Month: January 2008

Hardball Freakshow

by digby

He just can’t help himself. Raw Story has the latest on Matthews (w/video):

“Let’s not forget, and I’ll be brutal, the reason she’s a US Senator, the reason she’s a candidate for President, the reason she may be a front runner, is that her husband messed around,” Matthews pronounced Wednesday on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.

That observation opened the oft-criticized Hardball host to another round of criticism in the blogosphere. The hosts of The View, ABC’s daytime chat show aimed at women, weighed in on Matthew’s punditry as well.

“I’m very careful here as you know … not to give my personal opinions,” Barbara Walters said. “I had thought that people in news didn’t do that. Forget it. The way to get ratings: Come out and slam.”

Joy Behar chimed in: “It’s almost like a pile-on of these men against her, and I think they’re going to get the real backlash for it.”

Matthews took offense at Walters’ insinuation and took to Morning Joe Friday morning to defend himself. Host Joe Scarborough began with a nice ad hominem attack on Walters.

“Chris, we don’t want to take sides,” former GOP congressman Scarborough said innocently. “So I’m not gonna bring up the fact that Barbara Walters, a journalist, told Nancy Pelosi she wanted to have sex with Nancy Pelosi’s husband. We also will not bring up that journalist Barbara Walters told Faith Hill she wanted to have sex, on air, with Tim McGraw. Instead, I’m just going to ask you this straight question: Does Barbara Walters have a point?”

(For the record, Walters told Hill, “We’d all like to do your husband [Tim McGraw],” but she said it was co-host Whoopie Goldberg who “would like to do” Pelosi’s husband.) [And what in the hell does any of that have to do with politics anyway? WTF? — d]

Matthews said it was Clinton’s performance campaigning for New York Sen. Chuck Schumer in 1998, after revelations of her husband’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, that launched her own senate bid two years later. He said Walters and Behar — whose name he either was unable to remember or refused to acknowledge — had their facts wrong.

“Those are this historic facts, Barbara and the other woman, those are the historic facts. I know how you play to a crowd, I know how talk radio works, which is the way a lot of programs work, where you find something to argue about,” Matthews said.

“If Barbara Walters wants to debate history, and politics and what’s happened in this country the last 50 years, if she wants to go on Jeopardy and see what she knows and what I know, I’ll take her on,” Matthews promised. “If any of the women on that show want to take me on on historic political information … let’s talk political history. Let’s talk facts, not opinions, facts, and I’ll take them on.”

This is a very interesting thesis. But it’s a little chicken or the egg, don’t you think? It’s just as likely that it was the pathological desire of the press corps to flay Bill Clinton for something the rest of the country believed was trivial that propelled Hillary’s run — and win — for the Senate. (The Tweety Effect.)

In any case, his thesis is not a matter of “fact” or “historical political information.” Indeed, if you want to get a load of what Matthews thinks he knows about recent political history, all you have to do is look at this:

Michael, Michael, there’s a big difference between what happened to Al Gore and John Kerry. John Kerry got hit unfairly by the Swift Boats attacking his service to his country. They conflated his opposition to the war when he came back which we can all argue about, and his service to his country which is not really arguable. They trashed him.

But in terms of Al Gore, he’s the one who said he created the internet, he’s the one who put out the word that he’s the subject or the role model for Love Story, that he pointed the country’s attention to Love Canal. He stuck himself into that story.

And when Marty Peretz’s daughter wrote that story in Vanity Fair a couple of months ago, I’m sorry, she didn’t make the case. Gore got himself in those problem areas by vanity and showing off an trying to make himself cool. But John Kerry got unfair treatment. I think it’s a big difference guys.

I don’t think I need to point out the “facts” he gets wrong on that. (Not to mention that he gave endless free airtime to the swiftboaters to “make their case” so his late realization that they were a bunch of frauds rings a little bit hollow as well.)

One of the things the village idiots like Matthews continuously fail to understand is that voters don’t like the media trying to “take down” politicians on their own, against the will of the people. We inconvenient citizens don’t have much in this system but the right to vote for our representatives — when these elites decide all on their own that we’ve made the wrong choice (or that we’re about to) we tend to get a little bit testy.

