Month: November 2006

The Taming Of The Upstart

by digby

Jesus H Christ. I’m watching some “Democratic strategist” named Rich Masters agree with Joe Scarborough that Jim Webb had made a rookie mistake by failing to kiss George W. Bush’s ass when the jerk got snippy with him. Scarborough and whichever GOPbot they have on there agrees that it really reflects badly on the democratic party as a whole and Webb should apologise.

When these Democrats go on TV and fail to correct the record they turn these ridiculous manufactured flaps into news stories for the benefit of of the kewl kidz and the Republicans alike. I don’t know what it will take to get them to stop doing it. They are making Jim Webb into one of the “crazy” guys like they made Gore and they made Dean. Don’t they get that whenever a Democrats stands up to a republicans the establishment turns around and says they are nuts. Why are they helping them?

But there is more to this story than meets the eye. George Will got the vapors and called for the smelling salts this morning over Webb’s allegedly boorish behavior, which is what’s fueling the story today. But Will completely misrepresented what was said. George W. Bush acted like a prick, not Webb.

Here’s Greg Sargent:

Will writes:

Wednesday’s Post reported that at a White House reception for newly elected members of Congress, Webb “tried to avoid President Bush,” refusing to pass through the reception line or have his picture taken with the president. When Bush asked Webb, whose son is a Marine in Iraq, “How’s your boy?” Webb replied, “I’d like to get them [sic] out of Iraq.” When the president again asked “How’s your boy?” Webb replied, “That’s between me and my boy.”

Will says the episode demonstrates Webb’s “calculated rudeness toward another human being” — i.e., the President — who “asked a civil and caring question, as one parent to another.”

But do you notice something missing from Will’s recounting of the episode?

Here’s how the Washingon Post actually reported on the episode the day before Will’s column:

At a recent White House reception for freshman members of Congress, Virginia’s newest senator tried to avoid President Bush. Democrat James Webb declined to stand in a presidential receiving line or to have his picture taken with the man he had often criticized on the stump this fall. But it wasn’t long before Bush found him.

“How’s your boy?” Bush asked, referring to Webb’s son, a Marine serving in Iraq.

“I’d like to get them out of Iraq, Mr. President,” Webb responded, echoing a campaign theme.

“That’s not what I asked you,” Bush said. “How’s your boy?”

“That’s between me and my boy, Mr. President,” Webb said coldly, ending the conversation on the State Floor of the East Wing of the White House.

See what happened? Will omitted the pissy retort from the President that provoked Webb. Will cut out the line from the President where he said: “That’s not what I asked you.” In Will’s recounting, that instead became a sign of Bush’s parental solicitiousness: “The president again asked `How’s your boy?'”

Will’s change completely alters the tenor of the conversation from one in which Bush was rude first to Webb, which is what the Post’s original account suggested, to one in which Webb was inexplicably rude to the President, which is how Will wanted to represent what happened.

It’s virtually impossible to see how that could have been the result of mere incompetence on Will’s part. Rather, it’s very clear that Will cut the line because it was an inconvenient impediment to his journalistic goal, which was to portray Webb as a “boor” who was rude to the Commander in Chief, and to show that this new upstart is a threat to Washington’s alleged code of “civility and clear speaking” (his words). On that score, also note that in the original version, Webb said “Mr. President” twice — and neither appeared in Will’s version.

George Will is a liar, pure and simple. But, for some reason (I have my suspicions) certain Democrats are also blaming Webb. The flap really got started with some unnamed Democratic staffer idiot who said yesterday “I think Webb is going to be a total pain. He’s going to do things his own way.” (I wonder if his initials are Marshall Wittman?) That was what got the storyline rolling.

But it wasn’t seen as a Webb gaffe originally. Yesterday, CNN had characterized the exchange entirely differently:

SCHNEIDER (voice-over): Jim Webb became a Democrat and ran for the Senate for one big reason, Iraq.

JIM WEBB (D), VIRGINIA SENATOR-ELECT: I was an early voice warning against the implications of invading and occupying Iraq.

SCHNEIDER: Webb has special credibility on Iraq. He was a military officer who served in Vietnam, a former secretary of the Navy under President Reagan, and he has a son serving in Iraq.

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

SCHNEIDER: He wore his son’s old combat boots during the campaign.

WEBB: I have tremendous admiration for my son and for everyone else who is serving there that they need to be led properly.

SCHNEIDER: Webb took on President Bush directly.

WEBB: But the keyword is leadership, which has been a scarce commodity among this administration and its followers.

SCHNEIDER: President Bush saw Webb at a White House reception for new members of Congress this month. Webb had this exchange with the president which he confirmed to “The Washington Post.”

How’s your boy, Bush asked? I’d like to get them out of Iraq, Mr. President, Webb replied. That’s not what I asked you, Bush said. How’s your boy? That’s between me and my boy, Mr. President, Webb said.

The White House incident is costing a lot of tut-tutting in Washington. A Democratic Senate staffer told “The Post”, I think Webb is going to be a total pain. He’s going to do things his own way — shock, horror. Webb reassures his colleagues…

WEBB: I’ve spent four years as a committee counsel in the Congress. I know how the process works.

