macaca.”) They run their campaigns saying they are the party of personal responsibility and yet never, ever take any responsibility themselves — from the horrible decisions that have us bogged down in a quagmire in Iraq to allowing a predator to hang around the congressional pages because they didn’t want to lose a seat. Their great religious leaders sound like second rate political hacks spinning their conservative patrons’ deviant behavior as no big deal. When the chips are down, they are cowards — blaming, hiding, running.

It is long past time that liberals stopped being intimidated by these people and started telling the real story. These people who lecture Democrats for their alleged moral relativism simply have no morals at all.

Update: Here’s Holy Joe Tortureman claiming it’s “partisan” to request Hastert’s resignation. As I said last night, it’s lucky for the Republicans that Foley wasn’t having a consensual relationship with an adult woman or Lieberman would be angrily condemning Hastert for failing to protect the delicate ears of Connecticut’s children. Stalking schoolboys, on the other hand, not so much.

By contrast, Barbara Boxer speaks like a normal human being on the matter:

I can hardly believe my eyes and ears as I watch excuse after excuse over a set of e-mails that any parent would immediately know is not only inappropriate but a prelude to a predator’s first steps — winning the trust of a young person before taking full advantage of that trust.

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Angels Of Mercy

by digby

Just in case you haven’t had your daily dose of shocked, stunned, disbelief at something that is going on in Iraq, check out this story from CBS on conditions in Baghdad:

An assembly line of rotting corpses lined up for burial at Sandy Desert Cemetery is what civil war in Iraq looks like close up.

The bodies are only a fraction of the unidentified bodies sent from Baghdad every few days for mass burial in the southern Shiite city of Kerbala, CBS News chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan reports.

They come from the main morgue that’s overflowing, relatives too terrified to claim their dead because most are from Iraq’s Sunni minority, murdered by Shiite death squads.

And the morgue itself is believed to be controlled by the same Shiite militia blamed for many of the killings: the Mahdi Army, founded and led by anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

The takeover began after the last election in December when Sadr’s political faction was given control of the Ministry of Health. The U.S. military has documented how Sadr’s Mahdi Army has turned morgues and hospitals into places where death squads operate freely.

The chilling details are spelled out in an intelligence report seen by CBS News. Among some of the details of the report are:

• Hospitals have become command and control centers for the Mahdi Army militia.
• Sunni patients are being murdered; some are dragged from their beds.
• The militia is keeping hostages inside some hospitals, where they are tortured and executed.
• They’re using ambulances to transport hostages and illegal weapons, and even to help their fighters escape from U.S. forces.

Iraq’s Health Minister, Ali al-Shameri, is a devoted follower of Moqtada al-Sadr. He disputes the report’s claims.

I don’t know what to say. To listen to Condi Rice make happy talk today almost makes sick to my stomach.

I’ll leave it to Michael Ware of CNN: (via John Amato)

Blitzer: At this point, she comes in for a few hours, a day or whatever. Into Iraq, she immediately goes to the very secure green zone. Does she really see what’s happening inside Iraq? Does she leave there with a better appreciation of either the sectarian violence or the insurgency?

Ware: Of course not, Wolf. I mean you could just imagine the umbrella of security that encases someone like the security of state. But i mean going to from the airport which is its own self-contained little bubble. To the green zone which is the ultimate bubble here in Iraq, i mean, U.S. Officials and contractors and all manner of people will come into six to 12 months in Iraq. But never leave the green zone. They don’t know even what it’s like to walk an Iraqi street. Certainly not without the shroud of heavily-armed American soldiers about them. They don’t know what it’s like to go to someone’s home and sit and talk with them. To shop in the markets. To have blackouts. To not have water. To have the cure for benzene. Secretary Rice is so far from that reality that she couldn’t possibly hope to understand it. Certainly not from fleeting visits to an artificial bubble like the green zone, Wolf?

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Register To Vote Today!

by digby

Matt Stoller sez:

If you haven’t registered to vote and you live Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, or Washington, do it today. The deadlines for those states fall between October 7 – October 11, which is early next week. Voter registration is no longer hard. I did it a few days ago (change of address) through this site, which produced a nice slick PDF which I mailed in. The whole process took me fifteen minutes.

