Month: November 2007

The Village Fight Song

by digby

Kumbaaya.

Matthews asked David Gregory today about polarization:

Matthews: We all just saw that poll the other day — nearly 55% of married men say they’ll never vote for her. Doesn’t she walk into the white house nearly a pariah?

Gregory: And polarizing at a time when Americans are debating the why we didn’t have a debate about the war and other things … I just think that what Ron [Brownstein] wrote about the hyperpartisanship, we’re going to get into a new era of this, writ large. But at the same time, I mean this is the argument for engagement on the part of the public. If you step back and allow others to be engaged there are so many forces at work, entrenched interests as John Edwards might say, that they will decide this process for you and it will be a totally partisan divided process. And we have so many issues like the environment, war and other things that call for sacrifice.

That is truly moving, don’t you think? Here’s David Gregory all concerned about the “entrenched interests” who are “deciding this process” for us. I wonder who he’s talking about?

And naturally, what the country really needs is bipartisanship:

Brownstein: Even though the ratings and the best seller lists are kind of choosing up sides, I think most Americans would prefer a different kind of politics of consensus. I don’t think everyone wants to choose sides between Michael Moore and Ann Coulter, I think a lot of people are looking for a politics that’s more reasonable. because look, we are not able to resolve immigration, education, the environment, energy, health in this kind of divisive politics. We’re going to need something different if we’re going to get progress and that’s the task for whoever wins.

Brownstein has just written a book about all this, so he’s flogging his thesis. (And I haven’t read it so I can’t comment on it.) Apparently TV ratings, best seller lists, polls and any other measure of political belief. Brownstein just “knows” that none of that reflects what people actually believe — he knows they really want “reasonableness” (and, of course, compromise.) (And when it comes to the Village we know what that means don’t we?)

But I do have to wonder where all these people were when the Republicans were going against the will of the majority of the people in this country and impeaching a president for a trivial matter? (It seems to me that was “writ” pretty damned large.) Was that hyperpartisanhsip? Was it hyperpartisanship when they seized office after losing the popular vote and operated for six long years as if they had a clear mandate for every crackpot right wing wet dream that had been floating around since 1964? Was it hyperpartisanship when they said that anyone who opposed the president was unpatriotic or even treasonous? Has Rush Limbaugh been hyperpartisan for nearly 20 years? Was Tom Delay?

For some reason all this talk of how the American people really, really don’t like all this “polarization” and just want to have some “reasonable” people to come together and form a consensus wasn’t on the menu when the Republicans were in charge of everything and driving this country over a cliff. Then hyperpartisanship was called “the will of the people” even though Landslide Bush could hardly get over the finish line even in the middle of a war, and the congress was nearly evenly divided during his entire term.

Just as they never worried much about the threat to democracy caused by the Bush dynasty when Junior ran after his (failed) father had been either vice president or president for 12 years and are only noticing the dire consequences of such things since a Democratic dynasty threatens, these establishment pundits only seem to find partisanship distasteful when it’s being waged by liberals. When conservatives do it, it’s called “hardball politics” and they all admire them for sticking to their principles and representing their constituents. In fact, when they do it it’s assumed they represent the entire country even though they clearly don’t.

And the funny thing is that the allegedly hyperpartisan Democratic congress is actually allowing themselves to be punk’d over and over again by the the Republicans and are getting blamed for not getting anything done. Therefore, they are going to cry Uncle as loudly as they can so we can end all this unpleasantness and get back to the prized “consensus” that the Village Elders require.

And then Rush Limbaugh and Tom Tancredo will lead us all in a rousing round of Kumbaaya.

And BTW: I knew this would happen.

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Peter W. Pan

by digby

Nobody can accuse him of growing in the job…

US President George W. Bush had a shoot-out with the “bad guys” in Iraq on Thursday, playing a computer game with war veterans that simulates a firefight in Baghdad, the White House said.

Bush tried his hand at the game with two soldiers during a visit to a rehabilitation center in Texas that treats veterans wounded in Iraq.

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Bush helped “shoot the bad guys” in a Baghdad neighborhood, albeit virtually.

