Month: February 2007

Pull The Other One

by digby

Time has a lovely paean to Holy Joe today in which his blackmail and petulance are celebrated as acts of courage. But I think they may have gone a bit far when they bought this piece of bullspin:

…last month, after Lieberman told Reid he had stopped attending the weekly Democratic lunch because he didn’t feel comfortable discussing Iraq there, Reid offered to hold those discussions at another time. Lieberman has started attending again.

Right. Joe wasn’t “comfortable” being there:

Before Bush’s State of the Union speech in January, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley brought in Lieberman for a private consultation with the President. Lieberman says he talks with or e-mails Hadley, Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff and White House legislative-affairs head Candida Wolff every week or two.

You don’t suppose the real story is that the Democrats thought it wasn’t a great idea to talk about Iraq strategy with a turncoat in their midst, do you?

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Great Game

by digby

I will once again second Duncan’s prediction that Bush will not be leaving Iraq before his term ends no matter how many ponies Bob Novak sees galloping around the halls of congress.

Here’s Cheney again:

“I think if we were to do what Speaker Pelosi and Congressman Murtha are suggesting, all we will do is validate the al-Qaida strategy. The al-Qaida strategy is to break the will of the American people … try to persuade us to throw in the towel and come home, and then they win because we quit.”

It doesn’t get much clearer than that. Furthermore, Iraq and even iran aren’t the only things they are thinking about. There’s this nugget from Tony Blankley:

MR. BLANKLEY: American military involvement started in Iraq 16 years ago, in 1991. We’ve had troops or airplanes and their crews there since then. They’re going to be there for another 20 years. We can’t get a powder out of that part of the world.

MS. CLIFT: Not in combat for 20 years.

MR. BLANKLEY: And there will be combat going on for many years to come.

[…]

MR. BLANKLEY: But the fact is that when the oil is challenged in the Saudi oil fields and the Straits of Hormuz are closed, we’ll be fighting, even by your definition …

This is only tangentially about terrorism, which is no surprise. 9/11 was an opportunity for the PNAC crowd to play their Great Game over resources and domination. They are not going to stop playing it and I suspect that a Democratic administration will be stuck carrying it on to some degree now whether we like it or not. The Republicans have done a fine job of messing things up so completely that it’s going to be very, very difficult to extricate ourselves from it. The most we can hope for is that we find someone sane, competent and at least slightly visionary to manage this historic miscalculation and convince the rest of the world that we have not gone completely off the rails.

To that end, I recommend this site today, sponsored by Wes Clark and VoteVets called StopIranWar. If you have a few minutes, please sign the petition. I don’t know if we can stop crazy Cheney from doing it anyway, but we have to try.

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Smoking Them Out

by digby

In a thoroughly egregious Hardball yesterday, even by its usual egregious standards, Chris Matthews spun some CW that I think may be growing, even though it makes little sense:

MATTHEWS: Is David Geffen smart politically? He strikes me as someone who is very smart.

I mean, here‘s a quote. It‘s an indirect quote from today‘s Maureen Dowd piece in “The New York Times,” which caused all this stir over in the the Clinton world—quote—it‘s just about Bill and Hillary, obviously, and their relationship.

Geffen says, adding that, “If Republicans are digging up dirt, they will wait until Hillary is the nominee to use it.”

That‘s what I have always thought, that, if they‘re going to really turn the guns on the Clintons and the cameras and everything else, and try to, you know, smoke them out, in terms of any problems there, that they will wait until Hillary gets the nomination, then blast her when it‘s too late for the Democrats to change horses.

I think the US government spent eight years and 70 million dollars or so digging up Clinton dirt and rich wingnuts put up several more million on top of that. Every single allegation was aired in the press either through leaks or salacious official “reports.” An entire batalion of rightwing operatives also spent eight years making up dirt, including allegations of murder and drug running. They went all the way back to the Clintons’ college days, looked into financial transactions from the 70’s and interviewed virtually every person the Clintons had ever met. Libraries could be filled with the books and magazine articles written about their personal history along with vast numbers of psychological profiles and speculation about everything from Bill being a manchurian candidate to their sex lives. There were no limits and no stone was left unturned.

What in God’s name does Chris think they could possibly find after all that?

