Month: June 2007

Goo Goo G’joob

by digby

Crooks and Liars has a very informative video up of Paul Weyrich laying out the case for vote suppression back in the 1980’s. He pretty much admits that the Republicans only gain a majority by keeping Democrats from voting:

Weyrich: “Now many of our Christians have what I call the goo-goo syndrome — good government. They want everybody to vote. I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people, they never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.

The funny thing about this is that it was traditionally the evangelical Christians who eschewed “wordly” involvement in politics for sincere philosophical and theological reasons. And Paul Weyrich has made a very lucrative career out of threatening that they will once again retreat from the public square if the Republicans don’t stop being so liberal and failing the cause.

This guy is among the biggest con artists on the planet and it’s important to keep this in mind every time he fundraises and markets a new book to the gullible base about how the Republicans failed them but they need to keep the flame. It’s hard to believe they don’t see through his scam by now, but there’s a right wing sucker born every minute.

On the larger issue of vote suppression, it’s been amply documented that the effort that Karl Rove is alleged to have spearheaded to use the DOJ to push phony cases of voter fraud is part of a program that began back in the 1980’s. What we are seeing unravel in the US Attorney scandal is not a case of a rogue group within the department and white house or even a too-clever overreach run by Bush’s brain. This was part of an ongoing, many-decades-long GOP operation to convince the public that “voter fraud” is a threat to the nation’s electoral integrity so that they could keep Democrats from voting. It’s really that simple.

Now, this was accompanied by other measures, including a sophisticated program to challenge close elections and probably rig the voting machines wherever they could. But the most important part was the propaganda and the legal machanisms. They foolishly fired a bunch of Republican prosecutors and then publicly sullied their professional reputations or it would have gone on under the radar and probably tainted the 2008 election. (It still might…)

Weyrich says it clearly and you know it’s true. The more people who vote, the less likely it is that Republicans win. Now, that knowledge would make decent small d democrats take a look at their philosophy and wonder why that would be. They are not decent small d democrats and they don’t care what the people of this country actually want. They represent money and they use Jesus as a beard to stay in power.

If the congress does nothing more, they have to unravel this US Attorney scandal and Democrats need to start taking electoral reform seriously. They continue to ignore this program at their peril. It’s not going to disappear just because Rove is out of the white house.

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“Unfortunate Excess”

by digby

Right now the cable news networks are wall-to-wall in front of Paris Hilton’s house in L.A. waiting for the sheriff to show up in his white Bronco and lead them on a freeway chase. It’s truly riveting TV, watching a bunch of people milling around and listening to the talking heads speculating on when she might come through the door and riffing on the greater meaning of all this — race, privilege and the merits of cupcakes from Sprinkles. (The consensus is that they are very good. I agree.)

It is simply no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. I know I’m not alone in feeling that something has gone fundamentally wrong. In 2001, I had hopes it was an aberration when polls showed that three-quarters of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on September 11. More than five years later, however, nearly half the American people still believes that Saddam was connected to the attack.

At first I thought the exhaustive, nonstop coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial was just unfortunate excess — an unwelcome departure from the normal good sense and judgment of our news media. Now we know that it was merely an early example of a new pattern of serial obsession that periodically take over the airwaves for weeks at a time.

Late in the summer of 2006, American news coverage was saturated with the bizarre false confession of a man who claimed to have been present at the death of JonBenet Ramsey — the six-year-old beauty queen whose unsolved murder eleven years before was responsible for another long-running obsession. A few months prior to John Mark Karr’s arrest in Bangkok, the disappearance of a high school senior in Aruba and the intensive search for her body and her presumed murderer consumed thousands of hours of television coverage. Both cases remain unsolved as of this writing, and neither had any appreciable impact on the fate of the Republic.

