Month: October 2007

Buh Bye

by digby

Karen Hughes is leaving quite the legacy, isn’t she? (But damn, does she have a great resume, or what?)

Here’s my best blog post on Karen, from when she took her first tour of the world . Say what you will about her, she accurately reflected the president around the globe. God help us:

Idiot Abroad

Ezra Klein once asked something to the effect of “why would Bush send a seven foot tall white woman to aid our public face in the Islamic world?” It’s a good question, but more importantly, why would you send a seven foot tall white woman who speaks like a 6th grader to aid our public face in the middle east and convince the entire world that all Americans are as dim-witted as the president and that Osama bin Laden is right?

Sid Bumenthal puts it like this:

This week, Hughes embarked on her first trip as undersecretary. Her initial statement resembled an elementary school presentation: “You might want to know why the countries. Egypt is of course the most populous Arab country … Saudi Arabia is our second stop. It’s obviously an important place in Islam and the keeper of its two holiest sites … Turkey is also a country that encompasses people of many different backgrounds and beliefs, yet has the — is proud of the saying that ‘all are Turks.'”

Hughes appeared to be one of the pilgrims satirized by Mark Twain in his 1869 book, “Innocents Abroad,” about his trip on “The Grand Holy Land Pleasure Excursion.” “None of us had ever been anywhere before; we all hailed from the interior; travel was a wild novelty to us … We always took care to make it understood that we were Americans — Americans!”

If you would like to read some commentary that makes George W. Bush sound downright erudite, check out Hughes’ entire statement:

UNDER SECRETARY HUGHES: We’re going to be visiting, as you know, three unique and very important countries, three countries we have a very strong partnership with one of them. We also face very significant public diplomacy challenges in one of them. One of my missions is to go to listen. I hope to listen, to seek to understand, to show respect. Listening is a two way street, and so I hope that those people I meet will also return that open spirit and be willing to listen. I’m going to take a lot of questions, I’m going to participate in a lot of give and take and I hope they’ll be willing to listen to my discussion (inaudible).

[…]

I just wanted to talk a little bit to answer your questions about, kind of, my approach. As I said I view this trip as the beginning of a new dialogue that is very much people driven — public diplomacy is people-driven and it’s policy driven, because our policies affect people’s lives. I don’t see this as a matter of opinion polls or public relations, I see this as a matter of policy. That’s really what drew me to public service in the first place. When I first decided to leave reporting and go to the political process it was because I realized that the decisions made in the political process made a very real difference peoples lives. So when I talk about people I’m talking about policies, I’m talking about our policies and the impact they have on people. I think that’s what we’ve got to focus on here. I also — I go as an official of the United States government, but I’m also a mom, a working mom, and so I hope that I could help, in some places, put a human face on America’s public policy.

[…]

… just one of the points that we’re going to make as we meet with people is, is talk about our American story and how it’s a collective story that’s written by individuals. We all have unique stories to tell. My own background as a granddaughter of a Pennsylvania coal miner and a Kentucky railroad worker. Dina, of course came here from Egypt, and we’re very proud that our first stop in Egypt we’re going to be taking someone who I think Egypt is very proud of Dina, the fact that she emigrated from Egypt as a young child, and has risen to the highest levels of our American government, and that’s a wonderful American story.

Karima has her own American story. She is the daughter of a Palestinian father and a German mother and I’m sure that Bill has some part of an American story, although I haven’t heard it yet (laughter) I’m sure he will be glad to share it with you. He currently lives in Wisconsin and I don’t know what his family roots are.

When she isn’t talking about being a mom, which she seems to think is a unique and important qualification for being the voice of American public diplomacy, she’s actually advancing jihad. From the Blumenthal piece:

Hughes’ simple, sincere and unadorned language is pellucid in revealing the administration’s inner mind. Her ideas on terrorism and its solution are straightforward. “Terrorists,” she said in Egypt at the start of her trip, “their policies force young people, other people’s daughters and sons, to strap on bombs and blow themselves up.” Somehow, magically, these evildoers coerce the young to commit suicide. If only they would understand us, the tensions would dissolve. “Many people around the world do not understand the important role that faith plays in Americans’ lives,” she said. When an Egyptian opposition leader inquired why President Bush mentions God in his speeches, she asked him “whether he was aware that previous American presidents have also cited God, and that our Constitution cites ‘one nation under God.’ He said, ‘Well, never mind.'”