It’s a good thing they mark the “bad guys” in those games because if Junior had to tell the difference between civilian, insurgent, terrorist, Sunni, Shia or anything else, he would have gotten all frustrated and smashed that stupid old game all over the floor.

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Heeee’s Back

by digby

..and he’s become quite the pursed lipped scold now that he’s out of politics:

“The Web has given angry and vitriolic people more of a voice in public discourse,” said Mr. Rove, who served as one of President Bush’s top strategists until he resigned this past summer, and is a noted technology nut.

“People in the past who have been on the nutty fringe of political life, who were more or less voiceless, have now been given an inexpensive and easily accessible soapbox, a blog,” Mr. Rove said during a speech about politics and the Web at the Willard InterContinental, a hotel just blocks from his former place of employment.

Right. Angry vitriolic voices were silent until the internet came along and “gave them a voice.”

LIMBAUGH: And these American prisoners of war — have you people noticed who the torturers are? Women! The babes! The babes are meting out the torture…You know, if you look at — if you, really, if you look at these pictures, I mean, I don’t know if it’s just me, but it looks just like anything you’d see Madonna, or Britney Spears do on stage. Maybe I’m — yeah. And get an NEA grant for something like this. I mean, this is something that you can see on stage at Lincoln Center from an NEA grant, maybe on Sex in the City — the movie. I mean, I don’t — it’s just me.

LIMBAUGH: We killed his [Saddam Hussein’s] sons. We took his country. We put him in jail. He is still calmer and more rational than Howard Dean after he lost Iowa. He’s calmer and more rational than Gore after he lost his mind. He’s calmer and more rational than George Soros is.

LIMBAUGH: I mean, if there is a party that’s soulless, it’s the Democratic Party. If there are people by definition who are soulless, it is liberals — by definition. You know, souls come from God. You know? No. No. You can’t go there.

LIMBAUGH: Women still make up an average of only 13 percent of police officers… They’re never happy. And I don’t mean women. I’m talking about the activists. Don’t lose your cookies out there. This is according to the National Center for Women and Policing, which is a division of the Feminist Majority Foundation of American, which is the feminazis. This is exactly what I’m talking about. So what’s the reaction to this? Well, here’s my reaction, in the typical Rush fashion: If we’ve got four new female police chiefs out there, then I guess we can watch out for some naked pyramids among prisoners in these new jailhouses that these women ran, because we had a woman running the prison in Abu [Algore pronunciation] Grab. That’s how you do it.

VESTER: You say you’d rather not talk to liberals at all?

COULTER: I think a baseball bat is the most effective way these days. [FOX News Channel, DaySide with Linda Vester, 10/6]

“My pretty-girl allies stick out like a sore thumb amongst the corn-fed, no make-up, natural fiber, no-bra needing, sandal-wearing, hirsute, somewhat fragrant hippie-chick pie wagons they call “women” at the Democratic National Convention.”

SAVAGE: And we have all of the leaders — we have Obergrupenführer Clinton; we have Grupenführer Carter; we have Brigadeführer Daschle. … There are only a few rotten führers on the bottom of the corporals; they’re the ones wearing the little funny green costumes down there. But they’re all there. That’s how I see them.

DOBSON: How about group marriage? Or marriage between daddies and little girls? Or marriage between a man and his donkey? Anything allegedly linked to civil rights will be doable, and the legal underpinnings for marriage will have been destroyed.” Now, that’s more or less a prophecy. Not a divine prophecy, but a prediction.

ROBERTSON: You know, I don’t know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It’s a whole lot cheaper than starting a war.

MURDOCK:Though clearly uncomfortable, waterboarding loosens lips without causing permanent physical injuries (and unlikely even temporary ones). If terrorists suffer long-term nightmares about waterboarding, better that than more Americans crying themselves to sleep after their loved ones have been shredded by bombs or baked in skyscrapers.

In short, there is nothing “repugnant” about waterboarding.