Like JonBenet Ramsey, O.J. has recently been back at the center of another fit of obsessive-compulsive news, when his hypothetical confession wasn’t published and his interviews on television wasn’t aired. This particular explosion of “news” was truncated only when a former television sitcom star used racist insults in a night club. And before that we focus on the “Runaway Bride” in Georgia. And before that there was the Michael Jackson trial and the Robert Blake trial, the Laci Peterson tragedy and the Chandra Levy tragedy. And of course we can’t forget Britney and KFed, and Lindsay and Paris and Nicole, Tom Cruise jumped on Oprah’s couch and married Katie Holmes, who gave birth to Suri. And Russell Crowe apparently threw a phone at a hotel concierge.

In early 2007, the wall-to-wall coverage of Anna Nicole Smith’s death, embalming, and funeral plans and the legal wrangling over the paternity and custody of her child and disposition of her estate, served as yet another particularly bizarre example of the new priorities in America’s news coverage.

And while American television watchers were collectively devoting a hundred million hours of their lives each week to these and other similar stories, our nation was in the process of more quietly making what future historians will certainly describe as a series of catastrophically mistaken decisions on issues of war and peace, the global climate and human survival, freedom and barbarity, justice and fairness.

Al Gore

Hey has anyone noticed how fat that guy is?

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Quote Of The Day (And In A Bad Way)

by tristero

From Nancy Pelosi, who should know better, for heaven’s sakes:

“Science is a gift of God to all of us and science has taken us to a place that is biblical in its power to cure,” said Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, arguing for the bill’s passage. “And that is the embryonic stem cell research.”

One: This is a gratuitous insult to all thinking persons. Science is a process of inquiry that has enabled us to understand something about the nature of physical reality in a detailed fashion. It has taken centuries of hard, meticulous, and often backbreaking work to acquire this knowledge; the history of science is filled with failure, frustration, and fragmentary, provisional understandings. The relatively rare breakthroughs – Newton’s laws, Darwin’s natural selection, Einstein’s theory of relativity – are achieved only through enormous effort, not miracles. This is no gift from God but a quintessentially human endeavor.

Secondly, the kind of pandering, meaningless bullshit Pelosi mouthed will convince no one. But it does make clear how little a leading Democrat understands religious tropes in a modern political context. The rightwing retort is obvious: “God nowhere demands the sacrifice of human children for research. That’s the ethics of Mengele, not Jesus.” And from there, the “conversation” devolves quickly into idiotic arguments about when a fertilized egg becomes a human life. And the importance of the research, its potential benefits that are needed now, are forgotten.

Pelosi’s breathtakingly stupid comment merely indicates how far behind, still, Democrats are in developing a modern political rhetoric for their values and ideas. Here, for example, is a sentence from Bush’s statement opposing the stem cell bill:

Recent scientific developments have reinforced my conviction that stem cell science can progress in ethical ways.

The following discussion is not about the quality of the actual ideas, but their presentation; of course, any 1/4 way normal person – even Nancy Reagan – supports stem cell research. Nevertheless, Bush’s statement is quite sophisticated.*

Note the implicit, casual, natural-sounding assumption of the moral high ground, neatly embedded in the second half of the sentence. Note the assumption, further, that stem cell research inherently contains an ethical dimension. It is taken as axiomatic that this research has a moral component rather than being morally neutral like, say, the development of a more efficient tcp/ip would be.** And note the further assumption of a duality – either morally pursued or immorally pursued with no middle ground.

Yes, of course you can argue against such rhetoric but you argue uphill, because you first have to disentangle stem cell research from the numerous moral fetters Bush’s speechwriter has enveloped it in and only then can you construct an alternative – and far stronger – moral argument in favor of embryonic stem cell research.

By contrast, Pelosi’s remark is brain-dead on arrival. Worse than useless, it is misleading, insulting, and ineffective.

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*This should not be surprising. Because opposition to stem cell research is by any normal standards (religious or secular) completely indefensible, any statement that advocated such a position would have to be sophisticated in order to have any chance at persuasion. It goes without saying that it would be a Very Good Thing if the rightwing examined the content of their ideas half as carefully as they crafted their rhetoric.

