Month: November 2007

It’s Just Like “Hell Week”

by digby

… or maybe they just wanted to blow off some steam. And anyway, “bad guys always lie” so you have to torture them.

FOREMAN: On Friday, Michael Mukasey became attorney general of the United States despite his refusal to define an interrogation practice known as waterboarding, essentially convincing a person that he is drowning as torture. In a world where terrorists really are out there trying to kill us, where is the bright line between what must be done and what should be done? Retired Navy Lieutenant Commander Charlie Swift teaches, now teaches at Emery Law School in Atlanta and still represents one of the Guantanamo detainees. And with me in Washington, David Rivkin, an official at the Justice Department in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administration. Professor, let me start with you. Where do we stand in this debate now. It seems now that we’ve gone through months of trying to decide what we think torture and what is not.

LT. COMDR. CHARLIE SWIFT, U.S. NAVY (RET.): Well, as far as waterboarding goes, it’s an unusual debate to begin with, because as far as the military was concerned with, that was decided back in 1890 during the Spanish-American war when General Crowder ruled that water boarding was always illegal and never justified and we tried Japanese soldiers who did it to our troops during World War II where again we said it was illegal. So, it would seem that the bright line is on the other side of waterboarding, at least historically.

FOREMAN: Listen to what John Edwards said at a town hall meeting on Tuesday about the debate.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOHN EDWARDS (D), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIATE: Can you believe that we are having a debate in America about what kind of torture is tolerable? I will tell you what kind of torture is tolerable – no torture is tolerable. The United States of American should not be engaged in torture.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

FOREMAN: Mr. Rivkin, a lot of Americans in the polls seem to have a similar-type view, why is it so hard, why can’t we agree on a definition and stick to it?

DAVID RIVKIN, MILITARY LAW EXPERT: Incidentally, it is not a debate about whether torture is permissible, at least in my mind, it’s what things amount to torture. And with all due respect to my friend Charlie, there are several forms of waterboarding. Waterboarding is a very capricious term, it connotes a bunch of things. There are clearly some forms of waterboarding [that are] torture and off the table. They may well be some waterboarding regimens that while tough and useful in extracting information are not torture. My problem with the critics is that they don’t want to have, contrary to what Senator Edwards said, we are ought to have a debate as a serious society about what stress techniques of interrogation and what to do with it. Let me point out one thing, we actually waterboard our own people. Are we torturing our own people?

FOREMAN: But we’re waterboarding our own people to give them an idea of what they would encounter if they were captured by somebody else.

RIVKIN: Well, forgive me, as a matter of law and ethics, if the given practice like slavery and prostitution is officially odious, you cannot use it no matter what our goals is, you cannot even use it to volunteers. So, if all forms of waterboarding are torture then we are torturing our own people, and the very same instructor who spoke before Congress the other day about how it’s torture, is guilty of practicing torture for decades. We as a society have to come up with the same baseline using (inaudible) in all spheres of public life instead of somehow singularizing this one thing, which is interrogation of combatants and we need to look at it in a broader way.

FOREMAN: Then, why don’t we Professor Swift, just in deference with what the American people believe in, I think, why don’t we just back away from anything that gets close to this line?

SWIFT: I think we should. To me, it is unfathomable that we are up against the line. You know, again, looking back at World War II, what history has taught us and what we found is that the reliable means of getting intelligence, at least in the context of a war, are using those things that build rapport with the person that they find out that you are not the ogre that they have been told. They begin to question the people who are leading them, and eventually, that leads to actionable intelligence and it is reliable, and you see, that is the real problem with anything that is coercive. When you force somebody to talk, you cannot count on what they tell you. It is going to – in that case, I think it is really an unreliable form of interrogation, and again, that is why we don’t use it in court, because it is not reliable data.

FOREMAN: I seem like I have heard this in a lot of places, the same comment, what’s your response to that?

RIVKIN: It is historically and practically not true for a very simple reason. First of all, the reason stress techniques were used if you look at it is because there are four building techniques of the FBI. This has been reported in the newspapers like “Washington Post” and the “New York Times.” In late 2001, early 2002, I’m not working. You are not able going to be able with Khalid Shaik Mohammed, because while they’re evil, they’re enormously committed to their ideology. They’re prepared to die for it. Point number one. Second, bad guys always lie. Why will you try to build a rapport with them, will interrogate them stressfully. If you have enough time, your biggest problem is they say nothing. If they start talking, you’re able to go back and, for example and you ask, where is your safe house? You go and you see if he told you the truth.

FOREMAN: These are borderline techniques you’re talking about. If they were done to you, would you consider them torture?

RIVKIN. No. I am not, by the way, I am not even propounding waterboarding. My problem is that there is a range of stress techniques including temperature manipulation, sensor manipulations and maybe sometimes waterboarding that are actually used. Look, when people go for basic training for hell week, they sleep little bits of time at a time, their diets. There’s lots of abuse, instructors yelling at (inaudible).

FOREMAN: I have to cut you for a moment for a last word, very quickly, from Professor Swift, are we any closer, briefly to coming to a conclusion as to where we’re going with this debate and it seems like it is going on forever, and it sill is lively as ever?

SWIFT: Well, the reason we can’t have the debates, to get down to particular techniques is that the administration won’t tell us exactly what they are doing and won’t tell Congress exactly what they are doing, so when one lies on the edge of these things, it is impossible to have a debate until Congress completely looks at the question and stops using general terms. Congress has tried general terms, general terms haven’t work but we’re going to have need a specific debate.

FOREMAN: I’m afraid, we have to go. Professor Swift, thanks so much. Mr. Rivkin as well.

