Month: August 2007

Savvy Fools

by digby

Jay Rosen is the preeminent analyst of the press during the Bush administration and today’s piece about the media’s relationship with Karl Rove is typically insightful. He describes a group of insiders who are so taken with their own “savviness” that they end up admiring those who are best able to manipulate them — the Kewl Kid thesis with footnotes:

Savviness is what journalists admire in others. Savvy is what they themselves dearly wish to be. (And to be unsavvy is far worse than being wrong.) Savviness—that quality of being shrewd, practical, well-informed, perceptive, ironic, “with it,” and unsentimental in all things political—is, in a sense, their professional religion. They make a cult of it. And it was this cult that Karl Rove understood and exploited for political gain.

What is the truest mark of savviness? Winning, of course! Everyone knows that the press admires an unprincipled winner. (Of a piece with its fixation on the horse race.) Josh Green, a reporter for the Atlantic Monthly who actually took the time to understand Karl Rove’s career, totaled up his winnings in a 2004 article (“Karl Rove in a Corner,” subscribers only.)

The opposite of “savviness” in this context is something terribly, terribly uncool: the dreaded earnestness. What could be more terrible than people who actually believe in things or have silly idealistic notions about making something better? Yuck.

This is never as true as during a campaign, when every speech, every gesture is “interpreted” by the kewl kids as having some sort of calculated meaning. You’ll recall this recent example of extremely savvy, savviness on the part of the Wall Street Journal’s John Harwood:

HARWOOD: I’m going to defend that [cleavage] column too. When you look at the calculation that goes into everything that Hillary Clinton does, for her to argue that she was not aware of what she was communicating by her dress is like Barry Bonds saying he thought he was rubbing down with flaxseed oil, OK?

That’s so savvy it’s scary.

The savvy kewl kidz always have at least one blind spot, a candidate whom they just looove, no matter what he stands for. Perhaps they see it as a further function of their savviness that they can see the perfection no one else does in their object of desire, I don’t know. What I do know is that they always seem to find one straight-talking regular Republican guy who they just love to pieces:

Here we have the press corps latest crush:

A final thought: The political press is absolutely head over heels for Huckabee. (There were high-fives all around when it became clear he’d finish second.) He’s a genuinely endearing guy who can banter with the best of them–watching him with reporters brings to mind the old black and white footage of Babe Ruth jawboning with sportswriters. When you add that to the political media’s general affinity for underdogs, you can see how Huckabee’s about to enjoy some serious media afterglow, which will only further boost his profile.

Update: A couple of commenters have asked about the high-fiving I describe when the press corps realized Huckabee had taken second. I’d intended this to be hyperbolic, but now that I read it again maybe the hyperbole isn’t so obvious.

Anyway, the point was just that there was much rejoicing among the press over Huckabee’s showing. I talked to four or five other reporters about Huckabee yesterday. All of them were down when it looked like he might not make it out of Ames. These same people were pretty giddy once the results came in. (I’d love to name names, but nothing good would come of that for any of us…)

That’s nice to know, isn’t it? It’s a good thing that reporters are blogging these days or we wouldn’t. I wouldn’t count on that continuing, however. We already can’t be told specifically which reporters are “giddy” about Huckabee’s win because “nothing good will come of it.” I suspect the Kewl Kidz Klub is going to pull the plug on this sort of loose lips reporting. Nothing good can come of it.

The corollary to the secret savvy crush on the funny, regular Republican guy, of course, is the secret loathing of the allegedly phony, effeminate Democratic guy:

There is a difference in the political reality: fairly or unfairly, a healthy chunk of the national political press corps doesn’t like John Edwards.

Fairly or unfairly, there’s also a difference in narrative timing: when the first quarter ended, the press was trying to bury Edwards.

I won’t even mention the guy whose name starts with G and ends with “ore.”

Again, these so-called reporters have their own agenda, which they don’t bother to share with the public because they are “objective.” Except of course, they’re not, as these little anecdotes prove.

I agree with Rosen that the issue isn’t necessarily political bias, at least in terms of preferred policies. It’s this insidery, know-it-all, savviness that leads them time and again to be taken in by certain leadership archetypes that are based on adolescent notions about “real” and “cool” and “nerd.” They may think it’s “savvy” but it’s really an unevolved freshman dorm room cynicism that’s transparently manipulable by smart political operators. They just aren’t savvy enough to know that.

Update: Eric Boehlert writes about the fact that the mainstream media are uninterested in “gaffes” when they come from a Republican candidate, citing Mitt Romney’s humdinger about how his five strapping sons are serving their country equally with soldiers in Iraq by stumping for him in Iowa. (Read the whole breakdown of how the press handled that — even I didn’t know they were this obviously biased.)

Boehlert writes that despite heavy coverage on both right and left blogs:

The morning after Romney’s blunder, The Boston Globe, Newsday, the Chicago Tribune, and the Orlando Sentinel ran brief, 100-200-word items about it. USA Today included just a couple of sentences about the gaffe at the bottom of a longer Romney campaign report.

Incredibly, those were the only major American newspapers in the country to touch on the story in real time. I have a hard time imagining the same deafening silence would have met Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) or John Edwards if they had made such dismissive and condescending remarks as suggesting their children served their country not by serving in the military, but by working the rope line on their parents’ campaigns.

Keep in mind that Romney was crisscrossing Iowa for the entire week, which meant reporters had opportunities to ask the candidate follow-up questions about his controversial remarks prior to the Iowa straw poll. From what I can determine, no journalist did that for days.