Bob Somerby, Media Matters and the blogosphere have been documenting the Matthews dementia for years. The man has serious psychological issues with gender and sexuality, from embarrassing codpiece worship to blatant sexism, which seems to be the prism through which he views American politics and which he cannot seem to control. Since we are dealing with the first serious female candidate for president, his public neuroses made him the poster boy for the general misogynistic coverage of her candidacy and a biased, wrongly called election. A badly called election, by the way, which is largely believed to have been the result, at least in part, of a backlash against the media’s premature obituary and stomach churning arrogant schaudenfreude.

If Walters and Behar want to “take him on” all they need to do is read the archives of The Daily Howler and Media Matters for all the “facts” and “data” they need. There’s a paper trail all the way to upstate New York.

The other day I posted about a Working Assets petition about Matthews. Media Matters has also launched an email drive today.

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Close Guantanamo

by digby

If you’ve been tooling around the blogosphere today you may have noticed that the ACLU is sponsoring “Close Guantanamo Day.” You can find out more about it by clicking the ad on the left. (Do any of you Deaniacs still have your orange hats?)

The ACLU asked that we write blog posts about Gitmo and help educate our readers on the subject. I thought it would be more helpful to simply point you to one of the great, underused resources of the left blogsphere today: the interviews of attorneys and journalists involved in the war on terror and Guantanamo which have been done over the past several years at The Talking Dog:

Here’s an excerpt of his interview with journalist David Rose:

The Talking Dog: Have you had a chance to return to Guantanamo since he publication of your book, Guantanamo: The War on Human Rights?

David Rose: I tried to go to Guantanamo last June (of 2006). I was all set to cover the first military commission trials, when the news broke of the suicides of three detainees. The Pentagon suddenly revoked my clearance. Then, as I was in Washington, I managed to get a new clearance, faxed to my hotel, and we arranged transport by a circuitous route on civilian aircraft via Miami and Kingston, Jamaica, but ultimately, the Defense Department refused to let me in at that time, and I have not been back.

The Talking Dog: Do you have a comment on why, to this day, American detention policy, whether at Guantanamo, Bagram, Kandahar, Iraq, or elsewhere, including the ghost prisons and rendition program, remain a much bigger issue in Europe and outside of the United States than they do inside of the United States?

David Rose: In all fairness, it has become a far bigger issue in the United States since I wrote the book. Of course, John Kerry did not mention this at all when he ran for President– not one mention of Guantanamo. Large numbers of Americans think it is just perfectly fine to hold people this way. They don’t see the broader issues– that Guantanamo and America’s treatment of detainees is virtually a recruiting sergeant for terrorists, and that the policy is misguided ethically and counterproductive in achieving the supposed goals of fighting terrorism.

The Talking Dog: What were your impressions of General Geoffrey Miller, formerly commanding officer at Guantanamo and later at Abu Ghraib, when you met him?

David Rose: General Miller is a forceful, gung ho character to be sure. He was very keen to talk of his achievements, and the achievements of his staff. He is also very scary. He had no background whatsoever in intelligence or in interrogations- he was an artillery officer. In his view, intelligence gathering was a volume business- so many pages of transcripts, as if interrogations were equivalent to hitting targets with artillery rounds. He was very dogmatic, and very difficult to talk to. Quite frightening, actually.

The Talking Dog: Were there any other military or government officials that made an impression on you when you met them at Guantanamo?

David Rose: Two certainly come to mind. One was Louis Louk, then the chief surgeon, who left Guantanamo before the advent of the force-feeding regime. He made a comment about a detainee who wanted to kill himself being “a spoiled brat”. I found that troubling, actually.

The other was the chaplain (not Captain Yee, the Moslem chaplain), but the chief chaplain, a Baptist, I believe, Steve Feehan. He viewed the detainees as second class human beings– which I found quite troubling for a man of the cloth.

The Talking Dog: Do you have a comment on American media coverage of its government’s detention policy?