I was on the Seder show earlier today and mentioned that broadcast(mangling the date Commander Swift mentioned, unfortunately.) It was in response to Sam’s question as to whether the US has truly gone over the cliff. I said it was a near thing, mostly because of people like our friend Professor Rivkin there.

This man claims that if an American trainee can endure something, it can’t legally be called torture. He shamefully goes even further to state that if we call it torture, it means that all of those who have trained our troops to withstand it are guilty of being torturers.

He neglects, of course, to admit that the recruits and trainees who are put though such exercises can quit at any time and they know very well that their instructors won’t actually kill them. The total lack of control in the hands of someone who believes you are an enemy is what what makes waterboarding torture, and people who do it voluntarily have control. That’s the difference, and it’s clear to anyone who isn’t an intellectual fraud as Rivkin is.

He and others (like Pat Buchanan) are now saying that we need to make waterboarding explicitly illegal if we have a problem with it — even though one would think that any torture that was used by the Spanish inquisition and Pol Pot would automatically come under the heading of “torture” which is illegal under at least five different statutes and treaties. They are trying to pretend that waterboarding isn’t already illegal, pretending that waterboarding is merely “controversial” so they are pushing for a “debate.”(Swift even admits that they’ve left us no choice between the weasel words, parsing and secrecy.)

There is good reason to surmise that one of the main reasons why they are pushing for this legislation is so that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld can’t be indicted for war crimes retroactively. (Kind of like their friends the Telcoms.) After all, that’s the real reason Mukasey was instructed to say that he didn’t know if waterboarding was illegal. If he had, he might have been required to arrest some very important people who we know approved it.

But Rivkin’s bobbing and weaving serves another purpose. He’s literally defining deviancy down. He submits that these “stress positions” and the “hot and cold” and the waterboarding and other things they’ve done (plus God only knows what we aren’t yet aware of) are necessary when you are dealing with “bad guys” who always lie. And anyway, if Army rangers can endure it in training then so can suspected terrorists (who’ve been blindfolded, stripped, sodomized repeatedly with “suppositories”, held in painful restraints for days, subjected to extreme cold while being splashed with water and denied sleep.) This is what the right wing has left of their principles: if our special forces guys can live through something during their training that means it’s ok for us to do it to others under much more terrifying circumstances.

There has been tragic a shift in our culture’s taboos, thanks to schmucks like Alan Dershowitz and others who put this on the menu in the days after 9/11 and normalized the idea that torture might be ok — as long as we’re the torturers. There are plenty of people who agree with that reflexively. After all, our president told them right after 9/11 that we are good:

[H]ow do I respond when I see that in some Islamic countries there is vitriolic hatred for America? I’ll tell you how I respond: I’m amazed. I’m amazed that there is such misunderstanding of what our country is about, that people would hate us. I am, I am — like most Americans, I just can’t believe it. Because I know how good we are, and we’ve go to do a better job of making our case.

So, if we are good (exceptionally good!) that means that whatever we do is good. But torture is bad. So, that means that no matter what we do it can’t, by definition, be torture. See how that works? (I wonder if he also thinks this is a useful way to “make our case” to the rest of the world that we are good.)

This is more right wing rabbit-hole logic, and it’s become a sick parody of itself now that they are openly using it to defend torture techniques from the Spanish Inquisition. You ask this man Rivkin if he would consider waterboarding torture if it were done to him and he said unequivocally, no. (He learned his lesson well. The last Republican lawyer who went out and had himself waterboarded was fired when he called it torture.) It’s actually just another tool that good people use to defeat “bad guys.” No biggie. It’s not even illegal.

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Media Solidarity

by digby

Atrios and Matt Stoller make a good point about how the press is covering the WGA strike. And it just proves how corporate values rule the media. After all, the strikers in this case are fellow members of the media themselves, and yet they’re getting hostile coverage. And likewise, many of the news people who are covering them are in unions too. There can be no reasons other than corporate pressure to explain the hostility or the fact the strike is being virtually blacked out in the local press despite stars and political activists showing up to picket along with ordinary Americans.

On Saturday, New York stagehands went out on strike as well, closing the Broadway shows. Read this article to get a sense of just how slanted the coverage is. It’s one long extended whine about how the poor tourists are being denied their shows, quoting the theater management at length and not even addressing the reasons for the strike until the 12th paragraph. After a few cryptic quotes from the union they are back to talking about how the whole thing “doesn’t sit well” with the public.

It has become conventional wisdom among many, having been led by a media with a dog in the fight, that unions are bad for America. As I noted in a recent post, you have people like Jim Cramer going on TV screaming and spitting at the top of his lungs, “they have to break that union, they have to break that union!” (about the UAW) and it’s not countered with … anything.

This makes sense for the plutocrats like Cramer and Chris Matthews but for the rest of us, not so much, even if we aren’t in unions. Paul Krugman makes a persuasive argument in “Conscience of a Liberal” that the decades long conservative assault on the union movement has been a major contributor to the income inequality we are seeing today. Unions are essential to maintaining a thriving middle class and a thriving middle class is essential for a stable and decent society.

It’s clear that this is yet another area in which the media are failing their audience and their readers and we are going to have to be vigilant in our interpretation of their coverage. And there are other things we can do as well.

Update: It looks like LA gets it:

Los Angeles Strongly Supports Scribes, Spurns Studios: 69% of Los Angeles Area adults familiar with the Writers Guild of America strike say they take the side of the writers, according to this latest exclusive ABC7 News Poll Conducted by SurveyUSA. 8% say they take the studios’ side; 22% say they don’t take either side. Support for the WGA members is strong across all demographic groups. Would You Miss Your Programs? When asked if they would be upset if the strike lasted through the spring and there were no new episodes of current TV programs, respondents split. Women and younger respondents say they would be upset; men and older respondents are less likely to be upset if new episodes don’t air.