The issue, though, clearly struck a nerve with voters who, three times in three days, pressed Romney about his sons not serving in the military. Still, journalists descending into Iowa last week by the plane-load to cover the straw vote couldn’t have cared less.

Voters aren’t savvy enough to know that Romney’s wealthy, privileged, country club elitism doesn’t mean anything.

Besides, the press approves of Mitt (he has shoulders you could land as 747 on!) and so he will not only not be subjected to endless puerile little anecdotes that mean nothing, they won’t even ask him if he really believes that his sons are “serving” by writing their little blog and appearing at campaign rallies.

And one more thing: They rely totally awesome GOP henchman to spoon feed them all that hilarious dirt on those Democratic homos.

.

On The Road To Aztlan and Mecca

by digby

Check out this article by Chris Hayes in The Nation. This is one of the weirdest things I’ve ever heard:

When completed, the highway will run from Mexico City to Toronto, slicing through the heartland like a dagger sunk into a heifer at the loins and pulled clean to the throat. It will be four football fields wide, an expansive gully of concrete, noise and exhaust, swelled with cars, trucks, trains and pipelines carrying water, wires and God knows what else. Through towns large and small it will run, plowing under family farms, subdevelopments, acres of wilderness. Equipped with high-tech electronic customs monitors, freight from China, offloaded into nonunionized Mexican ports, will travel north, crossing the border with nary a speed bump, bound for Kansas City, where the cheap goods manufactured in booming Far East factories will embark on the final leg of their journey into the nation’s Wal-Marts.

And this NAFTA Superhighway, as it is called, is just the beginning, the first stage of a long, silent coup aimed at supplanting the sovereign United States with a multinational North American Union.

Even as this plot unfolds in slow motion, the mainstream media are silent; politicians are in denial. Yet word is getting out. Like samizdat, info about the highway has circulated in niche media platforms old and new, on right-wing websites like WorldNetDaily, in the pages of low-circulation magazines like the John Birch Society’s The New American and increasingly on the letters to the editor page of local newspapers.

[…]

Prompted by angry phone calls and e-mail from their constituents, local legislators are beginning to take action. In February the Montana state legislature voted 95 to 5 for a resolution opposing “the North American Free Trade Agreement Superhighway System” as well as “any effort to implement a trinational political, government entity among the United States, Canada, and Mexico.” Similar resolutions have been introduced in eighteen other states as well as the House of Representatives, where H. Con Res. 40 has attracted, as of this writing, twenty-seven co-sponsors. Republican presidential candidates in Iowa and New Hampshire now routinely face hostile questions about the highway at candidate forums. Citing a spokesperson for the Romney campaign, the Concord Monitor reports that “the road comes up at town meetings second only to immigration policy.”

Grassroots movement exposes elite conspiracy and forces politicians to respond: It would be a heartening story but for one small detail.

There’s no such thing as a proposed NAFTA Superhighway.

I guess this is the predictable re-emergence of the black helicopter crowd now that the Republicans have lost their power. (These conspiracy theorists always seem to go underground when the GOP is in power. My theory is that they switch seamlessly between anti-government conspiracy to cultlike authoritarian leadership worship depending on who’s in office.)

Apparently Lou Dobbs is talking about this too, with no mention that it’s complete nonsense of course. But then his relationship with the truth is pretty flexible when it comes to teh mexicanos. And I’m sure many of you will not be surprised to learn that one of the prime spreaders of this NAFTA Highway tale is the first class fabulist Jerome Corsi, of Swiftboat fame. You remember the documented liar and lunatic who all the newspeople treated with respect when he trashed John Kerry?

As it turns out, there is a foreign owned toll road being planned in Texas that has nothing to do with NAFTA and that’s causing quite a stir. People seem to have mashed the whole thing up in their lizard brains and come up with some one-world plot by Spain and the Council on Foreign Relations. Or something.

Hayes’ investigation shows that a lot of these people are insecure about the future and confused by the fast paced changes of the modern world. I get that. But they are also a bunch of racist jackasses and I lose my patience when they turn to idiotic wastes of time like this to deal with their fears. It doesn’t help anybody.

Glenn Greenwald made a similar point earlier today with this post about the totally kooky right wing faith that the US is seriously in danger of being taken over by Muslim extremists:

Every now and then, it is worth noting that substantial portions of the right-wing political movement in the United States — the Pajamas Media/right-wing-blogosphere/Fox News/Michelle Malkin/Rush-Limbaugh-listener strain — actually believe that Islamists are going to take over the U.S. and impose sharia law on all of us. And then we will have to be Muslims and “our women” will be forced into burkas and there will be no more music or gay bars or churches or blogs. This is an actual fear that they have — not a theoretical fear but one that is pressing, urgent, at the forefront of their worldview.

And their key political beliefs — from Iraq to Iran to executive power and surveillance theories at home — are animated by the belief that all of this is going to happen. The Republican presidential primary is, for much of the “base,” a search for who will be the toughest and strongest in protecting us from the Islamic invasion — a term that is not figurative or symbolic, but literal: the formidable effort by Islamic radicals to invade the U.S. and take over our institutions and dismantle our government and force us to submit to Islamic rule or else be killed.

It’s crazy talk and there’s just so much of it in wingnutland that it gets tiring. (And they call us the extremists …) As much as I feel sorry for people who are lost in the vortex of rapid change, they still seem to me to be looking for reasons to be stupid. (And they have more in common with the scary Muslims than they think.)

