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Month: June 2007

Number Two

by digby

Via Kevin Drum I see that the rumor about the usual suspects running around trying to provoke war with Iran even as the administration is ostensibly trying to ratchet down the trash talk has been confirmed. Why am I not surprised?

Sometimes I have to wonder what people from the past would think of something like this, though:

“We fully believe that Foggy Bottom is committed to the diplomatic track,” one European official said Wednesday. “But there’s some concern about the vice president’s office.”

Think about that. Until recently, the Vice President was a second rate funtionary who went to funerals. Now he’s so powerful that he’s running a shadow presidency and nobody really knows what to do about it. Certainly nobody thinks the empty codpiece will do anything about it. In fact, it’s just assumed that Uncle Dick has ordered him to STFU and go out and babble incoherently while the big boys do the work.

In fact, for such a tough guy, that Bush sure is a wimpy little doormat, isn’t he? Cheney and the neocons basically tell him go fuck himself on a regular basis and he just takes it. No wonder he’s punding his chest and screeching “I’m the president!” to his Texas pals.

Meanwhile, Chris Matthews reminds everyone daily that voters want to vote for the man who seems the manliest (competence is for eggheads) but I can’t help but suspect that the rest of the country is no longer so convinced that the right way to pick a president is to ask yourself whether he resembles a member of the Village People. We’ve just spent six years with the fake cowboy and look how well that’s turned out.

And clearly we should start paying more attention to Vice Presidents too…

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Majority Of The Majority

by digby

Tim Grieve at Salon’s War Room pointed me to a fascinating article in this week’s New Yorker about the “Republican Implosion,” with this wonderful little excerpt, quoting Tom DeLay back-stabbing Newtie:

“I don’t think that Newt could set a high moral standard, a high moral tone, during that moment,” DeLay says. “You can’t do that if you’re keeping secrets about your own adulterous affairs.”

But wait, didn’t DeLay himself engage in an adulterous affair? Well, yes, he did, but he says that was different because he wasn’t still having the affair by the time the impeachment proceedings rolled around.

“There’s a big difference,” DeLay says. “Also,” he adds, “I had returned to Christ and repented my sins by that time.”

Right. Morality is all in the timing.

But as amusingly illuminating as that is, the article actually brings to mind something else that I think is worth discussing a bit more: what Karl Rove’s plans to build the permanent Republican majority really were.

Among other things, the article says:

When Rove came to Washington, after the 2000 election, he envisioned creating an enduring Republican majority—the permanent mobilization of the Party’s broad, socially conservative base. Part of his strategy was to cast as threats, in alarming terms, same-sex marriage, abortion rights, and other bogeymen of the right. It is Rove’s cleverness, combined with his joie de combat, that made him insufferable to Democrats.

[…]

Rove believes what he has always believed: that the Christian right and, to a lesser extent, tax- and regulation-averse businessmen will continue to assure Republican victories.

I always find this fascinating. Rove continues to say this and I don’t think people have ever really understood what this meant. The man, after all, can count and that coalition is simply not going to be an enduring and mandate-giving majority, even though he mumbles some crap about ebay and Jesus to back up his claim. I don’t believe him for a minute. What Rove had in mind was something much more insidious — and much more revolutionary. The Bush machine intended to build a permanent governing majority not by persuading new adherents — the whole thing was to design an unbeatable political machine by demobilizing the center and the left.

Here is just one example of how they did that:

Saturday, November 27, 2004

In scuttling major intelligence legislation that he, the president and most lawmakers supported, Speaker J. Dennis Hastert last week enunciated a policy in which Congress will pass bills only if most House Republicans back them, regardless of how many Democrats favor them.

Hastert’s position, which is drawing fire from Democrats and some outside groups, is the latest step in a decade-long process of limiting Democrats’ influence and running the House virtually as a one-party institution. Republicans earlier barred House Democrats from helping to draft major bills such as the 2003 Medicare revision and this year’s intelligence package. Hastert (R-Ill.) now says such bills will reach the House floor, after negotiations with the Senate, only if “the majority of the majority” supports them.

