Month: October 2006

Go Team God!

by digby

Now that’s what I’m talking about …

Weighing in on Connecticut’s hotly contested congressional races, a group of religious activists have unveiled a giant billboard off busy Interstate 95 that accuses four candidates of voting to allow torture.

The billboard in Stratford names Democratic U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman and Republican Reps. Christopher Shays, Rob Simmons and Nancy Johnson as supporters of the Military Commissions Act of 2006.

The legislation, which President Bush was expected to sign into law Tuesday, allows military commissions to prosecute suspected terrorists and spells out violations of the Geneva Conventions.

Organizers say about 100,000 commuters pass the billboard in Stratford each day. The billboard – 14 feet high and 48 feet wide – was sponsored by Reclaiming the Prophetic Voice, which describes itself as a statewide interfaith network of religious leaders created in 2002.

The legislation would prohibit war crimes and define atrocities such as rape and torture but would otherwise allow the president to interpret the Geneva Conventions, the treaty that sets standards for the treatment of war prisoners.

“This is a shameful law,” organizer Rev. Kathleen McTigue said Monday. “It grants extraordinary power to the president to interpret the Geneva Conventions, including which methods of interrogation will be considered torture.”

And what about Connecticut’s most awesomely religious and moral candidate?

“This is just another example of the kind of mudslinging partisanship that Joe Lieberman wants to remove from our debates about how best to keep our nation safe,” said Lieberman spokeswoman Tammy Sun. “The fact is, Joe Lieberman does not support torture. He joined 11 other Democrats as well as Sen. John McCain – who is himself a prisoner of war – in voting to uphold the Geneva Convention.”

And that is just another example of the kind of slick, Rovian PR spin that Democrats across the country want to remove from our debates about right and wrong. The fact is, Joe Lieberman joined 11 other Democrats and John McCain — who is himself a man with no principles — in voting for a law that allows the president to unilaterally decide what constitutes torture, gives him the power to imprison people (including American citizens) indefinitely, try them in a kangaroo court based on heresay and coerced evidence and then sentence them to death with no right to appeal.

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Go Team Jesus

by digby

Kevin highlights a post by Rebecca Sinderbrand on the Showdown ’08 Blog in which she posits that evangelicals will look at the Kuo book like this:

…Kuo’s story — if it’s believed at all — wouldn’t affect the way voters like my mom feel about the president. And the White House-based account definitely wouldn’t have an impact on how they view the GOP-controlled Congress, which doesn’t make much of an appearance in the book. So what sorts of questions does it raise in their minds? How about: Why did this come out three weeks before the election? Who’s plugging this story? And: is there any reason to trust them?

Here’s your answers: This story — which people they trust dismiss out of hand — comes by way of a turncoat. Even if it is true, the words of some nameless White House aides, and a couple of missing numbers on a spreadsheet, aren’t enough for to make them question long-standing frindships. Meanwhile: the fact that these charges are emerging in mid-October makes them feel manipulated. And sure, that kind of manipulation makes them angry — but not at the Republican party.

…I think the only possible ballot-box impact in the short term, if any, could be a rare bit of good news for Republican congressional leadership: Even the suspicion of an “October surprise” at work might be enough motivate some evangelicals who might otherwise have stayed home to turn out for the GOP.

I have no special knowledge of evangelicals, but I suspect she is correct. Their identification with the Republican party seems to me to be tribal ID and religion as politics. (I sure haven’t seen many cases where religion trumps politics anyway.)

Frankly, I have no choice but to also doubt their sincerity as Christians — and so, by the way, does David Kuo:

Part of the problem, he says, was indifference from “the base,” the religious right. He took 60 Minutes to a convention of evangelical groups – his old stomping ground – and walked around the display booths, looking for any reference to the poor.

“You’ve got homosexuality in your kid’s school, and you’ve got human cloning, and partial birth abortion and divorce and stem cell,” Kuo remarked. “Not a mention of the poor.”

“This message that has been sent out to Christians for a long time now: that Jesus came primarily for a political agenda, and recently primarily a right-wing political agenda – as if this culture war is a war for God. And it’s not a war for God, it’s a war for politics. And that’s a huge difference,” says Kuo.

I’m pretty sure they like it that way. It’s competitive, it’s fun — and it has nothing to do with religion. Democrats who try to appeal to them are chumps. They don’t care about Jesus (you’ll recall he was very, very big on helping the poor.*) They care about beating Democrats.

I continue to believe they will vote in their usual numbers this election. If we win it will be because the independents will vote for us and the non-evangelical Republicans will stay home.

