Month: January 2007

Steamroller Democracy

by digby

I don’t now about you, but I’m all on pins and needles waiting for the big speech tonight. The big question will finally be answered: how much is the president going to escalate the war and increase the American occupation?

Think about that. We just had an election that completely repudiated the president’s strategy in the Iraq war. Only 12% of the public supports sending in more troops today. The military is not backing this either. Yet what are we watching on television all day? “How many more troops is the president going to send to Iraq?”

This is not just a slap in the face to the democratic process, it’s a slap in the face to our concept of reality. I wrote before that this president has always governed by tantrum, and this is no exception. He is doing exactly the opposite of what logic would dictate, just as he did after the 2000 election debacle when he governed from the far right as if he’d won a huge ideological mandate — and after 9/11 when he nonsensically insisted that we invade a country that had not been involved in the attacks.

I can hardly believe my eyes that he is getting away with it again. It’s truly stunning.

I think that we have to start looking at this differently than we have up to this point. To me, this is looking more and more like a series of tests of the Republican belief that pure power is all that’s needed to govern in a democracy. Dick Cheney has proven — and will continue to submit this proof today — that the president can do anything he wants to do. He is impervious to public opinion. Indeed, unless an election hangs in the balance, Republicans in general have shown repeatedly over the last few years that they believe our government is based solely upon the raw exercize of institutional power.

12% percent of the citizens in this country support escalating the war in Iraq and yet the president is going to do it anyway. 12%. We are not living in a democracy if the president can escalate this war under those circumstances. And yet he will — and it will have the perverse effect of giving him more power as people continue to absorb the idea that the government needn’t take its wishes into account.

This puts the impeachment of president Clinton in a new light as well. I had always thought it was done as a sort of long term payback for Nixon (Impeach the dirty hippie!) and an emotional reaction to the fact that the thousand year reign they expected after Reagan didn’t actually materialize. But it may have been more than that in retrospect. It was always a fundamentally undemocratic action. It was not favored by the people at any point and Clinton’s approval ratings actually went up on the day they impeached him. They lost seats in the election contrary to historical precedent. Yet the Republicans pushed the impeachment button even though there were many lesser options they could have taken. They used their institutional power to spite the people’s will and it was only the Senate’s 2/3 rule for impeachment that saved the country from having an institutionally legal but thoroughly undemocratic coup.(They did not achieve a simple majority to convict, but they likely would have if it meant that Clinton would have been removed.)

They paid no price for that and it gave them the courage to blatantly use the institutional power of the Supreme Court in 2000 to decide a presidential election on a partisan basis despite the fact that Al Gore had clearly been the people’s preference in both the nation as a whole and Florida in particular. Even though the public favored counting all the votes and felt no urgency to settle the election prematurely, the word went forth that the nation would be in grave crisis unless the election was settled immediately in the Republicans’ favor. (Scalia even made the astonishing argument that Bush would have trouble governing if the nation were to find out that he got fewer votes!) This threat of grave crisis came from the fact that Tom Delay promised that he would refuse to acknowledge Florida electors who voted for Al Gore in favor of a special set of Bush electors sent up by the Florida Republican majority state legislature. This would have been another example of pure institutional power thwarting the will of the people. The Supremes saved Tom the trouble, but the outcome was clear. The Republicans would use every lever of institutional power at their disposal to ensure that George W. Bush would become president.

And then there was Iraq, which never made any sense. Many people knew it at the time and a large number of people who supported it were uncomfortable with it but didn’t quite know why or didn’t want to ask. It was an executive branch steamroller on which they tacked what we all knew was a superfluous congressional vote (and one that was only called because it put the Democrats in an unteneable position going into an election.) Just as there hadn’t been any stopping those earlier instances of undemocratic and inexplicable strongarm demonstrations of power, there was no stopping the invasion of Iraq.