SCHNEIDER: Webb’s confrontation is a striking contrast to the pictures of Democrats meeting with President Bush and pledging cooperation and bipartisanship. It’s also not the way things usually get done in Washington, but it is what a lot of people voted for.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

SCHNEIDER: Webb did not run as a typical politician. And it doesn’t look like he’s about to change now that he’s gotten elected — Wolf.

I can’t help but wonder why Democratic spokespeople are out there today portraying this as a “mistake” when Schneider had seen it as a sign of Democratic spine just yesterday afternoon. Unless they are literally taking their marching orders from the lying George Will, this seems to me to be a public spanking from the establishment of both parties.

The fact is that George W. Bush acted like an ass when a US marine, war hero, father and US Senator said that he’d like to see his son brought home from Iraq. We’ve all seen how he acts when he gets snippy. In fact, it’s legendary. Here’s one of my favorites:

The American people must understand when I said that we need to be patient, that I meant it. And we’re going to be there for a while. I don’t know the exact moment when we leave, David, but it’s not until the mission is complete. The world must know that this administration will not blink in the face of danger and will not tire when it comes to completing the missions that we said we would do. The world will learn that when the United States is harmed, we will follow through. The world will see that when we put a coalition together that says “Join us,” I mean it. And when I ask others to participate, I mean it.

Here’s another one:

A lesson for correspondents covering Mr. Bush: When abroad, stick to English in the president’s presence.

Offenders might otherwise find themselves in the situation David Gregory, an NBC News White House correspondent, who appeared to raise Mr. Bush’s ire Sunday afternoon at Élysée Palace when he asked a rather in-your-face question to a tired president, then broke into French to seek Mr. Chirac’s opinion.

Perhaps Mr. Bush thought the French question was directed at him, or perhaps he thought Mr. Gregory was showing off. Whatever the case, Mr. Bush, his voice dripping with sarcasm, said “Very good, the guy memorizes four words, and he plays like he’s intercontinental.” (Mr. Gregory offered to go on in French, but that only made things worse.)

“I’m impressed ?que bueno,” said Mr. Bush, using the Spanish phrase for “how wonderful.” He added: “Now I’m literate in two languages.”

Or this:

It’s a standing joke among the president’s top aides: who gets to deliver the bad news? Warm and hearty in public, Bush can be cold and snappish in private, and aides sometimes cringe before the displeasure of the president of the United States.

Webb replied to him in a serious fashion and Bush snapped at him. It’s what he does. He doesn’t like being challenged and he rarely is. Look what he said about Karl Rove on the day after the election: “I obviously was working harder in the campaign than he was.” Sure it was a joke, but it was a nasty thing to say — especially to his longtime political partner — whom he calls “turdblossom.”

The man is a rude prick. Webb doesn’t seem inclined to put up with rude pricks, even when they are president of the United States. And somebody in the Democratic party apparently doesn’t like that. Now why is that?

Update: One of the Webb-sites writes that he has heard the exchange was even worse than reported. Webb’s kid came under heavy fire a couple of weeks ago and three of his comrades died. Bush is said to have approached him with a snotty tone, like “nice boy you have there — be a shame if anything happened to him” sort of thing. I have no way of knowing if this is true. But it is, at least, believable. Bush has a very nasty sense of humor and there’s no doubt he could say something in that tone with crude intent. This is the guy who mocked Karla Faye Tucker begging for her life. He doesn’t have a lot of limits.

Update II: This is Rich Masters. Now I get it.

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The Forgotten War

by tristero

[UPDATE: The tall man in comments wrote, in response to this post: “Please provide one instance of contemporary American Christians being this bloody, you delusional moron.” He would be, of course, entitled to his opinion of my mental state, had he only read what I wrote. But he didn’t.

I wrote that christianists, NOT Christians, CAN get this bloody. Some recent examples, mentioned in comments are, of course, Eric Rudolph and Timothy McVeigh. David Neiwert also has an example of some christianist terrorists caught a few years ago with an enormous arsenal, apparently within weeks of deployment. This is not to mention those christianists, eg the Phelps family and Christian Reconstruction followers of Rushdoony who are perfectly prepared to execute men who have consensual sex relations with other men (ditto women), and others.

And that’s for starters.

These people are an insult to genuine Christians. That is why I insist upon distinguishing between political activists and extremists who exploit the symbols of Christianity and Christianity itself.]

To those who thought the Taliban was gone, driven out by the “successful” US invasion of Afghanistan, think again. This is also an object lesson in what happens when political extremists use religious texts to drive their will to power. This is why America’s christianists who, Rushdoony teaches us, can get just as bloody, must be fought:

The gunmen came at night to drag Mohammed Halim away from his home, in front of his crying children and his wife begging for mercy.

The 46-year-old schoolteacher tried to reassure his family that he would return safely. But his life was over, he was part-disembowelled and then torn apart with his arms and legs tied to motorbikes, the remains put on display as a warning to others against defying Taliban orders to stop educating girls.