David Rose: There has been very distinguished reporting in the Washington Post and the New York Times, with the Washington Post probably the best. I have enormous admiration for Jane Mayer and the work she has done in the New Yorker on this. Of course, large swathes of Middle America read nothing about any of this, and certainly, the networks are not covering it. But for various reasons, including early acceptance of governmental statements about holding “terrorists”, many people, including many in the media, have uncritically accepted the government’s explanations.

The Talking Dog: One section of your book is called “The Least Worst Place” and notes that one of the original premises for the selection of Guantanamo as a detention facility was that it was, uniquely perhaps, beyond the jurisdiction of the country it was in, Cuba, and yet still arguably beyond the jurisdiction of the USA, the country that controls it. That fiction seemed to have been previously rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court, but now seems to have reemerged in a decision this week by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in Washington. Do you have a comment on that?

David Rose: The Court of Appeals Judgment deferred to the Congress. I’m sure that there is some constitutional authority supporting that. The Supreme Court is in no hurry to hear the case. British jurist Lord Steyn called Guantanamo a legal black hole– and the legal black hole has been dug again. The only way this will change is politically. This Administration has resisted the impact even of adverse decisions of the Supreme Court.

To change this, one would think that a crushing defeat for the Republican Party might help…

Back in the day I wrote a lot about General Geoffrey Miller, the half-mad artillery officer they sent to run Gitmo and then Abu Ghraib, whose policies led to the atrocities we all witnessed in those famous photographs.

Today the authorities claim that any resistance, within the camp, even self-destructive protest, is not the act of desperate men but an act of war:

Rear Admiral Harris is adamant that the people in his care are well looked after and are enemies of the United States.

He told me they use any weapon they can – including their own urine and faeces – to continue to wage war on the United States.

The suicide of three detainees, he reaffirmed to me, amounted to “asymmetrical warfare.”

Those are the words of severely deluded, paranoid authoritarianism. It isn’t just that Guantanamo is destroying our moral authority around the world. It’s destroying us from within. It must be closed.

Here’s a handy compendium of TTD’s interviews:

Readers interested in legal issues and related matters associated with the “war on terror” may also find talking dog blog interviews with attorneys Angela Campbell, Stephen Truitt and Charles Carpenter, Gaillard Hunt, Robert Rachlin, Tina Foster, Brent Mickum, Marc Falkoff H. Candace Gorman, Eric Freedman, Michael Ratner, Thomas Wilner, Jonathan Hafetz, Joshua Denbeaux, Rick Wilson,
Neal Katyal, Joshua Colangelo Bryan, Baher Azmy, and Joshua Dratel (representing Guantanamo detainees and others held in “the war on terror”), with attorneys Donna Newman and Andrew Patel (representing “unlawful combatant” Jose Padilila), with Dr. David Nicholl, who spearheaded an effort among international physicians protesting force-feeding of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, with physician and bioethicist Dr. Steven Miles on medical complicity in torture, with law professor and former Clinton Administration Ambassador-at-large for war crimes matters David Scheffer, with former Guantanamo detainees Moazzam Begg and Shafiq Rasul , with former Guantanamo Bay Chaplain James Yee, with former Guantanamo Army Arabic linguist Erik Saar, with law professor and former Army J.A.G. officer Jeffrey Addicott, with law professor and Coast Guard officer Glenn Sulmasy, with author and geographer Trevor Paglen and with author and journalist Stephen Grey on the subject of the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program, with journalist and author David Rose on Guantanamo, with journalist Michael Otterman on the subject of American torture and related issues, and with author and historian Andy Worthington detailing the capture and provenance of all of the Guantanamo detainees, to be of interest.*

*List updated

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The Choices We Have

by dday

So yesterday, we learned that the phone companies are so committed to helping the Bush Adminstration defeat the enemies of freedom that they would only cut off illegal wiretaps if the bills weren’t paid, not because they were, uh, illegal.

In at least one case, a wiretap used in a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act investigation ”was halted due to untimely payment,” the audit found. FISA wiretaps are used in the government’s most sensitive and secretive criminal and intelligence investigations, and allow eavesdropping on suspected terrorists or spies.