Senators from both parties, leaders of the Sept. 11 commission and others have sharply criticized the policy. The long-debated intelligence bill would now be law, they say, if Hastert and his lieutenants had been humble enough to let a high-profile measure pass with most votes coming from the minority party.

The political calculation in that is far deeper than just scuttling the intelligence vote. Across the board, no matter what the issue, the Republicans actively sought to deny the Democrats anything they could call a victory. And the closer the Dems were to getting one, the more Rove and his boys liked it. It made them look powerful to have the Democrats so frustrated and angry. But it also ensured that elections would stay close and intense —- good for the base, keeps them involved, spending money and churning the culture war. (Even better for the Big Money boys to do their thing under the radar.)

But this wasn’t confined to psychology. As Hacker and Pierson pointed out in their book “Off Center” this form of governance took a number of interesting turns. Aside from the unprecedented graft and corruption that fueled their expensive lifestyles and election campaigns, this plan also enabled partisan redistricting and rule making that favored Republicans in elections throughout the country.

Still, Karl knew that wouldn’t be enough. He needed to control the legal machinery to ensure that all these close elections he was engineering would fall his way. So he planted political operatives in the Justice Department and kept a close eye on anything that could affect elections. Just today it’s been revealed that he had a hand in the corruption trial of the Democratic Governor of Alabama:

According to Simpson’s statement, William Canary, a senior GOP political operative and Riley adviser who was on the conference call, said ” not to worry about Don Siegelman” because “‘his girls’ would take care of” the governor. Canary then made clear that ” his girls” was a reference to his wife, Leura Canary, the U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Alabama, and Alice Martin, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama.

Canary reassured others on the conference call — who also included Riley’s son, Rob, and Terry Butts, another Riley lawyer and former justice of the Alabama supreme court — that he had the help of a powerful pal in Washington. Canary said “not to worry — that he had already gotten it worked out with Karl and Karl had spoken with the Department of Justice and the Department of Justice was already pursuing Don Siegelman,” the Simpson affidavit says. Both U.S. attorney offices subsequently indicted Siegelman on a variety of charges. A federal judge dismissed the Northern District case before it could be tried, but Siegelman was convicted in the Middle District on bribery and conspiracy charges last June.

It sounds as though it’s possible the case could be similar to the one in Michigan that was summarily thrown out by the appeals court. (That’s the one where the crime required that the jury be convinced that ordinary political activity be considered a crime — which is deeply ironic considering the whining GOP mantra that the Dems are “criminalizing politics.” But then if I had a nickel for every hypocritical Republican utterance…)

One interesting sidenote in all this is that the man whose “girls” would take care of Seligman was evidently involved with Rove from way back when he was doing Supreme Court races in Alabama — and where Rove learned how to game close elections. (For the definitive expose of that operation, this article in the Atlantic by Joshua Green remains the gold standard.)

Rove is not a stupid man. He knows that the GOP base is extreme and that when the great middle gets a clear look at them they recoil in horror. (See Circus, Schiavo.) He correctly deduced that to keep Republicans in power he had to permanently rig the system. So he did. And if it hadn’t been for the war it might just have worked. The key to Rove’s success was to keep elections close enough to they could steal them. He just didn’t have enough time to get the machinery in place before all hell broke loose.

Here’s Karl in the New Yorker again:

Rove cautioned against reading too much into polls, or the results of the 2006 midterm elections. “It’s important to keep in perspective how close the election actually was,” he said. “Three thousand five hundred and sixty-two votes and we would have had a Republican Senate. That’s the gap in the Montana Senate race. And eighty-five thousand votes are the difference in the fifteen closest House races. There’s no doubt we’ve taken a short-term hit in the face of a very contentious war, but to have the Republicans suffer an average defeat for the midterm says something about the underlying strength of conservative attitudes in the country.”