Will the press go after Clinton for being a “calculating” bitch? (I think that word’s been used more in the past month than ever before in history.) Of course. Will they attack her mercilessly and dredge up every old trope that was used against her back in the day? Undoubtedly. But it is almost impossible to believe they could come up with any real dirt on her because there has never been a more thoroughly vetted candidate in history. Not that the swift-boaters won’t just make stuff up like they always do, but it should not be believable to anyone in the mainstream media and it should be greeted with so much skepticism as to be laughable on its face.

I have no dog in this fight and I could not care less if you vote for Hillary Clinton or if you don’t. Neither do I care if you think she’s a calculating bitch and hate her stance on the war and loathe everything she and her husband did during their administration. Those are fair game. But I will be damned if I’ll passively accept this ongoing enabling of character assassination against Democrats, I don’t care who they are. If an eight year multi-million dollar federal investigation into every aspect of his or her life isn’t enough for the mainstream media to accept that there is no unethical or criminal charges that can credibly be brought against Hillary Clinton then no candidate is safe. If they can believe that “dirt” still exists against her, imagine what they will do with the inevitable swift boat attacks on a candidate who is fairly new on the scene?

This idea that there’s “dirt” yet to be unearthed about Clinton is a pernicious rightwing meme designed to stoke the fear that we will be back in tabloid trivia land if Clinton is elected. But that’s a meaningless distinction among the candidates since we are already seeing all of them being trivialized with silly “spats” and “obambi” and “breck girl” commentary. It’s just the beginning and it will continue as surely as you can say the words “earth tones.”

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“Why Won’t He Just Attack?”

by digby

Here’s crazy Dick Cheney articulating his sophisticated foreign policy philosophy again:

“I think if we were to do what Speaker Pelosi and Congressman Murtha are suggesting, all we will do is validate the al-Qaida strategy,” the vice president told ABC News. “The al-Qaida strategy is to break the will of the American people … try to persuade us to throw in the towel and come home, and then they win because we quit.”

I’ve written a ridiculous amount about this and yet it always shocks me when I hear him put it so plainly. He believes bin Laden’s trash talk and has fashioned this country’s national security policy around it. This was the king of the “grown ups.”

But why should I be surprised? Perhaps it’s time to drag this one up again:

Following one White House meeting at which he’d asked for more time and more troops, Stormin’ Norman reports; Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell called to warn the Desert Storm commander that he was being loudly compared, by a top administration official, to George McClellan. “My God,” the official supposedly complained. “He’s got all the force he needs. Why won’t he just attack?” Schwarzkopf notes that the unnamed official who’d made the comment “was a civilian who knew next to nothing about military affairs, but he’d been watching the Civil War documentary on public television and was now an expert.”

And then, twenty pages later, Schwarzkopf casually drops the information that he got an inspirational gift from Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney right before the air war finally got under way. Cheney was presenting a gift to a military man, and he chose something with an appropriate theme: “(A) complete set of videotapes of Ken Burns’s PBS series, The Civil War.”

But that wasn’t the only gift that Dick Cheney had for Norman Schwarzkopf. Having figured out that the general was being too cautious with his fourth combat command in three decades of soldiering, Cheney got his staff busy and began presenting Schwarzkopf with his own ideas about how to fight the Iraqis: What if we parachute the 82nd Airborne into the far western part of Iraq, hundreds of miles from Kuwait and totally cut off from any kind of support, and seize a couple of missile sites, then line up along the highway and drive for Baghdad? Schwarzkopf charitably describes the plan as being “as bad as it could possibly be… But despite our criticism, the western excursion wouldn’t die: three times in that week alone Powell called with new variations from Cheney’s staff. The most bizarre involved capturing a town in western Iraq and offering it to Saddam in exchange for Kuwait.” (Throw in a Pete Rose rookie card?) None of this Walter Mitty posturing especially surprised Schwarzkopf, who points out that he’d already known Cheney as “one of the fiercest cold warriors in Congress.

This information was available before the 2000 election but we were too busy monitoring Al Gore’s wardrobe palette so it didn’t come up.

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Cultural Revolution

by digby

Like Atrios I like this post on LGM about the Ole Perfesser’s homicidal rant proposing that we covertly kill all the Iranian nuclear scientists so that they will not be able to produce a bomb. Excellent idea.

But you know what? You can’t just stop with the scientists. You’d have to also kill all the science professors and students because otherwise, they could learn how to make nuclear bombs and then we’d have to go in and kill them too. And when you think about it, as long as any educated people are around the potential to learn and teach is a problem. We sure would hate to see that smoking gun turn out to be a mushroom cloud.

