Month: November 2006

Supporting The Troops

by digby

Veteran’s Day is a good day to take a look at one of the greatest building blocks of the American middle class, the GI Bill:

On June 22, 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the “Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944,” better known as the “GI Bill of Rights.” At first the subject of intense debate and parliamentary maneuvering, the famed legislation for veteran of World War II has since been recognized as one of the most important acts of Congress.

During the past five decades, the law has made possible the investment of billions of dollars in education and training for millions of veterans. The nation has in return earned many times its investment in increased taxes and a dramatically changed society.

The law also made possible the loan of billions of dollars to purchase homes for millions of veterans, and helped transform the majority of Americans from renters to homeowners.

Most people would call that a good thing, right? A successful government program that helped millions of people improve their lives in tangible ways must be unassailable.

*Uh, no:

The public purpose of the G.I. Bill was to smooth the transition from military to civilian life after the war. But ulterior motives were also present. Washington Keynesians wrongly feared the economic consequences of putting this many people in the private sector at once; better to let them flounder around in schools for a few years.

Left-liberals wanted universities to be “democratized” and purged of traditional notions of merit and class. These ideologues saw veterans as a helpful tool (90 percent were eligible to receive funds) in this egalitarian effort. Moreover, colleges and universities across the country wanted government subsidies, just as they do today.

There’s a myth that most veterans would not have attended college without federal government help. In fact, myriad programs existed at all levels of society. Virtually every major church, civic organization, and large corporation raised money to provide them, and most states established loan programs as well. These could have worked without negative effects on schools. But they were preempted by the feds and history’s largest infusion of public dollars to education.

In 1946, the program’s first year, the government dumped $1.3 billion on higher education. This may not seem like much today, but it was then the largest program giving direct payments to individuals, exceeding unemployment benefits, Social Security (by four times), military retirement (by one third), and even agricultural subsidies during the heyday of rural central planning. Two years later, it had exploded in cost by 250 percent.

As veterans grew older, spending stabilized and declined, but the program left an awful political legacy. It served as a model for how politicians can grow the government without provoking public revolt, and caused an entire generation to regard government as a benefactor.

As Bob Dole said on the campaign trail, promoting federally funded vouchers, “I want to help young people to have an education, just as I had an education after World War II with the G.I. Bill of Rights.”

The bastard.

This is essentially the conservative argument against the New Deal and it’s been driving the political and economic debate for decades now. If the government does it — no matter how efficiently or how many people benefit — it must be wrong. And anyone who promotes such things is a self-interested liberal ideologue who wants nothing more than to destroy America’s will to succeed and make people dependent on them. It’s such an awful problem that they can’t even give government benefits to those who put their lives on the line because people might get the idea that government programs work — and that sends the wrong message. Slippery slope, don’t you know.

They’ve never had the nerve to really go after the GI Bill, of course. It would be political suicide. But they hate it and if Grover Norquist and his ilk have their way they would drown government veterans benefits in the bathtub right along with social security — or transform them into faith-based programs where Vets could get training from Ted Haggard (if they asked nicely.)

And it wasn’t as if we hadn’t tried it their way before:

Among the motives inspiring the legislation was the desire to spare the veterans and the nation the economic hardships that accompanied the return, years before, of those who fought in World War I.

… and resulted in this:

The Bonus march of 1932, when World War I veterans rallied in Washington DC for more effective veterans benefits during the height of the Depression was broken up when the US army sent tanks and soldiers with bayonet-affixed rifles into the veteran camps to clear the veterans out and burn the camp down, killing some (including William Hushka), and injuring many more.

(There are some surviving veterans of WWI, by the way.)

The GI Bill was a case of the government learning from mistakes, being responsive to a problem — and solving it. It worked.

Now who is it that supports the troops again — the conservative Club for Growth-style extremists like that guy I quoted above, or the Democratic party? The Democrats will make sure the VA works (as it has beautifully ever since Bill Clinton had it overhauled in the 90’s) and the GI bill and other more modern benefits will continue to be available to Veterans. The other side won’t because when you get down to it they just don’t believe that government is in the problem solving business. It’s really that simple.