With these well-meaning arguments, Hughes has provided the exact proof for what Osama bin Laden has claimed about American motives. “It is stunning … the extent [to which] Hughes is helping bin Laden,” Robert Pape told me. Pape, a University of Chicago political scientist who has conducted the most extensive research into the backgrounds and motives of suicide terrorists, is the author of “Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism,” and recently briefed the Pentagon and the National Counterterrorism Center. “If you set out to help bin Laden,” he said, “you could not have done it better than Hughes.”

Pape’s research debunks the view that suicide terrorism is the natural byproduct of Islamic fundamentalism or some “Islamo-fascist” ideological strain independent of certain highly specific circumstances. “Of the key conditions that lead to suicide terrorism in particular, there must be, first, the presence of foreign combat forces on the territory that the terrorists prize. The second condition is a religious difference between the combat forces and the local community. The religious difference matters in that it enables terrorist leaders to paint foreign forces as being driven by religious goals. If you read Osama’s speeches, they begin with descriptions of the U.S. occupation of the Arabian Peninsula, driven by our religious goals, and that it is our religious purpose that must confronted. That argument is incredibly powerful not only to religious Muslims but secular Muslims. Everything Hughes says makes their case.”

We know what happened when Bush put poor little Brownie in charge of federal disaster response and it wasn’t pretty. We’re going to be lucky if “Hurricane Karen” doesn’t set off WWIII.

She’s off to a good start.

The good news is that she’s listened and she’s learned and she’s bringing back to the White House some incredible insights:

Ms. Hughes promised to take what she learned from hearing dissenting views back to Washington. She was struck, she said, when a Turkish official told her to try to imagine the situation of Iraq, a next-door neighbor, sliding into possible civil war and engulfing Turkey from the perspective of “the common Turk.”

“I will be sure to bring that message back to President Bush when I get back to Washington,” she said.

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Gilded Age Politics

by digby

It isn’t just that the very,very rich are gobbling up more and more oftheir share of the nation’s wealth just as the did during the Gilded Age. The political cross currents are depressingly familiar as well.

This unfortunately explains why Rahm Emmanuel is telling the candidates that they should hammer on the Mexicans — Stan Greenberg has run some new focus groups and discovered … the new Reagan Democrats! (This time they hate Mexicans instead of blacks, but hey, it’s all good for our purposes.)

I’m not entirely surprised. When the rich get richer, uninformed people blame those who are below them on the economic scale. It’s a strong feature of right wing populism. (See: Dobbs, Lou.)

The difference this time is the growing and influential population of Hispanic citizens who are not going to allow this reflexive ignorance to become the easy demagogic tool it once was. The Democratic strategists had better find something better than this unless they want to spend another two decades fighting over the same diminishing electoral terain they’ve been battling over for the past two decades.

*Jack Balkin has written a fascinating discussion of populism and progressivism, and the pitfalls of each, in this paper. It’s a good time to study up if you haven’t cracked your Hofstadter lately.

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Huckabee Is Lying

by tristero

[UPDATED]

Huckabee is lying. He was deeply involved in the release of Wayne Dumond, the serial rapist who, upon his release, raped and murdered at least one woman. And the mainstream press – by refusing to do even the most basic investigation into the Huckabee case – is colluding with Huckabee in his lies. By the press, we’re not talking a loony tune like Malkin but the oh-so-respected Gail Collins of the oh-so-mainstream New York Times bending over backwards to absolve Huckabee. Those fluffing Huckabee aren’t the likes of James Guckert pretending to be a reporter instead of a hooker, but the Associated Press failing to report facts, just taking Huckabee at his word.