*as are most decent Christians. The Christian Right, however, is not in the least bit interested in poor people.

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Beautiful Minds

by digby

Following up on tristero’s post below discussing this NY Times op-ed, I have to take exception to the vague implication that the Republicans failed to read books about mid-east regional issues, Muslim history or arab culture. They did.

They read books by the neocon nutball Laurie Mylroie:

Historians will be debating that question for years, but an important part of the reason has to do with someone you may well have never heard of: Laurie Mylroie. Mylroie has an impressive array of credentials that certify her as an expert on the Middle East, national security, and, above all, Iraq. She has held faculty positions at Harvard and the U.S. Naval War College and worked at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, as well as serving as an advisor on Iraq to the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign. During the 1980s, Mylroie was an apologist for Saddam’s regime, but reversed her position upon his invasion of Kuwait in 1990, and, with the zeal of the academic spurned, became rabidly anti-Saddam. In the run up to the first Gulf War, Mylroie with New York Times reporter Judith Miller wrote Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf, a well-reviewed bestseller translated into more than a dozen languages.

Until this point, there was nothing controversial about Mylroie’s career. This would change with the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, the first act of international terrorism within the United States, which would launch Mylroie on a quixotic quest to prove that Saddam’s regime was the most important source of terrorism directed against this country. She laid out her case in Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein’s Unfinished War Against America, a book published by AEI in 2000 which makes it clear that Mylroie and the neocon hawks worked hand in glove to push her theory that Iraq was behind the ’93 Trade Center bombing. Its acknowledgements fulsomely thanked John Bolton and the staff of AEI for their assistance, while Richard Perle glowingly blurbed the book as “splendid and wholly convincing.” Lewis “Scooter” Libby, now Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, is thanked for his “generous and timely assistance.” And it appears that Paul Wolfowitz himself was instrumental in the genesis of Study of Revenge: His then-wife is credited with having “fundamentally shaped the book,” while of Wolfowitz, she says: “At critical times, he provided crucial support for a project that is inherently difficult.”

None of which was out of the ordinary, except for this: Mylroie became enamored of her theory that Saddam was the mastermind of a vast anti-U.S. terrorist conspiracy in the face of virtually all evidence and expert opinion to the contrary. In what amounts to the discovery of a unified field theory of terrorism, Mylroie believes that Saddam was not only behind the ’93 Trade Center attack, but also every anti-American terrorist incident of the past decade, from the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania to the leveling of the federal building in Oklahoma City to September 11 itself. She is, in short, a crackpot, which would not be significant if she were merely advising say, Lyndon LaRouche. But her neocon friends who went on to run the war in Iraq believed her theories, bringing her on as a consultant at the Pentagon, and they seem to continue to entertain her eccentric belief that Saddam is the fount of the entire shadow war against America

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Richard Clarke wrote in his book “Against All Enemies”:

Finally, Wolfowitz turned to me. “You give bin Laden too much credit. He could not do all these things like the 1993 attack on New York, not without a state sponsor. Just because FBI and CIA have failed to find the linkages does not mean they don’t exist.”

I could hardly believe it, but Wolfowitz was actually spouting the totally discredited Laurie Mylroie theory that Iraq was behind the 1993 truck bomb at the World Trade Center, a theory that had been investigated for years and found to be totally untrue.

Mylroie wasn’t the only one. They also read books by other crackpots:

The book in question is called The Arab Mind, and is by Raphael Patai, a cultural anthropologist who taught at several US universities, including Columbia and Princeton.

I must admit that, despite having spent some years studying Arabic language and culture, I had not heard of this alleged masterpiece until last week, when the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh mentioned it in an article for New Yorker magazine.

Hersh was discussing the chain of command that led US troops to torture Iraqi prisoners. Referring specifically to the sexual nature of some of this abuse, he wrote: “The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq.

“One book that was frequently cited was The Arab Mind … the book includes a 25-page chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression.”

Hersh continued: “The Patai book, an academic told me, was ‘the bible of the neocons on Arab behaviour’. In their discussions, he said, two themes emerged – ‘one, that Arabs only understand force, and two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation’.”

Last week, my own further enquiries about the book revealed something even more alarming. Not only is it the bible of neocon headbangers, but it is also the bible on Arab behaviour for the US military.

According to one professor at a US military college, The Arab Mind is “probably the single most popular and widely read book on the Arabs in the US military”. It is even used as a textbook for officers at the JFK special warfare school in Fort Bragg.