That last is actually good news for the Guild. Women and young people are the most valuable demographics to advertisers and theatrical distributors. It puts more pressure on management to settle.

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Telling It Straight

by digby

Intel Official: Say Goodbye to Privacy

A top intelligence official says it is time people in the United States changed their definition of privacy.

Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguards people’s private communications and financial information.

Trust ’em?

If you think this isn’t such a big deal, check out this post about what happened when we trusted our government with these powers just 37 years ago:

“For the past four years, the U.S. Army has been closely watching civilian political activity within the United States.” So charged Christopher H. Pyle, a former intelligence officer, in the January 1970 edition of Washington Monthly. Pyle’s account of military spies snooping on law‑abiding citizens and recording their actions in secret government computers sent a shudder through the nation’s press. Images from George Orwell’s novel 1984 of Big Brother and the thought police filled the newspapers. Public alarm prompted the Senate Subcommittee on Consti­tutional Rights, chaired by Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina, to investigate. For more than a year, Ervin struggled against a cover‑up to get to the bottom of the surveillance system. Frustrated by the Nixon Administration’s misleading statements, claims of inherent executive powers, and refusals to disclose information on the basis of national security, the Senator called for public hearings in 1971 to examine “the dangers the Army’s program presents to the principles of the Constitution.”

It’s happening again only this time instead of insisting that the government reveal its activities, the US Congress is about to legalize it. Officials are testifying that we’re just going to have to get used to it. No shudders through the press. If there is national alarm, it’s being ignored — constitutional liberties are seen as “political losers” for Democrats because we are engaged in a sophomoric schlong-measuring contest instead of a debate about the best way to defend the nation against threats.

One of the hallmarks of an authoritarian state is surveillance of its own citizens — if you give them the power they will use it to gain more. It’s inevitable. We Americans should be guarding our privacy more zealously than ever and insisting that our representatives find ways to ensure that the government does not repeal the fourth amendment in slow motion.

And once again, I’m shocked that a member of the government is just saying this kind of stuff outright in public and nobody seems to give a damn. If someone were to have asked you ten years ago what countries in the world had a doctrine of preventive war and used it to invade a country on false pretenses, spied on its own citizens, held people in jail indefinitely without due process and routinely tortured suspected enemies of the state, would you have ever believed the United States Of America was among them?

And in case you think we aren’t normalizing these discussions, take a gander at this op-ed in the Wall Street Journal via LGM:

There are some who claim that torture is a nonissue because it never works–it only produces false information. This is simply not true, as evidenced by the many decent members of the French Resistance who, under Nazi torture, disclosed the locations of their closest friends and relatives.

That’s allegedly liberal torture promoter Alan Dershowitz, who goes on to claim that anyone who doesn’t support the president having the power to use waterboarding to “save American lives” has blood on his hands.

Our new American credo: if it worked for Hitler, it’ll work for us!

Update:

Kerr said at an October intelligence conference in San Antonio, Texas, that he finds it odd that some would be concerned that the government may be listening in when people are “perfectly willing for a green-card holder at an [Internet service provider] who may or may have not have been an illegal entrant to the United States to handle their data.”

Right. And when that “illegal entrant” green card holder has the power to come to my house and arrest me and throw me in jail I might get a little bit more worried about him.

He noted that government employees face up to five years in prison and $100,000 in fines if convicted of misusing private information.

Somehow this doesn’t comfort me. If I recall correctly, the last guy who was convicted of lying about his involvement in a similar crime had his sentence commuted by his boss, the president.

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Sure, It’s Admiration

by tristero

Most likely, it’s abject fear. My guess is that Scaife sees a Hillary Clinton presidency as very possible, He expects Clinton to wreak revenge for what she and her husband endured – he’s the kind of person who thinks Clinton actually did order Deliverance-wannabes to castrate rapist Wayne Dumond – and is trying to ward off the attacks. Alternatively, Bill Clinton requested the meeting and read Scaife the riot act, telling Scaife that if he tries to repeat history and eagerly funds another smear campaign, Clinton will show no mercy.

There’s another possibility, that Isikoff got the whole story wrong. But that couldn’t be. It is Newsweek after all, and therefore the unspeakably snotty tone -or is it envy? – towards Clinton is the way All Of Us should view him. Look at that lede:

Bill Clinton is never at a loss for company. When he’s not globe-trotting or charming audiences for as much as $400,000 a speech, he’s often schmoozing visitors in his suite of offices in Harlem.

And that’s for starters. Isikoff’s quite the joker.

[UPDATE: To those unfamiliar with how people in real life frequently perform obeisance or issue unequivocal threats over lunch, I am certainly not suggesting that the meeting wasn’t entirely cordial, if not downright delightful. These things often are communicated en passant, a dropped word or inflection, that sort of thing. Often, the simple act of meeting is signal enough for everyone involved to get the message, so the conversation is about other topics: the weather, charity work, mutual friends, jokes, etc. ]

Saturday Night At The Movies

Diggin’ the scene with a gangsta lean

By Dennis Hartley

There is a key scene in Ridley Scott’s riveting crime epic “American Gangster” that speaks volumes about the personal code that drives one of the film’s principal characters. “Look at the way you’re dressed,” says the impeccably groomed and tastefully attired 1970s Harlem drug kingpin Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington) in disgust, to his ostentatiously pimped-out brother Huey (Chiwetel Ejiofor), “…it’s a look that says: ‘arrest me’. Remember, the loudest one in the room is also the weakest one in the room.”