**Rightwing Red Alert: Did I just say that embryonic stem cell research is as ethical as internet protocol development? Why yes, that’s exactly what I said. Both have exactly zero moral valence. One can imagine siituations in which both can be pursued unethically, but they aren’t.

Run For Cover

by digby

Lynne Cheney, the wife of Vice President Cheney, is “being floated in Senate GOP leadership circles as a possible replacement for the late Sen. Craig Thomas (R-WY), who died Monday night.”

When the Republicans go on about that ruthless power couple of Bill and Hillary Clinton, they are doing their usual projection. Dick and Lynne are the real deal.

You have never seen Hillary Clinton behave like this on TV and you never will. Lynne is one of the most aggressive people in public life, completely confident and totally mendacious. Big Time.

The Democratic Governor of Wyoming has to pick a Republican, but he doesn’t have to pick this Republican.

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Back Strokes

by digby

Jeff Goldstein’s co-blogger pal wrote this yesterday:

Homophobia at Hullabaloo, but I guess it’s all right when the MSM strokes a liberal. It’s not as though you’ll ever find a left-wing pundit tongue bathing Obama just because he’s black and clean and articulate. They’re not superficial, like we are, which is why they’re so underrepresented in Hollywood.

Setting aside the disorienting notion of anyone at Protein Wisdom being concerned about homophobia, the article he points to as “stroking a liberal” is a puff piece on John Edwards, but I can’t find any mention of his “manly attributes” or his “commanding figure” or any swooning about his virile, overpowering presence. Quite the opposite in fact — they go into the “Breck girl” thing in some detail and refer endlessly to his his boyish earnestness, hardly a leadership archetype. It reads as a “stroke” but not a “stroke” if you know what I mean. (The post from Protein Wisdom, however, with its vivid evocations of “tongue-bathing” Obama, as is typical of the site, is a little bit more in the ball-park.)

The Hollywood link inexplicably goes to the controversial comments former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough made about Mrs Fred Thompson “working the pole.” I’m not sure what the poster means by it, but it seems to be some sort of proof that Republicans are hetrosexuals. That’s nice.

Anyway, just in case anyone cares — my post said that this “mancrush” phenomenon had little to do with being gay or straight. I’m not even convinced that it’s explicitly sexual at all, despite the fact that they often use turgid, sexualized language to describe these GOP politicians. (Don’t make me drag out the codpiece transcripts…) I suspect it’s mostly a lazy adhereance to shopworn stereotypes from their childhoods, (and perhaps a little too much time surfing porn sites) but who really knows? It’s damned weird, I’ll tell you that. More importantly, this ongoing capitulation of the media to rank GOP propaganda about the “natural” leadership qualities of the the respective parties is destructive to our politics, which is why I discuss it all the time.

Anyway, I only bring this up again so soon because I wanted to share this interesting comment by aimai on the subject:

I’ve always thought the republican male attitude towards their male candidates smacks more of a kind of pedophilic victim’s stockholm syndrome. In other words, their longing for a strong, powerful, daddy figure is so strong that they wind up fantasizing about them in this almost sexual way. That is because, if I can turn to a different area, they are locked into a totally binary world: male /female, strong/weak, republican/democrat, sexual dominance/sexual passivity and attraction to dominance. If their candidates are ever going to be strong enough to dismiss the republican bases fear of weakness, they have to be so strong that all other entities in the universe are seen as their opposite. So even “manly men” are as women in the equation “republican leaders:followers” “men:women.”

That would explain why the presidential candidates are frothing at the mouth trying to top one another’s paranoid nuttiness. It’s getting much more difficult to signal the appropriate level of alpha manliness.