The press and the political establishment supported all of this, pretending that the nation felt the opposite of how they did and often excusing the behavior and admonishing the people’s righteous anger by saying that the nation need to “heal” or it needed “stability” or had to “get over it.” And it wasn’t altogether irrational because the violent eliminationist rhetoric of the far right echoes in the backround of all these actions (even though many of the commenters are not fully cognizant of where their feeling of threatening unrest actually comes from and are instead stuck in some timewarp from 1969.)

And here we are again. The nation has spoken in no uncertain terms that it does not want the Iraq war to be escalted. Indeed, they have said they want it to be de-escalated. The president is going to do the opposite. And we are all standing by watching it happen. Oh there will be a few protests in the congress and some political theatre, but the message is already clear. The president can do what he wants to do.

I think that we must be honest and admit that we aren’t living in a real democracy anymore. Yes, it has the trappings of one. We hold elections and we petition our government and offices change hands. But it is so infected with spin and lies and the willingness of its leaders to deny the democratic spirit of the constitution at every turn that it no longer really functions as one.

It has never been more clear that the people are irrelevant in our system of government than it is at this moment. Fully 70% of the public disapproves of president Bush’s job performance. Even more disapprove of his Iraq policy and a large majority believe it was a mistake to invade and occupy Iraq in the first place. 88% do not want this war war to be escalated. His party just lost a large number of seats in both houses of congress over this issue.

And yet this 30% president with 12% support in the country is going to exactly the opposite of what the country wants him to do and he will get away with it. Democracy? Not so much.

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The President Goes All-In

by poputonian

Tonight the reckless Gambler-in-Chief will try to throw his last soldier-chips into the Iraqi pot. One last gambit so George can achieve hero-hood, which is all he ever wanted to do, to be a bigger hero than he thinks people believe his daddy to be. This has always been personal to George Bush, a belief in himself that he is larger than America.

So, just for a little contrast, this might be a good time to visit a scenario that played out in September of 1776 when the United States was, oh, about sixty days old. It illustrates how the first Commander-in-Chief, when faced with a military crisis, listened to his generals and turned into a retreatin’ surrender-monkey. George Washington and his generals faced a tough question: save New York or save America?

It was early September and the American army had just been driven from Long Island by the British troops. The Americans were positioned around New York City with an idea to defend it when the British came ashore. But one of Washington’s trusted subordinates, General Nathanael Green sent him this letter:

The critical situation which the army is in, will, I hope, sufficiently apologize for my troubling your Excellency with this letter. The sentiments are dictated I am sure by an honest mind, a mind who feels deeply interested in the salvation of his Country; and for the honor and reputation of the General under whom he serves. The object under consideration is whether a general and speedy retreat from this Island is necessary or not. To me it appears the only eligible plan to oppose the Enemy successfully and secure ourselves from disgrace.
…
The City and Island of New York, are no objects for us; we are not to bring them in competition with the general interest of America.
…
It is our business to study to avoid any considerable misfortune, and to take post where the Enemy will be obliged to fight us, and not we them. The sacrifice of the vast property of New York, and the suburbs, I hope has no influence upon your Excellency’s measures. Remember the King of France when Charles the Fifth, Emperor of Germany, invaded his Kingdom, he laid whole Provinces to waste; and by that policy he starved and ruined Charles’s Army, and defeated him without fighting a battle. Two thirds of the property of the City of New York and the suburbs belongs to the Tories. We have no very great reason to run any considerable risk for its defense.
…
If we attempt to hold the City and Island, and should not be able to, we shall be wasting of time unnecessarily, and betray a defect of judgment, if no worse misfortune attends it.

So surrender-monkey Greene suggests they cut and run:

I give it as my opinion that a general and speedy retreat is absolutely necessary and that the honor and interest of America requires it.

Washington then gathered his generals for a council of war, as Greene had suggested, and revealed the results in a letter to Congress on September 8th:

On every side there is a choice of difficulties.
…
In deliberating on this great question [of retreat], it was impossible to forget that history, our own experience, the advice of our ablest friends in Europe, the fears of the Enemy, and even the declarations of Congress demonstrate that on our side the war should be defensive.