Maybe the thing to do is empty out all the cities and send the educated people to the countryside to work in the fields. I’ve heard that works. Or we could just apply the Bush Doctrine and take out the whole country to prevent them from ever even thinking about getting a bomb. It’s all good.

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Faith And Reason

by tristero

I’m sitting here killing time in an aiport and thought I’d jot down a few thoughts on the revival of the big religion in politics discussion.

Religious practice in the United States is a complex, fascinating subject that, oddly, had never received the kind of attention it deserved until very recently. But religion isn’t the real topic here. Only the role of religion in American politics is of concern, not how Americans practice their faith, or don’t. And unlike the subject of religion itself, the place of religion in political discourse is so straightforward, I’m surprised at the length and prolixity of the discussion:

By conscious decision, the Founders of the United States intended that there be NO place for religious privilege or argumentation in the decision-making process of government. None. As in zero, zip, nada.

No exceptions. Ever.

That’s it. Rhetoric like Lincoln’s? No big deal. Office of Faith-Based Initiatives? That’s an assault on America’s most basic values.

I am an absolutist about this. Your identity as a Baptist, a Jew, or atheist is, according the documents penned by the (very) intelligent designers who wrote the Constitution, utterly meaningless in the American political community in its decision-making. Put another way:

The essential principle of American politics is that it insists upon the exercise of cold reason in governance; revelation can play no part, nor can any religion have any kind of privileged status. Period. The End.

It is an indication of how bizarre public discourse on politics has become that my all-American, apple-pie position is dismissed as “radical,” “secularist,” “anti-religious” and even “fundamentalist.” Those who make such idiotic accusations, among them self-styled spokesmen for the “religious Left,*” apparently are unaware that many Americans like me have a long public record demonstrating the deepest respect for, and interest in, serious religious practice. Digby is right: this is pure counter-Enlightenment trash. But Digby is more polite than I am. It is also deeply anti-American.

*Funny, I always thought the religious Left meant people like genuine heroes like the Berrigans or perhaps Archbishop Romero, not wannabe powerbrokers within an establishment political party. Wallis as the next Berrigan? I really don’t think so.

The Big One

by digby

For those intrigued by my little Paineish scribblings yesterday, do yourself a favor and read this excellent post by Bruce Wilson at Talk2Action about the long march of the counter-enlightenment. He takes particular aim at Jim Wallis because he claims to be the primary leader of the religious left. But it’s also a matter of received wisdom on the right, most recently espoused by Dinesh DiSouza, who would rather throw in with Islamic terrorists than American liberals.

Frederick Clarkson has more on Wallis here. Clarkson and Wilson are both strong, passionate and intelligent writers of the religious left. They are not part of this insider cabal that’s advising the Democratic Party today, but they should be.

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I’m Tired Already

by digby

I just love it when billionaires say things like this, don’t you?

I think that America was better served when the candidates were chosen in smoke-filled rooms.

That’s the back-biting David Geffen in the Queen of Mean’s op-ed column today talking about the calculating Clinton while defending his chosen candidate, the man the QueenBee calls Obambi. What a Freudian field day we have at work on this one.

Clinton slaps back:

If Senator Obama is indeed sincere about his repeated claims to change the tone of our politics, he should immediately denounce these remarks, remove Mr. Geffen from his campaign and return his money.

Oh Jesus, are we denouncing and disavowing already???

Not to be outdone, Obama fires back with one of the best old wingnut chestnuts around:

It is ironic that the Clintons had no problem with David Geffen when was raising them $18 million and sleeping at their invitation in the Lincoln bedroom.

Bam! Right in the kisser.

I don’t blame Clinton for defending herself but demanding that Obama “denounce” his supporter is stupid. Furthermore, since she’s been running around doing a perfect George W. Bush impression this week, saying repeatedly that “some people don’t think terrorism is a threat” she’s not in a position to be too self-righteous.

And Obama should know better than to use that old Lincoln bedroom trope. Does he think the right wing won’t use the exact same made-up nonsense against him?

Perhaps someone should tell him about how the Washington Post helped gin up that controversy on behalf of the GOP congressional scumbags, even going so far as to count Chelsea Clinton’s slumber party guests in the Lincoln Bedroom controversy.