Here’s the truth

about the extraordinary steps Gov. Mike Huckabee took to help win Dumond’s freedom. He has since blamed others for Dumond’s release to kill again, but his actions over many years demonstrated his support for Dumond and, ultimately, the instrumental role he played in the parole board’s decision to free him.

The truth is that Wayne Dumond was a rightwing cause celebre. They thought Dumond, who was in jail for the rape of a distant cousin of Bill Clinton, was a victim of Clinton’s vengeance and may have been innocent. In fact, Dumond had a long history of violence, including involvement with murder, as well as sex crimes before his incarceration for the rape of Clinton’s distant relative. And Dumond was positively identified by his victim.

Regarding his influence with the parole board, a former member said:

“For Governor Huckabee to say that he had no influence with the board is something that he knows to be untrue. He came before the board and made his views known that [Dumond] should have been paroled … “

Huckabee, as you will discover if you read the article, never bothered to find out the truth about Wayne Dumond. He simply did the bidding of the most extreme rightwing operatives, going so far as to write a “Dear Wayne” letter to the rapist and murderer:

On the day of the vote, Huckabee released a statement in support of the board’s action: “I concur with the board’s action and hope the lives of all those involved can move forward. The action of the board accomplishes what I sought to do in considering an earlier request for commutation …

“In light of the action of the board, my original intent to commute the sentence to time served is no longer relevant.”

Huckabee’s office then released a letter to Dumond denying his application for a pardon.

“Dear Wayne,” Huckabee wrote, “I have reviewed your applications for executive clemency, specifically a commutation and/or pardon. … My desire is that you be released from prison. I feel now that parole is the best way for your reintegration into society. … Therefore, after careful consideration … I have denied your applications.”

Huckabee was able to achieve what he wanted to do in the first place: Release Dumond from prison with no apparent political cost to the governor.

What about Huckabee’s claim that the release of Huckabee was really Tucker and, more importantly, Clinton’s fault?

It’s another lie. Here is an article from the Village Voice written right after Huckabee freed Dumond, in that brief period befor it is known he began raping again, and started killing. The article’s subhead is “A Pardon That Clinton Didn’t Grant”:

As Clinton was abandoning Arkansas for national politics, he stymied DuMond’s release from prison, ignoring the judgment of his own parole board in June 1990 that DuMond’s continued incarceration was a “miscarriage of justice…”

Regarding Jim Guy Tucker:

In late 1991, on the campaign trail, Clinton began to be pestered about the DuMond case. Recusing himself, in April Clinton turned over the matter to his lieutenant governor, Jim Guy Tucker. Unlike Clinton, Tucker read every word of DuMond’s voluminous file, a DuMond lawyer told the Voice. Tucker promptly reduced DuMond’s sentence, making him eligible for parole. Seven years later Republican governor Mike Huckabee signed DuMond’s release papers.

Huckabee screwed up royally. Unlike Clinton, and unlike Tucker, he enthusiastically maneuvered for the release of a serial rapist and murderer. Let me say it plain:

The evidence in no way supports Huckabee assertions that he wasn’t involved in the release of Dumond but the exact opposite. Huckabee worked hard to release a convicted rapist from prison for one reason only: because extreme rightwing operatives believed that Bill Clinton had unfairly persecuted an innocent man – possibly even ordering the rapist’s castration – in order to advance his career. Nothing could be further from the truth. Even the supposed attack that led to his castration is doubtful, as Gene Lyons discussed. And once Huckabee released him, Dumond raped and killed at least one woman, and was implicated in a second.

And that is the truth.

[UPDATE: Let’s drive the point home. Here is the odious Steve Dunleavy in June, 1996:

“The new Governor, Mike Huckabee, has assured me Wayne will be a free man,” Mrs. Dumond said Thursday. “He is not one of the Clinton crowd. He is a very fair man. He has always been disturbed about the way the Clinton people never wanted my husband free,” she added. And there was a very good reason for the Clinton people not wanting her husband to go free.