I’m with Justice Stephen Breyer who recently said:

…the true division of importance in the world is not between different countries. The important division is between those who are committed to reason, to working out things, to understanding other people, to peaceful resolution of their differences … and those who don’t think that.”

If that makes me an elitist, one-worlder, so be it.

I can see this election’s going to have a nutzoid quality to it that we haven’t seen in some time. Just what we need.

Update: Dave Neiwert has more on this.

.

Architectural Disaster

by digby

Nobody is ever more passionate than an apostate. Here’s Andrew Sullivan:

The man’s legacy is a conservative movement largely discredited and disunited, a president with lower consistent approval ratings than any in modern history, a generational shift to the Democrats, a resurgent al Qaeda, an endless catastrophe in Iraq, a long hard struggle in Afghanistan, a fiscal legacy that means bankrupting America within a decade, and the poisoning of American religion with politics and vice-versa. For this, he got two terms of power – which the GOP used mainly to enrich themselves, their clients and to expand government’s reach and and drain on the productive sector. In the re-election, the president with a relatively strong economy, and a war in progress, managed to eke out 51 percent. Why? Because Rove preferred to divide the country and get his 51 percent, than unite it and get America’s 60. In a time of grave danger and war, Rove picked party over country. Such a choice was and remains despicable.

Rove is one of the worst political strategists in recent times…

That’s refreshing because mostly what I’m hearing in the press today is the glorious story of “the architect” as if he’d built something other than a huge pile of rotting compost.

I have written a ton of stuff over the years about Karl Rove and I’ve always been of the opinion that he was extremely overrated, although I’m willing to admit that getting a braindead playboy like Junior elected four times to anything, much less governor and president, does take some skill. But as for his alleged tactical and strategic genius, not so much. His gift is for dirty tricks and thuggish strong arm tactics. Machiavelli and Sun Tzu he ain’t.

But that’s not to say he didn’t think he was a genius. From the serendipitous article by Josh Green in this months Atlantic (no link, sorry):

Another important misjudgment by Bush, prodded by  Rove, was giving Rove too much power within the  administration. This was partly a function of Rove’s desire to control policy as well as politics. His prize for winning the reelection campaign was a formal role and the title of deputy chief of staff for policy. But his power also grew because the senior policy staff in the White House was inept.

In an early scene in Ron Suskind’s book The Price of Loyalty, Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, not yet alive to the futility of his endeavor, warns Dick Cheney that the White House policy process is so ineffectual that it is tantamount to “kids rolling around on the lawn.” Had O’Neill lasted longer than he did (he resigned in 2002), he might have lowered his assessment. Before she left the White House in humiliation after conservatives blocked her nomination to the Supreme Court, White House Counsel Harriet Miers had also served as deputy chief of staff for policy. The president’s Domestic Policy Council was run by Claude Allen, until he, too, resigned, after he was caught shoplifting at Target.

The weakness of the White House policy staff demanded Rove’s constant involvement. For all his shortcomings, he had clear ideas about where the administration should go, and the ability to maneuver. “Where the bureaucracy was failing and broken, Karl got stuff done,” says a White House colleague. “Harriet was no more capable of producing policy out of the policy office she directed than you or I are capable of jumping off the roof of a building and flying to Minneapolis.”

As a result, Rove not only ran the reelection campaign, he plotted much of Bush’s second-term agenda, using the opportunity to push long-standing pet issues—health- savings accounts, Social Security privatization—that promised to weaken support for Democrats, by dismantling Medicare and Social Security. But this also meant committing the president to sweeping domestic changes that had no public favor and had not been a focus of the 2004 campaign, which had centered almost exclusively on the war.

Bush’s reelection and Rove’s assumption of a formal policy role had a bigger effect than most of Washington realized at the time. It is commonly assumed (as I assumed) that Rove exercised a major influence on White House policy before he had the title, all the time that he had it, and even after it was taken away from him in the staff shake-up last year that saw Josh Bolten succeed Andrew Card as chief of staff.

Insiders don’t disagree, but say that Rove’s becoming deputy chief of staff for policy was still an important development. For the purposes of comparison, a former Bush official cited the productiveness of the first two years of Bush’s presidency, the period that generated not just No Child Left Behind but three tax cuts and the Medicare prescription-drug benefit. At the time, Bolten was deputy chief of staff for policy, and relations with Congress had not yet soured. “Josh was not an equal of Karl’s with regard to access to the president or stature,” says the official. “But he was a strong enough intellect and a strong enough presence that he was able to create a deliberative process that led to a better outcome.” When Bolten left to run the Office of Management and Budget, in 2003, the balance shifted in Rove’s favor, and then shifted further after the reelection. “Formalizing [Rove’s policy role] was the final choke-off of any internal debate or deliberative process,” says the official. “There was no offset to Karl.”

Rove’s greatest shortcoming was not in conceptualizing policies but in failing to understand the process of getting them implemented, a weakness he never seems to have recognized in himself. It’s startling that someone who gave so much thought to redirecting the powers of government evinced so little interest in understanding how it operates. Perhaps because he had never worked in government—or maybe because his standing rested upon his relationship with a single superior—he was often ineffective at bringing into being anything that required more than a presidential signature.