It’s one of the axioms Lucas picked up while paying his dues working as a driver for his mentor, an old-school Harlem crime lord (Clarence Williams III). By the time his boss keels over from a heart attack, Lucas has been thoroughly schooled in the shrewd business acumen of how to remain a “wolf in sheep’s clothing”; no matter how venal your methods are for getting to the top and maintaining your position, if you’re able to swing it while maintaining a respectable public appearance, everybody will still love you.

Scott’s film is all about “appearances”; judging a book by its cover, if you will. When we are first introduced to the film’s other main character, New Jersey police detective Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe), we’re not sure if we’re observing a cop and his partner serving a warrant, or if we’re watching a disheveled street thug and his pal pulling a B & E on someone’s apartment. While his personal grooming habits may be questionable, it is apparent that his integrity is of the highest order. Not only is he an honest cop in a department that is swimming in corruption (he’s sneered at as a “boy scout” when he turns in nearly one million dollars in cash discovered in a dealer’s car), he is also diligently studying to pass the bar exam so he can prosecute criminals in court as well. Ironically, he is concurrently entangled in a messy child custody battle with his ex-wife.

Lucas, on the other hand, maintains the outward appearance of an upstanding citizen; while surreptitiously operating on the opposite side of the law. He has prospered via an ingenious Southeast Asian heroin pipeline that bypasses any pesky “middlemen”. He buys an estate in the suburbs and sets up house for his brothers and his mother (played by the great Ruby Dee, who we don’t see enough of these days). He marries a beautiful Latina (Lymari Nadal) and ingratiates himself as a pillar of the community, mingling with the hoi polloi and contributing to charitable causes. Most interestingly, Lucas is also able to “hide in plain sight” due to the fact that during this era (the early to mid 1970s), it was literally beyond the ken of the law enforcement community to consider that such a sophisticated, large-scale drug operation could be helmed by an African-American.

Steven Zailian’s screenplay is based on true events; the story takes place in the same seedy 70s N.Y.C. milieu that inspired films like “The French Connection ”, “Serpico ” and “Prince of the City ”. There are numerous references made to the real-life French connection case, as well as the police corruption that was depicted the latter two films.

Scott uses a trick that worked well for Michael Mann in the similarly structured “Heat”. He builds a considerable amount of dramatic tension by keeping his two powerhouse stars apart for the lion’s share of the film, while steadily teasing on the inevitability that the two men’s professional paths are destined to cross. When Washington and Crowe finally do share a scene together, it proves to be well worth the wait (when you see it, watch closely for the coffee cup prop that becomes a proxy chess piece; it’s a masterstroke of gesture from both actors) Also, like the Mann film, the parallel character studies are drenched in irony. My favorite scene contrasts the manner in which the two men spend their respective Thanksgiving holidays. Lucas stands at the head of his table, in the opulent dining room of his sprawling mansion, surrounded by raucously cheerful family members, as he carves the bird in a veritable Norman Rockwell painting come to life; Detective Roberts sits alone in his dingy apartment, eating what looks like a peanut butter, pickle and crumbled potato chip sandwich while he catches up on his paperwork.

Scott utilizes his patented ultra-slick visual style, although a grittier look might have served the story better. Despite the deliberate pacing for the first 2 hours, something about the denouement feels curiously rushed (sorry, can’t elaborate-potential spoiler!) Those nitpicks aside, I would still recommend this film for fans of the director and crime drama buffs. The performances by Washington and Crowe are superb, as always. Also, honorable mentions need to go out to Josh Brolin, for his full-blooded performance as a corrupt Special Investigations Unit cop, and Armand Assante as a mob big shot. I liked the period soundtrack as well, although we need to declare a moratorium on Bobby Womack’s “Across 110th Street”. It’s a great song, but it’s now been used in three films!

Tryin’ to get over, 70s style: Superfly, Shaft (1971),Across 110th Street, Dead Presidents, Uptown Saturday Night (1974),Black Caesar, Hell Up In Harlem, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, Baadasssss!, Coffy, Foxy Brown, I’m Gonna Git You Sucka.

Good cop, bad cop, NYC: The French Connection , Serpico ,Prince of the City , Cop Land, Q & A (1990), Fort Apache, The Bronx, The Seven-Ups.

…and one more thing

You’ve likely heard by now that Norman Mailer has passed on. I’ll let the literary critics debate his legacy as an author, but I feel duty-bound to recommend a couple of memorable films that Mailer had a hand in creating.

Believe it or not, Mailer had four films to his credit as a director. I can’t speak for “Beyond the Law” (1968), “Wild 90” (1968), or “Maidstone” (1970) because I’ve never seem them (they’re pretty obscure), but Mailer’s fourth and final directorial effort, from 1987, happens to be one of my personal cult favorites.

If “offbeat noir” is your clarion call, “Tough Guys Don’t Dance” is your kind of film.Ryan O’Neal plays an inscrutable ex-con with a conniving “black widow” for a wife, who experiences five “really bad days” in a row, involving drugs, kinky sex, blackmail and murder. Due to some temporary amnesia, however, he’s not sure of his own complicity (O’Neal begins each day by writing the date on his bathroom mirror with shaving cream-keep in mind, this film precedes “Memento” by 13 years.) Veteran film noir icon Lawrence Tierny (cast here 5 years BEFORE Tarantino thought of resurrecting him for “Reservoir Dogs”) is priceless as O’Neal’s estranged father, who is helping him sort out events (it’s worth the price of admission alone to hear Tierny bark “I just deep-sixed two heads!”). Equally notable is a deliciously demented performance by B-movie trouper Wings Hauser as the hilariously named Captain Alvin Luther Regency. Norman Mailer’s “lack” of direction has been roundly criticized, but his minimalist style actually works perfectly for the story, giving his movie a David Lynch feel (although that might be due to the fact that Isabella Rossilini is in the cast and the soundtrack is by Lynch stalwart Angelo Badalamenti).