”We also found that late payments have resulted in telecommunications carriers actually disconnecting phone lines established to deliver surveillance results to the FBI, resulting in lost evidence,” according to the audit by Inspector General Glenn A. Fine.

True patriots, eh? When duty called, when September 11 happened (oh, wait, actually before September 11 happened), these brave footsoldiers in the trash-the-Constitution movement were more than willing to charge the government millions. Of course, the fact that the Administration let these kinds of bills go unpaid is ridiculous, too, but nobody’s really covered in glory here. Especially when these are the same phone companies who want full amnesty for this lawbreaking, and the Administration has made it their top priority to deliver it to them.

In the wake of this, Harry Reid, if the Wall Street Journal can be believed, is looking to punt on FISA reform.

We’re told that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is saying privately he now won’t attempt to update the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) on the wiretapping of al Qaeda suspects. Instead, he’ll merely support another 18-month extension of the six-month-old Protect America Act. Among other problems, the temporary bill includes no retroactive immunity for the telecom companies that cooperated with the feds after 9/11.

Now, let’s remember that the Protect America Act was a piece of garbage that gave Bush everything he wanted, with the exception of telecom amnesty. Michael McConnell and the booga-booga brigade pretended that the terrorists were a-comin’ to every member of Congress’ house, and they capitulated almost completely. The civil liberties protections are negligible and the surveillance is virtually unlimited. The version of the FISA bill passed by the House was designed to fix this abomination, to need to do which is recognized by absolutely every Democrat.

So if this is indeed Reid’s strategy, our options are now: maintain a bill that shreds the Fourth Amendment, or put forth a new bill that gives a little protection to the Fourth Amendment but lets the rapacious phone companies off the hook.

Remember, this is a Democratic Congress.

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Full Circle

by dday

“Go back to bed, America, your government has figured out how it all transpired. Go back to bed America, your government is in control. Here, here’s American Gladiators. Watch this, shut up, go back to bed America, here is American Gladiators, here is 56 channels of it! Watch these pituitary retards bang their fucking skulls together and congratulate you on the living in the land of freedom. Here you go America – you are free to do what well tell you! You are free to do what we tell you!”

-Bill Hicks, 1991

American Gladiators: A Breakout Hit?

Is “American Gladiators” the unexpected hit of the 2007-08 television season?

It’s far too early to say anything definitive, but Sunday’s two-hour premiere of the NBC reality competition “delivered the highest ratings among adults 18 to 49 of any new show this season on any network,” Benjamin Toff noted earlier this week.

The program drew an average of 12 million viewers on Sunday, gaining viewers during each half hour, and another 11 million when a second episode was shown in what will become its normal time slot on Monday night. This week a repeat will be shown on Sunday at 10 p.m., in a time slot originally filled by the Golden Globes.

Ah, progress.

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Huckabee On Evolution

by tristero

Here’s Mike Huckabee lying about his views on evolution:

Huckabee said he has no problem with teaching evolution as a theory in the public schools and he doesn’t expect schools to teach creationism.

‘We shouldn’t indoctrinate kids in school,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t want them teaching creationism as if it’s the only thing that they should teach.'”

Y’see, he’s a sensible nut job. Huckabee says creationism shouldn’t be the only “theory” taught in high school biology.

But that’s a lie. In fact, his behavior demonstrates that actually, he wants to eliminate evolution from the public high school classroom. PZ Myers found this report on Huckabee’s disgraceful record as governor of Arkansas when it comes to educating children:

During Huckabee’s tenure as Governor, evolution education in Arkansas languished in an environment of general hostility and insufficiency. Two anti-evolution bills were introduced in the state’s House of Representatives; textbooks in the Beebe, Arkansas public high school carried disclaimer stickers denigrating evolution; the state’s science curriculum earned a grade of “D” overall and an abysmal “zero” for its treatment of evolution; a creationist “museum” enjoyed state-funded advertising; and evolution was systematically and broadly squeezed out of schools and other educational institutions across the state. Huckabee did nothing to deter any of this – in fact, some of his public statements might indicate his tacit support.