Rove is much more a lightweight than people give him credit for. Green’s article is devastating. He is such a megalomaniac that he thought he could engineer a rare political realignment through sheer power. He treated congress like dirt:

Winning the 2002 elections earned Rove further distinction as an electoral strategist. But it didn’t change the basic dynamic between the White House and Congress, and Rove drew exactly the wrong lesson from the experience, bringing the steamroller approach from the campaign trail into his work in government. Emboldened by triumph, he grew more imperious, worsening his relations with the Hill. With both houses now in Republican hands, he pressed immigration reform and Social Security privatization. A congressional aide described a Republican leadership retreat after the midterms where Rove whipped out a chart and a sheaf of poll numbers and insisted to Republican leaders that they pursue a Social Security overhaul at once. Making wholesale changes to a beloved entitlement program in the run-up to a presidential election would have been a difficult sell under the best of circumstances. Lacking goodwill in Congress and having laid no groundwork for such an undertaking, Rove didn’t get a serious hearing on the issue—or on immigration, either.

A revealing pattern of behavior emerged from my interviews. Rove plainly viewed his standing as equal to or exceeding that of the party’s leaders in Congress and demanded what he deemed his due. Yet he was also apparently annoyed at what came with his White House eminence, complaining to colleagues when members of Congress called him to consult about routine matters he thought were beneath his standing—something that couldn’t have endeared him to the legislature.

You have to give the GOP caucus credit. They sure didn’t let on that Rove thought they were a bunch of useless lackeys. At the time, he was being worshiped as an electoral sorcerer. For a little context, check out this article from just before the 2004 election:

The bespectacled, wispyhaired political guru – known in some circles as “Bush’s brain” – had to be physically protected Tuesday night from a flock of lady admirers during a cocktail party at Gotham Hall.

“As soon as he got off the stage, he was mobbed by a group of women,” party volunteer Warren Seubel told Lowdown.

“Women were fawning over him. They were swooning,” said Seubel. “I’ve never seen someone so gnarly get so much attention from so many women.”

Things got a tad ugly when Rove’s handlers tried to separate the man from his fans.

“It was unbelieeeeevable. I had to start throwing elbows at senators and congressmen,” said Seubel. “But the real problem was the congressional wives.”

Maybe it was the 53-year-old Rove’s toast that had the gals excited. Addressing the crowd – which included human Uzi Ann Coulter, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, G. Gordon Liddy and Interior Secretary Gale Norton – Rove yelled, “We’re right, and they’re wrong! On the economy, we’re right, and they’re wrong! On the war on terror, we’re right, and they’re wrong! On marriage, we’re right, and they’re wrong!”

Yesterday, a Rove associate tried to knock down the sex-symbol scenario. “He’s like a rock star, and people want to shake his hand, take pictures with him, say hello, etc.” the associate E-mailed. “I’ve been here all week and it is crazy, but I don’t seriously think it is because he’s a babe magnet. He’s just the man!”

This country went insane for a while, didn’t it?

One thing Green says in his article that I think is very important to keep in mind as we begin to wind down this looney era — as bad as Rove was, he wasn’t really the boss:

Rove has no antecedent in modern American politics, because no president before Bush thought it wise to give a political adviser so much influence. Rove wouldn’t be Rove, in other words, were Bush not Bush. That Vice President Cheney also hit a historic high-water mark for influence says a lot about how the actual president sees fit to govern. All rhetoric about “leadership” aside, Bush will be viewed as a weak executive who ceded far too much authority. Rove’s failures are ultimately his.

And it isn’t over yet. With or without Turdblossom, his creature George W. Bush is still the president — for more than 500 days.

.

Turdblossem Special

by digby

There’s a ton of good coverage about Rove’s resignation today all over the blogosphere, too many to link. But be sure to check around and read them all. Jane Hamsher wondered this morning what the press isn’t telling us and it’s a natural question. Considering the fact that Rove is currently under a cloud in a number of different scandals as Marcy Wheeler points out here, it’s really not all that surprising that he would rather suddenly need to “spend more time with his family.” (I can’t believe they actually used that cliche when he has one kid who is in college.)

There are many possibilities but I would love for him to be taken down for his vote-rigging schemes in the Department of Justice and what I suspect is his involvement in political spying. After all, it’s been his MO since he started in politics. As I wrote earlier this year:

My suspicion has always been that there was some part of this program — or an entirely different program — that included spying on political opponents. Even spying on peace marchers and Greenpeace types wouldn’t seem to me to be of such a substantial departure from the agreed upon post 9/11 framework that it would cause such a reaction from the top brass, nor would it be so important to the president that he would send Gonzales and Card into the ICU to get Ashcroft to sign off on it while he was high on drugs.

As I pointed out last year:

From Bush’s Brain:

At a seminar in Lexington, Kentucky, in August 1972, Rove and Robinson recounted the Dixon episode with considerable delight. They talked about campaign espionage, about digging through an opponent’s garbage for intelligence — then using it against them. Robinson recounted how the technique had worked well for him in the 1968 governor’s race in Illinois when he “struck gold” in a search of an opponent’s garbage. He found evidence that a supporter had given checks to both sides in the race, but more to the Democrat, Sam Shapiro.

“So one of our finance guys calls the guy up the next day and told him there was a vicious rumor going around,” Robinson said, according to a tape recording of a seminar. “The guy got all embarrassed and flew to Chicago that day with a check for $2,000 to make up the difference,” he said.

This was the summer of the Watergate break-in, with the first revelations of a scandal that unraveled the Nixon presidency.The Watergate burglars broke in to the Democratic National Committee offices on June 17 and the whole business of political dirty tricks was rapidly becoming a very sensitive subject. Both Rove and Robinson recognized that. They even specifically mentioned the Watergate break-in at the seminars, not as a reason to avoid campaign espionage, but as a reason to keep it secret.