* ironically, this article weighs in against the conservative hobby horse,school vouchers, because they are just as pernicious as the GI Bill in installing government into the private education system. It’s pretty clear, although not explicit, that he would just prefer a totally private educational system for everyone — let the hoi-polloi teach themselves.

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More Southern Agitation

by digby

Super smart commenter Sara left this one the Southern Comfort post and I thought it was well worth talking about as we continue this conversation:

Yes, the South needs to rebuild its Democratic Party, and the DNC and Dean can start the ball rolling with some subsidies, but the hard work will be pulling together the Majority Minority African American Democratic Districts with the progressive democratic culture. It has to be built by people on the ground who can cross that racial divide and the trust divide that reflects racial sell-outs of the past, and create one party. For right now the secure Democratic Districts are mostly Majority African American — and in many parts of the South, that is the core of the Democratic Party. In Texas it will need to be three way trust — White anglo, Hispanic and Black.

The parties need to keep focused on doing elections well — but in the off season they need to be good social and information centers. You compete with the Republican Clubhouse in the Mega Church by offering up the party organization as a social setting and a place of fellowship as well as political education. You introduce young people to the party with events that welcome them into their political maturity. Parties in the South ought to be planning major events to which all those new Senate and House Committee Chairs are invited to speak and meet and greet. Out of this will come more election volunteers, and eventually candidates that can win locally and eventually on the state-wide stage. I’ll feel less critical of the South when I see all this sort of stuff just regularly happening. I’ll also be less critical when I see people on all sides of the race and trust divides understanding each other’s take on issues, and backing each other’s interests. That is, afterall, what a political party is all about.

One of the things we haven’t really gotten to in this discussion of southern politics is how race affects the Democratic Party. Anyone want to weigh in on that?

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Disenchantment

by digby

Beliefnet did a recent poll of evangelicals that sheds a little light on my post below:

The findings were in line with exit poll estimates such as CNN’s, which found about 70 percent of white evangelicals voted Republican in Tuesday’s elections in which Democrats regained control of the U.S. Congress from President George W. Bush’s Republicans.

While still strong, that level of support was below the 74 to 78 percent range that different surveys found in the 2004 election.

Significantly, about 60 percent of those polled in the Beliefnet survey said their views of the Republican Party had become less positive in recent years.

“It’s not that they are soured with the Republican approach to culture war issues like abortion, it’s that they are angry with them on issues such as
Iraq and corruption,” said Steven Waldman, editor in chief of Beliefnet.com, a Web site on issues of faith.

As with other Americans, the Iraq war topped evangelicals’ list of electoral concerns, with 22.5 percent citing it as the issue that most affected their votes.

Respondents were not asked to specify if Iraq was a negative or positive factor, so some who cited it may have voted in support of Bush’s Iraq policies. Other surveys have found white evangelical support for the unpopular war to be higher than among other Americans.

Abortion and gay marriage/homosexuality were second and third among evangelicals’ electoral concerns, cited by 16 percent and 10.7 percent respectively.

The survey found a general disenchantment with politics among devout evangelicals, with 51.5 percent also saying their views of Democrats had soured in recent years.

“There has been some movement away from the Republicans but it is by no means a stampede of evangelicals toward the Democrats,” Waldman said.

So the the top issues for evangelicals were Iraq (who knows whether they viewed it negatively or positively,) gay-marriage and abortion. A stampede it surely ain’t.

But if you really want to see where everything becomes clear, check this out:

Over 52 percent still felt Bush was a better Christian than former Democratic President Bill Clinton, while 13 percent felt the reverse was true. About a third rated them evenly.

I know I should be thrilled that 30% believe that Clinton and Bush are equal, but really, that is very thin gruel. George W. Bush started an immoral war that has killed hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis, endorsed torture and indefinite imprisonment, presided over the most corrupt government in American history, never goes to church and has never once admitted error or sought forgiveness — and yet 87 percent of these people believe that Clinton’s eight unauthorized hummers make Bush the better Christian or at least no worse. I think we all know what Jesus would have to say about that.