It has been even called a war of posts, that we should on all occasions avoid a general action or put anything to risk unless compelled by a necessity into which we ought never to be drawn. The Arguments on which such a system was founded were deemed unanswerable, and experience has given her sanction.

With these views, the honor of making a brave defense does not seem to be a sufficient stimulus when the success is very doubtful.

But how would George Surrender-Monkey Washington tell Congress he was going to cut and run? Actually, that part was easy because of who he was:

I am sensible a retreating army is encircled with difficulties, that declining an engagement subjects a General to reproach, and that the common cause may be affected by the discouragement it may throw over the minds of many.

But when the fate of America may be at stake on the issue, when the wisdom of cooler moments and experienced men have decided that we should protract the war [by retreating], if possible, I cannot think it safe or wise to adopt a different system.

This was always about America to George Washington, a belief in country that was larger than himself.

And So It Begins

by digby

A reader forwarded this latest chain e-mail making the rounds in wingnutland:

Be careful, be very careful

Barack Hussein Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, to Barack Hussein Obama Sr. (black muslim) of Nyangoma-Kogelo, Siaya District, Kenya, and Ann Dunham of Wichita, Kansas(white atheist).

When Obama was two years old, his parents divorced and his father returned to Kenya. His mother married Lolo Soetoro — a Muslim — moving to Jakarta with Obama when he was six years old. Within six months he had learned to speak the Indonesian language Obama spent “two years in a Muslim school, then two more in a Catholic school” in Jakarta. Obama takes great care to conceal the fact that he is a Muslim while admitting that he was once a Muslim, mitigating that damning information by saying that, for two years, he also attended a Catholic school. Obama’s father, Barack Hussein Obama, Sr. was a radical Muslim who migrated from Kenya to Jakarta, Indonesia. He met Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham—a white atheist from Wichita, Kansas—at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Obama, Sr. and Dunham divorced when Barack, Jr. was two.

Obama’s spinmeisters are now attempting to make it appear that Obama’s introduction to Islam came from his father and that influence was temporary at best. In reality, the senior Obama returned to Kenya immediately following the divorce and never again had any direct influence over his son’s education. Dunham married another Muslim, Lolo Soetoro who educated his stepson as a good Muslim by enrolling him in one of Jakarta’s Wahabbi schools. Wahabbism is the radical teaching that created the Muslim terrorists who are now waging Jihad on the industrialized world. Since it is politically expedient to be a Christian when you are seeking political office in the United States, Obama joined the United Church of Christ to help purge any notion that he is still a Muslim.

Don’t tell anyone but he’s black too.

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Lukewarm Broth

by digby

Yesterday I wrote about Applebee’s America, Gerald Ford and the beltway’s desperate desire to keep the dirty hippies from running amock. The new mantra is that just as we needed to “heal” by forgiving Nixon after he raped the nation, today we must likewise “heal” by forgiving and forgetting the utter hell the Republicans just put this country through for the last twelve years of trumped up scandal, impeachments, stolen elections, bankrupting the treasury, illegal warrs, and constitution shredding. Kumbay-frigging-yah.

Today, more proof of my thesis. Here’s that fabulous new online “entity” called Hotsoup, whose editor in chief is none other than Ron Fournier, one of the authors of the aforementioned “Applebee’s America”:

We’ve had a HOTSOUP debate over whether Ford’s pardon helped heal a divided country. To those who say nobody’s mind is ever changed in these debates, I’ll prove you wrong – I’ve been convinced here that Ford’s pardon was a huge sacrifice to pull our partisan nation back together. And now, by the most amazing coincidence, we’re all talking about his sacrifices at a time when our country is again dangerously divided. Ford’s passing away has put the importance of reunification back in the public focus. Ultimately, that may have been what Ford wanted. Can we put this reunifying idea back in the government’s focus? By ‘we’, I don’t mean the general public. I mean us folks on HOTSOUP. We’ve got a good cross-section of politically-minded people here. Maybe we can get some action going? What’s say we try to get the 110th congress to pledge this year’s session to the memory of Gerald Ford by working to reunify the country even at the cost of hard work and self-sacrifice. Here is the “Ford Pledge”:

“In honor of Gerald Ford, his decency, and the tremendous sacrifices he made to heal this country at a time of division, I pledge to spend 2007 working towards a similar depolarization – by cooperating with peers from opposing camps, by putting my countrymen’s needs before my party’s, and by making sacrifices if necessary. We stand stronger when united, and I pledge to lead my country by good example, just as I have been led by Gerald Ford’s good example. I pledge to spend 2007 working towards that strong unity, and I dedicate that work to Gerald Ford’s memory.”