Rove’s right about one thing: you can’t call any of those people part of the nutty fringe. This angry vitriolic blogger has been commenting on the state of our political discourse for some time and wrote this piece called “Limbaugh Nation” a while back in which I pointed out the salient difference between the netroots left and the talk radio right:

Notice how Limbaugh and the preachers pander to the depraved imagination? It’s not religious values these people are selling. They are selling a brutal, domineering, degenerate culture, making their listeners and viewers wallow in it, plumbing the depths of the subconscious, drawing forth Goyaesque images of bestiality and violence and death. That’s a feature of some religions, to be sure, but it’s not the nice upright Christian morality everybody’s pretending it is.

If the culture is careening into a crude, dog-eat-dog corrupt “Pottersville” it’s because the greedheads and the juvenile authoritarian thugs … have taken it over. And it is hard for liberals to counter this because our bedrock values include tolerance, free expression and personal autonomy and that enables this decadent turn in many ways. But let’s make no mistake, it is only on the right that purveyors of brutal, sadistic, depraved political discourse are welcomed into the houses, offices and beds of the nation’s political leadership.

Karl Rove is simply laughable in his new role as a political Miss Manners considering the company he keeps. In fact, it’s right up there with Tom DeLay calling himself a Christian.

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Huckabee Gets Another Free Ride

by tristero

C’mon, Salon. You know better.

The first fact anyone should know about Mike Huckabee is he is a man so opportunistic and ruthless – and so stupid – he proactively worked to release Wayne Dumond, a serial rapist and murderer, because he felt it would advance his political career. Putting the best spin possible on Huckabee’s behavior, the Dumond incident makes it very clear that Huckabee has such poor judgment he should be never be considered for a serious position in the US government, let alone the presidency, where his hand will rest on a nuclear button and some demented rightwing extremist could easily convince him to push it.*

But Dumond is not mentioned in Salon’s interview. What the hell is going on? Dumond may have been disappeared by the American press, but not to the women he raped and molested. Or to the families of his murder victim(s). And Huckabee bears responsibility for his release.

If you want to know who Huckabee is, and what this unforgivably ignorant and venal politician is capable of doing, start here and follow the links to careful investigative reporting of just how enthusiastically Huckabee “hearted” a serial rapist and murderer. It’s simply sickening that the press is permitting him to get away with his lying denials.

I, too, like entertainment and see no reason why political campaigns can’t be enjoyable, raucous, and exciting. In fact, they should be because it interests people and interested people may be more willing to vote. But permitting Huckabee to lie and conceal his involvement in the release of Wayne Dumond is totally reprehensible and irresponsible.

—

*”But everyone makes mistakes! And Huckabee’s acknowledged it.” apologists for Huckabee bleat. Releasing a serial rapist and murderer Steve Dunleavy’s hallucinated that he was actually a victim of Clinton vengeance is not a mere mistake. It demonstrates a total absence of judgement and good character. Remember, we are talking about the person who will serve as commander in chief of the largest army the world has ever seen. Huckabee has no business being taken seriously by anyone, let alone the media, as candidate for that office.

[Updated slightly for clarity.]

The Conscience Of A Liberal

by tristero

I just finished The Conscience of a Liberal by Paul Krugman. It is great.

In case you’re wondering, it is not a collection of Krugman’s columns but just as clearly written and intelligently argued. It is as compulsively readable as a great pageturner and it has enough good ideas to, well, advance a political movement.

I’ll try to post some brief excerpts soon.

In the Long Run Everything Will Turn Out Fine

for

…for millionaires and their kids.

Speaking of Jim Cramer, I just heard him casually claim on MSNBC that we will be paying 10 to 15 dollars a gallon for gas in the next five years. He didn’t say what would happen when a gallon of milk also costs $10.00 as a result.

Also, he assured us that if we get the right president in office “we’ll take a nasty recession” like Brazil did to get off the oil teat. Gotta be done people. Too bad about your (worthless) lives.

I always enjoy these financial gurus matter-of-factly telling us plebes we need to get royally fucked for the good of the country.

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Solidarity

photo courtesy IATSE

by digby

A couple of years ago you may all remember that the Southern California grocery workers went on strike. It was quite a long one, lasting several months and you could tell as you drove past the pickets that they were getting mighty frayed and tired toward the end. A surprisingly few number of people crossed the picket lines — we shopped at neighborhood grocery stores and those that hadn’t been struck, changing our habits in a simple show of solidarity.