THE CHARGES

The story of Wayne Dumond is not for the innocent eyes of the young, but every adult of voting age should read closely. These are the cold facts as an Arkansas court saw it: A 17 year-old girl says she was kidnapped and raped on Sept. 11, 1984, in Forrest City, Ark. Dumond, father of six, Vietnam veteran, churchgoer, was convicted in August 1985 of the rape. He was sentenced to life PLUS 20 years. An appeal by Dumond, under Gov. Clinton, got a response of: “No merit.”

—

After 4.5 years, with his freedom gone, his manhood gone, a five-person parole board recommended that Dumond go free for time served. John R. Steer, managing editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, records the following reaction from then Gov. Clinton: “Clinton had a romping, stomping fit. The victim was a distant cousin and St. Francis County [where this all took place] had a lot of votes and he deeply resented the pressure to free Dumond.” Clinton refused to sign a release. And Dumond rotted.

—

“Sometimes, ” said Mrs. Dumond, “I just want to give up. But now, who knows? The new governor [Huckabee] has personally assured me that Wayne’s case will be the first thing on his desk, after he clears up everything from this Whitewater thing.”

Dwayne Harris, a spokesman for Huckabee, the Republican lieutenant governor who will succeed Democrat Tucker, told me Friday that Huckabee ” has voiced a very special intention to thoroughly review the case of Wayne Dumond.”

(Note: I will gladly link directly to the original NY Post article if anyone has a link.) BTW, much of the apparent exculpatory evidence Dunleavy discusses comes from Dumond and only Dumond. And, as Murray Waas says:

Much of what Dunleavy has written about the Dumond saga has been either unverified or is demonstrably untrue. Dunleavy has all but accused Ashley Stevens of having fabricated her rape, derisively referring to her in one column as a “so-called victim,” and brusquely asserting in another, “That rape never happened.”

The columnist wrote that Dumond was a “Vietnam veteran with no record” when in fact he did have a criminal record. He claimed there existed DNA evidence by “one of the most respected DNA experts in the country” to exonerate Dumond, even though there was no such evidence. He wrote that Bill Clinton had personally intervened to keep Dumond in prison, even though Clinton had recused himself in 1990 from any involvement in the case because of his distant relationship with Stevens.]

[UPDATE II: The second to last sentence was revised for clarity.]

[UPDATE III: Here’s some more:

A Huckabee researcher reportedly attempted to refute some of the statements. He was unsuccessful. He tried, for example, to say Huckabee had never met with the Parole Board. The Parole Board members quickly dispensed with that nonsense. And it was noted that Huckabee’s recent book baldly misstates that Dumond died before being convicted of any murders in Missouri. He was convicted in one and was a prime suspect in another similar killing when he died in prison.]

Smaller Government

by digby

Never let it be said that the authoritarian Bush administration voraciously seeks more power wherever and whenever it can get it:

On the eve of an important Senate committee meeting to consider the legislation, Nancy A. Nord, the acting chairwoman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, has asked lawmakers in two letters not to approve the bulk of legislation that would increase the agency’s authority, double its budget and sharply increase its dwindling staff.

Ms. Nord opposes provisions that would increase the maximum penalties for safety violations and make it easier for the government to make public reports of faulty products, protect industry whistle-blowers and prosecute executives of companies that willfully violate laws.

That’s what Republicans mean when they say they want to “keep the government out of your lives.”

Warrantless eavesdropping, torture and throwing you in prison indefinitely? Not so much.

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Good Cause

by digby

Women’s Voice, Women’s Vote is launching a new voter registration drive for this campaign cycle tomorrow and it looks like it going to be fun:

20 million represents the number of single women who did not vote in 2004. Imagine the possibilities when they do vote! At Women’s Voices. Women Vote, we are trying to make this possibility a reality.

Please join us next Wednesday, October 31, as we launch our 2008 mobilization program with the premier viewing of our new “20 Million Reasons” Public Service Announcement campaign, starring Emmy-award winner Julia Louis-Dreyfus.