Tacit support is being far too cautious. From his statements, it’s clear Huckabee has no clear notion of consensual reality. And that, as we’ve learned in the 21st Century, is downright dangerous in a president.

Here Huckabee – that nice “aw shucks” likeable Gomer everyone talks about – gets downright hostile when asked about evolution. And he thoroughly evades the question for as long as he can:

Notice: He was asked about the evolution of life. He answers with a non-sequitur, about the creation of the universe, which Darwin and evolutionary theory never addresses. (And note that Blitzer falls for the bait and switch.)

His answer, of course, was carefully constructed and memorized gobbledy-gook he vomits up whenever the subject of evolution is broached. Here he again uses that variant of Soapy Sam’s hoary line in his debate with Huxley:

…after evolution came up in a debate earlier this year, Huckabee said in a conference call with reporters, “If you want to believe that you and your family came from apes, that’s fine. I’ll accept that. I just don’t happen to think that I did”

And here he repeats his opening gambit from the debate

I’m not sure what in the world that has to do with being president of the United States.

This is the only thing Huckabee’s said which I completely believe. He simply has no idea why being knowledgeable about a subject and grounded in reality might be useful in a president.

Sadly, neither do a lot of Republicans who have catapulted him to serious consideration as their nominee for president. And, in some ways even worse, neither do the denizens of the sober, serious national press, who have colluded with Huckabee to give him national stature.

Folks, this is what you call a litmus test. If a presidential candidate doesn’t have a steady grasp on reality, they have no business being even considered for president. Huckabee doesn’t. Not only that, he doesn’t think it’s important.

Forgive me. I understand Huckabee is a laughable clown. But I don’t find this funny in the least.

Oh, Hell

by tristero

For those of you who thought the war on evolution was over, it’s not. And this is no joke. It means that high school students in Florida run the risk of being unprepared for college-level biology. And if this garbage spreads, all of us will suffer the consequences as the US slips further and further behind in science. Truly, the anti-science rightwing nuts really hate this country.

Unfortunately, there is only one way to stop these people. If you care about science and you live in places where creationists are active you might consider making the effort to run for a place on the school boards.

The right wing keeps trying to make it harder and harder to be an American. But if you wanna live here, and you want a functioning democracy again, you have absolutely no choice but somehow to get active.

[Edited slightly for style after initial posting.]

Tweety’s New Meme

by digby

Matthews flogged the Bradley Effect yesterday like he’d just discovered gold … in his pants. Among other panels with whom he blathered on endlessly on the topic, he had Pat Buchanan, Dr. Eric Dyson and Dee Dee Myers on. Dr. Dyson felt there was evidence of the Bradley Effect and Buchanan disagreed:

Buchanan: …I think there’s a lot of special pleading here, going on right now. All those races you mentioned were general election races. This was a race inside the Democratic Party. Hillary Clinton benefited from a surge of women to her candidacy. Edwards collapsed. The Bradley Effect cannot explain why Edwards did so poorly when the pollsters said he was going to beat Hillary Clinton. I think the piling on by the media, and the gloating over her tears, and people thinking coming out of Iowa that you’re supposed to coronate Barack Obama was a tremendous backlash among New Hampshire, voters and independents said you’re not gonna impose your fellow on us, we’ll choose our own, and the women said we’re gonna go in there and we’re gonna pick up Hillary Rodham Clinton and stop what’s bein’ done to her.

Matthews: You sound like Alan Alda Pat. Where’s this new sensitivity towards women’s aspiration coming from?

Buchanan: Look I think the Obama spinners and the media are trying to explain why they have egg all over their faces. By doing this you are tarnishing Hillary Clinton’s victory and tarnishing the Democratic Party as racist.

Matthews: No, no that’s not what I’m doing here. I’m trying to explain.

Buchanan: Well, whoever’s attacking this Chris, whoever says this was racism was tarnishing the Democratic Party and…

Matthews: We’ll see in future elections. First of all, everything we’re talking about right now will be tested in future elections. because we’ll have a lot of these primaries and caucuses. Dee Dee get in here, and talk about this. Do you remember the Tom Bradley campaign?