Yesterday, I was at one of those stores and overheard a very heartening conversation between a couple of customers and a couple of grocery workers. The customers were members of the striking WGA and they were talking with the grocery guys about the strike. They were very animated, talking tactics and telling of their experiences as Union Men. It brought home to me again why unions are important.

You hear a lot of nasty snark in this town about how these WGA strikers are all millionaires playing at being hardhats, and it totally misses the point. The union movement is about solidarity, which is a fundamental progressive value. I have no idea if those fellows in the store were highly paid TV writers or hopeful freelance screenwriters or what, but it wasn’t relevant to the conversation. Those four guys had interests in common in their relationship to the owners of their industries. Unions are one of the vehicles that can make our capitalist society work to the benefit of all and not just the few.

The derisive tone much of the media has taken to the strike is nothing new, by the way. Just a few weeks back when the UAW went on strike against GM, Jim Cramer was apoplectic on Hardball screaming, “They have to break this union! They have to break this union!”(and Chris Salt-Of-The-Earth Matthews nodded in agreement.)

And they have always been especially hostile to the Hollywood unions, which were forged back in the day with battles in the streets. The right to organize in the entertainment business was extremely hard won and in many cases those who fought it were later blacklisted as commies for their trouble. It’s never been frivolous. The propensity to exploit in competitive “glamour” fields is very, very strong and it was always about making sure that those who weren’t on the A-list could make a decent living and build normal middle class lives. (And from the beginning many of the A-list marched in solidarity with their less rich and famous brethren. It may even have been partially in self-interest. Show business may be one of the most insecure professions on earth.)

Perhaps the seminal event in Hollywood organizing history is called “The War for Warner Brothers”:

By early October 1945 [the union] was not just running out of money, it was running out of patience. Temperatures were at record highs and nerves were frazzled. CSU President, Herb Sorrell, decided to make a stand at Warner Bros. On October 5th, some 300 strikers gather at Warner Bros. main gate at 4 A.M. on a typically warm day during this pivotal month. Shortly thereafter, strikebreakers, Chicago goons and county police attacked. They were armed with chains, bolts, hammers, six inch pipes, brass knuckles, wooden mallets and battery cables. The county sheriffs marched two and three abreast, steel-helmeted and reinforced with tear gas masks, and night sticks, Some carried 30-30 Garrand rifles and two were weighted down with an arsenal of tear gas bombs. The Warner Bros. studio police lobbed canisters of tear-gas from the roofs of the buildings at the entrance.

Pickets had their own “white-painted air-raid warden helmets” that shone eerily in the predawn gloom. These helmets and weapons added to the perception that this strike had become a pitched battle, a war. As Sorrell recalled it, “First, they drove through the picket lines at a high rate of speed, several cars. I think we took four people to the hospital. The fire hoses were dragged out; they turned them on the people’s feet and just swept them right out from under… they threw tear gas bombs… there were women knocked down… It was a slaughter.” The riot at Warner Bros. hit Hollywood and the nation like a thunderclap.

This wasn’t the only fight. There were the writers, actors, animators and others all forging their right to organize with very, very tough strikes. Their unions were extremely hard won.

Today the writers are striking because the industry financial models are changing and the owners are refusing to fairly compensate writers within these models. They do it every time and every time the writers and actors and others have to fight the battle anew. Today we aren’t seeing blood in the streets, and that’s a big relief. But the principles are always the same. It isn’t about the rare millionare writer. It’s about the many more numerous union members who aren’t millionaires and live on those residuals and need those pension and health care benefits. The union is the only security they have.

I was listening to the radio the other day and Paul Krugman was on taking calls. A woman on the show was bemoaning the fact that so many jobs were being outsourced and wondering how we could possibly compete in a global economy. Krugman relied, “One word. Unions.” He pointed out that all the other first world economies in Europe and Canada have a much higher rate of unionization that we do. The breaking of the unions in this country was obviously not essential for economic growth — it was done for political reasons to benefit the right wing and its corporate owners. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Unions and the solidarity it promotes are an important key to a progressive America, whether it’s the Writers Guild or the UAW or the janitors or the health care workers. They promote a strong and stable middle class — and help us see ourselves as one people with common interests.