[…]

In contrast, opinions of Patai’s book among Middle East experts at US universities are almost universally scathing. “The best use for this volume, if any, is as a doorstop,” one commented. “The book is old, and a thoroughly discredited form of scholarship,” said another.

None of the academics I contacted thought the book suitable for serious study, although Georgetown University once invited students to analyse it as “an example of bad, biased social science”.

There is a lot wrong with The Arab Mind apart from its racism: the title, for a start. Although the Arab countries certainly have their distinctive characteristics, the idea that 200 million people, from Morocco to the Gulf, living in rural villages, urban metropolises and (very rarely these days) desert tents, think with some sort of single, collective mind is utterly ridiculous.

So it really isn’t quite fair to say the Republicans and the braintrusts of Donald Rumsfeld’s military didn’t educate themsleves about arab culture or politics. They did — by consulting looney, tin-foil conspiracy theorists and discredited comic-book racist tracts. (They also watched “The Sands of Iwo Jima” at least twice.)

Remember, they don’t believe they have to be part of the reality-based community. That’s for silly losers like us — and those 650,000 dead Iraqis.

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A Day Which Will Live In Infamy

by digby

Today President Bush took the constitution and tore it into little pieces.

President Bush signed legislation Tuesday authorizing tough interrogation of terror suspects and smoothing the way for trials before military commissions, calling it a “vital tool” in the war against terrorism.

Bush’s plan for treatment of the terror suspects became law just six weeks after he acknowledged that the CIA had been secretly interrogating suspected terrorists overseas and pressed Congress to quickly give authority to try them in military commissions.

[…]

The American Civil Liberties Union said the new law is “one of the worst civil liberties measures ever enacted in American history.”

“The president can now, with the approval of Congress, indefinitely hold people without charge, take away protections against horrific abuse, put people on trial based on hearsay evidence, authorize trials that can sentence people to death based on testimony literally beaten out of witnesses, and slam shut the courthouse door for habeas petitions,” said ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero.

“Nothing could be further from the American values we all hold in our hearts than the Military Commissions Act,” he said.

Yet, here is the very next sentence in that AP report:

The swift implementation of the law is a rare bit of good news for Bush as casualties mount in Iraq in daily violence.

I assume that was written without irony.

I don’t ever want to hear anyone on the right talk about moral values again. They are concepts which they clearly do not understand. And if they dare to bring up the Bible or Jesus Christ after this I will laugh in their faces, knowing that by their own standards they are going straight to hell for what they’ve done.

Remember these faces:

Where’s St. John McCain? How odd that he isn’t there to enjoy the poisonous fruits of his labor.

Update: Jack Balkin talks about the new law, here.

Scandalous Ignorance

by tristero

Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, when the sound of the military airplanes patrolling the skies of Manhattan were still traumatizing everyone, I picked up some books on bin Laden, the Middle East, and Islam. I also peppered with questions the few people I knew back then who had some expertise on the subjects. In fact, lots of people I knew were doing the same thing; we were passing around books, articles, and clippings, emailing links to each other.

This strikes me as totally unremarkable behavior. We were scared stiff, and the first thing we wanted to know – other than that the attacks had stopped for now – was what the hell was going on.

But even today, people involved in counterterrorism policy in the United States still don’t know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite.

This is scandalous, as in worse-than-covering-up-for-Mark-Foley scandalous. Why? Well let one of the ignorant buffoons explain it to you:

Take Representative Terry Everett, a seven-term Alabama Republican who is vice chairman of the House intelligence subcommittee on technical and tactical intelligence.

“Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?” I asked him a few weeks ago.

Mr. Everett responded with a low chuckle. He thought for a moment: “One’s in one location, another’s in another location. No, to be honest with you, I don’t know. I thought it was differences in their religion, different families or something.”

To his credit, he asked me to explain the differences. I told him briefly about the schism that developed after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, and how Iraq and Iran are majority Shiite nations while the rest of the Muslim world is mostly Sunni. “Now that you’ve explained it to me,” he replied, “what occurs to me is that it makes what we’re doing over there extremely difficult, not only in Iraq but that whole area.”

Oh, dear God. I’m living in a Mel Brooks movie:

Roger De Bris: Did you know, I never knew that the Third Reich meant Germany. I mean it’s just drenched with historical goodies like that…

Are There No Real Men

by digby

…like Christopher Hitchens left?

He’s very upset. It seems the British have always been a bunch of mincing cowards and now the US is following in its footsteps along with the rest of the chickenshit Europeans.

T. CARLSON: … will there be any desire at all on the part of anybody in charge of anything in Great Britain to keep British troops in Iraq?

HITCHENS: No.