And bravo to the 13% of evangelicals who know that unjust war and torture are more heinous in the godly scheme of things than infidelity. I assume these are the folks who are voting for Democrats because they share their values of of social justice and the common good. Too bad there aren’t more of them.

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My Best Vote

by digby

This is my congressman:

The Democratic congressman who will investigate the Bush administration’s running of the government says there are so many areas of possible wrongdoing, his biggest problem will be deciding which ones to pursue.

There’s the response to Hurricane Katrina, government contracting in Iraq and on homeland security, political interference in regulatory decisions by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration, and allegations of war profiteering, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., told the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce.

“I’m going to have an interesting time because the Government Reform Committee has jurisdiction over everything,” Waxman said Friday, three days after his party’s capture of Congress put him in line to chair the panel. “The most difficult thing will be to pick and choose.”

[…]

Subpoenas would be used only as a last result, Waxman said, taking a jab at a previous committee chairman, GOP Rep. Dan Burton of Indiana, who led the committee during part of the Clinton administration.

“He issued a subpoena like most people write a letter,” Waxman said.

Waxman complained that Republicans, while in power, shut Democrats out of decision-making and abdicated oversight responsibilities, focusing only on maintaining their own power.

In contrast to the many investigations the GOP launched of the Clinton administration, “when Bush came into power there wasn’t a scandal too big for them to ignore,” Waxman said.

Among the issues that should have been investigated but weren’t, Waxman contended, were the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, the controversy over the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s name, and the pre-Iraq war use of intelligence.

He said Congress must restore accountability and function as an independent branch of government. “It’s our obligation not to be repeating with the Republicans have done,” Waxman said.

Waxman is savvy and will run investigations with focus and flair. He’s very, very good at these things. I think he will find a way to do this without appearing to be exacting revenge or wasting the congress’s time. And the fact is that it’s his duty to do it, regardless. Just look at the list of events about which we are all still reading tea leaves and waiting for Bob Woodward’s book to come out to tell us what the Washington whispers are saying. We need a sober, serious official look at what the hell’s been going on in Washington these last six years and Waxman’s the guy who can do it.

Update: Billmon has more.

Update II: Lawyers, Guns and Money takes down Mickey Kaus’ ill absurd rant about Waxman.

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God Gap

by digby

Before everyone moves on from this election, I think it’s important that we all bookmark this post by Kevin Drum and keep it handy. A new zombie meme is emerging and it’s going to have to be chased down and killed over and over again:

Why do I keep writing about the exit polls? Because of stories like this from the Washington Post’s Alan Cooperman:

Religious liberals contended that a concerted effort by Democrats since 2004 to appeal to people of faith had worked minor wonders, if not electoral miracles, in races across the country.

….Democrats recaptured the Catholic vote they had lost two years ago. They sliced the GOP’s advantage among weekly churchgoers to 12 percentage points, down from 18 points in 2004.

Once more with feeling: in the the overall national vote, Democrats picked up 5 percentage points compared to 2004.

Among Catholics they picked up 6 points.

Among weekly churchgoers they picked up 3 points.

Among white evangelicals they picked up 3 points.

There’s just no story here unless you look at individual races. Nationally, turnout among religious voters was as high as it was in 2004, and their shift toward Democrats was either the same or a bit less than the overall national shift. I’d love to be able to say that Democrats made some disproportionate inroads in this group, since it’s such an important part of the GOP base, but they didn’t. People need to quit saying it.

The problem with Cooperman’s story is not that it says that evangelicals and catholics may have moved to the Democrats, it’s that Amy Sullivan and her friends in the media are going to use Cooperman’s incorrect analysis to prove that that the Democrats need to deliver on some menu of social conservatism because of it.

And if it were true that conservative religious voters moved to the Democrats in great numbers, then I’m sure they would be right, which is why I’m not keen on continuing to try to appeal to social conservatives as a voting bloc — they are way too conservative even for our Big Tent. The real social conservatives understand this:

“Even though a lot of Democratic candidates talked about faith, and even though a lot of them are devout people who hold similar values, they are part of a party that is liberal,” said Janice Shaw Crouse, director of Concerned Women for America’s Beverly LaHaye Institute, a conservative Christian think tank. “So the only hope social conservatives really have is the Republican Party.”