If you want to learn more about the strike this is a good place to go. If you live in LA or New York, you can help the union by keeping abreast of the news and showing up at the picket lines to show support. you can sign a petition of support here. And we can all help workers everywhere by voting for politicians who support the union movement. It’s the American way.

There once was a union maid, she never was afraid
Of goons and ginks and company finks and the deputy sheriffs who made the raid.
She went to the union hall when a meeting it was called,
And when the Legion boys come ’round
She always stood her ground.

CHORUS:
Oh, you can’t scare me, I’m sticking to the union,
I’m sticking to the union, I’m sticking to the union.
Oh, you can’t scare me, I’m sticking to the union,
I’m sticking to the union ’til the day I die.

Update: For those of you in the LA area, the picketers are going to be at Fox Studios (10201 Pico) at 10 AM tomorrow. I’m told there will be a big show of solidarity from SAG so there should be some people you recognize. (You can park at the century City Mall and walk over.)

A big fan turnout would be helpful. The one thing the studios really don’t want is a consumer backlash — and it would mean a lot to the writers.

Correction: A reader writes in to remind me that:

Only one store in Southern California was actually struck. The other two chains did a lockout of workers. This was a union-busting move by the supermarkets to prevent the unions from doing rolling strikes (which would have inconvenienced southern Californians a lot less).

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Woof!

by tristero

From former Senator (thank God) Rick Santorum:

For our system to work, we must be able to debate issues civilly and compromise.

In response, I can do no better than to quote Richard Cheney’s immortal words:

Fuck yourself.

Oh, but let’s hear from Santorum himself:

What the Democrats are doing is the equivalent of Adolf Hitler in 1942 saying, ‘I’m in Paris. How dare you invade me. How dare you bomb my city? It’s mine.’ This is no more the rule of the senate than it was the rule of the senate before not to filibuster.

Courtesy Political Wire

We’ll have our opportunity someday, and we’ll make sure there’s not another liberal judge — ever!

The Badger Herald

I’m sure he was taken entirely out of context.

Feel free to add your own examples of Santorum practicing what he preaches. Like when Santorum ran out of a room, knocking over chairs, rather than sit and explain himself to the parents of a gay son. Very civil of him.

Boys Gone Wild

by digby

Jonathan Chait wrote a famous essay on the Netroots that concluded with this thought:

Conservatives have crowed for years that they have “won the war of ideas.” More often than not, such boasts include a citation of Richard Weaver’s famous dictum, “Ideas have consequences.” A war of ideas, though, is not an intellectual process; it is a political process. As my colleague Leon Wieseltier has written, “[I]f you are chiefly interested in the consequences, then you are not chiefly interested in the ideas.” The netroots, like most of the conservative movement, is interested in the consequences, not the ideas. The battle is being joined at last.

It’s clear in that article that unlike us scruffy, instrumentalist blogofacists,(and our right wing dopplegangers) Chait believes The New Republic is all about those highminded ideas. I wonder if he would consider explaining what “idea”the following article is exploring:

Jenna vs. Chelsea
Who’s the least virtuous first daughter?

For a long time, it seemed as if Jenna Bush’s public image was pretty much summed up by her work on the club circuit. Back in 2005, the New York Post made mention of a party that included “Jenna on all fours doing ‘the butt dance’ … as guys were ogling her thong.” If the First Twin’s choice of recreational activities wasn’t entirely bad–for instance, the Post’s source gave Jenna credit for “doing [the butt dance] very well”–then neither was it entirely good. By contrast, Chelsea Clinton learned the hard way about what can come of impromptu displays of thong and, so far, has covered her rear. It’s no surprise that her Poise Count–the number of LexisNexis articles resulting from the word “poise” paired with her name–clocks in at 770, while Jenna trails at 144. Chelsea was the accomplished Stanford graduate living a quiet life in New York, while Jenna was the not-so-accomplished University of Texas graduate living a loud life in–well, wherever she happened to go drinking.