Please do two things with this pledge:
1.) Mail it to your congressman. Request that they read it publicly. Please also send a link to this page, so they’ll know that this is a rather large grassroots movement. You can find the congressional web pages at http://www.house.gov/.

Gerald Ford made tremendous sacrifices? Because he had to give up the White House? Please.

The country was plenty polarized after Ford took office and it has remained so, to one degree or another ever since. I’m sure the Republicans are aware that something quite significant happened after Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon:

The U.S. House election, 1974 was an election for the United States House of Representatives in 1974 that occurred in the wake of the Watergate scandal, which had forced President Richard M. Nixon to resign in favor of Gerald Ford. This scandal allowed the Democratic Party to make large gains in the House election, taking 49 seats from the Republican Party and increasing their majority above the two-thirds mark

Reagan later created a large majority that didn’t last beyond his own brand of personality politics but the country has pretty much remained polarized ever since then. If these people want to end polarization, the way to do it is to have the reckoning that’s overdue by about 30 years.

But ending polarization isn’t what these guys care about at all. The beltway is filled with rich, indulgent parents who refuse to be responsible adults and force these miscreants to change their behavior, so they start screaming for mercy for the Republicans everytime they screw up. They are afraid of the deafening howls of outrage and threatened retribution from these GOP bullies when they are held accountable for what they’ve done. (They also find it unseemly that such people would be answerable to hoi polloi. Best for everyone to simply sweep it under the rug.)

If America wants more Nixons and more George W. Bushes they will drink the lukewarm beltway kool-aid and do what these people want them to do. If they want their country back they will put an end to this cycle right now. Once all the secrecy and lies and thievery have been exposed and examined, then maybe we can work on reconciliation. Until then, this is just beltway cowards’ appeasing the wingnut lunatics.

Update: Here’s a delicious screed riffing on the same theme: the beltway’s irrational fear of hippies.

Beware the dirty hippies. They’re immature and irresponsible. They’re utopians and dreamers. They meddle with lives and hate Christian values and blame America first and root for terrorists. They want free sex and legalized drugs and mandatory abortion. They want to eat your babies. They heart Satan.

This enormous backlash against revolutionary leftism continued growing and gaining strength long after revolutionary leftism petered out as a political force of any real influence. The narratives and habits of mind bequeathed us by the culture war are with us still, despite the long-ago disappearance of one combatant. It’s shadowboxing on a nationwide scale, and it shows no signs of abating.

Any number of examples could be cited. The same dynamic plays out on virtually every issue: there’s the virulent far-right position, funded by deep-pocketed reactionaries and pushed by talk radio, an enormous network of mutually reinforcing conservative pundits in every major media outlet, an entire cable news network (three now, really), and numerous powerful politicians in leadership positions in every branch of government. Then there’s the avowedly liberal position, represented by some obscure professor or a guy in the comment section of a blog or a random placard at a protest. Then there’s the “centrist” position, which is the far-right position with the edges rubbed off.

How does one establish oneself as a “centrist”? Why, by bashing the dirty hippies. After all, if you bash the virulent reactionaries, you’re criticizing “real Americans” and the heartland and the baby Jesus. Everybody positions themselves by way of their distance from the — at this point largely mythical — dirty hippie. There’s no faster route to media exposure for someone on the left that to spend every minute of the day criticizing other people on the left. Mickey Kaus. Joe Klein. Richard Cohen. Joe Lieberman. The list goes on and on.