You can’t be all things to all people, people. If the large swathe of religious voters who are incorrectly alleged to have voted Democratic are widely seen by all these chatterers as religious liberals then great. More people concerned with social and economic justice would be a very welcome and logical addition to our coalition. (And even if it isn’t true I have no problem if people think it is.) But if this unsubstantiated mass migration to the Democrats is used by Amy Sullivan and the like as a cudgel to force Democratic tolerance for such abominations as creationism or right wing “family values,” then I see no margin in allowing the error to go unchallenged.

Let’s keep it real and ensure that it is well understood that the religious voters who voted Democratic are not people who expect the party to abandon gay rights or choice because they “delivered” the election. Those people voted in huge numbers, as they always do, for the Republicans.

The data shows that religious voters moved to the Democrats in the same numbers that every other demographic did, (except young voters and hispanics who voted Dem in significantly larger numbers than 2004.) We can draw no lessons on social policy at all from the rather small percentage change among these very religious voters except that they wised up, like a whole bunch of other people. Good for them. Welcome to the circus.

Update: Josh Marshall, also riffing on Kevin’s unpacking of the exit polls, has more on this zombie meme and where it came from. Unsurprisingly, it came from a badly written new story.
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Lieu-sieur

by digby

“The profile of corruption in the exit polls was bigger than I’d expected,” Rove tells TIME. “Abramoff, lobbying, Foley and Haggard [the disgraced evangelical leader] added to the general distaste that people have for all things Washington, and it just reached critical mass.”

Exit polls showed heavy discontent with the course of the war, and Bush announced the departure of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld the next day. But Rove took comfort in results of the Connecticut Senate race between the anti-war Democratic nominee, Ned Lamont, and Sen. Joseph Lieberman, who ran as an independent after losing the Democratic primary over his support for the war. “Iraq mattered,” Rove says. “But it was more frustration than it was an explicit call for withdrawal. If this was a get-out-now call for withdrawal, then Lamont would not have been beaten by Lieberman. Iraq does play a role, but not the critical, central role.”

How pathetic is it that the great GOP magus is reduced to finding his silver lining in an Independent beating a Democrat in a blue state?

He goes on to point out that they really didn’t lose because the races were so close in some states.

I know. This is not a man who has ever shown even the tiniest bit of shame or self-awareness so I shouldn’t be surprised. But that one got me.

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Moving To The Right

by digby

No, not us. Them. It’s hard to see how it’s possible for them to move any further, but they think it is.

The dog-beater whines:

“Laura Ingraham said it best. When Congressional Republicans wait until the First of October to begin reaching out to their base, they are destined to lose. That was the GOP s downfall. They consistently ignored the constituency that put them in power until it was late in the game, and then frantically tried to catch up at the last minute. In 2004, conservative voters handed them a 10-seat majority in the Senate and a 29-seat edge in the House. And what did they do with their power? Very little that Values Voters care about.

“Many of my colleagues saw this coming. I said in an interview with U.S. News and World Report shortly after the 2004 elections, “If Republicans in the White House and in Congress squander this opportunity, I believe they will pay a price for it in four years—or maybe in two.” Sadly for conservatives, that in large measure explains what happened on Tuesday night. Many of the Values Voters of ’04 simply stayed at home this year.

“The unfortunate thing is that Republican leaders still don’t appear to get it. Sen. Arlen Spector, R-Pa, said on Wednesday that the election results represented a ‘seismic earthquake’ and that his party must become ‘a lot more progressive and a lot less ideological.’ Dick Armey emerged from four years in the wilderness to blame conservative Christians for Tuesday’s defeat. They were, he said, ‘too involved’ with the party. He can’t be serious! Someone should tell him that without the support of that specific constituency, John Kerry would be President and the Republicans would have fallen into a black hole in ’04. In fact, that is where they are headed if they continue to abandon their pro-moral, pro-family and pro-life base. The big tent will turn into a three-ring circus.