Also worth checking out:

“The Executioner’s Song”-A star-making turn from Tommy Lee Jones helped make this dramatization of the Gary Gilmore case one of the best “made for TV” films ever. Mailer adapted the teleplay from his own book (BTW-I would put the book up there with “In Cold Blood” as a bonafide true crime classic.)

-D.H.

Gender Bender

by digby

You all remember this little exchange between Tucker Carlson and Cliff may from a couple of weeks ago I’m sure:

CARLSON: Do you think that people who are voting on the basis of gender solidarity ought to be allowed to vote in a perfect world? Of course they shouldn’t be allowed to vote on those grounds. That’s like — that’s moronic. I’m sorry. I know I’m going to get bounced off the air for saying it, but that’s true.

ROBINSON: That doesn’t trump all other characteristics. There are a lot of women who are going to vote for Republicans in November because they’re conservative.

CARLSON: I’m not saying women shouldn’t vote for Hillary at all. I’m merely saying the obvious: that you shouldn’t vote for her because she’s a woman. Here’s what the Clinton campaign says: “Hillary isn’t running as a woman. As Hillary says, she’s not running as a woman candidate. The only reason to vote for her is that you believe she’s the most qualified to be president.”

Well, that’s actually completely false, considering the Hillary campaign — and I get their emails — relentlessly pushes the glass ceiling argument. “You should vote for her because she’s a woman.” They say that all the time. She just said that on The View. I mean, that’s like their rationale.

MAY: At least call her a Vaginal-American, as opposed to —

CARLSON: Is that the new phrase?

According the Carlson, women are assumed to be backing Hillary in greater numbers than men because they are voting purely on the basis of gender solidarity. And they probably shouldn’t be allowed to vote if that’s the case.

Fast forward to this week:

CARLSON: Senator Hillary Clinton enjoys a big lead in the national polls, but it‘s a much tighter race in the early primary state. Today a new NBC News/”Wall Street Journal” poll reveals that over half of the men in the country and almost 40 percent of the women say they would never vote for Hillary Clinton.

Meanwhile, a poll in “Parents” magazine found that among all the candidates, Hillary is the one parents would least trust to baby-sit their children. But wait. If that‘s true, how is she doing so well?

[…]

PRESS: I also have to say the parenting thing, here‘s the real question. Would you want any of those—trust any of those presidential candidates to baby-sit your kids? I mean, get serious. They‘d be dialing for dollars the whole time.

CARLSON: Let‘s be honest. Who would be the most severe when it comes to toilet training. I think we know the answer.

BUCHANAN: Who would you allow—you wouldn‘t want to be baby-sat by her. Holy smokes…

CARLSON: I think a lot of—it‘s interesting. If you—a lot of people love Hillary Clinton and she can obviously be elected president. I‘m not even attacking her. But I notice married people, married men and married white men, getting more extreme, despise her. Why is that? I‘ll tell you why. Because she gives off the feeling that she despises them. If you give the voters the feeling you don‘t like them, they won‘t like you back.

PRESS: That‘s your read of it. My read is different. I think first of all that these polls—I think we make too much of these polls. We don‘t know who the opposition is, what the issues are in November 2008. So how can you say that 55 percent of married men today are never going to vote?

CARLSON: Married guys—she won‘t get within ten points of winning them. No way.

PRESS: There are a lot of married men out there today who are afraid of strong women and don‘t want a strong woman and won‘t vote for any woman.

CARLSON: You really believe that?

PRESS: I honestly do.

CARLSON: I live in a world of strong women. I love strong women.

PRESS: So do I, I‘m just saying we‘re not among that category.

There are a category of men out there who would never vote for a woman.

CARLSON: This is how she loses when people say things like that. The implication of that is you‘re not a good enough person to support Hillary Clinton. If you‘re a more decent person, you‘d like her. That‘s how liberals feel about it. Like you‘re not ready to support her. Maybe I just don‘t like her.

Notice that little sleight of hand there? When women say they support Hillary it’s because they are irrationally supporting someone because of their gender. When men say they won’t support Hillary it’s because “she gives off the feeling that she despises them.” If you even bring up the fact that there are men out there who will refuse to vote for any woman, you attacked for allegedly saying that men aren’t decent people. Heads I win, tails you lose.

Carlson believes that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote if they like the idea that a woman may become president and vote for her partially on that basis, but it’s not irrational for (white) men vote against a woman because they irrationally feel she “despises them.”

I get accused of being a shill for Clinton all the time because I write about this stuff and it’s assumed that it’s some sort of partisan plot to boost her candidacy. But the truth is that I haven’t backed anyone and my reasons for highlighting this narrative is because it reveals the way these Village pundits really think. I don’t care who you support in the election, this kind of talk — especially just spewing out in the mainstream media with very little awareness — makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck if you happen to be female. It’s like having everyone assume that the “normal” state of being in this world is male and this strange idea of appealing to women is some sort of illegitimate pander to an extreme, fringe interest group.