Or in the words of Joe Klein:

Oh, Ana, I disagree–and my disagreement is about substance rather than positioning…

Liberals were “right” about Vietnam, but they have paid a price ever since because they were so obnoxious about their correctness. The leftier liberals proceeded to see Vietnam in every American military initiative–the placement of Pershing missiles in Europe, Star Wars, the removal of Noriega, the first Gulf War–and they suffered as a result. Just because they’re right about Iraq, and about this escalation, it doesn’t mean they won’t be blamed by the public if the result of an American withdrawal is lethal chaos in the region and $200 per barrel oil. All I’m saying is that those who oppose the war now have a responsibility to (a) oppose it judiciously, without hateful or extreme rhetoric and (b) start thinking very hard–and in a very detailed way–about how we begin to recover from this mess.

Lots and lots of substance in that line of thinking. Liberals may be right but they are so totally icky and, like, nobody totally kewl likes them.

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Punchline Drunk

by digby

The clearest sign we’ve seen yet that the wingnuts are really on the run is that they are now pathetically trying to imitate liberal-ish media and they have no earthly idea what they are imitating or what it means:

Great Moments In Fox News Dept. Forget Keith Olbermann’s “Worst Person In The World” contest — it’s now been completely upstaged by a new Sunday contest on Fox: Sean Hannity’s “Enemy of the State” award.

This is their idea of irony, no doubt, but it’s not funny because … oh why bother:

An enemy of the state is a person accused of certain crimes against the state, such as treason. Falsely describing individuals in this way is often a manifestation of political repression. For example, an authoritarian regime may purport to maintain national security by describing social or political dissidents as “enemies of the state”.

They are becoming parodies of themselves.

And I have a sneaking suspicion that Dennis Miller has something to do with this — poor, sad, Dennis “bad timing” Miller who thought he was making a good career move and ended up in the wingnut ghetto.

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Moral Hazard

by digby

There is an interesting back and forth going on between Jonathan Chait and Peter Wood who has written a book about “The New Anger” which is apparently a manifestation of a leftwing unhinged by Jimi Hendrix.

I wrote about Staney Kurtz’s review of Wood’s book last week in some detail, tracing the actual genesis of the “New Anger” — and let’s just say that it wasn’t the Democrats who invented it. In fact, it was once celebrated on the cover of national magazines as a righteous Republican emotion:

After writing that post I got some very interesting correspondence from two different people who had been working in the congress during the 80’s when Newtie and the boyz were starting their jihad and they both said that I didn’t know the half of it.

This rightwing anthropologist’s thesis about leftwing “anger” is part of the resurgence of the rightwing victimization theme which as been around, but somewhat ridiculous, during the years in which they held power in all three branches of government. In this case they are saying that the left is irrational — much as certain cloddish men are prone to tellling women to “calm down” when they get righteously pissed at their poor behavior, the right is trying to marginalize liberal anger.

In a different line of attack, as with this new book “Applebee’s America”, they are pushing the idea that there is no such thing as partisanship in the first place. The whole red-blue divide is now deemed ridiculous as we are all members of discrete tribes, most of which are composed of swing voters.

“Applebee’s America” is perfectly designed to appeal to the lukewarm punditocrisy who are desperate to believe that the needs and desires of average Americans are exactly like their own and to that end a book written by a Republican strategist, a Democratic strategist and a reporter is their idea of analytical nirvana. (It’s juuuuust right.)

This is awfully convenient for the Republicans who must shift gears and say “why, oh why, can’t we all get along?” now that they no longer hold the institutional levers of power. That whole “elections have consequences” thing is so 2004. And it’s extremely convenient that one of the authors of “Applebee’s America”, Bush’s former pollster Matthew Dowd, has changed course and finds that the country is one vast land of swing voters who want nothing more than for the parties to all get along. He’s the guy who famously gathered the data that proved to Rove after the Republicans controlled all branches of government that there was no longer any such thing as a swing voter. But let’s not let that get in the way of a soothing new meme for the DC courtiers to embrace.