“Republican leaders in Congress during this term apparently never understood, or they forgot, why Ronald Reagan was so loved and why he is considered one of our greatest presidents. If they hope to return to power in ’08, they must rediscover the conservative principles that resonated with the majority of Americans in the 1980s — and still resonate with them today. Failure to do so will be catastrophic. Values Voters are not going to carry the water for the Republican Party if it ignores their deeply held convictions and beliefs.

“To quote Dr. Ken Hutcherson, ‘When Republicans act like Democrats they lose, and when Democrats act like Republicans, they win.’ And therein lies the lesson of ’06.”

You just keep right on believing that Jimbo.

The problem with this and the other GOP reason-for-loss meme (that the conservatives abandoned the party because the Republicans had abandoned their philosophy of limited government) is that it just isn’t borne out by either the facts (or even the conventional wisdom that this election was a move to the center.) These people all seem to truly believe that the majority who voted for Bush two years ago came out in favor of Democrats this week because they were upset that the Republicans were insufficiently conservative. Does that make any sense?

I hope they continue to believe this and act accordingly because the GOP actually lost the moderates and independents, not their base, and for good reason:

While the publicly-available election data can’t answer this question definitively, everything we know about public opinion suggests there isn’t a majority constituency for economic libertarianism. (Tax cuts, perhaps, but not the smaller government that goes along with it.) Probably the best source on this is an exhaustive 2005 study by the Pew Research Center, which divided the electorate into nine different “typologies.” Of the nine groups, only two were discernibly libertarian on questions of economics, amounting to 20 percent of registered voters. The rest were sympathetic to government, to varying degrees. Even more empirically-minded conservatives–like National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru–have conceded as much.

The easiest way to see this is to focus on a specific issue. For example, amid all the conservative hand-wringing is the occasional lament about Social Security privatization. But there’s a simple explanation for the GOP’s wobbliness on the issue: A solid majority of the country opposes it. According to a Washington Post poll from March of 2005, Americans disapproved of the president’s Social Security plan by a 56-35 margin. And they disliked the plan more the longer they heard about it. Though it’s hardly the only explanation, it’s no surprise that two of the plan’s most vocal supporters–Talent and Santorum–lost on Tuesday night.

I expect this confusion comes from the fact that Republicans truly believe their own hype that says the majority of Americans are fundamentalists — either of the free market or Christian variety. They are, after all, faith-based. But it’s never been true.

The moderates and independents broke against the Republicans for a number of reasons to do with the war, the lies, the mismangement, the spending, the corruption and the whole overused conservative mantra that lost all meaning sometime after the 2,000 American death in Iraq, Terry Schiavo and the endless repetition of tiresome free market bromides that never seem to add up to anything real. It’s like watching “Cosby” re-runs at this point — mildly nostalgic but completely irrelevant.

One thing seems quite clear to me; it’s the conservative movement that has been discredited with most people, not just George W. Bush. The majority of people in the country don’t see a difference between the two and for good reason: the conservative movement worshipped Bush like he was the second coming and they greedily (and very publicly) sucked up the credit for his elections. They own his ass whether they like it or not and they have from the very beginning.

Remember this:

Congress’ passage of a ban on late-term abortions in November, 2003 – again with centrist Democratic support – presented Bush with yet another opportunity to burnish his credentials with the religious right. As Bush signed the bill flanked by Christian right mandarins like Jerry Falwell, Lou Sheldon and Sen. Rick Santorum – an image seemingly calculated to rankle the 100 Planned Parenthood activists protesting outside the White House – cries of the ceremony’s 400 attendees erupted in cries of “Amen!” Later that day, Bush celebrated privately with a virtual who’s who of the religious right, including Falwell, radio host Janet Parshall, SBC leader Richard Land and National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) president Ted Haggard, who leads a 14,000 member church in Colorado Springs, Colo. Together, they joined hands and prayed.