They want Jack Bauer daddy:

FINEMAN: What‘s appealing about Rudy Giuliani is not the generous side, what‘s appealing about him is the tough cop side.MATTHEWS: Right. You just wait until daddy gets home.FINEMAN: Yes, that part…MATTHEWS: That Daddy.FINEMAN: … of the daddy. It‘s the tough cop side, so…MATTHEWS: Yes. Yes.FINEMAN: And he can smile all he wants, and I understand why they‘re trying to do it, but come on. That‘s not why…

Remember, he would have been a great white hunter too, if only he’d been given the opportunity.

H/T Linda, also in the comments.

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For Those Who Thought Kitzmiller Killed “Intelligent Design” Creationism

by tristero

It’s baaack:

Science textbook statement from [Chesterfield County, Virginia] School Board Chair Thomas J. Doland (cont.)
“We have received much interest and concern from our citizens relating to the theory of evolution as taught in our science classes. It is the School Board’s belief that this topic, along with all other topics that raise differences of thought and opinion, should receive the thorough and unrestricted study as we have just articulated. Accordingly, we direct our superintendent to charge those of our professionals who support curriculum development and implementation with the responsibility to investigate and develop processes that encompass a comprehensive approach to the teaching and learning of these topics.

To which Ed Brayton says:

Looks to me like they are going to develop supplemental materials, outside of the textbooks they approved, to put ID into science classrooms along with evolution. If they do so, of course, a lawsuit will be filed immediately and it will end up costing the school board a whole lot of money. They have been led in to the Dover Trap and the result will likely be the same. They would be wise to step back from the precipice on this one.

While this looks doomed to failure (and one that decent taxpayers in Chesterfield County will be forced to pay dearly for if they go through with this), there is something more insidious afoot. PZ Myers informs us that Discovery Institute has just published a 150 page piece of trash called “Explore Evolution.” Its particular scam is that it doesn’t mention God and it also doesn’t mention “intelligent design” creationism. What it does do is use outdated and misleading information to bash evolution to “teach the controversy” where there isn’t one:

The embryology chaper, for instance, has a “case for” that only talks about Haeckel, as if that were the most interesting and informative and sole example of modern developmental biology they could find…I know the creationists are infatuated with Haeckel, but get over it, please. It’s an obsolete theory that was proposed about 140 years ago, was discarded in the 19th century, and is only mentioned to dismiss it in modern textbooks. They couldn’t find anything current and interesting in modern developmental biology to discuss, but had to go dig up that antique, again? Presenting modern development through the distorting lens of Haeckel is simply dishonest and misleading.

Why should you care about this? Because, the war against science has been on the leading edge of the development of rightwing rhetoric that then gets transferred to other fronts. For instance, the “out-liberal the liberals” technique was perfected by creationists. Here are some fresh examples which were also quoted in Ed Brayton’s blogpost:

“Our children are not being educated; they are being indoctrinated,” said Cathleen Waagner. “Let the evidence speak for itself and let [the students] draw their own conclusions.”

Another speaker, Michael Slagle, presented a document containing 700 signatures of scientists worldwide who have questioned the validity of evolution.

“Students are being excluded from scientific debate. It’s time to bring this debate into the classroom,” he said.

I would like to remind everyone that when it comes to “intelligent design” creationism, there is no debate and there is no controversy: scientists agree that it is garbage. What about those 700 scientists who have questioned the validity of evolution, you ask? Well, take a look at Project Steve which demonstrates exactly how idiotic this kind of argument is. According to NCSE, only about 1% of all scientists are named Steve. As of 5/21/07 810 scientists named Steve had signed up in support of evolution.

What makes this so damn infuriating is that the theory of evolution is one of the most awe-inspiring concepts I know. And Darwin’s life is a model for how someone born into privileged circumstances should spend his/her time – a welcome contrast, if ever there was one, to the laziness and incuriousity of the current occupant of the White House. For schoolchildren should be denied the opportunity to receive a clear, unambiguous explanation of evolution – that truly is a mind crime of the worst sort. Yet that is what creationists have perpetrated. Rather than risk the kind of crap that’s going on in Virginia, schools simply avoid the topic of evolution altogether, as they did for some 25 years plus after Scopes.