Mr Halim was one of four teachers killed in rapid succession by the Islamists at Ghazni, a strategic point on the routes from Kabul to the south and east which has become the scene of fierce clashes between the Taliban and US and Afghan forces.

h/t Daou Report

President Unbound

by digby

Last week tristero approvingly linked to this exceptional essay in the NY Review of Books by Mark Danner in which he synthesizes certain aspects of recent books on the Bush administration and tells a very straighforward tale of what went wrong with the Iraq war.

Now, I have long agreed with the thesis that the chances of success were nil no matter how well the “plan” (whatever it was) was carried out. And I am fully prepared to wade through the many comments that will inevitably come stating that this is all part of a grand plan for oil or permanent bases or world domination or whatever, which will all be true to some extent or another. But as word finally begins to trickle out from this previously leak-proof administration, it’s becoming clear that John DiUlio’s early observations of the Mayberry Machiavellis was spot on. There was no “plan.” There was just wishin’ and hopin’ and competing visions and magical thinking. It was as bad as any of us imagined in our craziest blog posts.

This was an unusually incompetent group at everything but domestic electoral politics (and it turns out that they weren’t even all that good at that.) They may have had big plans and big ambitions, but they never had even the first clue about how to implement them. And they were led by a man of such shallow character and dim intellect that they could not learn.

This all proves that it really matters who the president is. It matters a lot. We will be electing a new administration in less than two years and it’s important to try to learn from this, beyond ideology, beyond partisanship. The Bush administration debacle is not, after all, confined to Iraq. There was Katrina as well, along with untold numbers of domestic, economic and foreign policy crises that have been put into motion and haven’t yet come to fruition. The malfeasance wasn’t confined to Don Rumsfeld or Doug Feith.

Here’s a rather long excerpt from Danner’s piece that I think begins to explain just how important the choice of president is, no matter how many “grown-ups” you surround him with. (I urge you to read the wholething however for the full flavor of the dysfunction and ineptitude of the Bush White House) :

Rumsfeld’s war envisioned rapid victory and rapid departure. Wolfowitz and the other Pentagon neoconservatives, on the other hand, imagined a “democratic transformation,” a thoroughgoing social revolution that would take a Baathist Party–run autocracy, complete with a Baathist-led army and vast domestic spying and security services, and transform it into a functioning democratic polity—without the participation of former Baathist officials.

How to resolve this contradiction? The answer, for the Pentagon, seems to have amounted to one word: Chalabi. “When it came to Iraq,” James Risen writes in State of War,

the Pentagon believed it had the silver bullet it needed to avoid messy nation building—a provisional government in exile, built around Chalabi, could be established and then brought in to Baghdad after the invasion.

This so-called “turnkey operation” seems to have appeared to be the perfect compromise plan: Chalabi was Shiite, as were most Iraqis, but he was also a secularist who had lived in the West for nearly fifty years and was close to many of the Pentagon civilians. Alas, there was one problem: the confirmed idealist in the White House “was adamant that the United States not be seen as putting its thumb on the scales” of the nascent Iraqi democracy. Chalabi, for all his immense popularity in the Pentagon and in the Vice President’s office, would not be installed as president of Iraq.

Though “Bush’s commitment to democracy was laudable,” as Risen observes, his awkward intervention “was not really the answer to the question of postwar planning.” He goes on:

Once Bush quashed the Pentagon’s plans, the administration failed to develop any acceptable alternative…. Instead, once the Pentagon realized the president wasn’t going to let them install Chalabi, the Pentagon leadership did virtually nothing. After Chalabi, there was no Plan B.

An unnamed White House official describes to Risen the Laurel-and-Hardy consequences within the government of the President’s attachment to the idea of democratic elections in Iraq:

Part of the reason the planning for post-Saddam Iraq was so nonexistent was that the State Department had been saying if you invade, you have to plan for the postwar. And DOD said, no you don’t. You can set up a provisional government in exile around Chalabi. DOD had a stupid plan, but they had a plan. But if you don’t do that plan, and you don’t make the Pentagon work with State to develop something else, then you go to war with no plan.

Woodward tends to blame “the broken policy process” on the relative strength of personalities gathered around the cabinet table: the power and ruthlessness of Rumsfeld, the legendary “bureaucratic infighter”; the weakness of Rice, the very function and purpose of whose job, to let the President both benefit from and control the bureaucracy, was in effect eviscerated. Suskind, more convincingly, argues that Bush and Cheney constructed precisely the government they wanted: centralized, highly secretive, its clean, direct lines of decision unencumbered by information or consultation. “There was never any policy process to break, by Condi or anyone else,” Richard Armitage, the former deputy secretary of state, remarks to Suskind. “There was never one from the start. Bush didn’t want one, for whatever reason.” Suskind suggests why in an acute analysis of personality and leadership:

Of the many reasons the President moved in this direction, the most telling may stem from George Bush’s belief in his own certainty and, especially after 9/11, his need to protect the capacity to will such certainty in the face of daunting complexity. His view of right and wrong, and of righteous actions— such as attacking evil or spreading “God’s gift” of democracy—were undercut by the kind of traditional, shades-of-gray analysis that has been a staple of most presidents’ diets. This President’s traditional day began with Bible reading at dawn, a workout, breakfast, and the briefings of foreign and domestic threats…. The hard, complex analysis, in this model, would often be a thin offering, passed through the filters of Cheney or Rice, or not presented at all.