T. CARLSON: Won‘t the pull-out be immediate at that point?

HITCHENS: It will be, as you say, an abandoned position politically.

And the only question is how to avoid it making—how to avoid making it look—I‘m sorry to keep stumbling—how to avoid making it looks as if it was a scuttle.

T. CARLSON: Right.

HITCHENS: That‘s presumably why this—why Mr. Dannat, General Dannat backpedaled as he did.

Then of course, it would be a phased withdrawal. But they always say that. That used to be, in wartime parlance, when the British army had had to run away from somewhere, such as Dunkirk or—or Terbrook (ph), they would always say it was a strategic withdrawal to prepared positions. That‘s simply military parlance for abandoning an operation.

T. CARLSON: Right. Of course. But this is—I mean, this is inevitable, is it not? It‘s going to happen? The United States must be factoring in the inevitability of this. This is really news from nowhere, isn‘t it? I mean, we‘re going to be alone in Iraq sooner rather than later?

HITCHENS: No. I think it‘s been noticed that a number of those who have been very strong in support for President Bush were leaving office or about to do so.

Surely, that‘s Mr. Berlusconi, Mr. Bush. The change in power in Japan doesn‘t seem to have had quite that effect, though the political support will be stronger than the presence of Japanese forces in Iraq.

Yes, look, you‘re generally right. Those who want to leave Iraq to its own devices and who always did want that are much nearer to being able to claim a victory than they have been for a while. And I hope it makes them very happy.

T. CARLSON: What is—just sum up for us. What is the prospects of the idea now floating around on the Democratic side, maybe on the Republican, as well, of partitioning that country into three separate countries or an alliance, a federation of three countries? Is that going to happen? Is that a wise idea?

HITCHENS: Do I have a chance to make one more point before I answer that? I don‘t want to seem top be dodging it.

T. CARLSON: Yes.

HITCHENS: You‘ll notice that the general also says that he‘s afraid of the army cracking under the strain, which is an argument you hear here, as well.

T. CARLSON: Right.

HITCHENS: What he seems to be doing is positioning himself to be the sort of Colin Powell of the British army. Remember, that was always the view of Colin Powell when he was chairman of the joint chiefs, that the U.S. Army was too fragile to be tested in actual combat, as particularly in Bosnia, if you remember, where he had to be challenged by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: “So why do we have this wonderful big, shiny army if we never want to use it?”

That‘s the—the line now taken by military men is, “It really inconveniences us if we have to use our troops in warfare.” Nobody says, look, how are we going to…

T. CARLSON: Well, I think…

HITCHENS: How are we going to learn—how are we going to learn how to fight these people in rogue states and failed states if we don‘t—which are bad conditions, if we don‘t try?

T. CARLSON: Yes, but I think—the question—you don‘t want—if you‘re in the position of—if it is, you know, your job to send people off to go die, you want to make certain that their deaths are in the service of something worth attaining, that it‘s, you know, a wise use of their lives, basically.

HITCHENS: That‘s not—that‘s not—that is a decision not to be taken by generals, however. I‘m a voter. I can make that decision, and I‘m asked to.

The extraordinary thing is that the British have lost a very, very small number of people in Iraq and have gained a great deal of experience, it might be said, and have also done rather well in the Shia areas of the south…

T. CARLSON: Right.

HITCHENS: … which would undoubtedly trump—trounce your other question, would undoubtedly give a large new area of responsibility to the United States if they were to pull out.

So all these are very serious points. Still, there is always something odd to me in the existence of a professional military class that, in effect, is combat adverse, that doesn‘t think anything is worth fighting for.

Colin Powell, if you remember, didn‘t want to even send an aircraft carrier to Kuwait on the warning of Saddam Hussein‘s invasion, less we get ourselves mussed up. I just think it‘s always worth noticing that about the conservative vote here (ph) …

T. CARLSON: It is worth noticing. And you can interpret it a couple of different ways. It‘s interesting. Anyway, Chris…

HITCHENS: If we‘re going to pay—if we‘re going to pay for this huge military establishment, then I think…

T. CARLSON: Might as well use it.

HITCHENS: Yes. Well, we…

T. CARLSON: We‘ve got all these nuclear weapons, you know, sort of languishing in silos. Let‘s use one.

HITCHENS: Well, those are—those really are—those really are useless to us, of course.

T. CARLSON: I hope so.

HITCHENS: Good point.

Now what was your last question again? I don‘t have time for it.

T. CARLSON: As I always do talking to you, I got caught up in it and we‘re out of time.

HITCHENS: And I talked myself out of a job yet again. So all right.

