Month: July 2007

Saturday Night At The Movies

Touch Me I’m Sick

By Dennis Hartley

Oh, Michael-you are such a pill.

Our favorite cuddly corn-fed agitprop filmmaker is back to stir up some doo-doo, spark national debate and make pinko-hatin’ ‘murcan “patriots” twitch and shout. Unless you’ve been living in a cave and have somehow missed the considerable amount of pre-release hype, you have likely gleaned that I am referring to documentary maestro Michael Moore’s meditation on the current state of the U.S. health care system, “Sicko”.

Moore grabs our attention right out of the gate with a real Bunuel moment. Over the opening credits, we are treated to shaky home video depicting a man pulling up a flap of skin whilst patiently stitching up a gash on his knee with a needle and thread, as Moore deadpans in V.O. (with his cheerful Midwestern countenance) that the gentleman is an avid cyclist- and one of the millions of Americans who cannot afford health insurance.

Moore doesn’t waste any time showing us the flipside of the issue-even those who are “lucky” enough to have health coverage often end up with the short end of the stick as well. A young woman, knocked unconscious in a high speed auto collision and rushed to the ER via ambulance, was later denied coverage for the ambulance ride by her insurance company because it was not “pre-approved”. She ponders incredulously as to exactly how she was supposed to have facilitated “pre-approval” in such a scenario (so do we).

The film proceeds to delve into some of some of the other complexities contributing to the overall ill health of our current system; such as the monopolistic power and greed of the pharmaceutical companies, the lobbyist graft, and (perhaps most depressing of all) the compassionless bureaucracy of a privatized health “coverage” system that focuses first and foremost on profit, rather than on actual individual need.

I know what you’re thinking-kind of a downer, eh? Well, this is a Michael Moore film, so there are plenty of laughs injected to help salve our tears. Most of the levity occurs as Moore travels abroad to the socialized nations of Canada, Britain, France and Cuba to do a little comparison shopping for alternate health care systems.

Much of the vitriol and spite aimed at “Sicko” seems to have been triggered by this aspect of the film. Indeed, the film has only been open for a week, and already the wing nut comment threads are ablaze with about a million variations on “Well if you think it’s so much better than America then why don’t you just move there you big fat Commie traitor.” (In his typically sly, self-aware fashion, Moore leads into his Cuba segment by weaving in footage and music from vintage Communist propaganda films; knowing full well that those with small minds will undoubtedly take the bait and completely miss the irony.)

The classic Moore moment in “Sicko” arrives as he sails into Guantanamo Bay with a megaphone and a boatload of financially tapped Ground Zero volunteer rescue worker veterans who are all suffering from serious respiratory illnesses. After learning that the Gitmo detainees all enjoy completely free, round the clock medical care on the taxpayer’s nickel, he figures that the state of the art prison hospital wouldn’t mind offering the same services to some genuine American heroes. Of course, the personnel manning the heavily armed U.S. military patrol boats in the bay fail to see his logic, and they are unceremoniously turned away.

Undeterred, he decides to give the Cuban health care system a spin (while they’re in the neighborhood-why not?) They are welcomed unconditionally, and receive prompt and thorough care. Is it a propaganda move by the Cubans? Probably. Does Moore conveniently fail to mention the “minuses” of the Cuban health care system (or the Canadian, British and French systems for that matter)? Sure-but who cares? The “plusses” greatly outweigh the “minuses”, especially when compared to the current health care mess in our own country (at least he’s showing enough sack to step up and give people some alternatives to mull over). Moore makes his point quite succinctly-the need for health care is a basic human need. It should never hinge on economic, political or ideological factors. As one of his astute interviewees observes, it is a right, not a privilege.

In fact, this may qualify as the least political of Moore’s films to date. Consequently, it may disappoint or perplex some of his usual supporters, especially those who always anticipate that a Moore film will give them a vicarious “let’s go stick it to The Man” thrill ride. Things are not so black and white this time out; the issue at hand is too complex. I don’t think there is any filmmaker out there who could sum it all up (tidy solutions and all) in less than 2 hours, but Moore has done an admirable job of scratching the surface, and most importantly, he manages to do so in an entertaining and engaging fashion. After all, isn’t that why we go to the movies?

Rated Rx: Hospital (1970 documentary), The Hospital, MASH, Britannia Hospital, The Doctor, Lorenzo’s Oil, The Kingdom, Young Doctors In Love,

…and a special programming note: On Friday, July 13, Turner Classic Movies will be airing a triple bill featuring The Hospital (1971), The Interns (1962) and The Young Doctors (1961). Break out the rubber gloves and the popcorn…stat.

Heartsick

by digby

I’ll let Dennis give the full run down on “Sicko’s” plot since he does that sort of thing so well. I’ll just cut to my impression of the film and what I think it means.