(Go on over to the book’s site and take the fun test “what’s your tribe?” I’m apparently in the “tipping tribe” which makes me a swing voter. Seriously.)

I don’t know if there’s going to be any stopping this. But I think it would be best for the Democrats to keep a smile on their faces and just do what needs to be done. It is a very serious moral hazard to allow the Republicans to continute to get away with this stuff:

In insurance theory, moral hazard is the name given to the increased risk of problematic (immoral) behavior, and thus a negative outcome (“hazard”), because the person who caused the problem doesn’t suffer the full (or any) consequences, or may actually benefit.

That practically defines the Republican party since 1974.

This has been going on almost as long as I can remember, from Nixon’s crimes to Reagan/Bush and the Savings and Loan scandals and Iran Contra and now Bush Jr and well… everything. Every time they did it, the establishment watched these people rape the nation and then got all misty eyed for civility and healing and forced the Democrats to not only clean up the mess, but take unbelievable abuse while they did it. This has got to stop.

Update: Jesus H. Christ. You just can’t win with these people. John Boehner asks the Democrats to let him go to the Ohio State game today along with a bunch of other politicians and in the spirit of comity, the Democrats said yes. Now they are being slammed for being hypocrites because they have gone back on their pledge to work five days a week. Had they said no to Boehner, they would have been slammed for not allowing him to cheer on his team in the big game.

Meanwhile we had 12 years of the nastiest, unethical behavior in modern American history and the press treated it as if it was simply good old fashioned harball politics.

Moral hazards everywhere, my friends.

Update II: I should also point out that as Atrios and Yglesias mention, Jonathan Chait sometimes exhibits the exact same tendency as the Republicans to say that the liberal blogosphere is shockingly and inappropriately angry. The truth is that he’s righteously angry, we’re righteously angry and the only difference is that we work in a medium that is much more conversational and informal than he does. Whatever. Believe me, the right sees no difference between us and it probably behooves the liberal punditocrisy to stop worrying about our profane vitriol and start loooking at the bigger picture. We’re all in this together whether they like it or not.

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Godspeed Fellow Bloggers

by digby

I’m getting a little bit depressed about the bloggers who are quitting these days. First, it appears Billmon has checked out for good. Jeanne D’Arc said so-long some time ago as did my pal Kevin K. Yesterday I read that Kevin Hayden at American Street just can’t afford to do it anymore. He’s been one of the longest running and hardest working bloggers around and I don’t think the blogosphere will be the same without him.

And today, I see that one of my very favorite bloggers, Michael Bérubé, is hanging it up too. I will really miss him.

It’s a strange and almost compulsive thing we do and I don’t blame anyone for finally getting burned out or disillusioned or just plain bored with the conversation. I think all of us feel that way at least from time to time. When I first started, I used to take time off, but that’s not really possible anymore. So, you just keep keeping on or you stop, I guess.

Anyway, I will miss all of them and would hope they would leave the door open to returning if they get the urge. Any of these fine writers are more than welcome to contribute here, any time they have something to say. It would be an honor to host them.

Meanwhile, on a lighter bloggy note, Street Prophets has found a new way to raise a little “dough” by creating a cookbook and selling it. As a cookbook collector myself, I’ll be buying one and any of you out there who are similarly into either cooking or eating might want to do the same. (They say that cooking is good for the soul, but I never took it literally…) Pastordan and his folks are some of the good guys on the religious left and I think they should be supported by all of us godless liberals out here or the faux religious left will turn the Democratic party into a mild version of Focus on the Family.

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Four Eggnogs And A Funeral

by digby

As regular readers know, I’ve been pondering this infuriating fixation on bipartisanship and moderation for the last couple of weeks and watching aghast as the press does the wingnuts’ bidding, setting up the Dems as failing to fulfill their promise to the American people that they would be moderate and bipartisan if they won the election. This was simply not on the agenda during the election, other than that the House Democrats would restore some sort of fairness to the rules and pass anti-corruption legislation. In fact, the entire election was about the Democrats taking power to provide some needed checks and balance on the Republicans.