“Following the prayer,” Falwell wrote in an email to his followers, “I told President Bush the people in the room represent about 200,000 pastors and 80 million believers nationwide who consider him not only to be our president but also a man of God.”

And here’s more:

President Bush’s tax cut finally has passed, but there’s no time for the true believers in this downtown conference room to celebrate.

Grover Norquist calls on a White House official, who rises to thank more than 100 conservative activists for their help in passing the sort of sweeping tax relief this group has been pursuing for years at weekly strategy sessions known as “the Wednesday Meeting.”

But the agenda is full with other issues as well: confirming conservative judges. Battling curbs on guns. Boosting Republican congressional hopefuls. And, of course, cutting more taxes.

This nondescript room in an L Street office building is the incubator for Bush’s political strategy, one that puts his conservative base first and foremost.

Karl Rove’s alleged genius has been celebrated for one simple thing the last six years — his “play to the base strategy.” Please don’t come crying now that he wasn’t adequately kissing your asses. That’s pretty much all he did and everybody knows it.

George Bush may have been the guy who killed the movement, but it’s dead nonetheless and everyone saw the movement robots wildly cheering him on their television screens. Their old “conservatism can never fail, it can only be failed” just isn’t going to work this time no matter how much they prop up its decaying corpse and pretend it’s everybody’s favorite girl. The vast majority of the public knows very well that George W. Bush is the most conservative president in American History. That’s what they don’t like about him.

So go ahead, run a bunch of firebreathing, social-security-privatizing, stem cell illegalizing wingnuts next time, please. And fight as hard as you can to get the most conservative, Christian right presidential candidate you can find. Demand your due. I’m begging you.

Update: Oh, and by the way, when I say the conservative movement is dead, I don’t mean that the movement conservatives are going anywhere. They have simply been reduced to their essence.

Here’s Perlstein:

Cheating is by now a constitutive part of Republican culture. Such false-flag harassment was a crucial part of “ratfucking” operations in Richard Nixon’s 1972 presidential campaign — to take just one example, Nixon agents circulated fliers in the Milwaukee ghetto advertising a non-existent “free lunch” sponsored by the Democrats. The Watergate hearings in 1973 and 1974 were full of these kinds of revelations. It didn’t shame Republicans into retreating. It just made them more careful practitioners — more careful, yet at the same time more brazen: consider those NRCC spokesmen. They could have denied the hustle. Instead, they owned up to it.

Ideology may come and go, but this is what they really believe in. And they have trained a new generation in its dark arts.

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General Shinseki For Secretary Of Defense

by tristero

Now that I have your attention…

We all know why Bush chose Robert Gates. Yes, he’s apparently a competent bureaucrat but that’s not the real reason. The real reason is he’s a longtime Bush family fluffer. And Crawford’s Own Churchill – bold, brave George – is too insecure to work with anyone else.

Those are Gates’ only two qualifications. Now, what’s the downside to this guy? Well, among other things, as we all know by now he was so close to Iran/Contra he nearly got indicted. That’s kind of a big downside, given how scandal-prone this administration is. But there’s another problem with him:

Robert Gates has no specific qualifications to run the Department of Defense.

The only job experience that comes close is that he was in the Air Force from 1967 to 1969. Now this just may be fuzzy math, but by my calculation that’s, let’s see…yup, that’s 37 years ago. But let’s not exaggerate. It’s true, back then they did have computers just like they do now! Of course, many were the size of a warehouse and were programmed as often from punch cards as they were terminals, but they were computers. I’m sure Gates can easily grasp the basics of modern weapons technology to make informed decisions in no more than, oh, about 5 or 6 years. (That, of course, leaves him no time to study anything else connected with the operation of the modern military, like tactics, deployment issues, and overall strategery. Anyone remember Tom Ridge? Gates may be smarter but still…)

So what else makes Bush think Gates can run the Pentagon? Well, Gates has been in the Baker/Hamilton Iraq study group for at least 5 or 6 hours now, or is it minutes? But I’m sure he’s been working real hard.

Meanwhile, General Eric Shinseki has spent his entire career in the military. Plus he had the guts to challenge Rumsfeld’s lowball numbers, and he did it in public.