First of all, it made me cry and a Michael Moore film has never made cry before. I’ve laughed and cheered and certainly gotten enraged, but even through all of those emotions in this film — and there were plenty of them — I remained choked up. I just couldn’t get past the idea that people could make these life-ending and life-ruining decisions about other people — for profit. It’s so fundamentally at odds with what I think of as normal human empathy that on some levels it seems akin to being a concentration camp guard or an executioner. (And from the emotional reaction from those who’d worked in the industry and had quit, it takes a toll those with empathy who are asked to perform that dirty function as well.)

There is one story in the film of a woman whose husband was denied a bone marrow transplant allegedly because it was an “experimental procedure,” — is one a thousand excuses health insurance companies use to keep from having to provide care for those whose premiums they eagerly cashed in the years before their customer got sick. But I think what got me about that particular story was the fact that this woman worked in the hospital where the board of directors of this managed care company also worked. She spoke to them personally. She wasn’t just a piece of paper in an in-box. It was a real live person, a colleague and neighbor, literally begging for her husbands life … and they said no. For profit. It makes me want to howl in pain and outrage.

(Apparently, the film is making the insurers howl too. Check out this post from Michael Moore today in which he posts an internal Blue cross memo. The rep they sent to see the movie and report back wrote: “You’d have to be dead to be unaffected by Moore’s movie.”)

The film shows that there are alternatives. As Dennis mentioned, the most contentious parts of the film are when Moore goes to other countries and finds that people there are happy with their “socialized” health care systems which feature some things that we can only dream of in America — like house calls and thorough preventive care for all. It’s bound to make the xenophobes and the American exceptionalists seething mad to think that there could be anything better in other countries than the sweet land of liberty, but if you’ve ever spent time outside the United States (which most Americans haven’t) you know that there are many things other countries do better. We do not have a monopoly on high living standards any more than we have a monopoly of “goodness” even though many fellow citizens who’ve never left their home town will fight you to the ground arguing otherwise.

When the TB guy story was blazing I wrote that one of the most annoying things about it was that the guy said he was willing to put god knows how many other people at risk because he believed that he would die in a European hospital and had to get back to America where the health care was good. Aside from it being a thoroughly selfish act, it was just wrong. He would have had fine care in that Italian hospital and he could have arranged for transportation back to the states without endangering the lives of of all those strangers many of whom might not have had access to the superior health care he had at the end of the line. It’s just a perfect illustration of the success of the medical corporate propaganda that says all these foreign health care systems are so inferior it’s better to have inadequate access to or spend a prohibitive amount for American care than have universal coverage “like the socialists in France.” This guy wasn’t in Cambodia or Kenya — he believed they would “kill” him in Europe and that’s just nuts.

Moore’s movie is actually quite successful in showing that people in other first world countries with universal care live very well despite the fact that they pay higher taxes for medical care (and other things) because — they don’t have to pay for medical care and those other things. The people who live middle and upper middle class lives as professionals don’t lose anything — and the society as a whole gains tremendously because those crippling worries are removed from all, the poor and middle class alike. I don’t think Americans have any idea that they are not actually living at the top of the heap — they think what we have is a good as it can possibly be, and it just ain’t true.

“Sicko” is a surprisingly affecting movie, with its cast of people who you cannot look at and say they are dirty hippies, or losers or people who should have known better. They are regular Americans — hard working people who had the bad luck to get sick. And the amazing thing is that they were almost all insured. (The stories of the uninsured are so horrific that you almost have to laugh at the idea that our system could be considered superior to the worst third world country by anyone.)

This movie is perhaps the opening salvo in a new movement for guaranteed national health care. I hope so. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel. There are a variety of health care systems out there that work better than ours does for less money. All we have to do is be willing to set aside our misplaced pride and admit that this isn’t working and we need to do something about it. There are experiments all over the globe with universal care — we can pick among them and find something that’s right for us. Even business is getting ready to jump on board because these costs are starting to kill them too.

When I left the theatre here in liberal Santa Monica, there were people outside handing out literature. But I hear it’s happening all over the country and people are begging for information about what they can do. If this film does anything it will bring home to people that they are living in denial if they think they are safe because they have health insurance. The fact is that in America, the insurance companies incentives are designed to kill you if you get sick. It’s really that simple.

If people really care about being the best, they need to understand that this country will never again be “the best” as long as that continues.

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It’s Not Freedom

by digby

Rick Perlstein reports:

An argument has broken out in the comments for my Independence Day post. Folks are beating up on me for beating up on poor Barry Goldwater–when the problem is clearly George Bush.

Allow me to respond.

The watchword of The Big Con is that conservatism is the problem, not Bush, and that it is not the perversion of conservatism that is at issue but its original conception. Goldwater, in his famous acceptance speech, and Reagan, in his 1981 inauguration speech, spoke for that original conception. It is, as Reagan pronounced it: “government isn’t the solution to our problems, government is the problem.”

That means: tax cuts and dismantling and attempted dismantling of the structures of shared sacrifice that make America great, and keep America free. (Key example: affordable college education.)