“While this is all well and good as fun and games, you’ve really got to use your head about who knows about this kind of thing.” Robinson warned.

“Again in those things, if it’s used sureptitiously in a campaign, it’s better off if you don’t get caught. You know, those people who were caught by Larry O’Brien’s troops in Washinngton are a serious verification of the fact that you don’t get caught.”

Remember: Watergate was about bugging the Democratic National Committee. The “3rd rate burglary” was to replace an illegal bug that had been planted on the telephones of prominent Democrats.

The lesson of Watergate for the chagrined Republicans was that they needed to be more forceful in assuming executive power and they needed to be more sophisticated about their campaign espionage.

That’s what they’ve done.

It’s pretty to think that the proof of that might be forthcoming, but I hesitate to get my hopes up. Cheney would have Rove committed to Gitmo before he’d let that come out.

The Abramoff scandal is also promising, but we’ve been waiting for that shoe to fall for a long time. Perhaps it’s finally worked itself through the system.

If I had to guess at what might be the thing that is causing him to leave right now, I’d have to guess that it’s the most prosaic crime of all: violation of the Hatch Act.

Here’s a little reminder of what Karl has been up to on that count, from the LA Times:

GOP at a loss?
Karl Rove has an 11th-hour plan to win. He taps government resources to boost candidates in need.

By Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten Times Staff Writers October 29, 2006

…This week, Rove and his staff will turn to their endgame. They will oversee a mobilization of political employees from Cabinet agencies, Capitol Hill and lobbying firms many of them skilled campaign veteran to more than a dozen battleground states. Many will act as “marshals,” supervising the “72-hour plan” developed by Rove in 2001 with Ken Mehlman, the former White House political director who now heads the
Republican National Committee…the success of the get-out-the-vote effort depends on putting a reliable army of volunteers into the field, and some worry about the sour mood among Republicans this year. Rove and Mehlman have tried to ensure quality control by recruiting experienced operatives to supervise key state operations.

In the summer, they invited hundreds of political appointees from Cabinet agencies, along with other GOP activists and Hill staffers, to attend a pep rally in Washington. The event featured appeals to politically experienced federal appointees to volunteer for campaign work in battleground races in the final two weeks of the campaign. In a twist that resembled an Amway sales meeting more than a political strategy session, they offered those who signed up on the spot a chance to win an iPod and other prizes. As the political landscape shifted in September and October, Rove’s office suggested new destinations for some of these volunteers, pointing them toward races that had become more critical.

But to senior-level political appointees, such conversations with the White House would not be anything new: Nearly all have had regular contact with Rove and his political deputies to a degree previous generations of appointees did not. For example, Interior Department employees describe regular visits from Rove’s staff during Bush’s first term. On one occasion, Rove visited a retreat for
the 50 top Interior Department managers. The lights dimmed in an agency conference room as Rove went through a PowerPoint presentation showing battleground races in the 2002 midterm election, and occasionally made oblique but clearly understood references to Interior Department decisions that could affect these races. By stopping short of explicitly calling on the Interior Department officials to take action, Rove stayed within the rules against exerting improper political influence. This year, Rove’s deputy, Sara Taylor, has delivered similar presentations to nearly every Cabinet agency providing managers with a look at polls showing presidential approval ratings and the latest data on House and Senate races. In addition to Taylor’s visits to Cabinet agencies, Mary Matalin, the Republican consultant and former advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney, spoke to agencies this fall describing the stakes in November. “These visits are a reminder of what’s important,” said one
agency manager who attended one of the sessions. “They didn’t need to say anything explicitly. We already knew what to do.”

Sometimes the simplest crimes are the ones that get you. If he’s being forced out — and short notice suggests that it’s at least a good possibility — this would be my guess as to the reason. It’s so blatant that the press reported it at the time as if it were perfectly normal. It isn’t.

I would further suspect that if it is the reason, it performs the function of a Bernie Kerik “nanny taxes” excuse, where they sort of cop to the stupid crime nobody cares about to stave off inquiry into the bigger ones. Not that the entire GOP establishment won’t rise up and defend him no matter what he’s accused of, but this would be the easiest for them to defend with their Libby patented extended whine, “they’re criminalizing politics!!!” .

After all, as we learned last week from GOP spinner Karen Hanratty on Hardball, “everybody knows” the town is run on patronage. Only young and naive people think it should be otherwise. I’ll look forward to the 763rd episode of the Mr and Mrs Toensing-Digenova show where the Ricky and Lucy of the GOP bar-b-q set explain to all of us that patronage is the American way.

.

Piggish Prerogatives

by digby

There is lots of interesting stuff in the ether today, not the least of which is the fact that Rove is coming off the taxpayers payroll at long last, but I want to start you off with this little Media Matters gem from last Friday that absolutely floored me when I saw it. In fact, I backed up the TiVo and watched it twice because I couldn’t actually believe what I was seeing:

BURNETT: Well, they were part of the biggest increase in home ownership in this country that we’ve ever seen. I mean, home ownership’s ticked up a few percentage points over the past few years, thanks to low interest rates —

MATTHEWS: Yeah.

BURNETT: — and all those creative types of mortgages. And you could say that’s a good thing, but, you know, Chris, I guess just to throw it out there and, you know, be provocative, but also ask a fair question — you know, maybe not everybody is able to own a home. We like to think of owning a home as a right in this country.