Shinseki: Competent. Knowledgeable. Independent. Not even a whiff of scandal.

Gates: Competent. Not knowledgeable. Bush family loyalist. The best that can be said is there wasn’t enough evidence to indict him in Iran/Contra.

I see no reason why Congress shouldn’t insist on the best.

—

Ok, lemme make it plain what I’ve been saying here.

Of course, I know that Bush would never accept Shinseki. And of course, just about no one with an ounce of self-respect or talent would agree to report directly to George W. Bush unless they were a longtime family friend.

The real point of this post is two-fold. First of all, Bush hasn’t changed in the slightest and is still jerking the country around, including the troops who are laying down their lives implementing his utterly insane war.

More importantly, given how much political capital Dems have right now, there is only one reason I can think of why this country should tolerate any more of Bush’s clowning: We’re so used to it we can’t think of anything better. But let’s conduct a quick thought experiment: Imagine a presidency where top positions were filled by qualified women and and men, not goons so unconditionally loyal they had knee pads surgically attached.

In truth, I don’t have to imagine such a presidency. I can easily remember one.

So I can’t think of a single reason why Bush can’t start behaving like a real president instead of a scared rabbit. There is nothing to stop him from appointing competent AND knowledgeable people to high positions who don’t have incidents in their past that seriously call into question their integrity. Provided Democrats insist.

And I think, for a lot of reasons the Democrats should insist. Bush can start right now. Gates should never have been nominated and he should not be confirmed.

Taunt-ology

by digby

Glenn Greenwald catches the Washington Post airbrushing history from their very own paper to protect President Bush from being called a liar when he even admitted to the lie. (These internets are dangerous boys. You can’t just go around doing this anymore because people will catch you.)

Greenwald writes:

It is now conclusively clear that President Bush lied last week, several days before the election, when he vowed definitively to reporters that Donald Rumsfeld would remain as Defense Secretary for the next two years. At the time he made that statement, he was deep into the process of replacing Rumsfeld, if not already finished, and the President knew that the statement he made about Rumsfeld was false at the time he made it. That is the definition of “lying.”

There can be no reasonable dispute about this, since the President at his Press Conference not only admitted lying when he told the reporters that Rumsfeld would stay, but he even went on to explain his reasons for lying (“the reason why is I didn’t want to inject a major decision about this war in the final days of a campaign. And so the only way to answer that question and to get you on to another question was to give you that answer”). The decision was clearly a fait accompli before the election, as the President himself said: “win or lose, Bob Gates was going to become the nominee.”

[…]

At some point, the Post changed what was the accurate reporting — that Bush expressly acknowledged that he “misled” reporters because he had “indicated that he had made the decision to replace Rumsfeld before the elections” — by claiming in the new version that he merely “contemplated” Rumsfeld’s exit before the election. Worse, the Post deleted entirely the accurate statement that the President “appeared to acknowledge having misled reporters.” (If one does a search of the Post for the deleted paragraphs, the article will still come up in the Post’s search engine, but the entire passage is nowhere to be found in the article).

(Read the whole post for the amazing technicolor rationalizations of Howie Kurtz if nothing else.)

Clearly there was some pressure to remove from the historical record the fact that Bush knowingly lied to the public before the election. And the Washington Post clearly capitulated.

But ever since it happened I’ve been puzzled as to why Bush lied about it in the first place. It seemed to me when I heard about it that it would have been a good thing for him to at least signal obliquely that he would change course after the election rather than issue such unequivocal support. They had to know that the independent Republican leaners would have felt a little bit better about voting GOP if they thought that Bush was going to dump Rummy, right?

My guess is that Rove was worried about the reaction among kool-aid drinkers like Pamela Atlas Shrugged, which means that they have gone deep into the bunker and truly are communing with the crazies. Did Rove really come to believe that his turn-out strategy could trump a 13 point lead? What’s he smoking?