For decades the Republicans have been running against the “soft” (read: “gay” or “sissy”) Democrats and it’s worked quite well for them. But with an actual woman running to be the Big Kahuna, it seems to have scrambled the decks, which isn’t surprising. Their attacks are received differently when they aren’t seen through the lens of a puerile boys locker room. It has a different characteristic, more jarring and dissonant, maybe because it’s so much more direct. (I’m certainly not defending the “gay” slur either — it’s just that it’s so commonplace in politics that most people don’t even see it.)

But what did surprise me — and I guess I’m just a fool for not having realized it before — is that so many of these men in the media seem to have such severe psychological issues in this sphere. Tucker and Matthews and many of their guests are personally offended that a woman would appeal directly to other women for votes, as if that’s undemocratic and unfair. And they get extremely bent out of shape when their sexist attitudes are challenged.

Jamison Foser captures one of those moments in his column this week. I saw it and it was jaw dropping:

While kids are dying in the war, Matthews obsesses over Hillary Clinton’s “Chinese” clapping. For three straight days, Matthews wasted viewers’ time with discussions about … clapping. Thursday night, he discussed it in two separate segments. Finally, Chrystia Freeland of the Financial Times urged Matthews to get over his fixation with Clinton’s mannerisms and focus on issues:

FREELAND: I do think that we have to be a little bit careful also about not picking on Hillary’s mannerisms a little bit too much. So — MATTHEWS: Ah, those secondary characteristics are off-base. Am I being told that? FREELAND: Just a little bit. I mean, there’s the clapping, there was the laugh. I think there are things to pick on Hillary about, but probably the clapping wouldn’t be what I’d choose. PATRICK HEALY (New York Times reporter): Well, there’s one thing, Chris — MATTHEWS: Well, give me a list — Chrystia, give me a list some day on email of whom — what I’m allowed to criticize about Hillary. And how — FREELAND: Any policy matters; dynasty I think is OK, too. MATTHEWS: Oh, OK. Yeah, I’ll be sure to keep that in mind. Jim Warren, what do you make of this as a cultural phenomenon? If you’re watching us from overseas, you say, “Is this what Americans do at political rallies? Oh, it’s interesting.” JAMES WARREN (Chicago Tribune managing editor): Well, I mean, she can’t copy me and stick her hands into her pants pockets. So, there’s not much left to her. And given the repetity of her life, 10,000 different appearances a day — oh, my gosh, it looks like she’s at Sea World in San Diego. Here comes the seal! Yikes. [This was in response to a video that spliced a bunch of different events together. — digby]
MATTHEWS: You’re worse than I’ve ever been. WARREN: Anyway. MATTHEWS: Throw me a fish.

Watch the video. Matthews’ “I’ll be sure to keep that in mind” was just dripping with sarcasm.

(If only Imus had been on hand to call her a fat-assed bitch, the show would have been complete. I’m sure they’ll all be making pilgrimages to his new show to resume snapping towels at each other as soon as possible.)

Keep in mind that Chrystia Freeland was a reporter for the Financial Times, not a Democratic operative. And as with Tucker Carlson, there’s that puerile derision between the host and one of his guests. Plenty of people on those shows seem uncomfortable with the bizarre inappropriateness of the hosts, but they don’t quite know what to do about it. Carlson and Matthews end up picking one to be his Ed McMahon to laugh loudly at his “jokes” and egg him on.

It’s a very bizarre spectacle, especially since it’s on the newly anointed “liberal network.” I find myself turning over to the somnambulent tones of Wolf Blitzer whenever these guys get going on this subject. I can only stand so much of it before I boil over. I hope they realize that if they want to place themselves on the leftward side of the dial that non-stop juvenile sexist banter isn’t exactly going to get them there.

The fact is that politicians of both genders and all ethnicities and races all over the country are trying to say in one way or another, “I’m one of you. I understand your needs and your problems and I will represent you!” It’s what they do. To say that Clinton is doing something that’s out of bounds by making a pitch to women is mind-boggling, (particularly after the years and years of hunting trips and horseshoes and cigarette boats to make that pitch to the ever valuable “angry, white male.”)

To constantly deride her on the basis of gender is ridiculous. She’s the front runner and there’s plenty to criticize her for. (Her support for the Peru free trade agreement, for one.)That these guys are obsessing on the gender stuff is very, very revealing.

And by the way, despite all the fuss about how married men are rejecting Clinton because she allegedly despises them, the race probably isn’t going to hinge on their tender feelings of insecurity:

Single parent households have grown from under a quarter to over a third of American households over the past 25 years and a majority of households are now headed by unmarried Americans for the first time. From 1960 to 2006, the percentage of the voting age population that was unmarried grew from 27 to 47 percent. Between the 2002 and 2006 elections, the growth rate of unmarried Americans was double that of married Americans. If this trend continues, the unmarried will be a majority of the population within 15 years. These changes have broad implications for the future of our country, its politics and the policy direction of the national government.

Importantly, unmarrieds come to the table with a somewhat different agenda, even more focused on changing the direction of the country, more focused on basic issues of the economy and jobs, more focused on ending the war and, it should be noted, a bit
more cynical about law-makers’ willingness to listen to their concerns. For this and other reasons, the rising unmarried majority has so far remained relatively quiet in our national conversation.

While improved in recent election cycles, unmarrieds, particularly unmarried women, still do not vote at the same levels as their married counter-parts. In total, there are over 53 million unmarried women of voting age, 20 million of whom stayed home in the last presidential election. What is clear is that this cohort is changing America culturally and demographically and as it becomes increasingly involved in the democratic process, will continue to change America as well.