MATTHEWS: Yeah.

BURNETT: It might not be.

MATTHEWS: Could you get a little closer to the camera?

BURNETT: My — what is it? Is it zooming in strangely?

MATTHEWS: Come on in closer. No, come in — come in further — come in closer. Really close.

BURNETT: What are you — what are you doing?

MATTHEWS: Just kidding! You look great! Anyway, thanks. Erin, it’s great to — look at that look. You’re great.

BURNETT: I don’t even know. I’m going to have to go look at the tape here. I’m in a strange location.

MATTHEWS: No, you’re beautiful. I’m just kidding. I’m just kidding. You’re a knockout. Anyway, thank you, Erin Burnett.

BURNETT: All right, Chris. See you later.

Anyone who doesn’t understand the insidious nature of sexual harrassment should take a look at the video of that exchange. Here you had a professional woman discussing a very serious and urgent subject on a news program. And Chris Matthews, (in an apparent attempt to disprove the fact that he has a sexual fetish for mature, beefy men) treated her like someone he was trying to pick up in a bar (very clumsily, as you would expect.) She was confused, embarrassed and knocked completely off balance by his inappropriate remarks, made all the worse because she was on the air. (It would have been just as wrong, however, if she’d been in a meeting or in a regular workplace conversation.) The woman was trying to do her job and this moron got all cute acting as if he couldn’t hear a word she said. How “nice” of Matthews to make her feel and look like a fool in front of hundreds of thousands of people. I’m sure she really enjoyed that “compliment.”

She is a beautiful woman, and I don’t doubt that her looks have helped her in her television career. Good looks helped Stone Phillips and Anderson Cooper too. But it isn’t a crime to be attractive and it doesn’t mean that a person deserves to be treated like a bimbo. (When you see the video, it’s quite obvious that this woman hadn’t flirted or even thought of Tweety in those terms. She was sitting behind a desk analyzing the housing market, fergawdsake. She didn’t know what he was talking about.)

Anyway, if any of you wonder why the more subtle forms of sexual harassment drive women nuts, this is it. Is it the end of the world? No. But it’s completely inappropriate and it perpetuates this very creepy male prerogative in the workplace that isn’t either fair … or legal. Matthews is a pig. He should apologize to Burnett on the air for that nasty little display and then he should hire a lawyer. I doubt this is the only time he’s acted like this. The man has obviously got a problem with women.

Update: If you’re not reading Somerby on this topic, you’re missing out. Here’s one that reader linked in the comment section that I’d completely forgotten about.

.

Not That Anyone Will Notice

by digby

Matt Yglesias wonders why this isn’t getting more attention, seeing as the world was widely believed to be spinning off its axis when Democrats did this last year in Connecticut:

In the coming election, moderate and maverick Republicans face mirror-image risks. Because the maverick conservatives tend to represent more solidly Republican areas (like Graham in South Carolina or Hagel in Nebraska), they face relatively less danger of losing to Democrats in a general election next fall. But precisely because they represent conservative regions where demands for ideological purity are more intense, the mavericks are confronting an elevated risk of challenges in party primaries.

Hagel, the most outspoken Republican critic of the war, has already drawn a serious primary opponent (Nebraska Atty. Gen. Jon Bruning) for next year, and Graham and Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens could face challenges in the primaries too — which would make 2008 the first time since 1978 that more than one Republican senator has faced such a challenge. More than half a dozen House Republicans, all of them in Republican-leaning districts, also have attracted primary challengers.

What, no rending of garments among the cognoscenti about how the horrible party purists are destroying the Republican chances of ever appealing to the mainstream? No talk of Stalinist purges and purity oaths? I’m shocked.

Meanwhile, the public seems to have caught on to the uselessness of “moderate” Republicans:

Some moderate Republicans, including Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter and former Rhode Island Sen. Lincoln Chafee, also have confronted arduous primaries from conservative challengers in recent years, and Maryland’s Wayne Gilchrest, a leading House centrist, is facing one now. But for most of the remaining GOP moderates, primaries are no longer the principal danger. Instead, because they mostly now represent swing or even Democratic-leaning constituencies, the moderates face a growing danger in their general election campaigns. In 2006, the Republican Party suffered heavy general election losses in the affluent, white-collar suburbs where moderates tend to be located and where they once thrived (especially along the coasts and in the upper Midwest). And “the environment for them in 2008 could be as bad or worse,” said independent election analyst Stuart Rothenberg.

[…]

The upcoming election may further deplete the ranks of both the mavericks and moderates. Bush’s focus on mobilizing the conservative base, while generally helping Republicans in conservative areas, has alienated independent and moderate voters in the suburban districts many moderates GOP officeholders represent.

Golly, that’s odd. It seems like just yesterday I was being lectured to ad nauseum that the base of the Republican Party was Real America and the latte-sipping losers who didn’t see that could just STFU and submit. Now it turns out that it’s the lunatic fringe of the right that has the Republican party spiraling down to a regional minority. How’d that happen?

Last year at this time, the press was apoplectic that the Democrats in Connecticut would even dream of taking on an incumbent Senator even though there had long been similar efforts from the right wing of the Republican party. But, of course, the assumption was that the right wing of the Republican party represented the mainstream, unlike the dirty hippies of Connecticut, and therefore were realigning the nation along its natural wingnut axis. It will be interesting to see if they internalize this or just keep robotically mouthing their comfortable mantra that the real problem in this race is that the Democrats are too far to the left, as Cokie and Gergen did a couple of weeks ago. Maybe if Ron Brownstein writes this piece about thirty more times, they might wake out of their 40 year coma and see that it isn’t 1968 any more — but I doubt it.