It is also probable that Bush, Cheney and Rove all believed that any sign they were listening to the opposition would be perceived as weakness by the terrorists which I think is one of their fundamental mistakes in running the war on terror. Like most immature bullies they attach much too much importance to silly schooolyard taunts:

Al Qaeda gloats over Rumsfeld

Nov 10, 2006 — BAGHDAD (Reuters) – A purported audio recording by the leader of Iraq’s al Qaeda wing gloated over the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, as a top U.S. general said the military was preparing to recommend strategy changes.

Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, also known as Abu Ayyub al-Masri, said in the recording posted on the Internet on Friday that the group had 12,000 armed fighters and 10,000 others waiting to be equipped to fight U.S. troops in Iraq.

“I tell the lame duck (U.S. administration) do not rush to escape as did your defense minister…stay on the battle ground,” he said.

How much do you think Junior hates that? I would guess it bothers him quite a bit, judging from his rhetoric over the past five years.

I suspect they think the world sees things through the same schoolboy lens as they do and truly believed that if their voters saw al Qaeda dissing the Prez before the election they would recoil from their weakened leader in disgust. Perhaps they are right. And I suspect they couldn’t take the idea of Democrats gloating (we are pretty much the same as al Qaeda in their minds) either.

But backing Rumsfeld so stongly before the election actually made him look cracked in the head, which is a selling point with his cult, but makes everyone else increasingly nervous. I believe it was a serious miscalculation, which is why somebody’s calling up the Washington Post and instructing them to airbrush history.

Update: AJEsquire in the comments may have this right. I hadn’t thought of it. Gates is a family retainer. They didn’t need any lead time to get him on board.

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Winning Into Losing

by digby

Despite my clear allegiance to the netroots and my belief that they were vital in this election, I have refrained from weighing in too heavily on the internecine fighting in the hope that it would blow over as our victory sank in and people gathered their wits and properly apportioned credit. I was more than willing to say Rahm and Chuck had done their jobs and that we did ours which means that the party won big, giving us a real governing coalition instead of a bare majority That seems like a nice, lukewarm water assessment designed to let everyone have a fair share of the credit.

I was being far too generous:

Some big name Democrats want to oust DNC Chairman Howard Dean, arguing that his stubborn commitment to the 50-state strategy and his stinginess with funds for House races cost the Democrats several pickup opportunities.

The candidate being floated to replace Dean? Harold Ford.

Says James Carville, one of the anti-Deaniacs, “Suppose Harold Ford became chairman of the DNC? How much more money do you think we could raise? Just think of the difference it could make in one day. Now probably Harold Ford wants to stay in Tennessee. I just appointed myself his campaign manager.”

Apparently the beltway elite is determined to start a war. There is no reason for them to float this other than a purely malicious power play. Dean’s strategy at least arguably worked (I would say undisputably) and the party won the fucking election. Why bring out the long knives in the middle of our victory glow? For the establishment to choose this moment to slap the progressive base of this party right in the face by dissing Dean is to alienate their new younger voters (and their future), their internet-based supporters and their activist grassroots all of whom worked their hearts out in this election.

If there is anyone with the party out there reading this, please talk these short sighted retreads out of pursuing this line. The DNC leadership post is a partywide elected position and Dean has the allegiance of the states, so this is nothing more than public masturbation. There’s no point in floating this nonsense except to piss people off.

We have a very important presidential election coming up and unless the Democratic party is living under some Rovian illusion that we have just begun the new thousand year reich, it’s going to be very tough. If they think they don’t need need all the help they can get, they’re crazy. We may not be their favorite people, but we are valuable members of the party whether they like it or not — and boneheaded talk like this will make things unpleasant in a million little ways that just aren’t worth it at a time like this. Don’t be dumb.

The establishment is going to have to grow up and learn to live with the netroots and the grassroots activists who back Dean. I hate to be the bearer of bad news but we aren’t going anywhere.

By the way, has anyone seen one word from Emmanuel and Shumer thanking the grassroots,the netroots or the volunteers for all their time, hard work and money? Perhaps they have, but it sure isn’t showing up in all the laudatory profiles. How classy.

Update: Sorry, Rahm Emmanuel did post this on the DCCC site on October 27.

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