But lets end this post on a positive note. If you want to learn exactly how beautiful a theory natural selection is, then pick up The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution by Sean B Carroll. A great, great book about evidence for evolution that, of course, Darwin never knew about, the evidence in our genes. Carroll presents his arguments brilliantly and succinctly. Perhaps it’s a little intense for high school but if you’ve had even a taste of college-level science, you are going to love this book.

Nothing New About It

by digby

Kagro X over at Kos responds to Joe Klein’s intemperate column today in which he takes bloggers to task for being … intemperate.

He makes one point that I think it important for some of these journalists to understand:

My difference with Klein here is this: blogging hasn’t changed things here. Some portion of your readership always thought these horrible things about you (though admittedly, there are probably plenty of people who have recently come to that). All blogs have done is allowed them to say it, and for you to hear it.

Speaking for myself, I have been recoiling from the political media for more than a decade. Joe Klein often made me very intemperate back when I read the dead tree versions of his column. Blogging just gave me a forum to express it publicly. And much to my surprise, I found that many, many other people felt exactly the same way. Just because we didn’t have his email address or a comment section doesn’t mean he hasn’t been pissing off (and turning off) his readers for a very long time.

Something went very haywire in the political establishment during the 90’s and picked up speed in this decade. I noticed it then and it motivated me to reignite my involvement in politics at a much later age than anyone would normally do it. And my impatience with the media was born of sheer frustration with people who consistently interpreted the world in a way that bore no resemblance whatsoever to the world that I saw with my own eyes.

There’s a reason why the so-called liberal media is losing its audience and has been for a long time. Perhaps its practitioners ought to look in the mirror and ask themselves if it might be because they have been failing to properly do their jobs. (Or they could just read their emails without having a hissy fit every time someone gets “vituperative” and try to figure out if it might be something other than blogo-stalinism that makes them this way. It’s ridiculous.)

And, by the way, Klein’s column just led Brit Hume’s show on Fox, with lots of juicy quotes about “free-range lunacy” and the “fierce, bullying, often witless tone of intolerance that has overtaken the left-wing sector of the blogosphere.”

Congratulations, Joe. Your friends at Fox, at least, appreciate all you do for the cause.

Update: David Frum at National Review has a slightly different take on it. He quotes this interesting new theory from Eli Lake:

I bet at least half of the netleft are failed professors, over-educated literary theory PHDs, who make themselves appear more numerous than they arethrough their anonymity and deliberate manipulation of google. Their real audience are the technocrat staffers for Dems on the Hill, who agreed with them that their bosses were pushovers during the Bush presidency.

What if the netleft, that has created the impression that there is a rising plurality that would like to abandon Iraqis to Qaeda, Quds and the Ba’ath, are just a few thousand committed Marxists in their pajamas? What if the Dems have strategically miscalculated? What if their over-compensation is to appease a vocal 1 percent of the electorate that actually draws contempt from the rest of the country?

Uh oh. They figured out our secret plan. Now they’re going to ruin everything and run their campaigns for the real majority who want to stay in Iraq for evuh, and we will lose again. Damn their hides!

Update II : from Shawn Fassett in the comments, here’s an interesting tid-bit about Frum. Nice work if you can get it…

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One Of Them

by digby

I had a delightful conversation recently with a very smart and experienced political observer who told me that Romney would likely end up being the GOP nominee — he was the establishment choice, business guy, good brand, looks good on TV. The elites had signed off on him just as they’d signed off on Junior, Dole, Senior etc and that’s how it’s done.