Louis-Dreyfus joins fellow actors Christine Lahti, Amber Tamblyn, Sarah Paulson and Jurnee Smollett. Filmed on a replica of the Oval Office, the result is a patriotic and provocative PSA and media campaign designed to mobilize the largest group of non-voters in America – unmarried women.

The engaging spots feature a group of women who reflect the diversity and greatness of our country including: Tina Gainsborough, an 87 year old daughter of a suffragette whose first vote was cast in 1932; Farrah Seigal an 18 year old magician about to vote for her first time; Jasmine Segura a Los Angeles Country firefighter; Marlisa Grogan an Iraq war veteran; Trina Ray a Jet Propulsion Lab astronomer who works on the Cassini satellite probe to Saturn; and Ana Cubas who celebrated her 18th birthday by becoming a US citizen and voting.

[…]

The “20 Million Reasons” campaign will be broadcast on TV, radio and will be distributed across the Internet and social networking sites in English and Spanish.

WVWV is non-partisan and this is a good cause on the simple merits — more women voting, the better for the country, regardless of the politics. But the fact is that single women vote in far, far greater numbers for progressive candidates and causes than any other single demographic group. If they can be mobilized, it would be a juggernaut the Christian Right could only dream of.

I’ve had the pleasure of seeing a bit of this campaign and I think it’s going to be fun and hopefully effective. Keep your eyes open for it — and if you haven’t registered to vote, or know others who haven’t, you can do it right there on the WVWV site.

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Thank You Sir, May I Have Another?

by digby

Will Bunch reports on the young fellow who was tased down in Florida:

“I am a far more reasoned individual than I was a short while ago, and the reasoned response of the university has helped me a great deal,” Meyer wrote.

Shorter version: He loves Big Brother.

Yep, a little electroshock therapy for someone who tries to ask difficult questions of an elected official — now that’s we call a good journalism education! Now that his thought process has been cleared up, we can expect to see Andrew Meyer asking questions from the White House press room in about 12 years or so. (Just kidding, most reporters on the presidential beat only look like they’ve been lobotomized.)

I’m laughing, but only because it’s easier than crying. One of the things that has obviously worked very well on the press in recent years has been sheer, thuggish intimidation. When they aren’t in actual agreement, they are clearly frightened.

Greenwald discusses this in today’s update on the public affairs officer (and future Michele Malkin contributor) Colonel Stephen Boylan:

The ultimate significance of this matter, which goes far beyond the specific question of what Col. Boylan did or did not do in this case (though that is important in its own right), is articulated perfectly by Zack in this comment. The type of hostility, pseudo-intimidation, and stonewalling expressed by Col. Boylan here (in the emails of undisputed authenticity) is the type to which reporters are frequently subjected when they step out of line, particularly with war reporting. That is one reason why so few of them ever do.

And just survey the long list of media outlets and journalists which have been the target of swirling, right-wing lynch mob campaigns for perceived offenses in reporting about the war — The Associated Press, Reuters, Eason Jordan, The New Republic, Ashleigh Banfield. There is a clear attempt to create strong disincentives for any journalist or commentator to do anything other than cheerlead loudly and deferentially.

“Don’t tase me bro” could be the DC press corps’ motto. As you can see, it works very well. After a while you don’t even have to do anything — taming the press corps now is as easy as simply threatening to deny them access. The people who don’t comply tend to be the older guys like Seymour Hersh, who have become immune, and certain younger, iconoclastic types who are just temperamental rebels. A real tasering may be required for them at some point.

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Ignorant Gasbag

by digby

If the world is very, very lucky, Rudy Giuliani will not win the GOP nomination for president and will begin his inevitable career as a moronic right wing talk radio blowhard by next summer:

Do I think the mission overall in Iraq is the correct one, I think without a doubt it is,” the former New York mayor said at Insight Technologies, which makes tactical weapon lights and laser systems for the military.