…This granted certain unique advantages to Bush. With fewer people privy to actual decisions, tighter confidentiality could be preserved, reducing leaks. Swift decisions—either preempting detailed deliberation or ignoring it—could move immediately to implementation, speeding the pace of execution and emphasizing the hows rather than the more complex whys.

What Bush knew before, or during, a key decision remained largely a mystery. Only a tiny group—Cheney, Rice, Card, Rove, Tenet, Rumsfeld—could break this seal.

This says it all. Bush had been this way when he was governor of Texas. We knew, for instance, that he’d had his aides read him short abstracts of death penalty reports rather than reading them himself — and he never questioned their assumptions. The man had not ever been truly interested in the job of governance, nor did he take it particularly seriously.

Still, one would have thought that when it came to running the most powerful nation in the world he would have grown in the job. He didn’t. He and Cheney created a small,insular circle of incompetent advisors that fed his ego and his tiny mind. What wasn’t clear until now is how well they controlled him. It turns out — not so much.An amazing amount of power resides in the person of the president, regardless of how dim or ill informed he is, and as that anecdote shows, when the president speaks, even if he has no idea of the consequences of his decision, people obey.

His romantic and childlike belief in the magical “democracy” that was created for public consumption by the greeting card poets on the rightwing welfare rolls led him to make a fateful decision that was both right and wrong at the same time. But he made it and there was no other plan and neither he nor anyone else seemed to think that was a problem. The tinker bell strategy in full effect.

Danner continues:

Suskind describes how many of those in the “foreign policy establishment” found themselves “befuddled” by the way the traditional policy process was viewed not only as unproductive but “perilous.” Information, that is, could slow decision-making; indeed, when it had to do with a bold and risky venture like the Iraq war, information and discussion—an airing, say, of the precise obstacles facing a “democratic transition” conducted with a handful of troops—could paralyze it. If the sober consideration of history and facts stood in the way of bold action then it would be the history and the facts that would be discarded. The risk of doing nothing, the risk, that is, of the status quo, justified acting. Given the grim facts on the ground—the likelihood of a future terrorist attack from the “malignant” Middle East, the impossibility of entirely protecting the country from it—better to embrace the unknown. Better, that is, to act in the cause of “constructive instability”—a wonderfully evocative phrase, which, as Suskind writes, was

the term used by various senior officials in regard to Iraq—a term with roots in pre-9/11 ideas among neoconservatives about the need for a new, muscular, unbounded American posture; and outgrowths that swiftly took shape after the attacks made everything prior to 9/11 easily relegated to dusty history.

The past—along with old-style deliberations based on cause and effect or on agreed-upon precedents—didn’t much matter; nor did those with knowledge and prevailing policy studies, of agreements between nations, or of long-standing arrangements defining the global landscape.

What mattered, by default, was the President’s “instinct” to guide America across the fresh, post-9/11 terrain—a style of leadership that could be rendered within tiny, confidential circles.

America, unbound, was duly led by a President, unbound.

I blame the media for this. After 9/11 they lost their minds and became unthinking hagiographers and adminstration cheerleaders to an absurd extent. The man’s halting, incoherent first press conference after 9/11 scared me more than the attacks and yet the press corps behaved as if they were in the presence of a God whose stuttering, meandering gibberish were words uttered from on high. He was called a genius and compared to Winston Churchill. Paeans to his greatness were turned into best sellers. His “gut” was infallible. It was patently obvious that he was in over his head and yet this bizarre, almost hallucinogenic image of the man emerged in the media that actually made me question my sanity at times. It took years for this trance to wear off with a majority of the public and even longer in the media. It was one of the strangest phenomenons I’ve ever observed.

Until recently, however, I was never quite sure if Bush himself believed it. It appears that he did. Big time. And that belief in his own hype created a completely dysfunctional organization. I suspect that what started out as a shield by Cheney and Rove to narrow the influences upon him may have morphed into a bubble designed to keep him from completely spinning out of control. But it couldn’t keep him from making decisions, and make them he did, without thought or analysis or knowledge. His belief in his “gut” and God’s anointment has been leading this nation since 9/11. Combined with Cheney’s megalomaniacal belief in untrammelled executive power it has been a disaster.(In fact, Cheney could not have chosen a better subject to more thoroughly discredit his theory than Junior.)

I understand that it is difficult to know in advance what constitutes a real leader. A resume isn’t enough to make one (although it’s certainly better than not having one at all) and depending on personality or symbols isn’t enough either. I don’t know what the magic formula is. I do know that when someone speaks like a fool and acts like a spoiled child and appears to be “intellectually uncurious” and has never done anything in life that would give you a clue that he knows how to govern or lead — well, it’s not a good idea to make that person the most powerful person on the planet. If we’ve learned nothing else, I hope we have learned that.