Oddly, however, in the last couple of weeks, the media has been obsessing that the election reflected a desire among the American people for the congress to stop fighting and work together, which makes no sense. The Republican congress didn’t fight — the Democrats just caterwauled ineffectually from the sidelines, while the Republicans did what they wanted. There was no gridlock, they passed virtually every piece of legislation they wanted and the congress was perfectly in sync with the president. If comity was what people were concerned about they obviously would have kept undivided government.

The American people voted for the Democrats because they wanted them to stop the Republican juggernaut. Look at the poll numbers. Look at the election results.

So, where is this coming from? First, it’s obviously coming from the Republicans who have much to gain by whining incessantly about being trod upon by the horrible Democrats who are betraying the citizens who voted for them by being big old meanies. No surprise there. They make their money and derive their power among their mouthbreathing base by portraying themselves as being victimized — whether in power or out, the liberals are always keeping them down.

It’s also long been obvious that the political and media establishment are perfectly comfortable with noxious rightwing nutballs like Tom Delay running things, but panic at the idea of a Democrat with a pulse. Their worship of “moderation and bipartisanship” a la Jerry Ford is largely based on their irrational fear of hippies. Still, it all seemed a bit bizarre, even for them.

One of the sillier theories I’d been bouncing around was that the punditocrisy and the reporters had spent so much time riffing and boozing during that interminable period of mourning for Ford that they somehow conflated their tributes to his moderation and bipartisanship with some sort of mandate from the American people in this last election.

Up to that point, the media had seen the Democrats’ post-election promises to “work with the other side” — as a rhetorical rebuke to the way the Republicans had governed. They were right. While I’m sure the Democrats had no intentions of running the congress like a plantation as the Republicans had, nobody thought it meant that they would follow the president’s agenda or compromise on issues on which they had run, like the war or preserving social security. The election, after all, was a referendum on a party that had had six years of total power and who’s approval ratings were hovering in the low teens. The press had had to extract assurances that the Democrats wouldn’t impeach the president, for crying out loud. Bipartisan kumbaaya was clearly not on the agenda.

Suddenly, Jerry Ford died and it seemed to me that days and days of eulogizing Ford’s legacy just prior to the new congress taking over (and during the holiday drinking season) had caused the media to literally confuse the Ford ascension in 1974 with the election last November. It wasn’t until I saw Fox News this week-end that my theory was confirmed:

Fox News Watch:

Eric Burns: Grandma Pelosi goes to Washington. Don’t you think the handlers have to back off just a little bit?

Neal Gabler: yeah, perhaps. I mean the themes of this week were really moderation and bipartisanship, not being grandma. We saw that in Ford’s funeral and we saw that with the celebration.

Burns: Celebration meaning?

Neal Gabler: Moderation meaning, we’ve had … and this is a slap clearly at the Bush administration — “we’ve had six years of hyperpartisanship” …. and what we’re looking at in Gerald Ford is a model of bipartisanship and moderation and what we’re looking for in terms of the new congress is the hopefulness of bipartisanship and moderation.

That pretty much covers it all in one muddled, hangover stew. Evidently, the brainless punditocrisy does now believe that people voted for the Democrats last November because they were yearning for 1974 and wanted the Democrats to act like Jerry Ford. These people have decided that the Democrats are supposed to “pardon” President Bush in order to heal the nation.

I don’t think so.

60 Minutes last night reminded us of what it was really like back in the good old days when Betty Ford was in the White House being excoriated for her courageous decision to act like a normal human being instead of a robot:

Betty wouldn’t step back. In fact, her outspokenness was such a trademark that there are several exhibits about her candor at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum in Michigan.

For one, the Fords abandoned the notion of separate bedrooms. At the time, people were shocked by this.

“We had always shared a bedroom, and I thought there was no reason we had to change our lifestyle if I wasn’t gonna give him up entirely,” Mrs. Ford told Stahl.