Register here

As a bonus, since I did it through that site I’m now counted as an ‘Internet Freedom Voter’, or a voter who cares about net neutrality.

If you need deadlines for other states, go to this post.

Update: I missed Florida, New Mexico, Hawaii, Pennsylvania, New York, and Virginia. Ack.

Here’s more on voter registration from the DSCC

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Wag The Tongues

by digby

Tony Snow had a bad morning. He was very upset at the suggestion that the white house might have some influence on the page predator scandal because the congress is a co-equal branch of government and operates completely independently. That’s a first. For the last six years the House has been nothing more than a Bush rubber stamp and corrupt money machine. Suddenly the Bush administration has no juice, huh?

Joe Scarborough just asked one of the most important questions about this scandal. Why was Tom Reynolds involved in this issue in the first place? Tom Reynolds’ only job in all this was getting Republican congressmen elected. The mere fact that he’s in the middle of this indicates that they were covering this up.

Here’s what Hastert said in his ill-fated CNN interview earlier this week:

REPORTER: Congressman Reynolds put out a statement on Saturday saying that he told you in the spring. Do you think he’s lying?

HASTERT: No, I’m not saying. I just don’t recall him telling me that. If he would have told me that, he would have told me that in the context of maybe a half a dozen or a dozen other things. I don’t remember that.

REPORTER: Other allegations of improper e-mails?

HASTERT: No, just other things that might have affected campaigns.

Come on. This was always a campaign issue for the Republicans and that gets to the heart of their problem. They were more concerned about keeping their power than protecting the pages.

Chuck Todd just pointed out that this never would have happened if Tom Delay were still around. The inter-caucus fighting we are seeing between Boehner, Blunt et al is a result of a power vacuum and I think that’s true — Hastert himself was always just Delay’s hand-picked front man, installed by him and run by him. When Delay was ousted, the organization started to fall apart. He was the organization. And it’s quite clear that George W. Bush and Karl Rove don’t have the juice they used to have.

(On a side note, supposedly Tom Delay was calling around yesterday trying to find out if any of his staffers knew about Foley and they told him they didn’t because they were too busy dealing with his scandals.)

There are many moving parts to this scandal, but the one that’s driving decisions so far — from the original revelations months ago until today — is the election. Whether the GOP decides it’s better to stick with Hastert or throw him over the side will be decided purely on that basis until it’s over. In the meantime we are witnessing all kinds of jockeying for power among the ambitious Republican congressmen who are waiting to pounce.

Regardless of what Hastert says today, Scarborough says he is a dead man walking and I tend to agree. Ultimately, I think they are going to need a human sacrifice in a scandal like this and he’s the guy Tony Blankley chose to be the one last week.

Update: Hastert said absolutely nothing in his press conference that we haven’t heard before. The beat goes on.

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Outing The Pages

by tristero

There’s a huge…hullabaloo this morning over the outing of at least one page by the extreme right and the possible publication of the apparently gay Congressional aides named on The List obtained by David Corn. This should surprise no one.

The rightwing really senses imminent defeat and they will do literally anything they think they can get away with to prevent it. Hence, the release of the name of the page under the pretext that he was actually not a minor when the emails/ims were sent. In fact, that’s a deliberate lie, spread to sow confusion of the he-said-she-said variety. Not only do lies of this sort dislocate the truth to the liar’s advantage, they slow down legitimate investigations as the lies have to be researched and debunked. We’ve seen this strategy many times before from the right. In Rathergate, a lie about typewriter fonts turned out to be highly successful, buying the rightwing enough time to exploit other objections that were more plausible and decisively turn the topic away the important subject: Bush’s dereliction of duty, his drunkeness, and his cowardice.

In the Foley case, it clearly is the hope that by confusing and slowing down the story, evidence of Democratic complicity in the leaking of the story will eventually appear which will again enable Republicans to change the subject and accuse the Dems of vicious campaign dirty tricks (so far, Predatorgate seems to be entirely and stubbornly an intra-Republican scandal).

Also, it may seem paradoxical but the outing of the names and the accompanying lies actually is an attempt to suppress as much real information as possible. Knowing that the extreme right will post your name and your picture and then lie about you all over the internets is a strong incentive to shut up if you were the victim of sexual harassment by Republicans. I suspect their tactic will be extremely effective.