Read the whole thing. It’s very important that we not attribute the failure of the last few years solely to George W. Bush or even Dick Cheney’s assault on the constitution. The virulent form of conservatism they represent is not just political, it’s a systemic, cultural ill that has seized our society and made us lose our sense of common purpose — and decency.

That is not an accident. Perlstein refers to his Independence Day post, to which I linked before, and which I highly recommend you read if you haven’t done so. He discussed a new book, The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America that talks about how conservatism, which babbles incessantly about freedom and liberty, is actually anything but. It’s not a Marxist argument, it’s a simple series of observations that show the conservative cultural message and government policies have ended up narrowing people’s freedom to pursue their own destiny rather than expand them as they insisted they would do.

That conservatives’ tragic misunderstanding of freedom has produced exactly what Goldwater feared most: stifling the energy and talent of the individual, crushing creative differences, forcing conformity – and, yes, even leading us to despotism (and I’m not talking about habeus corpus or NSA spying). By methodically undermining the public’s will and ability to underwrite the public good, systematically accelerating economic inequality, and making turning oneself into a commodity – “selling out” – the only possible route for young people who wish a reasonably secure middle class existence, conservatives killed liberty. The canary in the coal mine is the death of young people’s “freedom to live adult lives typified by choice rather than economic compulsion.”

This is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. I’ve worked for many, many years in the corporate pink collar ghetto and later the corporate white collar management ghetto and was always moved by my overseer’s devotion to freedom when they would “allow” us to leave early for a doctor appointment or theatrically dole out a discretionary bonus of a hundred dollars at the end of a banner year and expect us all to gush adoringly at their generosity. The entire enterprise is designed as an exercise in conformity in which those most eager to reinforce the corporate ethos rise to the top and enforce it even more rigidly. (Which is understandable. Having been through the “boot-camp” that beat every original thought and idea out of their heads until they don’t even know they once had them, the next generation of bosses are always ready to give it even harder to those coming up behind them, if only to justify their own acquiescence to such humiliation.) And anyone who complains is reminded of that inspiring war cry of American liberty: “you can always quit.”

Except, of course, most of us really can’t and they know it. You can’t go without health insurance and you can’t afford to take a chance on a new job that might not work out because there just isn’t much room to fail in our society. It takes a very brave person to put their own and their family’s well being at risk when the consequences of failure are so high. Most people make the rational decision to stick with the soul destroying job, answer to a boss that treats them like a lackey and live a life of quiet desperation because to do otherwise would be irresponsible.

Doesn’t that work out nicely for the corporate owners of America, eh?

And then there is the crippling debt load, a situation which people are conditioned to accept as a normal part of life, necessary to their happiness and a decent, middle class way of life. Which it is. Lucky young people today start out life with a burden that forces them to sell their souls very early, do not pass go, do not take that year long trip to Europe or write that novel or start that small business you and your pals thought up in junior year. Better join the firm and get that debt paid down before you even have a chance to think. Get in there and start getting your training to be a Corporate American. Before long, you’ll have forgotten all about that other stuff. Go out and buy yourself something pretty. It’ll make you feel better. Put it on the card.

For everybody else, those who work paycheck to paycheck in restaurant jobs or toil in retail or struggle in one of those elusive manufacturing jobs, it’s just pure fear of being out of work that keeps you in line. If you are lucky enough to have health insurance you will do almost anything to keep it. If you have a sick family member you are as good as a slave.

I know this is depressing. But being enslaved is depressing and our economic system is slowly but surely turning into a system of involuntary servitude in which people are trapped in jobs they cannot leave or so panicked by the idea of being left holding the huge bag of debt or illness that they are paralyzed with fear. It’s not like you can just check out and reinvent yourself, or “go west young man.” There is no escape in the 21st century surveillance society. If that’s freedom, then we need a new word to describe “the power to determine the course of one’s own destiny.”

None of this exactly new, of course. The Republicans have always said they wanted to go back to the 50’s, and they meant it, at least in terms of insisting on a conformist culture that turns humans into robots.

The cure is quite simple. Make sure this radical right wing experiment is thoroughly and finally discredited in the public’s mind and replaced with something very simple — a normal western democracy that has a decent safety net for all its citizens, a commitment to making the middle class accessible to those on the bottom and a sense of responsibility among those who have thrived and become wealthy. It’s not that complicated and it doesn’t require a wholesale reworking of our society. It simply requires a return to the …ahem … traditional American values that undergirded the New Deal, and a healthy respect for that old truism, “there but for the grace of God go I.”

The other side will shriek and hold their breath until they turn blue, but this is the weakest they’ve been in a quarter century. The time is now to make the argument. (Here’s another good place to start: Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class)

The evidence just keeps piling up. The conservative movement is a grotesque new form of aristocracy cloaked in the mantle of radical free market religion. They are playing all of us for suckers and getting away with it.