But hey, keep hope alive. Maybe someday the press will even catch up to the fact that the radicals of today are these people:

Or these people:

Or these.

.

Why Paris Hilton Is Personally Making You Miserable

by digby

I’m over at FDL this afternoon hosting a discussion with Dr Robert Frank about his new book “Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class”

We hear a lot about income inequality these days and if you’re like me, you probably wonder, other than the fundamental unfairness of it all, why this matters. After all, life isn’t fair, get back to work and stop lallygagging.

As it turns out it matters a great deal, and that sense of dissatisfaction and anxiety so many of us feel is a direct result of the conspicuous consumption of the fabulously wealthy overclass trickling down through society and making it necessary for people to constantly buy more, even as they are earning the same. According to Frank, it’s not just keeping up with the Joneses or class envy or any of the other things that people usually attribute to those who live beyond their means. It’s a natural, human response to the context in which they live. Frank makes a compelling case that measuring yourself against your neighbors, co-workers or whatever, isn’t just a matter of “keeping score.” It’s the way we make sense of the world. And that measure is affected every day by what the super-rich are buying.

In a delightfully droll passage, Frank describes going shopping to replace the battered $89.00 bar-b-q he’d used quite happily for years, until all his repairs finally failed and it fell apart. He sees this amazing Viking grill extravaganza with burners for stir frying and rotisseries that practically cook the food itself and deliver it to your table. It costs $5,000. But, boy is it awesome. He reluctantly turns away and contemplates a different model with some of the same features, but now that he’s seen the top of the line, it just isn’t as impressive. But being a responsible consumer he realizes that he can’t be that extravagant and he considers buying this more basic model — for $1,160. It’s so improved from the banged up old $89.00 model on which he’d happily grilled for years they might as well not even be called a bar-b-q, but in spite of that, he feels a vague sense of disappointment at what it doesn’t have compared to the fancy Lamborghini level grill. Buying it would feel positively frugal, even though it’s ridiculously expensive on its own terms. I’m sure you’ve all been there. You have no idea what’s out there, but once you see something with all the bells and whistles you subconsciously compare everything else you see to it. And something that you would have found to be an amazing improvement over what you once had, suddenly becomes a compromise.

For the record, Frank settles on a $250.00 Weber and felt extremely frugal buying it — though it cost three times what his other grill had cost. But you can also tell by the loving detail with which he describes those more expensive models, that they made a lasting impression. He went back a year later to look at them again and the top of the line model was now $13,000.00 — and that $1100.00 model now looks like a worthless piece of junk by comparison.

This is the mechanism by which the extremely wealthy change the context of our everyday lives in ways we aren’t even aware. And in a society that ties such fundamental community functions such as schools and public safety to property values and perceptions of power, it is almost a matter of necessity that the middle class keep reaching for the bigger house and the bigger car in order to maintain a stake in their community. It is perfectly understandable that people want to have their kids educated in good schools and live in safe neighborhoods.

Neither is it counter-intuitive that if you need to be taken seriously by people who have money, you have to appear that you have money too. I remember being confused when I first started working in a business where there were always a lot of recent college grads in entry level grunt positions driving very fancy cars and dressing in designer clothes. It took me a while to realize that they were all children of wealth. As a result of their ability to give the properly successful appearance, those of us who didn’t have money spent far more on such things than we had any right to, merely to even be in the running. I suspect this gets worse every year as the rich continue to shed the last vestiges of social restraint on flaunting their wealth.

The problem is that middle class American incomes are not even close keeping up with what they need to spend in this kind of cycle and haven’t been for more than two decades, while income gains for these super-rich have been stratospheric. That’s what’s making everyone feel the squeeze: the middle class are working themselves into an early grave and taking on more debt than they can manage not because they are foolishly trying to keep up with Paris Hilton but because they have to in order to hang onto the place in society they already have.

Frank discusses at length the costs of this striving and I think we all can imagine what they are in terms of health and happiness. This is a sick little merry-go-round we’re on. Fortunately, he has a novel solution that I would hope the powers that be would consider: a progressive consumption tax that would give an incentive for the rich to think twice about this reckless extravagance that’s dragging everyone else down as they try to keep up. It would encourage saving among the rest of us, which virtually all economists agree is sorely needed, and if nothing else would force the super-wealthy to at least kick in something for the public good while they’re running themselves ragged with their endless shopping for expensive gew gaws.

This is a very accessible little book, written in easy to understand language that gets to the heart of the problem for average people who are just trying to make a living and raise their kids and find some way to leave this world a little better than they found it. It gives us some real insight into how we actually find our place in the world around us and — pursue happiness. That important knowledge leads to how we might change policies to actively encourage that fundamental American value.

Please join me in a discussion with Dr Robert Frank at the FDL book salon.

.

“The truth is that men are tired of liberty.”

by digby

Benito Giuliani

“We look upon authority too often and focus over and over again, for 30 or 40 or 50 years, as if there is something wrong with authority. We see only the oppressive side of authority. Maybe it comes out of our history and our background. What we don’t see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.”

Via Devilstower

.

Saturday Night At The Movies

Divine Trash, Hidden Jewels-Part 3: Summer of Darkness

By Dennis Hartley

This week I am continuing a series that I am posting on occasion, spotlighting some films you may have missed, and that your humble reviewer thinks are worth the search and a peek on a slow night (or as an antidote to those dismal summer releases).