The president matters. But whether or not we want to have a beer with him or whether or not we approve of his private life is not what matters about him or her. These are false hueristics and they don’t add up to leadership any more than years of political experience translates into great political skills. Citizens need to think a little bit harder about this choice, look a little deeper, ask some serious questions. Part of the job is certainly PR and a president does have to be the star of the national TV show for four years. But it’s a lot more than that and Americans need to rediscover a healthy sense of the requirements of this particular job.

Most importantly, the people who work in politics and the media need to take this more seriously. Presidential politics isn’t American Idol, it’s a contest for the leadership of the United States of America and putting together an “electable” package cannot be the only focus. And it goes without saying that this kewl kidz and mean girls nonsense from the press has to stop. The past six years have been a tragedy and we desperately need some thoughtful, intelligent, competent leadership to set this right.

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Bloggy Fun

by tristero

I agreed to participate in an academic survey of political blogs. The people doing it are interested also in hearing from blog readers so if you are interested in participating, you can go to this link and take the survey. If they ask, choose tristero, as Hullabaloo is not listed.

Bush’s Compassion

by tristero

Talk about stunted social skills:

At a private reception held at the White House with newly elected lawmakers shortly after the election, Bush asked Webb how his son, a Marine lance corporal serving in Iraq, was doing.

Webb responded that he really wanted to see his son brought back home, said a person who heard about the exchange from Webb.

“I didn’t ask you that, I asked how he’s doing,” Bush retorted, according to the source.

I’ve omitted Webb’s response, which you are more than welcome to read about at the link, because I want to focus entirely on the unspeakable callousness Bush displayed here.

Folks, political enemy or friend, that is no way – ever– for anyone to talk to the father of a kid who’s in a combat zone.

This is the same man who reminisced about his hell-raisin’ during a speech at the worst natural disaster in American history. This is the same man who, when, asked to name his greatest achievement while president, “joked” that it was when he caught a large fish in his fake pond on his Crawford estate – sorry, ranch. This is the same man who, when informed that a second plane had hit the World Trade Center in less than 10 minutes, sat reading “My Pet Goat” in a children’s classroom. This is the same man who, in front of a supporter who he assumed wouldn’t report it, mockingly imitated a woman about to be executed in his state.

Sickening.

h/t, Josh Marshall

Talking To The Hand

by digby

NEWSWEEK: Your grandfather was Muslim, but you are a Christian. What did you think of the pope’s original comments about Islam and how the reaction played out?

Barack Obama: Well, I think that we live in a time where there are enormous religious sensitivities, and I have no doubt that the pope did not intend to offend the Muslim faith any more than many of us sometimes say things in a different context that aren’t intended to cause offense. But I think all of us, particularly religious leaders, have to be mindful that there are a lot of sensitivities out there. Now, the flip side is that there are those in the Muslim community who are looking to take offense and are constantly on the lookout for anything that would indicate that the West is somehow antagonistic toward Islam.

Did he say anything that he needed to apologize for?

You know, I leave it up to the pope. He made an apology and I wouldn’t challenge his judgment on it.

Did you read what he said?

I read what he said. And, as I said, I think he is mindful that he did not want to cause offense or pain, and to the extent that he did, I think he felt it necessary to apologize. My point, I guess is that all sides in the current environment have to be very careful how we talk about faith. I gave a speech recently in which I said that Democrats, for example, should not be afraid to talk about faith. But I think we’ve got to do so in a way that admits the possibility that we are not always right, that our particular faith may not have all the monopoly on truth, and we’ve got to be able to listen to other people. You know I think one of the trends we are seeing right now, and which I think is causing so much political grief both domestically and internationally, is that absolutism has become sort of the flavor of the day.

And lukewarm water will dilute it, I guess. He’s completely right that Democrats need to get with the program and recognise that we don’t have a monopoly on truth. All this absolutism has got to stop. It’s a big problem for us:

Barack Obama’s efforts to reach out to evanglical Christians in preparation for his possible Presidential campaign is running into very stiff resistance from the Christian right. As the Chicago Tribune reported recently, Obama is set to attend a huge evangelical gathering in California on Dec. 1, at the invitation of megachurch Pastor Rick Warren, the evangelical superstar who wrote The Purpose-Driven Life. Analysts have interpreted Obama’s scheduled appearance as a sign he’s working much harder than Dems ordinarily do to win over Evangelicals.

But the appearance is now provoking an intense backlash from leaders of the Christian right. They are calling on Warren to disinvite Obama from the event because of his liberal positions, especially abortion rights — or as one of those leaders put it, Obama’s support of “the murder of babies in the womb.”

Obama’s efforts are running into fierce resistance. For instance, an open letter from a group of Christian-Right figures — including Phylis Schlafly, Tim Wildmon and others — criticizes the invitiation by citing Obama’s pro-choice stance and his support for condom distribution in answer to the AIDS epidemic, “not chaste behavior as directed by the Bible.”