The importance of unmarried Americans is clearly demonstrated by the demographic shift that this country has been (and is continuing to) undergo. Between the 2002 and 2006 midterm elections the proportion of unmarried voting age citizens grew at a rate that surpassed the married population. In fact, the rate of growth of the unmarried population was nearly double the growth rate among those who are married.

While the rapid growth of the unmarried population over the past four years is notable, it is merely the continuation of a long-term trend. Between 1960 and 2006, the percentage of the voting age population (as opposed to households) that was unmarried increased from 27 to 47 percent. If the current growth trend continues, the unmarried population will become a majority in the next 15 years.

All the Democratic candidates will hopefully be smart enough to look to the future of this country and go where the votes are, including unmarried people and Latinos and other growing influential demographics. Perhaps they will finally throw off this self-defeating notion that the only people who are worth trying to persuade are a bunch of white male Village pundits who have serious problems with ordinary Americans they don’t recognize from the favorite TV shows of their childhoods. I’m holding my breath.

If you are a blogger or have a web site, you can get a neat little widget that allows people to register to vote at Women’s Voices, Women Vote.

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Doing What Comes Naturally

by digby

Reagan’s old 11th commandment hasn’t been operative for some time (if it ever was), but Rich Lowry is still out there valiantly pretending that it is.

I admire the fighting spirit of the Rudy folks, but gee whiz. He’s the front-runner! (According to the national polls.) There’s no need to come off so defensively, and not every attack requires a nuclear response. Doing it to Joe Biden is one thing, but to fellow Republicans who aren’t even a threat at the moment is probably ill-advised.

He’s talking about Rudy’s nuclear response to McCain’s lukewarm criticism of the “Kerik problem.”

I actually doubt seriously that this will hurt Rudy among the rank and file, particularly southern conservatives. They don’t like McCain much and love any politician who will be unremittingly ruthless in every way. To them, politics is a gladiator fight to the death. Presidential candidates prove their bona-fides in places like South Carolina by completely destroying their opponents and proving they have what it takes to go after the real enemies of the state: liberals.

I think Rudy knows exactly what he’s doing.

Via K-Drum who points out that Rudy goes nuclear as a matter of reflex, which is true. Along with his “law and order” kept-the-negroes-in-line appeal, that’s what’s making him so popular. He’s an authentic racist and a sonofabitch — the Republican dream candidate.

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The Conscience Of A Liberal

by tristero

Here, as promised, is a brief excerpt from Paul Krugman’s wonderful new book, The Conscience of a Liberal. I’ve chosen a small section that illustrates the detail and clarity of his argumentation. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of equally concise passages to illustrate his overall point – that liberals have a unique opportunity to restore New Deal government to the US – and to rebut rightwing nonsense:

…don’t high taxes and an extensive welfare state remove the incentives to work and innovate? Gross domestic product per capita in France is only 74 percent of GDP per capita in the United States. Isn’t that a compelling argument against moving in a French direction? Well, France and other countries with generous social programs do have serious economic problems. These problems are not, however, as simple or as closely related to the generosity of social programs as you might think.

France does have much lower GDP per person than the United States. That’s largely becasue a smaller fraction of the population is employed – French GDP per worker is only 10 percent lower than in the United States. And that difference in GDP per worker, in in turn, is entirely becasue French workers get much more time time off: On average French workers put in only 86 percent as many hours each year as U.S. workers. Worker productivity per hour appears to be slightly higher in France than in the United States.

The real question is which aspects of the French difference represent problems, and which simply represent diffferent and possibly better choices. The lower number of hours per worker in France seems to fall in the second category. In the United States vacations are very short, and many workers get no vacation at all. France has essentially made a decision, enforced by legal requirements on vacation time as well as union settlements, to trade less income for more time off. And there’s some evidence that this decision actually makes most people better off. As one recent study of the difference in working hours between Europe and the United States points out, polls suggest that people would like to work shorter hours, and international comparisons of reported “life satisfaction” seem to say that working less improves the quality of life even if it reduces income. Yet it’s very difficult, for any individual, operating on his or her own, to trade less income for more leisure. French rules and regulations that solve this problem by requiring that employers provide vacation may actually be a good thing, even though they reduce GDP.

The passage continues by explaining that while France has higher rates of unemployment than the US, that is because:

The French are more likely than Americans to stay in school…This sounds like a virtue, not a vice, of the French system…

Once they reach prime working age…the French are just as likely to be employed as we are…

Krugman then discusses a serious problem with the French system and does so without excusing them and without pulling punches.

The lay reader is left with the impression that Krugman has carefully, and fairly, compared French employment practices with American. That is what is meant in the argumentation biz by the technical term “effective persuasion.”

I invite commenters to try to tear Krugman’s argument here apart. But you must provide links. As a lay reader, I don’t have the knowledge or training to evaluate Krugman’s analysis. But it is arguments of this kind that critics of Krugman must engage if they wish to criticize his book with any seriousness. The reviews I’ve read fail to do so. One of them carped over a mere typo and a matter of opinion. Another one objected that Krugman’s portrayal of the rise of conservatism was “cartoonish” because Krugman accurately quoted racist and pro-Franco remarks from the early years of the National Review. (What was truly cartoonish, of course, was the crude racial stereotyping and admiration of fascism in the passages Krugman quoted.)

Speaking personally, I found the cumulative effective of Krugman’s spare style very accessible, and just as importantly, very moving. There are no cheesy time-wasting stories inserted to people-ize the argument – “Jacques Clavecin is a baker who takes his 4 weeks of vacation in Eastern Europe studying ancient methods of bagel making” – just the facts. But somehow, Krugman makes those facts not only accessible but compulsively readable.