Since a truly open primary on both sides is unusual (and Bush has badly damaged the establishment along with everyone else) it will be interesting to see if they have the same power they usually do. Rick Perlstein pointed me to this piece in TNR today in which Noam Scheiber discusses the history of GOP establishment dominance but wonders if it will hold up this year as usual:

In effect, the Romney campaign provides a near-perfect test of who really wields power in the GOP. On the one hand, conservative elites look at Romney and see a tall, good-looking, well-spoken, highly successful capitalist who, on top of all that–dayanu!–is willing to pretend he opposes gay marriage, abortion, and illegal immigration. In addition to Sekulow, Romney wowed the likes of Jerry Falwell and Gary Bauer at last October’s meet-and-greet with evangelical heavies. He performed a similar feat two weeks earlier in a meeting with the Baptist leadership of South Carolina. Romney won positive reviews this January at a conclave of influential conservatives sometimes called the GOP’s Renaissance Weekend. And he has thus far gained the admiration of anti-tax jihadist Grover Norquist, disgraced evangelical huckster Ralph Reed, Focus on the Family honcho James Dobson, and much of the staff of National Review.

On the other hand, the typical conservative evangelical looks at Romney and sees a dangerous cult member. As Amy Sullivan has noted in The Washington Monthly, there is a geyser of anti-Mormon sentiment just waiting to be tapped among heartland evangelicals. Sullivan cites, for example, the firestorm a Baptist leader recently ignited simply for apologizing to Mormons after a coreligionist called Utah “a stronghold of Satan.” Similarly, a prominent conservative activist recently related the following exchange to my colleague Michelle Cottle: “I asked a friend of mine who’s a pastor in Middle America, ‘You have a choice between two candidates: Hillary Clinton versus someone who is good on social issues and who is a Mormon.’ And my friend said, ‘I don’t think I could vote for a Mormon.'” And on it goes.

Suffice it to say, if Romney comes up short, it will amount to a repudiation of the party elite by the grassroots. I, for one, will have no choice but to concede that the GOP establishment isn’t quite the decisive force most Democrats (and more than a few Republicans) assume it to be. If, on the other hand, Romney clinches the nomination despite the intense suspicion he arouses, we will have unassailable proof that the GOP is dominated by its establishment.

I’ll put my money on the establishment every time. The Right is the party of authority and they will do as they are told. In my opinion the religious right pooh-bahs will also go along to protect their party prerogatives and they will assure their flocks that Mitt is one of them even if he is a Morman (or Rudy or anyone else.)

Choosing Mitt speaks volumes about what the big money boys really care about and what they think matters in campaigns:

If there’s one knock on Romney, then, it’s not that he’s a Mormon, but that he hasn’t sufficiently paid his dues to unite the GOP hierarchy behind him. The combination of a fractured establishment and deep hostility from a key part of the GOP base could be a potential deal-breaker. That’s why you see John McCain, the onetime frontrunner, attacking Romney as a fraud even as he largely gives Giuliani a pass.

But, in a way, McCain is missing the point. The people he has to convince aren’t the people who watch debates on TV. It’s the people who pal around with the candidates backstage. And they already know Romney’s a fraud. They just happen to think, in the words of a certain Focus on the Family patriarch, that “he’s very presidential.”

“Presidential” — the magic word evoked by panting pundits and Republicans alike to describe rich, white, conservative men who look good good on TV. “He’s right out of central casting” they exclaim! (In fact, lately, they are literally out of central casting.) But I would never underestimate the power of that “presidential” claim. People really do cast their president as much as vote for him (or her) and the press, being an integral part of the entertainment industrial complex, is even more invested in those values than the public at large. The GOP big money boys know all about this stuff — they are marketers and they hire spokesmen for their products every day. (In fact, St Ronnie of Hollywood made his bones as a mouthpiece for GE.) Casting is one of their very best skills.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out in this race, which is unusual in that it doesn’t feature a true heir apparent. I guess the question now is whether Hollywood Fred is reliable enough for the money boys and makes a better spokesmodel. He’s the only one to make a profit at it, after all.(Rudy is a wild card too — if he maintains traction with the base with his drooling sadism, they can probably be persuaded that he’s crooked enough to do what he’s told.)