More like the underlying strength of the machine he’s put in place to steal elections. They aren’t very good at governance, we know that. But they have been remarkably good at winning close elections. It failed him this time in the face of an unpopular war and an unpopular president but I wouldn’t assume that the machine is permanently diabled. They’re just changing the oil. It’s important that the Democrats continue to seriously pursue this issue.

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Magic

by digby

Sometime back I wrote:

“‘Conservative’ is a magic word that applies to those who are in other conservatives’ good graces. Until they aren’t. At which point they are liberals.”

I just happened to pass by a TV and on Tucker Carlson’s show the chyron read “Just how liberal is President Bush?”

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Happy Sgt. Pepper’s Day!

by tristero

Yep, 40 years ago today, Sgt Pepper was released and that’s as good an excuse as any to do a Beatles roundup.

First of all, to you kiddies out there who want to know what all the brouhaha about The Beatles was all about, I strongly suggest you – hell, everyone should have it – grab the four Complete Ed Sullivan Shows with The Beatles . Now here’s the thing: you have to watch one a night, all the way through, including Miitzi Gaynor sing what she calls “real music,” and Frank Gorshin doing Kirk Douglas impressions. You will learn two things. First of all, that life in mainstream white America in 1964 was bereft of any positive cultural merit whatsoever. And secondly, this is the ideal society your average Republican politician has in mind for America, sans Beatles of course. It truly is hard to believe. You must see these shows in their entirety to understand how much this country has changed.

The greatest book I know on The Beatles’ music – and there are some remarkably good ones – is Recording The Beatles which goes into awesomely meticulous detail about how the boys worked at Abbey Road. With scads of photos and tons of info on techniques like ADT, close mic-ing drums, and flanging, no home is complete without it!

For those of you who are intimidated by so much tech geek, try Geoff Emerick’s memoir, Here, There and Everywhere which has wonderful stories (he was their main engineer from Revolver forward) and insights into their musicianship, but much less technical. A charming book.

And finally, if you’ve ever wanted to be your own mop-top, East West released today Fab Four, their long awaited “virtual instrument” collection which meticulously sampled the instruments and gear used by the rocking teen combo and created high-quality instruments you can play on your computer with a midi keyboard. How good it is is anyone’s guess right now – they haven’t even posted demos, but East West does very good sampling and it could be a lot of fun, especially if you have some halfway decent keyboard chops.

Sorry, I can’t suggest a bio as I grew up with the story, so there hasn’t been much need to read about it. I’d imagine any of the popular ones are ok. If you look, you can also find fairly good score transcriptions of the recordings, plenty of bootlegs, and so on. But really, it’s the music, y’know, and you should own quite a bunch of Beatles albums in the original US or UK release. Which ones? They’re all terrific, even Let It Be if you listen to it once every five years or so 🙂

The State Of Art In Professional Punditry In The Third Millenium

by tristero

Morton Kondracke:

Barring a miracle, the United States faces a catastrophic defeat in Iraq, with President Bush and both Republicans and Democrats in Congress sharing in the blame.

And why do they share the blame?

On the other hand, the Iraq experience does not inspire confidence in Democrats’ ability to carry out foreign policy in a time of grave danger, either. Most of them agreed with Bush on the presence weapons of mass destruction and voted to authorize the war – then quickly backed off when the going got tough.

Hardly any Democrats joined Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in arguing that more troops were needed to achieve victory. Democratic policy almost from the beginning was: “get out,” regardless of the consequences.

Now, despite the fact that al-Qaida leaders have declared Iraq to be the central front in the jihadist war on America, Democrats want to abandon that struggle. They say they want to confront al-Qaida in Afghanistan instead, but who’s to believe they would stay the course there if it became difficult?

This is so mind-bendingly stupid it reminds me of when I saw Pat Boone on tv covering (I think) a Little Richard song, cheerfully snatting his fingers on 1 and 3.

And y’know something? When someone’s that far out of it, there’s no amount of ‘splaining you can do to help them get it.

h/t, Josh.