Jesus. Sometimes I don’t think we deserve to win. We can’t seem to stop helping the other side, even when they are down and out.

Meanwhile, the gentlemen in the press room are simply appalled at the rank incivility among their lessers. Here they are with the Duke of Snow, pledging fealty to the House of Bush:

David Gregory: …I think that politics and political coverage has become so polarized in this country and in part because everybody- McCurry worried about cable news, with the cameras- that was- that seems like a hundred years ago. Because it- it’s the Internet, and the blogs, that have really used this White House press conference to somehow support positions out in America- political views- and they- and they- uh- they will clip, and digitize portions of these briefings to fit into their particular argument and I think people try to divine motives of the questioners and- and certainly draw conclusions about, uh, the answers, or- or non-answers, uh, based on their, their, their own political views.

Tony Snow: You know you raise uh, I’m glad you raised the blog issue, because, uh, I think they’ll be kind of a generational divide, uh, do either of you guys look at blogs much?

Panel Member: I write a few, but I don’t look at them much.

(laughter)

Tony Snow: And my guess is this side of the room is- looks more at blogs. Um, you look at blogs, right?

Panel Member: I look at blogs. I’m all for blogs, I’m all for the First Amendment, I think people oughta be empowered to write what they want.

Tony Snow: Yeah. Well, I think what’s happened is we, we’ve got this new Democratic age of the media but you’re right, it actually- I’ll- I’ll occasionally punch it up and it’s amazing, you get this wonderful imaginative hateful stuff that comes flying out, and, I think one of the, the, the, maybe one of the, the most important takeaways is, it’s the classic old line “not only should you not believe your own press you probably shouldn’t believe your opposition blogs either”. What do you think, Richard?

Richard Wolffe: Yeah, uh, well, uh yeah, I totally agree. I, I, uh- David hit on a good point here that a lot of the blogs are trying to divine motive and bias. There seems to be this sort of- the witch hunt that’s out there. A lot of the blogs are, are, are unduly devoted to media criticism which is itself kind of interesting given all the things you could comment on…And, it, uh, in my humble view, I think the press here does a fantastic job of adhering to journalistic standards in covering politics in general. And the, um, the interesting thing in, in looking at the political coverage as people try to guess what we do is, is that they want us to play a role that really isn’t our role.

Our- our role is to ask questions and get information. But it- the press briefing isn’t Prime Minister’s question time. It’s not a chance for the opposition to take on the government and grill them to a point where they hand- throw their hands up and surrender. Now, obviously there’s a contentious spirit there- we’re trying to get information, but, it’s not a political exercise, it’s a journalistic exercise, and I think often the blogs are looking for us to be political advocates, more than journalistic ones.

Perhaps someone should get these young knights of realm an AM radio so they can see what their Kings followers have been saying for the past 15 years. Dear me.

Gird yourselves, people. It’s going to be a looong campaign.

Update: Here’s a freebie link to the Modo column so that you can all assess whether I’m being “truthy” about Geffen. I chose that quote because it stuck out to me as being quintessential, big donor, privileged elitism, which is basically what the whole stupid column reeked of. I frankly do not give a damn what Geffen thinks of either Hillary or Obama.

I thought my post was quite clear that the whole shrieking lot of them were acting like a bunch of asshats, but if it wasn’t: the whole shrieking lot of them, including the press, are acting like a bunch of asshats.

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Debating Point

by digby

Blogpac has an action going today that I think is worthwhile. If you have a spare minute or two, click this link and sign up to send an email to various democratic officials to protest their agreement with Roger Ailes to have Fox News host a presidential primary debate.

The last time they did it, they cut away early to let Bill “boxcars” Bennett spin the debate before it was even finished and displayed banners calling it the “Democrat” party debate. Everyone knows that Fox News is the propaganda arm of the Republican party and there is no reason that Democrats should lend them any credibility by pretending they aren’t actively hostile to everything they stand for. I’m not crazy about the fact that so many Dems appear on the network but there is at least some rationale for that — if they don’t then nobody will even try to rebut their partisan spin.

These debates are something else. They are expressly for Democratic primary voters and we should not have to give that network our business in order to watch our presidential candidates debate one another.

Take a couple of minutes to register your complaint, here.