But you let me do it.

T. CARLSON: Thank you. Christopher Hitchens, I appreciate it.

HITCHENS: You too.

Petulant Hitch is feeling very let down by the warriors these days. He voted for them to die and they are simply not cooperating. (Think of all the experience they’re missing out on!)

How long before he looks at the suicide bombers of Al Qaeda and sees the kind of courage, committment and fortitude the west has clearly lost? I’d say it’s a matter of weeks.

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Giving Them A Zero

by digby

Reason #678 why a modern democracy should have a secular government. Here’s an excerpt from David Kuo’s book:

While the conferences were being birthed, we were also figuring out what to do with the Compassion Capital Fund. Promised originally at $200 million per year then cut in early 2001 to $100 million, and then again to $30 million, it was only faith-based money we had to distribute [even though $8 billion of new money had originally been promised].

Many of the grant-winning organizations that rose to the top of this process were politically friendly to the administration. Bishop Harold Ray of Redemptive Life Fellowship Church in West Palm Beach had been one of the most vocal black voices supporting the president during the 2000 election. His newly-created National Center for Faith-Based Initiatives somehow scored a 98 out of a possible 100. Pat Robertson’s overseas aid organization, Operation Blessing, scored a 95.67. Nueva Esperanza, an umbrella of other Hispanic ministries, headed by President Bush’s leading Hispanic ally, Luis Cortez, received a 95.33. The Institute for Youth Development, that works to send positive messages to youth, earned a 94.67. The Institute’s head was a former Robertson staffer. Even more bizarre, a new organization called “We Care America” received a 99.67 on its grant review. It was the second highest score. They called themselves a “network of networks” an “organizer of organizations”. They had a staff of three, all from the world of Washington politics, and all very Republican. They were on tap to receive more than $2.5 million.

All this information trickled in to our office when we requested updates on the Compassion Capital Fund. It took a while, but we finally got the list of recommended grantees. It was obvious that the ratings were a farce.

[A few years later,] my wife Kim and I were together with a group of friends and acquaintances. Someone mentioned that I used to work at the White House in the faith-based office. A woman piped up and said, “Really? Wow, I was on the peer-review panel for the first Compassion Capital Fund.” I asked her about how she liked it and she said it was fun. She talked about how the government employees gave them grant review instructions – look at everything objectively against a discreet list of requirements and score accordingly. “But,” she said with a giggle, “when I saw one of those non-Christian groups in the set I was reviewing, I just stopped looking at them and gave them a zero.”

At first I laughed. A funny joke. Not so much. She was proud and giggling and didn’t get that there was a problem with that. I asked if she knew of others who’d done the same. “Oh sure, a lot of us did.” She must have seen my surprise, “Was there a problem with that?”

I told her there was actually a huge problem with that. The programs were to be faith-neutral. Our goal was equal treatment for faith-based groups, not special treatment for them. This was a smart and accomplished Christian woman. She got it immediately. But what she did comported with her understanding of what the faith-initiative was supposed to do – help Christian groups – and with her faith. She wanted people to know Jesus.

Whether out of a cynical power grab, as it most certainly is with many of the preachers and all of the Republican politicians including Joe Lieberman, or whether out of a sincere desire for people to know Jesus, this is a recipe for disaster. Right now, they only have to content with atheistic malcontents like me who don’t appreciate my tax dollars going to religion at the expense of other programs. But it’s only a matter of time before it sets off infighting among the churches themselves.

And I hate to be nasty about this, but this woman he describes is not actually an innocent. She giggled about how clever she was for automatically giving the non-religious Christian groups a zero because she was among people whom she obviously assumed would approve of such behavior. When she saw that she was dealing with someone of integrity she backed off and pretended not to have realized that she was not being a good Christian or a responsible adult. It was not a simple misunderstanding.

This is not to say that only a rightwing Christian would do such a thing. It could be anyone who had a vested interest in the outcome — which is exactly why people like this woman should not have been making such decisions. But how can you say that committed religious people should not be involved in such things? You can’t even ask the question. The only way to deal with this is for religion not to be involved in such things.

Kuo’s message is actually very interesting in this regard. He’s seen the intersection of politics and Christianity up close and he came away believing that his religion was becoming tainted by politics:

“Christian Americans are at a critical juncture, and we have some hefty decisions to make regarding our personal and political values,” said Kuo. “During my tenure in the White House, I came to realize the extent to which religious organizations were being manipulated for political purposes and rewarded through financial shenanigans. The myriad ways this situation compromised the central tenets of Christianity was deeply and profoundly disturbing for me. What hangs in the balance is not only the integrity of our faith, but the stability and moral fiber of our nation, as well as the religious and political freedom upon which it stands.”