Then there’s this press release from the National Clergy Council, an umbrella group representing various conservative denominations. In the release, Rob Schenck, president of the group, did not mince words: “Senator Obama’s policies represent the antithesis of biblical ethics and morality, not to mention supreme American values.”

Obama’s attempted inroads with evangelical voters may end up being successful, but not without a significant struggle from leading figures in that movement.

Not a problem. Democrats just need to stop being so absolutist about abortion, birth control, free speech, civil rights and religious freedom and then everyone will be Democrats. (Except liberals, but who wants to be in the same party with those losers anyway?)

Let me be clear about this. I do not dislike Obama nor do I think his conciliatory tone is necessarily incorrect. There is utility in showing the religious right’s fundamental intolerance if nothing else. I do find his split-the-difference, triangulation tiresome, however, in the same way I find the news media’s he said/she said analysis lazy. It does not clarify anything, it obscures reality and it makes it difficult for Democrats to take a stand on the social justice issues that might just inspire some people of faith. You will notice that in his statement above about absolutism he only calls out two groups by name — Democrats and Muslims. Yet, there is no more intolerant group of people in this entire country than the religious right. By failing to “include” them by name in his call for conciliation he validates their phony argument that they are the victims of intolerance.

I don’t have any sense that he really understand what he’s up against with the right, but it looks as though he’s going to find out. I will be very impressed if he goes into the belly of the beast at Warren’s church and resists the temptation to trash secular liberals to make cheap points before a hostile crowd. I’ll be even more impressed if he takes it as an opportunity to challenge their assumptions about themselves.

Show us the money, Obama. Psycho-babble platitudes about “listening” are not going to carry you to the White House. Start talking.

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Profiles In Cowardice

by tristero

After reading all about Arlen Specter and the Military Commisions Act, which revokes habeas corpus and permits evidence obtained by torture to be admissible if the military, without oversight, says it doesn’t violate Geneva, I was truly hoping the article would end with an exciting statement from the Dems that they would make reversing this montrosity a major priority. Hah!

Leahy, the incoming chairman of the Judiciary Committee, voted against the Military Commissions Act and denounced its habeas provisions in especially harsh terms. But there are no signs that the new Democratic majority will take on habeas corpus anytime soon. Few Democratic politicians seem enthusiastic about proposing legislation that will principally benefit accused Al Qaeda terrorists, and, in the unlikely event that Democrats passed such a bill, it would face a certain veto from President Bush. The Supreme Court – not Congress – is likely to be the only hope for a change in the law.”This is definitely not going to be the first thing out of the box for us,” one Democratic Senate staffer said. “We make fun of Specter, but we’re basically leaving it up to the Courts, too.”

“Principally benefit accused Al Qaeda terrorists?” Exactly what are they accused of doing? Oh, sorry, that’s right, I have no business asking that question, do I? And by the way, why do I want to know? Better turn myself in now…

This is a time bomb, ladies, gentlemen, and Republicans.

Just How Sick Is The Discourse In This Country?

by tristero

This sick. The influential right sez, “Fine, just blow the place up.” A leading liberal hawk sez, “Bring back Saddam Hussein!”

And there you have it, specific proposals from the right and the left about what to do in the Middle East. Blow it up? Or put it back the way it was? Let’s put on our most somber mien and discuss it!

And they call those of us who knew this thing was crazy from the start “third-rate minds.”

No wonder “sober centrists” congeal around adding 20,000 troops and waiting one more Friedman Unit to see what happens. If these are the only alternatives on the table – because the people who were right all along are all but entirely excluded from the mass media and the government – is it any wonder that the middle position between two stupid ideas is an equally stupid idea?

Special note to the cognitively impaired who read the above and concluded I think Chait somehow represents the left or liberals. I am well aware that while Limbaugh accurately represents the right in all its Cro-Magnon stupidity, Chait is speaking only for himself. However, in the msm, Chait is the prototypical liberal hawk. So his semi-serious – according to him – proposal to return Saddam to power will be considered as a liberal idea, and denounced as, you’ve got it, a perfect example of how unserious and dictatorial liberals are. Kee-rist, what a fucking moron.

Gut Bomb

by digby

Following up on my post below, I just noticed that Kevin Drum has cautioned the liberal blogosphere not to rely too heavily on populist gut instinct just because the tiresome punditocrisy has lifted “centrism” to some position of worship. He’s right, of course.

But as I write below, I would actually posit that the real problem is the liberal punditocrisy which reflexively rejects anything that is tainted by its association with grassroots populist sentiment. Particularly now, when many experts were marginalized because they failed to support the war and many liberals of both the netroots and grassroots were proven right, it behooves the establishment to open its minds to thinking from outside the usual suspects in the beltway. That doesn’t mean they should trust us liberal bloggers’ “guts.” We would not ask them to. It means they should stop trusting their own. Their guts, like Bush’s, are defective.

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Straw Strongmen

by digby

When I read Jonathan Chait’s piece in the LA Times from yesterday, I assumed he was making a Swiftian modest proposal. I read his piece to be a satirical left hook to the notion that the Baker Commission was going to find some magical solution to the Iraq quagmire and conclude that the only formula that would work would be to put Saddam back in charge.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I just saw him on Matthews explaining that he was engaging in “a little bit of hyperbole but I think there’s something to it” and “maybe we should put it back where we found it.”