The butt dance, however, turned out to be the end of an era for Jenna. Shortly after the Post story, she began teaching at a public elementary school in Washington, D.C. She got engaged to a young conservative named Henry Hager, a former aide to Karl Rove. And she took a job as an intern for UNICEF and wrote a book called Ana’s Story, a nicely rendered nonfiction account of the life of a 17-year-old Central American mother living with HIV. If it’s all a calculated effort to re-tune the Jenna product, it has worked on me. In fact, the closer I look, the more I like Jenna. And, I regret to say, the less I like Chelsea.

[…]

… Blame The New York Times for planting the first unfriendly thoughts in my head. In an article published this July, the paper unkindly reminded readers that Chelsea, in the months after September 11, had written in Talk magazine that “‘serving’ in the broadest sense now seems like the only thing to do. … Is banking what’s important right now?” To which the Times not so gently pointed out that Chelsea’s post-9/11 resume has consisted of stints as a McKinsey consultant and as an investment analyst at Avenue Capital, a hedge fund run by the nuns of Calcutta. Oh, sorry–make that Clinton donor Marc Lasry.

[…]

…it all seems a bit–much. Quoth the Times: “Friends say financial independence is important to Ms. Clinton; she may improve on her low-six-figure McKinsey salary by hundreds of thousands of dollars.” That’s quite a declaration of financial independence.

And Chelsea didn’t exactly spend her Oxford days tending to the world’s unfortunates, either: Among the events she attended were a Versace couture show in Paris (sitting next to Madonna and Gwyneth Paltrow), a ball thrown by Sir Elton John, and a film premiere with Paul McCartney. Nor did she join her British celebrity friends in visiting landmine amputees, unless the amputees happened to be holed up at Oscar de la Renta’s Dominican villa. In New York, Chelsea has befriended celebrities like Tara Reid (who, to be fair, may actually qualify as a public service cause) and become a regular at establishments like Schiller’s and Bungalow 8. In short, while Jenna has used her celebrity–at least in part–to help impoverished children, Chelsea has used her celebrity to get herself good tables at Nobu.

It goes on like that for an interminable length of time and ends with this:

Now, I’m sure many readers will complain that neither Jenna nor Chelsea deserves such scrutiny. But, like it or not, they’re from families that have become dynasties. Bush and Clinton aren’t just names anymore; they’re brands. When Jenna gets sloshed and does the butt dance while others go to war, it hurts the Bush brand. When she interns with UNICEF, it helps the brand. When Chelsea holds hands with her parents while the family is immersed in scandal, it helps the Clinton brand. When Chelsea talks about service and then serves herself some hedge fund megabucks, it hurts the brand. And we care about the brand, because our political hopes often rest on its success or failure.

I don’t know what to say. I think it’s supposed to be funny, but I’m not actually sure. Is this some kind of “Borat” from another dimension thing and I’m just not hip enough to get the joke?

I guess obsessing on the daughters is the in thing among a certain crowd this week. This is from Andrew Romano at Newsweek:

[W]ho’s the next Jenna Bush?

Before her recent makeover as an author, caring humanitarian and blushing bride-to-be, Jenna was our brash, boozy, barely legal hellraiser-in-chief. Sure, Stumper respects the difficult choices confronting America as it prepares to head to the polls. But sometimes the utterly insignificant stuff–like which candidate’s daughter is most likely to replace our beloved Bush twin in the tabloids–is a lot more fun. Plus, the election is a year away. We’ll have plenty of time to get heavy, people.

Here, then, are our exclusive rankings of eight potential Jenna 2.0’s. The methodology was simple: read up on the contenders, compare their hijinks to Jenna’s, then rate the lovely ladies of 2008 from one (unlike Jenna) to 10 (like Jenna) on our totally arbitrary Jennometer ®.

The writer evidently scoured the internet for every embarrassing tabloid item he could find and searched Facebook and Myspace for personal details about these girls and women. At one point he begs for “photos, folks. We need photos.” (The good news is that he didn’t seem to feel it necessary to see little six year old Sasha Obama in a miniskirt.)

I don’t know, maybe I’m losing my sense of humor. But this puts these women and girls on the gossip menu and I just don’t think that’s necessary. Apparently the “first daughter” thing is some sort of sexual fantasy among a certain political geek type, but it’s probably best to keep those immature thoughts among their beer drinking buddies (and in their pants) if they write for major magazines that pride themselves on intellectual rigor — and news. I’m afraid it’s kind of hard to take them seriously after baring their puerile ids like that for all to see.