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Guts

by digby

Bush Rips Democratic Lawmakers’ Failures

President Bush accused Democratic lawmakers on Saturday of being unable to live up to their duties, citing Congress’ inability to pass legislation to fund the federal government.”Democrats are failing in their responsibility to make tough decisions and spend the people’s money wisely,” Bush said in his weekly radio address. “This moment is a test.”The White House has said the failure of a broad immigration overhaul was proof that Democratic-controlled Capitol Hill cannot take on major issues. “We saw this with immigration, and we’re seeing it with some other issues where Congress is having an inability to take on major challenges,” said spokesman Tony Fratto.The main reason the immigration measure died, however, was staunch opposition from Bush’s own base — conservatives. The president could not turn around members of his own party despite weeks of intense effort.

The Fox Evil Greedheads Shows were all robotically mouthing the same talking point this morning. The Democrats failed to get the immigration reform bill done, or anything else, and they might as well go home.

If you haven’t signed this petition yet, do it. This is ridiculous.

Meanwhile, speaking of guts:

HERE’S A PARADOX: Science is our best way of deciphering the complexities of the natural world. It is useful, consistent and, despite the claims of fundamentalists — religious or postmodern — true. Yet the insights of science are often counterintuitive, frequently lacking what Stephen Colbert called “truthiness.”

When Colbert coined that term, during the inaugural episode of his satirical show, “The Colbert Report,” he applied it to things that people in general (and George W. Bush in particular) know to be true “from the gut,” as opposed to from the head. Truthiness trumps dry logic, dull evidence and mere facts. It disdains or simply bypasses laborious intellectual examination in favor of what feels right. The word has taken on a life of its own, and Colbert stuck it scathingly to Bush’s political decisions, including the rationale for invading Iraq and his claim to have looked into Vladimir Putin’s eyes and seen “his soul.”

But such gut thinking poses another set of dangers to science. All too often, it bumps into scientific truth, and when it does, it tends to win — at least in the short term. Ironically, much of the time, scientific findings don’t seem immediately logical; if they were, we probably wouldn’t need its laborious “method” of theory building and empirical hypothesis testing for confirmation. We’d simply know.

After all, the sun moves through our sky, but it is the Earth that is going around the sun. Our planet is round, even though it sure feels flat under our feet as we walk. The microbial theory of disease only prevailed because Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch and other scientists finally marshaled enough irrefutable evidence to overwhelm the alternative perspective: that things too small to be seen with the naked eye couldn’t possibly exist or have any effect on us.

And the tiniest bit of sanity only began to return to politics when the Republicans and George Bush proved without doubt that they were unable to govern by running the country into the ground and destroying its reputation. Prior to that time it was believed that you needed to decide your presidential choice on the basis of whether you’d like to have a beer with him.

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The Village

by digby

I was awfully pleased this morning to see that Dan Froomkin and I are of the same mind when it comes to this silly “Clinton did it, too” defense of Scooters Skate:

[A]s it happens, the previous granting of clemency that is most analogous to what Bush did dates back neither to the Clinton or even the Nixon era, but to Bush’s father’s presidency.In 1992, on the eve of his last Christmas in the White House, George H.W. Bush pardoned former defense secretary Caspar Weinberger and five others for their conduct related to the Iran-Contra affair, in which he himself was also loosely implicated.As David Johnston reported in the New York Times at the time, independent prosecutor Lawrence E. Walsh was livid. “Mr. Walsh bitterly condemned the President’s action, charging that ‘the Iran-contra cover-up, which has continued for more than six years, has now been completed.'”

Martin Longman suggested when I wrote about this yesterday that I recall the establishment press consensus at the time, just as a sort of exercise. You won’t be surprised that many of them were similar to this, from the Boston Herald:

In exercising his power to lift the taint of illegality from six American patriots – former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger; former Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams; CIA officers Duane Clarridge, Alan Fiers, and Clair George; and former National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane – Bush showed mercy and wisdom. As he noted, each man acted from love of country, none profited (or even sought to profit) from his actions, and all six have long records of service to the nation.

Meanwhile, the president’s pardons reaffirm some fundamental principles. Among them, that foreign policy in the United States is ultimately the domain of the president. That differences of policy are not crimes. That political disputes should be resolved through politics – i.e., elections – not through prosecutions.

Some of these six men have pleaded guilty to such “crimes” as not turning over their notes of confidential policymaking sessions. Hounded by Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh, with his unlimited budget and Simon Legree mindset, they knew they faced bankruptcy if they didn’t admit guilt – even though they had done nothing wrong.

Iran-Contra was a flawed policy, not a criminal conspiracy. We hope the president, in pardoning the six, is able, as he put it, “to put bitterness behind us and look to the future.” And we hope Walsh’s fanatic pursuit will finally be stopped.

Sound familiar? Walsh, you’ll remember, was a Republican judge.