[…]

“Suppose Hillary Clinton and John Edwards’ new position was their position back then, that it was a mistake to take him out,” Giuliani said, referring to former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. “Wouldn’t we be dealing with Saddam Hussein becoming nuclear right now? If Iran was becoming nuclear what would he be doing? Sitting there letting his arch enemy gain nuclear power over him? Or would we now be dealing with two countries seeking to become nuclear powers.”

[…]

“This is the world we live in. It’s not this happy, romantic-like world where we’ll negotiate with this one, or we’ll negotiate with that one and there will be no preconditions, and we’ll invite (Iranian President Mahmoud) Ahmadinejad to the White House, we’ll invite Osama (bin Laden) to the White House,” Giuliani said.

“Hillary and Obama are kind of debating whether to invite them to the inauguration or the inaugural ball,” he added.

Rush had better hope this guy becomes president because he’s going to give him a run for his money if he gets into the big money Republican media game of hyperbolic gibberish and idiotic nonsense. He’s got the shinin’.

Update: Via Duncan, I see that Ezra wonders why the Village isn’t writing about the fact that the GOP front runner is a barking madman. I think it’s simple. They don’t think he is. They also don’t think Ann Coulter is a shrieking lunatic or that Rush Limbaugh is a lying sack of offal or that one should find anything morally objectionable about torture or indefinite detention or invading countries on false pretenses. They believed for years that Tom Delay was a regular guy and that James Dobson is full of good ideas.

The Village, in other words, is comprised of the same people who are giving money and time and support to the lunatic Rudy Giuliani. They think being simultaneously stupid and madly aggressive is normal. After all, they pretty much gave George W. Bush a nonstop blowjob for years until he had been below 40% national popularity for so long they couldn’t ignore it.

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The Boylan Email Mystery Solved

by tristero

With great care, I sifted through all the evidence about who wrote the “Colonel Steven Boylan” emails to Glenn Greenwald. After much parsing of internet arcana, I’ve concluded that beyond a doubt these e-missives were not written by Colonel Boylan but rather by someone else with the same name.

Therefore Colonel Steven Boylan should not be held responsible for what Colonel Steven Boylan writes and fobs off as his, ie, Colonel Boylan’s. It is not his, i.e., Colonel Boylan’s, fault that his email account is identically similar to Colonel Boylan’s despite the fact that a fool could easily discern the difference.

Besides, even if we (mistakenly) assume that Colonel Boylan is, in fact, Colonel Boylan – which he is not – the notion of holding a military officer accountable for the words s/he writes during wartime is simply an outrageous idea on Glenn Greenwald’s part. The next thing you know he’ll insist that officers be held responsible for their actions.

With that cleared up, we can now devote our full attention to far more pressing issues.

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[NOTE: There are those among you who may think Twain said something similar about Shakespeare. This is, at best in dispute. As is whether Twain and Shakespeare were in fact both pen names for Samuel Clemens.]

Liberal Error

by digby

Atrios brings newbies up to speed about why it’s such a stupid idea to bring the fake “social security crisis” back into the political dialog and also links to a Matt Yglesias post about the “whole mountain of stupid” Villagers like Joe Klein forced us to climb when Bush decided his tiny 04 mandate meant he could destroy the nation’s most successful program.

One of the problems with Klein (who has admittedly become ever so slightly less reflexively Villager in recent months) is that his views were so long considered to be the epitome of those of a sensible liberal. This had the unfortunate effect of making average citizens naturally loathe and despise liberals while at the same time marginalizing actual liberals as being beyond the pale even though they are at least as large a constituency as the social conservatives who are worshipped and embraced as Real Americans among the village elders. It remains a serious problem for Democrats who have to tip-toe around these false designations to reach out to their own voters without getting the whole village lynch mob running after them with bar-b-que forks and sharpened swizzle sticks.

And on social security, the “liberals” like Klein were at their absolute worst, spouting gibberish that it had to be “fixed” for reasons that gave any sane person a headache:

Government was, and very much still remains, the last of our major institutions that stuck in the Industrial Age, where the paradigm is top-down, centralized command and control, assembly line, standardization, and one size fits all.