Chait said “almost everyone with a brain says we shouldn’t have gone in the first place” but later admits that he was for the war but on different grounds than the neocons who were delusional about spreading democracy. He was for the war because he thought “weapons of mass destruction were the rationale” and said “I didn’t pay attention to, I confess, I didn’t pay much attention to the possibility of a completely failed state. When the Bush administration talked about democracy I thought they were lying they way they lie about everything else that they do.”

Matthews reminded him that in 1991 Baker and Powell had warned about the break up of Iraq if the US invaded and admitted that he got tired of hearing about that and now knows they were right. Chait, however, disagrees. He says that the post war was “bungled as badly as you could have, they had no plan, Rumsfeld threatened to fire the next general who said, ‘what do we do about Iraq’ in the post war. They didn’t have enough troops, they broke up the Baathist bureaucracy, they broke up the army, they did it as badly as you couldn’t have, so you know, I think what they could have had was a stable, you know … last vicious dictatorship.

Matthews asked if he would have gone with the INC and Chait responds, “No, no, I thought what they would do all along was keep the Baath Party in place, get rid of Saddam, get rid of his sons…”

Matthews interrupted as he always does and moved on to another point, so perhaps Chait had something else to say, but I have to admit I was astonished by his point of view throughout the exchange. I had thought his op-ed a rather unsubtle piece of satire and it turns out that it was only barely exaggerated version of what he thought should have happened to begin with and what he still thinks should happen now. He’s making a real argument.

Jonathan Chait, you’ll remember, wrote the seminal essay on why liberals should support the war in October of 2002 in TNR. Apparently he forgot to mention what he “really” thought the Bush administration was going to do. (That’s probably because it was as illiberal as it’s possible to be and even Henry Kissinger would have found it to be beyond our ken.)

Here’s what Chait had to say back then:

When asked about war, they [liberals] typically offer the following propositions: President Bush has cynically timed the debate to bolster Republican chances in the November elections, he has pursued his Iraq policy with an arrogant disregard for the views of Congress and the public, and his rationales for military action have been contradictory and in some cases false. I happen to believe all these criticisms are true (although the first is hard to prove) and that they add more evidence to what is already a damning indictment of the Bush presidency. But these are objections to the way Bush has carried out his Iraq policy rather than to the policy itself. (If Bush were to employ such dishonest tactics on behalf of, say, universal health care, that wouldn’t make the policy a bad idea.) Ultimately the central question is: Does war with Iraq promote liberal foreign policy principles? The answer is yes, it does.

Liberals and conservatives share many foreign policy values in common: encouraging democracy and capitalism, responding to direct aggression, and so on. That is why, for instance, both overwhelmingly supported overthrowing the Taliban and hunting down Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. In the post-cold-war era, though, liberals have centered their thinking around certain ideals with which conservatives do not agree. Writing in these pages in 1999, conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer identified three distinctly liberal principles: advancing humanitarian (rather than merely national) interests; observing international law; and acting in concert with international institutions, such as the United Nations. Krauthammer cited these three principles in order to dismiss them. I disagree. Underlying all three is an understanding that American global dominance cannot last unless it is accepted by the rest of the world, and that cannot happen unless it operates on behalf of the broader good and on the basis of principles more elevated than “might makes right.”

This article was widely discussed at the time and many of us chewed it over in some detail. I remember his argument quite well. (The bit about international law was particularly incoherent.)So you can imagine how startling it was to hear Chait say today that he always thought the Bush administration was lying about what it planned to do in Iraq — and that he backed an invasion that would result in the installation of a friendly dictator. All in the name of liberal values.

Wolfowitz said long ago that WMD was the argument they could all agree upon, but the “liberal” argument was not completely ignored. We certainly got it from TNR and in the pages of the major newspapers. Indeed, it was the official liberal argument in favor of the war. Only realist misanthropes and dirty hippie throwbacks argued that the democratic domino theory was a crock. We were borderline racist and hated America for even suggesting that it might be just a tad unrealistic.

To be sure, Chait based his argument most fully on the WMD threat, but for all his skepticism about Bush’s honesty in other areas, it apparently didn’t cross his mind that they might lie about that. Neither did it occur to him and all the other liberal hawks that Saddam might have had good reason to exaggerate his arsenal for regional or domestic purposes, something that the thin gruel Powell presented to the UN and the continuous debunking of “proof” (as with the aluminum tubes and the drone planes) should have made thinking people at least consider.

But now we find out that certain liberal hawks (or Chait at least) always had their own “cakewalk” fantasy. The US was going to invade, get rid of the WMD, install our own friendly dictator and then get out. Who knew?

Matthews rather acidly asked him if we shouldn’t just pick sides now that the whole mess had devolved into civil war — or maybe just back Moqtada al Sadr for president of Iraq and let it go at that — and Chait looked flummoxed. (Of course, it was Matthews incoherently shouting, so you can’t really judge from that alone.)