The deal was struck long ago. Churches are not expected to contribute to the public treasury nor is the public treasury supposed to subsidise churches. Not everything has to be part of politics and government. History (and current events) shows that countries are far more stable and democratic when they have religion live side-by-side with government rather than entwined with it.

Kuo’s book is about his religion being corrupted by politics. I am concerned about politics being corrupted by religion. I think we are both right. This country does better when the two spheres operate independently. As long as they aren’t wrapped up in one another there’s no reason we can’t all get along.

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Di-Vaaahning The Will Of The Fixer

by digby

Can we get one thing straight? The “leaking” of James Baker’s secret plan to end the war — which Baker himself is appearing all over television *not* talking about, is a political ploy to get wobbly Republicans to believe — again — that the “grown-ups” are riding to the rescue. Jesus, how obvious can they be?

I’m watching Lee Hamilton fall all over himself to say he is not going to be partisan I believe him. He’s a very nice,agreeable gentleman. But it’s just a little bit much when he asserts that James A. Baker III, the fucking Bush family fixer, is similarly objective. Please. James Baker is as cutthroat a partisan as ever lived.

Once you’ve sold out your elder reputation to the degree that you will lie, cheat and twist the facts without regard to any sense of fairness or decency to obtain an election victory for your boy, I think you’ve given up any claim to “statemanship” — at least until the cheating bastard is out of office.

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Taking Out The Trash

by digby

DemFromCT has an interesting post up this morning over at Daily Kos discussing the rise of hyper-partisanship. He quotes an interview with the authors of The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track,Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann:

Is the current Congress demonstrably more partisan than those in the past? Why does it matter?

MANN: Partisanship particularly increased after the 1994 elections and then the appearance of the first unified Republican government since the 1950s. Now it is tribal warfare. The consequences are deadly serious. Party and ideology routinely trump institutional interests and responsibilities. Regular order — the set of rules, norms and traditions designed to ensure a fair and transparent process — was the first casualty. The results: No serious deliberation. No meaningful oversight of the executive. A culture of corruption. And grievously flawed policy formulation and implementation.

It really can’t be overstated how Newt’s bare knuckle style of politics changed the way things worked in Washington. When it was combined with the big money media operations that finally came to fruition during that era — Limbaugh, FOX etc. — any old fashioned notions of political comity went out the window. And it was such a strong series of below the belt punches that it knocked the Democrats to the ground for nearly a decade. (It was providence that the Democratic president at the time was a skilled rope-a-dope fighter who could withstand a relentless rain of blows.)

The assault on the political system was so intense that they even pushed the nuclear button and impeached the president for trivial, political purposes. The president’s very successful governance and the Senate requirement for a supermajority were all that kept them from going through with it. In the aftermath of the 2000 election, with the use sophisticated media techniques and manipulation of the various levers of government under their control, they managed to seize control of the presidency despite a dubious outcome in a state run by the president’s own brother — and they got away with it. (They even got the press to repeat their snide mantra: “get over it.”)

Think about that. Within one two-year period, the Republicans tried to remove a legitimately elected and popular president from office on a purely partisan basis and then assumed the presidency through an unprecedented partisan Supreme Court decision after losing the popular vote.

We all watched that happen, many of us not realizing how extraordinary and how dangerously undemocratic the US political system had become. It was all “legitimate” after all. No laws were broken. Newt’s take-no-prisoners political style had become normal. But it was nothing compared to what was to come.

After taking office under the most questionable circumstances in history*, they proceeded to rule as if they had won in a landslide. Once 9/11 happened, he had the mandate he’d been pretending to have and the Republican congress docilely turned their power and responsibility over to the president as if he were a king. What little dissent had been tolerated (such as Jim Jeffords defecting) was completely quashed and Democrats’ only function in the government was to serve as a straw-man foil for the Republicans to run against.

DFC writes:

From … the Hastert policy of only considering bills acceptable to the “majority of the majority”, to Frist’s considering of the Nuclear Option of changing the rules about filibusters, the House and Senate have become a “my party before my Country” institution, and it started in 1994.

That “majority of the majority” is especially important when looking at this period of Republican rule. In one of the most cynical decisions of their reign (and there have been many) they consciously governed without any support from the opposition, even to the point of scuttling popular bipartisan legislation rather than allowing the opposition to participate in any meaningful way. There has never been a case of partisanship so severe in American history.