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Reason and Faith

by digby

In addition to the many insightful and interesting posts Atrios has written with respect to religion this past week or so, he links today to a tour de force on the subject by Mithras that I highly recommend. He hits on one of the most infuriating aspects of this debate which is the apparent childlike naivete with which so many people of these new strategists of the religious left view the anti-abortion movement. Mithras brings up the case of Eric Rudolph and reminds us that the longest ongoing terrorist actions in the United States are the killing and maiming of doctors who perform abortions. These are not the actions of people who “just want a seat at the table.” Read this post if you have further questions about whether it is politically smart to capitulate to these people. (And make no mistake, as long as this “outreach” remains fixated on abortion, which it is, it is heading toward capitulation on the issue.)

But this topic touches on something that is even bigger than a person’s right to own her own body and decide her own future, as unbelievable as that may sound. And it’s not really about the vaguely insulting language that says people like me don’t have a basis for morality. It’s just a fact that most people think that religion is their moral foundation and they can’t imagine how someone else could arrive at similar positions without it. Fine. We can agree to disagree on that as long as the constitution continues to protect me from theocracy. The real problem is that by focusing on religion as being the source of positive values, these new religious left professional strategists are making the Democratic Party as dismissive of reason as the Republicans. That’s as bad a long term political strategy as outright hostility to religion would be.

In order to be effective, our politics cannot be faith-based or our enlightenment inspired constitution and its fundamental rationality becomes dangerously superfluous. After all, it is not based upon faith, it is based upon some very simple observations about human nature, power and fundamental human rights which formed a system of government that is designed to allow its citizens a maximum amount of freedom and a maximum amount of equality, two “values” which are constantly in tension and are constantly evolving. Those two basic values have always formed the heart of the political debate in this country and they cannot be reconciled solely by faith. Conscience and morality certainly play the most vital role in our society and for every individual. They inform our beliefs about liberty and equality, but the state itself,made up as it is of flawed human beings, is simply not capable of organizing or acting on that basis, which is why power is divided and deliberation and debate are so highly valued in our constitution. Religious belief is not subject to compromise and faith is not subject to reason, nor should it be. It is something else entirely.

These last few years have shown just how authoritarian the right wing has become and we can see the outlines of much worse down the line. The only thing holding them back is that ancient piece of paper and the common belief we all still hold that it is the guiding document of our government. That belief is being eroded daily with these challenges to the idea of deliberation and debate based on knowledge, reason and persuasion. It’s not much of a leap to see where its going.

I have no problem with politicians using religious rhetoric to inform voters of their own personal views, but when appeals to positive virtues become exclusively associated with religious values we end up aiding and abetting a whole host of conservative appeals to authority in the process. We must value reason itself, and employ it liberally and respectfully or we are going to find that the epistemic relativism that the right’s been so successful with in recent years will have some very unpleasant consequences.

This nation is not going to be prosperous and successful in the future if we fail to properly emphasize the idea that reason is intrinsic to democracy. And we certainly are not going to be able to deal with the complicated challenges we face, like the rise of militant fundamentalism, nuclear proliferation or global warming unless we agree that people who do not subscribe to religion can be trustworthy and that science, analysis and knowledge form as much of a legitimate basis for human progress as religion. The right demagogues these things for the express purpose of advancing their authoritarian agenda and I don’t think it’s wise for Democrats to allow a new class of “religious strategists” to further empower them in some ill-conceived crusade to gain votes from the least likely people in the nation to vote for them.

If the Democratic party doesn’t stand for freedom and equality and the basic rational premise of the constitution then nobody does. The Republicans sold that out when they made their bed with Jerry Falwell, even though they pretended for years that they were the keepers of the flame. I’d hate to see the Democrats capitulate to the same socially regressive forces and empower the opposition in the process.

The religious and secular left have the chance together to make both reasoned and moral arguments for social justice, civil liberties and civil rights based upon our shared liberal values. Our rational and idealistic worldviews are not in tension. There is no purpose to all this pandering to the right except perhap to give a few new strategists an opportunity create a divide where none exists so they might exploit their positions as professional mediators.

Beware the insider religio-political industrial complex. It dishonestly foments this fight with bogus statistics and bad advice. Democrats are making a big mistake if they listen to them. Their political ambition is tragically weakening the one thing that keeps the nation together and keeps the right from hurtling completely out of control — the US Constitution and a respect for the clear-eyed reason that inspired it. Democracy is not faith based and religion isn’t democratic. People need to be reminded of the difference not encouraged to see them as the same thing.

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