One final point: It’s not about the sex, and especially it’s not about gay sex, sayeth many a commentator. Riiiiiight. Maybe it’s not supposed to be about those things, but the right, at least, is treating it like it is. Hence the dangerously false bullshit about gay men being more prone to pedophilia than straight men. Hence the hypocritical moralizing and also the intensity of the entire scandal. And it surely is doubtful whether the word “disgusting” would surface so often in discussions over hetero cyber-sex between a 16 year-old girl and a middle-aged congressman.

The fact is that this is a sex scandal involving a rightwing political movement which has gone out of its way to claim a God-given moral superiority when it comes to matters of the flesh (and everything else). Their sexual hypocrisy is fully exposed here – covering up for a pedophile while posing with children to pretend they care about their welfare.

The fact is that this is a uniquely gay sex scandal involving a rightwing political movement which has gone far out of its way to express revulsion for same-sex relationships in the most explicit terms possible, often by lengthy descriptions of sexual acts whose obscene content gets past the FCC only through the substituion of a pseudo-medical vocabulary for the banned vernacular terms.

By going so far as to equate same-sex intimacy with bestiality thereby making it impossible for them to perceive homosexuality as anything but an unacceptable perversion, the delusional rightwing failed, and still fail, to understand that homosexual attraction and sexual behavior is simply normal human behavior. They apparently never realized that they were inviting a sex scandal like the Foley mess which includes homosexual acts that would make it all but impossible for homophobic christianist leaders to stand aside and defer strategically to the corporatists and imperialists.

Like Digby, I feel that as sickening as it is to learn all the ways that Republicans covered up for Foley, and as reprehensible as all sexual exploitation of minors by adults is by Foley or anyone else, the truly outrageous national scandals perpetrated by the modern American rightwing are the rape of the US Constitution; the disgraceful neglect of the citizenry epitomized by 9/11 and Katrina; and perhaps most dramatically tragic, the unspeakable stupidity and madness of the war in Iraq and the utter failure of the Afghanistan war.

[Edited slightly after original post, mostly in the final paragraph.]

Who’s Responsible For the $20 Million “Victory” Celebration?

by tristero

You’ve probably heard about the $20 million snuck into the fine print of some bill earmarked to celebrate the great military victories of the US in Iraq and Afghanistan. But I’ll bet you don’t know who’s responsible for the legislation. Take a guess.

O, ye cynics! You think it was $20 million earmarked for Republican propaganda. Seriously, where has the idealism in America fled to? Here’s the real story behind the $20 million. It starts over 30 years ago:

“People came home from Vietnam and had to sneak back in and they were spit upon,” said Don Stewart, communications director for [the office of Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican whip]. For Iraq and Afghanistan, he said, Mr. McConnell felt the troops should be able to “attend ceremonies, get awards.”

That’s right. Liberals opposed to the Vietnam War, who forced soldiers to slink home as objects of scorn, were responsible for the $20 million waste of taxpayers money on non-existent victory celebrations. Liberals, not small-government conservatives.

And check out McConnell’s truly compassionate conservatism. The awards and ceremonies are for the soldiers whether or not there is an actual victory of some sort in Iraq or Afghanistan. Forgive me, I’m gonna weep, It’s just like how they used to give out trophies to my daughter’s 4th grade soccer team, regardless of whether they won, but to bolster their self-esteem. it’s all sooooo touching.

[Note to rightwingers and others with cognitive impairments: The vast majority of the rank and file in the military are decent human beings who have been lied to by George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, but who nevertheless have served honorably and bravely. They deserve our respect and support.

Truly, the best way we can show them that respect is not with “victory” celebrations which they know are utterly bogus, having seen Iraq and Afghanistan for themselves. We show them contempt when we treat them like little children and manufacture celebrations that cheer for what they themselves know are not real victories.

We show the mean and women of the military the greatest respect by insisting that the truth of these obscene, pointless wars get told. We honor these soldiers by removing the scoundrels responsible for these ghastly disasters from power at the earliest opportunity and by seeing whether legal charges can be brought against all those responsible for the serial catastrophes and the exploitation of the American armed forces for spectacular pecuniary gain.]