Throughout this period they successfully manipulated and co-opted the media in a thousand different ways. Their decades long project to mau-mau the press about its alleged liberal bias and the emergence of rightwing media served to obscure this story as it was unfolding. The leaders of the political media became ensconced in the new Republican political establishment and reflected their attitudes and biases.

Probably the starkest illustration of that was this famous comment about Bill Clinton by the dean of the Washington Press Corps:

“He came in here and he trashed the place,” says Washington Post columnist David Broder, “and it’s not his place.”

He was ostensibly speaking about the president having an affair but it is redolent of the common Republican view that after Ronald Reagan, the Republicans had a permanent lock on the presidency that was rudely foiled by this interloper. Republicans constantly mentioned that Clinton won with a 43% plurality and therefore, 57% of the nation had rejected him. Oliver North even said “he’s not my commander in chief,” during his unsuccessful race for the Senate. Senator Jesse Helms said [Bill Clinton] “better watch out if he comes down here [to North Carolina]. He’d better have a bodyguard.”

That was the least of it as any of you who are above the age of 30 or so well remember. There has rarely been a more vicious partisan environment than during the 1990’s. And the media, as frightened as anyone of this marauding hoard of political hatchetmen, naturally sidled up to the bullies as a way of protecting themselves. Hence, David Broder saying that it was Clinton who came to town and trashed the place when it was really Newt Gingrich and his wild revolutionaries who broke all the rules of civility and comity.

Here’s a little sample of how this worked:

Language: A Key Mechanism of Control

Newt Gingrich’s 1996 GOPAC memo

As you know, one of the key points in the GOPAC tapes is that “language matters.” In the video “We are a Majority,” Language is listed as a key mechanism of control used by a majority party, along with Agenda, Rules, Attitude and Learning. As the tapes have been used in training sessions across the country and mailed to candidates we have heard a plaintive plea: “I wish I could speak like Newt.”

[…]

Often we search hard for words to define our opponents. Sometimes we are hesitant to use contrast. Remember that creating a difference helps you. These are powerful words that can create a clear and easily understood contrast. Apply these to the opponent, their record, proposals and their party.

* abuse of power
* anti- (issue): flag, family, child, jobs
* betray
* bizarre
* bosses
* bureaucracy
* cheat
* coercion
* “compassion” is not enough
* collapse(ing)
* consequences
* corrupt
* corruption
* criminal rights
* crisis
* cynicism
* decay
* deeper
* destroy
* destructive
* devour
* disgrace
* endanger
* excuses
* failure (fail)
* greed
* hypocrisy
* ideological
* impose
* incompetent
* insecure
* insensitive
* intolerant
* liberal
* lie
* limit(s)
* machine
* mandate(s)
* obsolete
* pathetic
* patronage
* permissive attitude
* pessimistic
* punish (poor …)
* radical
* red tape
* self-serving
* selfish
* sensationalists
* shallow
* shame
* sick
* spend(ing)
* stagnation
* status quo
* steal
* taxes
* they/them
* threaten
* traitors
* unionized
* urgent (cy)
* waste
* welfare

This was was way beyond what we had long accepted as the polite language of politics that allowed people to battle over issues but maintain decent human relationships when the workday was over. The kind of “bipartisanship” that the old lions are constantly going on about was killed in the 80’s and 90’s by a political machine that consciously set out to demonize first liberals and then Democrats. David Broder and his friends in Washington can’t wrap their minds around the fact that there was a deliberate right wing strategy to kill bipartisanship because they reluctantly went along with it, were duped by it or embraced it themselves.

So, why am I taking this little trip down memory lane of which most of you are all too well aware and need need no reminding? Because we are very possibly going to win this election and you can very confidently place a large bet in Las Vegas that the cries to end the partisanship will be deafening. I have little doubt that the entire Washington press corps is gearing up for a full scale vapor-fest if the Democrats attempt to demand even the slightest bit of accountability for the past six years of corruption and failure. The Democrats have to accept that they will once again be fighting the entire political establishment.

You can see the outlines already. Time’s cover this week features Barack Obama, the latest empty receptacle of establishment bipartisan wishful thinking:

Obama’s actual speaking style is quietly conversational, low in rhetoric-saturated fat; there is no harrumph to him. About halfway through the hour-long meeting, a middle-aged man stands up and says what seems to be on everyone’s mind, with appropriate passion: “Congress hasn’t done a damn thing this year. I’m tired of the politicians blaming each other. We should throw them all out and start over!”

“Including me?” the Senator asks.