In case they didn’t know it, these young women are all real live humans, with feelings and everything. They didn’t ask for notoriety — their parents are public servants. What exactly have they done to be spoken of like they are all auditioning for these men’s private “Girls Gone Wild” tape?

Certainly, nobody can truly believe that we vote for “brands” and because these women and girls share that “brand” they are answerable to the public? Surely great intellectuals who traffic in great, important “ideas” would never seriously believe such intellectual drivel as that, would they?

H/T to Bob

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Falling In Line

by digby

Via Kevin, I find this from Rich Lowry:

Just talked to a top social conservative. He says, hinting that more prominent social cons will end up going with Rudy, “There’s plenty more where this comes from.” On the impact of the Robertson endorsement on the race: “What it does for Rudy is it says, ‘It’s OK to vote for Rudy.’ I think there will be more of that, pre-nomination and post-nomination.” On conservative evangelical voters and Giuliani: “If Rudy is the nominee, they’re going to vote for him — period.”

I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so. Back in March actually.

It’s possible that these people will reject Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani for the same “moral” reasons they condemned Clinton. But I very much doubt it. Dobson and Falwell and all these guys are hucksters and the people who follow them either have no moral consistency or they are shallow and insincere. Oh, they’ll find some lame rationale, as all Republicans do, but it’s long been clear that the only thing that matters to them is that the candidate be a member in good standing of the tribe and that they pay tribute to the High Priests.

I continue to wonder when the Democratic establishment is going to recognize that the Christian Right is run by a bunch of powerful phonies and that this small slice of the American electorate has been the tail that very cleverly wagged the dog of American politics for far too long.

(I thought at the time they’d end up backing Gingrich, but Newtie doesn’t have the sadistic torture thing going for him and that really turns on the folks.)

Kevin also asks if Giuliani will appeal more to these young, moderate evangelicals who everybody’s so excited about. I wrote about that too a while back based on this article:

Rebuffing Christian radio commentator James C. Dobson, the board of directors of the National Association of Evangelicals reaffirmed its position that environmental protection, which it calls “creation care,” is an important moral issue.

Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, and two dozen other conservative Christian leaders, including Gary L. Bauer, Tony Perkins and Paul M. Weyrich, sent the board a letter this month denouncing the association’s vice president, the Rev. Richard Cizik, for urging attention to global warming.

The letter argued that evangelicals are divided on whether climate change is a real problem, and it said that “Cizik and others are using the global warming controversy to shift the emphasis away from the great moral issues of our time,” such as abortion and same-sex marriage.

If Cizik “cannot be trusted to articulate the views of American evangelicals on environmental issues, then we respectfully suggest that he be encouraged to resign his position with the NAE,” the letter concluded.

The Rev. Leith Anderson, the association’s president, said yesterday that the board did not respond to the letter during a two-day meeting that ended Friday in Minneapolis. But, he said, the board reaffirmed a 2004 position paper, “For the Health of the Nations,” that outlined seven areas of civic responsibility for evangelicals, including creation care along with religious freedom, nurturing the family, sanctity of life, compassion for the poor, human rights and restraining violence.

My comment was:

I heard CNN say that Giuliani is up 16 points now on McCain and that he is just as popular among social conservatives as other Republicans. This makes me wonder about the above. Giuliani holds the opposite views of these evangelicals on every single issue. He is an economic conservative, anti-family values, anti-environmentalist, pro-choice and pro-gay rights. On human rights and restraining violence, he is completely off the scale. There is literally nothing that any of the evangelicals in this article have in common with Giuliani — except, perhaps, his authoritarian leadership style, which is what I think controls most Republicans.

I have seen nothing to change my mind. The Religious Right will back Rudy. And they know that Rudy will probably lose. But by falling in line they will keep their seat at the table — and blame the loss on the fact that Rudy wasn’t a social conservative. I don’t know how many times they can run this game, but it’s all they’ve got. Their real problem is that they hit their high water mark over a decade ago:

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