And yes, “we put the bitterness behind us and looked to future” — or I should say the Democrats did. The Republicans went on an unprecedented crusade to take the next president down almost immediately by any means necessary. And when the inevitable Republican independent counsel (there were almost never any other kind) was appointed and failed to find that Hillary had killed Vince Foster with her bare hands, they had him removed and replaced with one who was a little bit more reliable and would keep digging until he found something.

But to this day, elite opinion makers in this country continue to maintain that a Republican president cannot be held accountable by the congress for anything because he is trying to guard our country against the boogeyman and shouldn’t be second-guessed. I don’t know why they have absorbed this message so thoroughly — I assume it’s from a quarter century of loud pontificating at GOP social functions — but they have. If a president lies, breaks the law or corrupts the constitution in the name of keeping us safe, you are not going to find many beltway elites who are willing to say he should be stopped. It’s fear of the angry mob, I guess.

The other unsurprising sentiment I found among the punditocrisy regarding Poppy’s Christmas Eve pardons was relief that good old Cap had been spared, even though he was clearly spared to shut him up. Here’s some world weary beltway wisdom from our old pal Richard Cohen in the Wapo’s December 30, 1992 issue, who had his suspicions, but in the end just shrugged his shoulders and moved on:

Back when Caspar Weinberger was secretary of defense, he and I used to meet all the time. Our “meetings” — I choose to call them that — took place in the Georgetown Safeway, the one on Wisconsin Avenue, where I would go to shop and Cap would too. My clear recollection is that once — was it before Thanksgiving? — he bought a turkey.

I tell you this about the man President Bush just pardoned because it always influenced my opinion of Weinberger. (In contrast, I submit the member of the House leadership who had an aide push the cart.) Based on my Safeway encounters, I came to think of Weinberger as a basic sort of guy, candid and no nonsense — which is the way much of official Washington saw him. It seemed somehow cruel that he should end his career — he’s 75 — either as a defendant in a criminal case or as a felon. The man deserved better than that.

And so when Weinberger was indicted by Lawrence E. Walsh, the special Iran-contra prosecutor, I despaired. Weinberger had been on the “right” side of the debate within the Reagan administration of whether to sell arms to Iran in exchange for the release of hostages held in Lebanon. He opposed the swap, but he did so in confidence. Clearly, he lost the argument, and he may have lost his good sense when he allegedly withheld evidence. That being said, I was pleased when he was pardoned.

[…]

We now know that Bush kept a diary that, until recently, he withheld from the special prosecutor. My guess is that we will eventually get even more evidence of Bush’s participation in the making of the arms-for-hostages policy but that, ultimately, his role will always be in dispute. That, in a way, is fitting. It conforms to his posture on raising taxes, on abortion, on civil rights and on judicial appointments, the misrepresentation of Clarence Thomas as eminently qualified for the court above all. A kind of haze, a political-ideological miasma, is the fitting legacy of the Bush presidency.

Cap, my Safeway buddy, walks, and that’s all right with me. As for the other five, they are not crooks in the conventional sense but Cold Warriors who, confident in the justice of their cause, were contemptuous of Congress. Because they thought they were right, they did not think they had to be accountable. This is the damage the Cold War did to our democracy.

It was “the Cold War” that did this to our democracy, not the corrupt Republicans who believed a dictatorship would be better, as long as they were the dictators. (Of course, they changed course right quick when they took control of the congress two years later. Suddenly they were the voice of “the people” and the president was irrelevant — a development about which the beltway gasbags were conspicuously silent as they bathed Newtie in a hagiographic glow of Mr Deeds style populism in his early days as speaker.)

But what tipped it for Cohen was that he knew Cap. He bought a turkey. He was one of them. Like Scooter. The Village protects their own.

The Clintons weren’t their own. Neither was Carter. Reagan, of course, was —- why they’d been watching him in the movies for decades. All Americans felt like he was one of their own. (And Nancy was a first lady they could admire, even as she exerted an iron grip on the social life of the village. She was a powerful QueenBee.) Nixon wasn’t one of them — no way. Ford was. The senior Bush’s have been villagers forever —in fact, their son was the village idiot but they accepted him as president as long as there were many respected elders like Dick and Lynn and Don and Scooter keeping an eye on him.

Back in 92 Cohen had informed himself enough of the facts to know that Bush was covering up his crime, but in the end just couldn’t get past that picture of old Cap the lonely old Safeway turkey buyer (which surely pleased the villagers.) He’s fully made the transition to elder now. He might even be a priest: he no longer bothers to look at the facts at all.

Update: E.J. Dionne is able to look beyond the village’s opinion of Scooter, their wonderful neighbor and colleague, and see the commutation for what it really was.

I harbored no personal desire to see I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby spend a long time in prison for his perjury and obstruction-of-justice convictions. People who know him tell me he is a thoughtful and interesting man, and I have no reason to doubt them.Yet when I learned that President Bush had commuted Libby’s 30-month sentence, I was enraged although not surprised. Rage should not be a standard response to political events (though avoiding it has gotten harder in recent years), so I had to ask if my anger was justified. Here’s the case for getting mad and staying mad.