But it does raise the question: do liberal hawks think that this is still a solution to the problem? Chait indicated that he was exaggerating to get people “thinking.” But perhaps his “bring Saddam back” was as serious a piece of advice as his earlier exhortations that liberals should support the war. I would suggest that it has just as much merit.

Update: Chait just appeared on Tucker and expanded on his thesis:

We’ve learned that there are worse things than totalitarianism and one of them is unending chaos…My argument is not an entirely cynical argument… One of the things that foments chaos is the expectation of chaos, when people’s behavior changes, when they don’t see any established order, and one of the few things we’ll be able to do, I was sort of supposing, would be the return of Saddam Hussein — he has high name recognition, people know who he is, they know what he’s capable of doing and you have, it’s still a recent enough that he was in charge of the state, that you still have the Baath army units and the infrastructure to put in place. So I was hypothesizing that this may be the only force capable of actually ruling the country, not that we want that by any means, it was horrendous, but simply that you have order, I mean it might be the best of some very, very, bad alternatives.

TC: Best for us. It seems to me the one thing about Saddam, as deranged as he may have been, he did have something to lose, he didn’t want to die, and he wasn’t a religious nut, he was incredibly brutal. Does that tell us something about what we would need to do in order to secure Iraq. I mean, he killed people with poison gas, Was that something he had to do? Was that required?

Chait: No I don’t think so. But look, he’s psychotic so you can’t assume that anything a psychotic man does is something he rationally had to do. And he would still be psychotic if he was in power. There would be no doubt about it. I mean, it certainly would be better for us,

We wouldn’t have the Iranian influence and you wouldn’t have Iraq becoming a potential terrorist haven, both things that threaten us a great deal, if we had Saddam in power. You would have someone who would brutalize his own population but again you’re getting that right now anyway and you might be getting less of it if he returned.

TC: Obviously we’re not… because there is a civil war, and according to NBC it officially begins today, that kind of implies we ought to pick a side. And in fact pick a strongman to preside over the country in a less brutal way than Saddam did, but in a brutal way nonetheless and keep that place under control? Should we pick a side?

Chait: I don’t know. I think I’m probably like you. You read all these proposals about what to do with Iraq and there all people who specializing in the topic and know more about it than I do and probably more than you do and it just doesn’t sound that convincing and when they pick apart the other guy’s proposal, when they say “here’s why we need a strongman and here’s why partition won’t work” and you say “that makes a lot of sense” and the other person says “here’s why we need partition and why the strongman won’t work” and that seems right also, so that sort of the mode I’m in. I just don’t know what to do. The only time anyone seems convincing is when they say why everything else won’t work.

I hate to be a profane blogofascist, but that is just chickenshit nonsense. This guy makes a living as a pundit. He wrote an extremely provocative article saying that we should re-install Saddam (or some other strongman.) And then he cops out by saying he’s confused because the “experts” don’t have any easy answers.

This kind of thinking has permeated the establishment from day one. Plenty of people said in advance that the war was a mistake for exactly the reasons that Chait is now so surprised by. Nobody listened to them then and nobody is listening to them now. In fact, they were and are derided and marginalized. Today allegedly liberal pundits are rather seriously discussing the merits of installing friendly dictators now that their fantasies failed to become reality. How ridiculous.

Update II: One thing that should be noted is that Chait, like many of his DC brethren, has what seems to be temperamental aversion to the dirty hippies of the left. During the Bush years he has gone slightly cuckoo over Deaniacs, anti-war protesters, Lieberman ousters and grassroots troublemakers in general. I don’t know the guy, but from reading his stuff it appears to be the result of a reflexive emotional reaction.

This is one of the fault lines that exists in liberalism today — the knee jerk assumptions by the elites about the grassroots populists and vice versa. The problem for the party, however, is that opinion makers like Chait are taken seriously by policymakers while the grassroots troublemakers are not and the result is that their visceral dislike of our ilk comes into play in important ways. I happen to think that Chait’s disgust with the activist left leads him to make incorrect decisions. He’s not in the same league as someone like Richard Cohen, but then Richard Cohen has become something of a joke, whose inexplicable sinecure on the op-ed pages of the Washington Post mostly serves as fishwrap. TNR, on the other hand, is listened to by Democratic policymakers and Chait’s overheated reactions to the grassroots should be addressed.

He and others — he’s far from alone — should try to see things with clearer eyes. This is not the early 70’s and grassroots progressivism in 2006 isn’t a youth or a social movement. It is passionate and it is populist, at least in a stylistic sense but it is not radical or anti-intellectual. The liberal pundit class is making a number of errors in judgments at least in part because they are emotionally recoiling from being associated with what they see as dirty hippies. This is a problem.

At the end of his interview with Chait, Matthews said something like “what’s going on with you guys at “The New Republic?” You’re going liberal.” Chait responded, “we’ve always been liberal.”

Mark my words, soon it will be said that when the going got tough the liberals said we should bring back Saddam Hussein. Everybody knows that the left are totalitarians from way back.

Chait sticks in the shiv coming and going.

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