But old Mitt really is one them — a rich, white businessman who will reliably advance the interests of the tribe and that is what matters. After all, their boy Bush may have screwed up the whole world, but he delivered for them. They’ll back whichever candidate will do that the best.

The Dems, on the other hand, will have their president chosen like they always do — by the press, as it should be.

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One Small Step For Justice

by digby

Good News:

The Senate Judiciary Committee just voted for the Specter/Leahy habeas restoration bill. The committee sent it to the floor with no amendments, no debate and on almost a party line vote (with the GOP sponsor, Senator Arlen Specter from Pennsylvania voting in favor).

Kudos to all the Democratic senators who showed up and waited for a quorum (critical mass for a vote); Senator Feinstein came in just under the buzzer.

Senators voting aye: Leahy (D-Vt.), Specter (R-Pa.), Kennedy (D-Ma.), Biden (D-Del.), Kohl (D-Wis.), Feinstein (D-Cal.), Feingold (D-Wis.), Schumer (D-N.Y.), Durbin (D-Ill.), Cardin (D-Md.), Whitehouse (D-R.I.).

Senators voting nay: all the other Republicans (Hatch, Grassley, Kyl, Sessions, Graham, Cornyn, Brownback, Coburn).

Though far from the comprehensive legislation needed to either close Gitmo and transfer the detainees into secure proceedings in civilian courts, or provide the detainees with a full and fair opportunity to challenge the grounds for their detentions, S. 185 is a crucial piece of lawmaking.

It signals to the White House and the Republican minority in Congress that this is a real issue, and that the quick and dirty passage of the MCA in the final days of the GOP-controlled 109th Congress was ill-advised and somewhat ham-handed.

Ill advised and “ham-handed” are not the words I would use. I’d call it craven political malpractice but that’s just me.

This nearly party line vote just shows, once again, that the Republican Party has become a depraved and lawless party. In one breath they rend their garments over Scooter Libby being forced to pay the price for lying repeatedly under oath and obstructing justice in a national security investigation. In the next, they vote once again to degrade the most fundamental constitutional right we have for no other reason than puerile, macho posturing that will actually make the nation less secure.

These law ‘n order, national security tough guys are a bunch of pearl clutching, incoherent ninnies who don’t have the integrity or the intelligence to protect a bunch of first graders crossing the street, much less the nation. Now let’s see if the Democrats can hold together even though the empty codpiece will veto it and mewl about how the terrorists are coming to kill their children. Maybe we can convince them that this is a good test case for challenging the idea that the taunts and threats of a 28% lame duck president and his would-be psychotic successors is something they should be spending too much time worrying about right now.

In any case, doing the right thing on this one really should be a gut check and it’s a good sign that they got it out of committee.

Update: Here’s a post about the bill by Chris Dodd and you can follow his prescriptions for the next steps necessary to restore the constitution here.

No Need To Delegate To Grown-Ups

by digby

It occurs to me as I read stories like this, which show that Dick Cheney was personally involved in the US Attorney scandal too, that one of the things the Democrats could do on the campaign trail would be to emphasize repeatedly that they will be the actual president and they promise not to delegate the job to the vice. It’s the equivalent of Bush’s “honor and integrity” line, designed to stick it to the current president and tar the other side with his shortcomings. And it has the benefit of being something that I’m sure will be true. Not one of the Democratic candidates is so callow and easily led that they will allow a dark, unaccountable Rasputin-like figure such as Dick Cheney to run a shadow government out of the vice president’s office.

The Dem nominee should come up with a line that goes something like, “the Bush administration liked to say that the “grown-ups” were in charge. Well, when I’m president, the president is going to be in charge.”

This reign of Cheney is very creepy and unprecedented in American politics. I don’t think people want it to happen again.

Update: From the comments: “The Bush administration liked to say that the grown-ups were in charge. Well, when I’m president, the president is going to be a grown-up.”

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