The core point is that “equal justice under law” either means something or it doesn’t. In this case, all the facts we know tell us that Libby received far more than equal justice, as evidenced by the irregular way his commutation was handled.

See? Not so hard. Dan Froomkin can do it too. They prove it’s possible. But you have to be willing to go against the village which probably isn’t easy. In fact, it’s so daunting that it may even be necessary to replace the elders altogether if we are going to fix this mess.

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Sicko

by digby

Dennis Hartley and I are going to do a little Siskel and Ebert thing for Saturday Night at the Movies this week and both review “Sicko”. If you’ve seen the movie, or are thinking of it, (and have no life at all) then stop by tomorrow night at about 6pm pacific time and let’s talk about it.

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I Heart Shuster

by digby

If you get a chance, watch David Shuster turn Fouad Ajami into a blubbering puddle of melting playdough on Hardball today. It is an awe inspiring performance by a reporter who knows the facts and refuses to let these neocon liars bluster and bloviate about irrelevancies.

Dan Burton got so mad he spat out that Shuster was a “strong liberal Democrat,” (which Shuster just laughed off.) Burton kept going on and on about how Clinton was convicted of perjury and got off scott free, which everyone corrected, but he just kept blathering on about anyway. This seems to be some kind of wingnut talking point. (I think he may have had a few too many Mint Juleps, too.)

C&L will undoubtedly have the video up before long, don’t miss it. Made me almost feel like the world is setting itself back on its axis — at least for today.

Here’s the vid at C&L.
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Mr And Mrs Nut

by digby

A number of people have blogged about this fascinating little James Fallows anecdote at the Atlantic blog and it’s a really good one.

At the first meeting, one Republican woman on the commission said that the overwhelming threat was from China. Sooner or later the U.S. would end up in a military showdown with the Chinese Communists. There was no avoiding it, and we would only make ourselves weaker by waiting. No one else spoke up in support.

The same thing happened at the second meeting — discussion from other commissioners about terrorism, nuclear proliferation, anarchy of failed states, etc, and then this one woman warning about the looming Chinese menace. And the third meeting too. Perhaps more.

Finally, in frustration, this woman left the commission.

“Her name was Lynne Cheney,” Hart said. “I am convinced that if it had not been for 9/11, we would be in a military showdown with China today.” Not because of what China was doing, threatening, or intending, he made clear, but because of the assumptions the Administration brought with it when taking office. (My impression is that Chinese leaders know this too, which is why there are relatively few complaints from China about the Iraq war. They know that it got the U.S. off China’s back!)

Lee Hamilton, who had also been on the commission, was sitting at the same lunch table and backed up Hart’s story. Another chapter in the annals of missed opportunities in recent years.

Like most people who follow politics, I was aware of the neocons for years before Bush came to office, but it wasn’t until 9/11 that I delved deeply into their more modern incarnations like the PNAC. And what I, and many others, found there was a very startling and dangerous movement for American empire that envisioned some pretty starkly mad scenarios. War with China being among their top priorities.

I never knew that Lynn Cheney was on the Hart-Rudman Commission, but it doesn’t surprise me that she carried the PNAC Party line, nor that she quit when they insisted on focusing on terrorism. One of the things that has always distinguished these wingnut intellectuals is that they are always wrong about everything. They never gave the threat of Islamic terrorism much more than a passing thought until 9/11, despite the fact that they have spent every day since then shrieking like fishwives about “appeasement” and “WWIV” and the “gravest threat the world has ever known.”

Just as a reminder of how cuckoo-bananas these demented robots people Cheney placed all over the government really are, here’s an article from 2003, which Bush was still being hailed as “this extremely popular president” like he’d been anointed by God. They were still working the China angle:

Neoconservative hawks have scored a new victory in the administration of President George W. Bush with the hiring by Vice President Richard Cheney of a prominent hawk on China policy. China specialist and Princeton University professor Aaron Friedberg has been named deputy national security adviser and director of policy planning on Cheney’s high-powered foreign policy staff headed by I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, one of the most influential foreign policy strategists in the administration. Libby also served as the general counsel to the Cox Commission, a House Select Committee that issued a report in 1999 accusing China of large-scale espionage to advance its nuclear weapons program and was soundly criticized by many China scholars for its factual errors, unsupported allegations, and shoddy analysis.

Both Friedberg and Libby, as well as Cheney, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, and 21 other prominent right-wingers, signed the 1997 founding charter of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which called for the adoption of a “‘Reaganite’ policy of military strength and moral clarity.” Friedberg also signed another PNAC letter to Bush on September 20, 2001, which called for the “war on terrorism” to be directed against Iraq and other anti-Israel forces in the Middle East, in addition to al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. And the professor wrote a chapter on the threat posed by China in Present Dangers, a 2000 book edited by PNAC cofounders William Kristol and Robert Kagan that also included chapters by other leading neoconservative hawks, including former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle and former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief James Woolsey.