The summer of 2007 has been belly belly good for aficionados of film noir (guilty, your honor!). Recent DVD reissues include Criterion’s long awaited restoration of Billy Wilder’s cynical masterpiece “Ace in the Hole”, a trio of great noirs from MGM featuring Fritz Lang’s “The Woman in the Window ”, Orson Welles’ “The Stranger” and “Kansas City Confidential ” (with all three sporting transfers far superior to the public domain prints on previous DVDs) and an outstanding 10 movie box set from Warner Brothers, the “Film Noir Classic Collection, Vol. 4 ”.

The real jewels amongst the treasures in the Warner Brothers box set are a pair of cult films that hardcore noir geeks have been itching to get their mitts on for years-“Crime Wave” and “Decoy” (conveniently together on one disc-it’s enough to almost make me believe that there is a God).

“Crime Wave” was originally released in 1954 and was directed by Andre de Toth, who is perhaps more well-remembered for helming stark westerns like “Ramrod” (1947) and “Day of the Outlaw” (1959). After languishing in B-movie obscurity for decades, this strikingly photographed low-budget wonder has been frequently name-checked by noir historians and essayists, slowly building a cult following over the years.

The story itself is fairly standard issue; an ex-con trying to go straight (Gene Nelson) is framed and blackmailed by two former cell mates (portrayed by ubiquitous noir heavy Ted de Corsia and an impossibly young Charles Bronson). Nelson’s character gets a shot at clearing himself by helping a homicide detective (memorably played by a looming, toothpick-chewing Sterling Hayden) bring his blackmailers to justice.

The two main factors setting “Crime Wave” apart from other B-movies of the era are the meticulously composed cinematography (by DP Burt Glennon) and the ingenious use of L.A. locations. Although the decision to shoot almost exclusively on location was likely based more on pragmatism (budgetary constraints) than artistic vision, the end result was a naturalistic, almost documentary-like realism that makes the film feel much less dated than most of its contemporaries. I should mention that this DVD transfer is nearly flawless, taken from what looks like a pristine vault print.

I also send out major kudos to whomever it was who came up with the truly inspired idea to pair up film noir expert extraordinaire Eddie Muller with the master of modern pulp crime fiction, James Ellroy for the commentary track. Muller’s encyclopedic torrent of fascinating trivia and savant-like grasp of All Things Noir is always worth the ride (I heartily recommend you pick up his book “Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir” and/or any DVD reissue that sports a Muller commentary) and having Ellroy in the passenger seat is extra icing on the cake. Ellroy is a riot; panting and growling his way through the commentary and acting like a perverse version of the proverbial kid in the candy store as he spots and identifies familiar L.A. locales. Most interestingly, he posits “Crime Wave” as a spot-on visual time capsule of the 1950s LAPD milieu that informed the backdrop for the series of crime novels usually referred to as his “L.A. quartet” (“The Black Dahlia“, “The Big Nowhere”, “L.A. Confidential” and “White Jazz”). Fans of “L.A. Confidential” in particular will likely fall out of their chair like I did when Ellroy exclaims “THAT is Bud White!!” the first time Sterling Hayden’s world-weary, physically intimidating LAPD detective shambles onscreen.

And then (hoo, boy!) there’s “Decoy” (1946), which gets my vote for the closest thing to a David Lynch film prior to, well the moment David Lynch unleashed his first full-length feature film on an unsuspecting public. Featuring a truly demented performance from British actress Jean Gillie as one of the most psychopathic femme fatales ever (replete with an insane cackle that could decalcify your spinal column at twenty paces), this mash-up of “Body Heat ” with “Re-Animator” nearly defies description (although I think I just described it…).

Gillie masticates all the available scenery as Margot Shelby, the mastermind of a small gang of thieves, who comes up with an elaborate scheme to literally bring a former associate back from the dead immediately following his execution in the gas chamber (don’t ask) so she can put the squeeze on him and find out where he hid $400,000 (can’t call that a cliché storyline, can we?).

In order to get to that loot, Margot charms, uses and then unceremoniously discards a string of hapless male chumps in record time (the film runs less than 80 minutes). In the film’s most infamous scene, she runs over her lover, then just for giggles, backs up the car and runs over him again (remember, this movie predates “Faster, Pussycat! Kill!… Kill!” by a good 20 years). A must see for genre diehards who think they’ve seen it all.

By the way, Warner is selling the five double feature discs in the box set “a la carte” as well; but they list at a hefty $20 each. I would recommend picking up the box set-Amazon and some of the brick and mortar retailers are selling the collection for around $40 (averaging out to $4.00 per title) making this DVD reissue the bargain of the year for noir enthusiasts!

.

Mark Your Schedules

by digby

Tomorrow afternoon I will have the great pleasure of hosting Robert Frank, the author of the new book “Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms The Middle Class” at the Firedoglake Book Salon — at 5pm on the east coast and 2pm here in the west.

Professor Frank will be on hand to tell all of us what’s going to happen in the stock market next week.

Just kidding! He told me the TSA confiscated his crystal ball in the Albany airport several months ago. But he will be available to discuss why we should care about income inequality and why so many of us are feeling like we are falling behind. The answers will surprise you.

*If you’d like to see Dr Frank in action, check out this You Tube. I’ll tell you, until I started blogging I didn’t know economists were such a funny bunch.

.