A chorus of n-o-o-o-s. “Not you,” the man says. “You’re brand new.” Obama wanders into a casual disquisition about the sluggish nature of democracy. The answer is not even remotely a standard, pretaped political response. He moves through some fairly arcane turf, talking about how political gerrymandering has led to a generation of politicians who come from safe districts where they don’t have to consider the other side of the debate, which has made compromise–and therefore legislative progress–more difficult. “That’s why I favored Arnold Schwarzenegger’s proposal last year, a nonpartisan commission to draw the congressional-district maps in California. Too bad it lost.”

This will, I predict, be the latest fad: bipartisan nothingness. Now that the Republicans have successfully moved the political center so far to the right that they drove themselves over the cliff, we must stop all this “partisan bickering” as if the Democrats have been equally partisan and therefore can ask for and expect the right to meet them halfway, which they never, ever do. That means we must let their most heinous ideas congeal into conventional wisdom, let their criminal behavior go unpunished, clean up the global disaster they’ve created, do the heavy lifting to fix the deficit they caused. While we’re fixing things, they’ll count their ill-gotten gains, catch their breath and gear up to trash the place all over again.

Modern bipartisanship can be simply defined as Democrats repeatedly getting taken to the cleaners by Republicans. Until the rules of the game are changed it will remain so whether Democrats are in the majority or not. That pathetic Charlie Brown with the football ritual is what Joe Lieberman is running on and what Joe Klein is angling for with his Blankslate Obama love-fest. (Norquist called it date rape but that’s too kind — the Liebermans and Kleins love being in the spotlight giving wingnuts lapdances. They enjoy every minute of their rightwing orgy — they just don’t want to take responsibility when they turn up with wingnut transmitted diseases.)

It is going to take some deft media management and skillfull legislative action to stop this pattern, but stop it we must. We have had more than two decades to assess this and this is how the conservative movement works. You can almost feel the relief (and even the glee) in some of the recent right wing claims that losing will be good for the party.

Richard Viguerie says it right out loud:

“The importance of losing elections is greatly underrated,” he adds. “There’s not any way Ronald Reagan would have been elected in 1980 if [Gerald] Ford had been elected in ’76.”

This time the stakes are so high and the failures so manifest that we cannot allow this zombie revolution to rise again. No matter how tempting it is to let bygones be bygones and get to work to “fix” the problems, the Democrats must recognize that fixing the problem requires discrediting this Republican revolution once and for all. Until that happens, they will keep coming back and each time they do they destroy a little bit more of our democracy.

We may win this one but we are basically the janitors, winning the contract to clean up after the conservative frat boys trashed the place for the last few years. And Daddy Broder believes it when his boys tell him it was the cleaning people who caused all the damage because he just can’t bring himself to admit that they are out-of-control misfits because they come from good families and dress so nicely when they come to the club. We need to make sure the dean and all his friends have their noses rubbed in what their boys have been up to all these years before we can ever hope to do anything but take out the garbage and change the sheets every few years.

*The fact that the deciding Supreme Court vote was cast by a justice appointed by the candidate’s own father in a case based upon partisan decisions made by the president’s own brother the governor of Florida made this the most egregious case, even compared with Hayes-Tilden race in 1876. It was corrupt on an entirely different level. And looking at it now from the perspective of six years down the road, we can see that that very first act of blatant cronyism presaged the way the Bush administration would work, from Cheney’s energy task force to the botched occupation of Iraq to Katrina.

.

Some Good News

by tristero

Michigan Citizens for Science

Michigan Citizens for Science (MCFS) is happy to announce that we won a major victory with the State Board of Education on Tuesday. Having failed to have pro-ID [“intelligent design” creationism] language included in a bill earlier this year to harmonize the educational standards for public and charter schools in the state, House Republicans turned their attention to the State Board of Education and attempted to influence that board to include anti-evolution language into the new science standards. The BOE rejected those attempts with a unanimous vote.

And this is as good a time as any to make the point that Kitzmiller was a far more important decision than Scopes, for three reasons. First of all, unlike Scopes, scientists were permitted to testify extensively on the theory of evolution. Secondly, the judge’s decision was particularly damning, putting creationists on notice that their legal antics were dishonest and wasting the judiciary’s time.

But the most important reason is that, unlike Scopes, the good guys decisively won.

Back in 1925, Scopes was convicted, as part of Darrow’s strategy to appeal the case eventually to the Supreme Court. Instead, the case got kind of waylaid on a technicality. In Kitzmiller, the verdict was an unequivocal slam-dunk for science, reason, and the core American value of separation of church and state.

ht, Frederick Clarkson whose post has all sorts of interesting goodies.