That book “Present Dangers” was edited by Robert Kagan —the great seer and author of “the surge” among other nutzoid schemes — cited these six “mounting threats” in the year 2000:

• #1 China: The Challenge of a Rising Power
• #2 Russia: The Challenge of a Failing Power
• #3 Iraq: Saddam Unbound
• #4 Iran: Fundamentalism and reform
• #5 North Korea: Beyond Appeasement

Notice anything missing?

Just as an aside, you have to love this conclusion to the above linked article:

Friedberg’s assumptions were even questioned by Zalmay Khalilzad, a senior Bush strategist who has handled relations with Afghanistan and Iraq but has supported a policy of both engagement and containment–or “congagement”–toward China. In a published reply to Friedberg’s Commentary article, Khalilzad criticized his assumption “that the current Chinese regime and/or its likely successor will pursue regional hegemony. This is by no means inevitable,” Khalilzad said, arguing that it was also possible that the relationship would evolve into “mutual accommodation and partnership,” particularly if Beijing made democratic reforms.

But Friedberg thinks this unlikely. “Regimes in transition from strict authoritarianism to greater political openness,” he replied, “have historically been prone to bouts of aggressive nationalism.”

He may be right, but it’s also pretty obvious that when regimes of historically great political openness are led by believers in strict authoritarianism those regimes also tend to be prone to bouts of aggressive nationalism. See: Rome; United States.

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Over Tipping

by digby

I was reading this post by Steve Benen about the latest John Solomon journalistic abortion on the endlessly fascinating topic of John Edwards’ hair and I wondered if anyone knows whether the first tip on this story came from an oppo shop. (If you know, drop me a line.)

Here’s why I’m curious. It is my understanding that reporters will receive a tip about something like this then do their own investigation and report the tip if it turned out to be true.(Or in the case of Barbara Comstock’s 2000 operation, at least, actively seek out nasty nuggets of irrelevant slander to fuel the next day’s smear cycle.) Journalistic ethics only require that the story be factual to justify running it, and since the tips are usually on background, it is not reported that it comes from an opposing campaign.

Now on the surface, that sounds reasonable. Facts are facts and it shouldn’t matter where the original tip came from as it turns out to be true. But it isn’t reasonable in a 24/7 cable and tabloid newspaper world in which political operatives twist such trivia into epic metaphors for “character” and “authenticity” and the allegedly more serious newspaper columnists like Maureen Dowd, viciously cackle over it for months while establishment icons like David Broder write columns informing “The Village” that real Americans don’t like politicians who are so lacking in character and authenticity. Around and around it goes in an endless feedback loop. “Facts” quickly become fiction in this milieu.

I know the news media are annoyed by what they see as the bloggers’ simplistic analysis of “the political narrative” and I’m sure that most of them do not cover a campaign with such things in mind. But in the daily rush of campaign coverage I think even many of the good ones fail to see how these “tips” and “research” are actually a form of campaign propaganda designed specifically to implant certain subliminal impressions and ideas about candidates which are not actually true, even if the details are factual. (If they are aware of it, then they are all guilty of journalistic malpractice for failing to reveal that in every story they write about these things.)

In keeping with the convoluted modern press definition of fairness they will say that it is up to the Democrats to feed them equally trivial nasty gossip that they can use to illustrate whatever caricatures they wish to convey about their rivals — then everything will equal out in the end. Indeed, it is the Democrats’ failure if they are not good at character assassination and they have no one to blame but themselves. (“Get better smear artists, Democrats, and we’ll give you equal time — but only if we can “verify” that your “tip” is factual. We do have scruples, after all.”)

John Soloman appears to be a particularly lazy mean-girl reporter who loves the dirt that Republicans dish out, and in his new job as chief political reporter for the Washington post, we can certainly expect more of this. But others with more integrity will contribute as well because they simply aren’t willing to acknowledge that their simplistic journalistic conventions have been corrupted because of one political party’s superior ability to manipulate them. They have become part of the right wing message machine — whether it’s laundering smears or pushing out false information on Iraq’s WMD and outing CIA agents as political retribution. They seem to think this is just part of “the game.” I think it’s a big problem for American democracy and I would hope that the members of the mainstream media who care about these things would step back and try to see how it looks from afar. The big picture shows a very ugly kind of collusion overlaid with a thin layer of stale, useless protocols that the media call ethics.

Television gasbags have been gleefully recycling this Edwards nonsense all day, based upon the latest Soloman story and treating it like it’s news. Matthews said “sometimes small stories can reveal big things.” He pretends he’s cleverly pointing out that Edwards is a phony populist for getting expensive haircuts but what he’s really doing is pushing GOP propaganda that Edwards is effeminate and soft. Like all Democrats.