In the Information Age, Clinton knew that the paradigm was the computer, that the government had to be more decentralized, that bureaucracies had to become more flexible, and that our social safety net had to reflect that–the fact that people had more information and have to have more choices about where they get their health care, where their money for their retirement is held, and so on.

I wrote this about Klein’s gibberish at the time:

The government has to be more like a computer. Bureaucracies have to be more flexible and our social safety net has to reflect that because people have more information so they have to have more choices about where they get their health care and where they put their retirement money. Huh?

I can’t find anywhere where Klein actually explains why we need to have all these choices about our safety net or why having more information compels it. Indeed, as Josh Marshall pointed out earlier, it is counterintuitive. In a world in which people are asked to take many more chances in their careers, where pensions really are a relic of the past, where health care can be yanked from beneath you in a moments notice, it seems to me that government guarantees of basic security are more important than ever.

Klein’s DLC catechism has all the markings of someone who jumped on a sexy trend when he was younger and hasn’t realized the fashion has changed. There is no there there. He’s like one of those e-venture capitalists of the late 90’s spewing fast talking bullshit about “new organizational paradigms where knowledge is defined in terms of potential for action as distinguished from information and its more intimate link with performance.” In other words, gibberish.

It was fashionable for one brief period to think that turning government into a collection of kewl, outsourced, totally, like, stand alone pods of individualized data collection and service modules, but most people sobered up sometime in early 2000. It was always crap.

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There is no crisis. That’s not just a slogan. Even with Bush spending like a drunken sailor we’re still good until 2047. Bringing this into the conversation now for any reason is a big mistake especially when we’ve got a real impending crisis on our hands with medicare, which can only be cured with comprehensive health care reform. (And if you want to talk about a financial crisis, there’s the billion a week we’re tossing down the rabbit hole in Iraq.) Social Security as an issue helps nobody but Republicans and their enablers like Joe Klein who want to persuade people that modern life requires that they constantly put absolutely everything they have in the world on a roulette wheel called “the market.” I understand why wall street types want to get their mitts on a piece of that action but I don’t understand why why anyone who calls himself liberal would think it’s a good idea.

*And yes, I understand that Obama was not endorsing anything particularly radical — but after all we went through to finally get it off the agenda, seeing a Democrat putting the issue back in play is just depressing.

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Mistah Soljah

by digby

I wrote before that I thought Obama was doing a very clumsy Sistah Soljah in South Carolina with this homophobe gospel singer Donnie McClurkin. Turns out McClurkin is actually emceeing the show and gives a rousing speech at the end about the evils of homosexuality, (and the campaign continues to defend it) so I think there’s little doubt that this is intentional.

I’m sure Obama is listening to his advisors tell him that he has to win South Carolina or it’s over. And apparently South Carolina is a stew of bigotry and resentment, the place where the dirty tricksters pull out all the stops to win. This kind of thing is perfectly in keeping with that sort of strategy. But as I said before, it’s a mistake, particularly for the man whose rationale for running is a desire to heal the nation’s political and philosophical wounds.

This is also one of the dangers of trying to run a “unity” campaign at a time when the right has become so extreme that “reaching out” to them often means legitimizing bigots, xenophobes and warmongers. It’s possible to do it, but it takes a very deft diplomatic hand and an unusual ability to communicate well with all concerned without giving up your principles. That’s exactly what was supposed to be Obama’s strong suit. This error is hardly reassuring.

* Like Atrios, I’m also not crazy about the legitimizing of a phony social security crisis. This is NOT helpful. There are many, many ways to go after Hillary Clinton without validating right wing bullshit. If “unity” means using irrational, faith-based nonsense, whether from wall street or the church, to win votes, then it’s going to be a very hard sell. If liberals are expected to reach out from our “hermetically sealed” worldview to bigots, the least those who insist we do it can do is commit to using reason. I think that’s only fair. This country and the world have had quite enough of fairy tale governance.

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