Yes, it’s true. It’s hard to put down. The Conscience of a Liberal is a pageturner and really should not be missed.

An Earlier Interview Scherer Did With Huckabee

by tristero

Earlier today, I complained that Salon gave Huckabee a free ride by interviewing him but failing to bring up Dumond, the rapist who, after Huckabee enthusiastically worked to free him, was released from prison and who raped and murdered at least one woman.

Michael Scherer, who conducted the interview, wrote in to inform me that indeed he had asked Huckabee about Dumond at an earlier time. I emailed Michael with some questions, but thought, in the interests of fairness, I should post this link to that earlier interview now. I owe Michael an apology as I was unaware of this earlier interview.

I believe that by far the most important facts to understand about Mike Huckabee are the sheer depth of his immersion in the lunacy of far right ideology and his willful ignorance. They led Huckabee into a key role in an awful tragedy. I think Dumond is a subject Huckabee should never be permitted to avoid or deflect by claiming he’s just “too compassionate.” After all, if he was so compassionate, he never would have campaigned for Dumond’s release in the first place.

Finally, after Murray Waas’s detailed debunking of Huckabee’s claims, I think that Dumond’s release needs a very thorough investigation before Huckabee’s version of events should be accorded any credence whatsoever:

By far, Huckabee’s most glaring mistake goes by the name of Wayne DuMond, a paroled rapist who murdered a woman after being released. DuMond’s story is Southern Gothic, the Dukes of Hazzard meets John Grisham. He was a Vietnam veteran with a violent past and six children. In 1984, he was accused of raping a high school student in Forrest City, Ark., a town named for a founder of the Ku Klux Klan. The student happened to be a distant cousin of then-Gov. Bill Clinton, and the daughter of an influential local mortician. While DuMond was awaiting trial, two men broke into his home, hogtied and castrated him. The local sheriff, Coolidge Conlee, later displayed the testicles, floating in formaldehyde, for visitors to his office.

A mangled DuMond was eventually sentenced to life in prison, without the possibility of parole. But the distant Clinton affiliation soon turned his case into a cause. Right-wing radio hosts and columnists decried the severe sentence. They raised questions about the lack of DNA evidence, and railed against the small-town justice system, which never prosecuted DuMond’s attackers. During the 1992 presidential campaign, while Clinton was traveling out of state, Tucker commuted DuMond’s sentence to allow for the possibility of parole. When Huckabee became governor, he publicly announced that he intended to commute DuMond’s sentence to time served. “My desire is that you be released from prison,” he wrote DuMond in a letter. Before Huckabee signed any papers, the state parole board approved the prisoner’s release. Two years later, DuMond murdered a woman in Missouri and later died in jail.

The case presents Huckabee with a clear problem, along the lines of Willie Horton, the furloughed rapist who helped sink the 1988 campaign of Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis. The attack ad almost writes itself: Huckabee, egged on by right-wingers, worked to free a rapist who murdered again. When I bring up the issue, the former Baptist minister becomes defensive and tries to place the blame elsewhere. “Jim Guy Tucker commuted this guy’s sentence to make him parole eligible,” Huckabee says, as we sit in the back of the minivan. “Clinton knew it, Tucker did it, and now they try to blame me for it.” In 2002, several members of the parole board told the Arkansas Times that the governor had actively advocated for DuMond’s release behind the scenes. Huckabee calls this a lie, but he acknowledges he made a public appeal for the parole. “And I certainly regret that, in light of what happened,” he says.

This is not a mere mistake one can simply regret. It is the kind of mistake that demonstrates Huckabee’s overwhelming opportunism and willingness to blame others for his own failures.

There is no reason why this man should be taken seriously as a presidential contender. And there certainly is no reason why the press shouldn’t repeatedly ask him hard, informed questions about Dumond as long as he continues to run.

As for Huckabee’s alleged charm and likeability, it matters not so much as a goddam cent. Not if he’s so enthralled with right wing nuttiness he can’t see reality. Not if he is too lazy to find out the facts about a rapist he so eagerly wanted to release.

Serious People

by digby

Media Bloodhound just sent me the most fascinating FOX News transcript from January 2, 2000.

Can you guess who said this?

??????: Well, we do have a tendency to underrate the talents of our security people. I mean FBI, CIA do a much better job than they’re generally credited with.

But the fact is that there is a much less of a risk of terrorism today than there was 15, 20 years ago. I mean 15, 20 years ago we had the Soviet empire. It was financing, training, arming, smuggling, equipping terrorists all over the world, plus all the satellite countries, plus rich Iraq, rich Libya and Iran and so forth. And today the Soviet empire is gone.

Iraq is a shadow of what it was. Iran has less money to spend. Libya actually looks like it’s in fear of terrorism itself. So there’s less terrorism today. And we’re less at risk today than we were in the past. And I found frankly all the rhetoric and all the fear talk and all the how-to-do-it shows on the media forecasting scenarios of chemical weapons attacks in Washington and so forth to be a bit irresponsible and quite overblown.

[…]

??????: Well, nothing’s changed for 20 years so far as I can tell, except this ghastly terrorism bill that was passed by this administration, which…

TONY SNOW: Hold on; ghastly why?

?????: Because it creates these star chambers where people are accused of things: they never see evidence, they don’t know what they’re accused of, they’re thrown out of the country. I mean, if we have evidence against people we should introduce it. We shouldn’t just say, “Well, we made a mistake and let you in the country and we’re throwing you out, we won’t tell you why.”

Ralph Nader? Dennis Kucinich?

Nope

It’s Michael “bomb,bomb,bomb Iran” Ledeen.

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