Fox’s Major Garrett just did a huge piece on this “controversy” ending with this:

“The stylist said ‘I try to make the man handsome, strong, more mature and these are the things, as an expert, that’s what we do.’ For sheer irony, that Edwards seems to believe he needs all three, might be the sharpest cut of all.”

They’ve played the “I Feel pretty” video three times in the last half hour.

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Very Close To The Tree

by digby

All over TV today I’m hearing references to Clinton’s allegedly self-serving last minute pardons and how Scooter’s commutation pales by comparison. Scott Stanzel in the press briefing put it this way:

Q Scott, what do you say to Democratic critics who say that the commutation of Libby’s sentence was intended to mollify conservatives, his own Republicans included, who were beginning to break with him on issues ranging from immigration to Iraq?

MR. STANZEL: Well, if that was what we were responding to, then a full pardon would have been the answer of the day, because that’s what many people — many conservatives were asking for. And that is what the President did not do. He respected the jury verdict. There’s still the hefty fine and the probation. And it’s interesting to me — there’s much hypocrisy in Washington, D.C., but it seems to me that the hypocrisy demonstrated by Democratic leaders on this issue is rather startling. When you think about the previous administration and the 11th hour fire sale pardons, and issues that were provided commutations on the last day in the numbers of the hundreds, in the final time between the post-election period, it’s really startling that they have the gall to criticize what we believe is a very considered, a very deliberate approach to a very unique case.

Q So you’re accusing Bill and Hillary Clinton of hypocrisy?

MR. STANZEL: I would say that it is amazing to me that they can — with what they did on January 20, 2001, they can criticize the President for issuing a commutation — his fourth — insomuch as they issued — President Clinton issued 141 pardons on January 20th; over 200 in the period — in the post-election period in 2000. It sort of pales in comparison.

That’s an extremely compelling argument for sure. But, I think they are missing the boat on this. There is a much better precedent for what Dubya did that actually could make this one pale by comparison.
Remember this little Christmas present?

It’s a family tradition.

Update: I must be that I’m losing my touch and not writing clearly any more, because nearly everything I write these days is coming in for withering criticism of a position I’m not actually taking.

I’m not defending Clinton’s pardons. I didn’t even discuss them or the merits of them. But others are and I’ve been watching Democrats on television stumble all day because they didn’t have a ready quip to hit them with.

I thought that since the Bushies made the mistake of bringing up past pardons, it was a natural opportunity to attack them back by dredging up Poppy’s pardons of members of his own administration, which were very controversial in exactly the same way Junior’s are.

I’m a big believer in not trying to explain or excuse in these TV debates — attack the Republicans, right back, with their own misdeeds.

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Fourth Of July Treats

by digby

Here are two final independence day links from two wonderful writers.

Rick Perlstein reviews a new book that helps us put into perspective how we got here:

I want to celebrate Independence Day by recommending a new book. It’s not about conservatism per se. But it’s one of the best manifestos I’ve seen about just how disastrous the conservative vision for American has truly been.

It’s called The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat In Winner-Take-All America, and it’s by a young writer named Daniel Brook.

Brook’s got guts. Because frankly, his topic – the fate of the best and brightest graduates of our top-flight universities – sounds like a subject for whiners. Who cares about them, right? They’ll do fine on their own. What do the lifestyle and career choices they make after college have to do with the well-being, moral and material, of the rest of us?

A whole lot, Brook has me convinced. Their plight is a window onto the fate of nothing less than American liberty itself – and how the right has run it into the ground.

The book begins, provocatively enough, by quoting Barry Goldwater’s 1964 nomination speech – the one in which he proclaimed, “extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.” What he also said was, “The tide has been running against freedom…. In our vision of a good and decent future, free and peaceful, there must be room for the liberation of the energy and talent of the individual… Equality, rightly understood, as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences. Wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our own time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.”

What’s the argument? That conservatives’ tragic misunderstanding of freedom has produced exactly what Goldwater feared most: stifling the energy and talent of the individual, crushing creative differences, forcing conformity – and, yes, even leading us to despotism (and I’m not talking about habeus corpus or NSA spying). By methodically undermining the public’s will and ability to underwrite the public good, systematically accelerating economic inequality, and making turning oneself into a commodity – “selling out” – the only possible route for young people who wish a reasonably secure middle class existence, conservatives killed liberty.

Read On …

Gene Lyons looks at the big picture and helps us see where we are going:

As the nation celebrates Independence Day, there’s ample cause for optimism that our democracy will survive the presidency of George W. Bush intact. That Americans would reject the Bush / Cheney brand of half-baked authoritarianism hasn’t always been clear. (See Joe Conason’s “It Can Happen Here” for details. ) It was touch and go for a while. Frankly, there have been times since 2001 when it was hard not to wonder if we still had the intestinal fortitude to govern ourselves. Politically, the Bush administration is dead in the water.

Read on...

Enjoy.

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