But if that shocked the country, it was nothing compared to Betty’s interview with Morley Safer in 1975. All hell broke loose. She said that if she were a teenager, she probably would try marijuana, that she’d seen a psychiatrist, and that she was pro-choice. And then there was the question about her 18-year-old daughter.

“Well, what if Susan Ford came to you and said, ‘Mother… I’m having an affair’?” Safer asked.

“Well, I wouldn’t be surprised. I would think she’s a perfectly normal human being, like all young girls,” the first lady replied.

Historians consider the interview so important, it runs perpetually at the Ford Museum. At first, two-thirds of the mail and phone calls were negative. Editorials criticized her for being too candid and too liberal, potentially an enormous problem for Jerry Ford.

Asked if her husband was upset with her, Ford told Stahl, “When he saw it, he said, ‘Well, honey, there goes about 20 million votes, but we’ll make it.'”

But other people were outraged. “There were people who actually demonstrated in front of the White House and said I was a embarrassment as a first lady,” she remembered.

She went on to become extremely popular because, shocking as it was, she was actually like the vast majority of the country. Her views were not out of the mainstream — she was just one of the few people in public life who had the courage to not be a hypocrite.

If everyone wants the Democrats to emulate the Ford era, being independent, outspoken and broadminded like Betty would be the right way to go about it. People were sick and tired of mushmouthed platitudes and insulting deception after all the years of lies. After Bush, I have a feeling people might just be looking for a little of that same Betty Ford straightforward honesty and clarity.

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Feingold-Obama Bill

by poputonian

Obama tells about it in last Thursday’s WaPo:

A Chance To Change The Game
By Barack Obama
Thursday, January 4, 2007; A17

…
It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that [the voters] message was intended for only one party or politician. The votes hadn’t even been counted in November before we heard reports that corporations were already recruiting lobbyists with Democratic connections to carry their water in the next Congress.

That’s why it’s not enough to just change the players. We have to change the game.
Americans put their faith in Democrats because they want us to restore their faith in government — and that means more than window dressing when it comes to ethics reform.
…
We must stop any and all practices that would lead a reasonable person to believe that a public servant has become indebted to a lobbyist. That means a full ban on gifts and meals. It means no free travel or subsidized travel on private jets. And it means closing the revolving door to ensure that Capitol Hill service — whether as a member of Congress or as a staffer — isn’t all about lining up a high-paying lobbying job. We should no longer tolerate a House committee chairman shepherding the Medicare prescription drug bill through Congress at the same time he’s negotiating for a job as the pharmaceutical industry’s top lobbyist.

But real reform also means real enforcement. We need to finally take the politics and the partisanship out of ethics investigations. Whether or not the House ethics committee has been covering for its colleagues, the secrecy with which its members have operated has led people to question why legislators who are serving jail time were not caught and stopped by the committee in the first place. It’s led people to wonder why Congress cannot seem to police itself.

I have long proposed a nonpartisan, independent ethics commission that would act as the American people’s public watchdog over Congress. The commission would be staffed with former judges and former members of Congress from both parties, and it would allow any citizen to report possible ethics violations by lawmakers, staff members or lobbyists. Once a potential violation is reported, the commission would have the authority to conduct investigations, issue subpoenas, gather records, call witnesses, and provide a report to the Justice Department or the House and Senate ethics committees that — unlike current ethics committee reports — is available for all citizens to read.

This would improve the current process in two ways. First, it would take politics out of the fact-finding phase of ethics investigations. Second, it would exert greater public pressure on Congress to punish wrongdoing quickly and severely. Others have proposed similar good ideas on enforcement, and I am open to all options. We must restore the American people’s confidence in the ethics process by ensuring that political self-interest can no longer prevent politicians from enforcing ethics rules.

The truth is, we cannot change the way Washington works unless we first change the way Congress works. On Nov. 7, voters gave Democrats the chance to do this. But if we miss this opportunity to clean up our act and restore this country’s faith in government, the American people might not give us another one.

UPDATE: jman in the comments points to this excellent David Sirota link.

What’s Wrong With This Picture?

by digby

CW: Democratic Congress Edition

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