Myers: I do. There’s no question that people went into, they were embarrassed to tell pollsters that they wouldn’t vote for an African American and were uncomfortable doing that and so there was this giant disparity between what the campaign expected and what actually happened. I think Pat makes a good point. This is a Democratic primary and it’s a different universe. I don’t know, you know we hope against hope that that’s not happening in a Democratic primary. I don’t think we know yet and …

I think Pat’s right on the money though. I think women stood up and, even women who weren’t for her two days ago, who were lukewarm to her saw what they saw as piling on.

Dyson countered that Pat Buchanan was discounting the element of race. Buchanan again said that Dyson was trying to tarnish Hillary’s victory and explained that even his wife and daughter, staunch Republicans, were disgusted by the media treatment of Hillary in the final days and that the numbers quite clearly indicate it was women surging to Hillary, not secret racism that accounted for the polling discrepancy.

Up to this point it had been a fairly reasonable disagreement, which there is no real way to resolve. Was it a strong women’s vote, The Bradley Effect, good turn-out something else or elements of all of them?

And then the discussion took a turn:

Dyson: I’m glad to see that Pat Buchanan is coming to the defense of those who are battered because enough women and minorities, Latinos and Hispanics and a whole bunch of Arabs in this country, and Jews and Italians and Poles have been battered. The reality is this. In a particular race for a heated debate over a very powerful victory like the presidency, certainly race comes into play… I’m not suggesting that it is the central line here, I’m suggesting that it plays a role and that despite the fact that I agree that Hillary was being pounced on in a very serious and severe fashion and women identified with her. But that doesn’t mean that women who identified with Hillary Clinton are not also motivated by racial considerations.

That’s a very hot accusation in a Democratic primary to suggest that the women who voted for Hillary didn’t do it as a matter of affinity but rather did it because they couldn’t vote for an African American and had earlier lied to pollsters about it. (That’s what the Bradley Effect is.) It’s possible that it’s true, but it’s a provocative accusation about a specific group of voters in the Democratic coalition.

Of course, we can depend on Buchanan to take the discussion all the way into the swamp:

Buchanan: Would you not agree that racial considerations have entered the equation to make Barack Obama so beloved and heroic, he’s our savior,and all this other nonsense. Race had nothing to do with that?

Dyson: No, no, no. Barack Obama has overcome despite the racial realities. Barack Obama has had to walk in to the room proving that he is highly intelligent, highly literate, capable of transcending any tribal loyalties to articulate a transcendent vision that speaks to the entire universe of political reality.

Dyson said that Obama wasn’t running as a “race man” which Buchanan agreed with, backhandedly complimenting Obama on not getting involved with the “Jena nonsense” and the whole thing devolved into some ugly crosstalk about “noblesse oblige” and competition between “race and gender.” Matthews eventually tried to pin Dyson down and admit that Hillary’s crying jag brought out a bunch of addled old Golden Girls to vote for her and then pin Buchanan down that they were also racists who couldn’t wait to pull the lever against the uppity African American. That’s called “fair and balanced” on a show like this.

The takeaway “insight” from this Hardball was that the Democratic race is now a battle between the racist old bitches and the sexist African Americans. Fabulous. (White men like Chris, you’ll notice, are the only ones voting purely on the merits in this little scenario.)

Dyson, by the way, gave a critique that I would hope the Obama campaign will think twice about:

Dyson: All I’m suggesting is that even though her tears, the sentiment that was being expressed because of all the tiredness, her verklempt moment that you talked about, was also the articulation of an idea that I find troublesome. That is to suggest that “I am THE only person. I’m gonna get it right, he’s gonna get it wrong,” and there’s an implicit racial subtext to that: “don’t let a black man run this country.”

I’m not black so maybe I can’t hear a racist argument when it’s spoken, I’ll grant that. But these candidates are pretty close on policy so they have to run on something. If Dyson is suggesting that it’s racist for his opponents to say that he will not make as good a president as they will, then his opponents literally have no argument to make for their candidacy that isn’t racist. In any case, it’s very hard for me to see how anyone could run if he or she can’t criticize his or her opponent on judgment, experience, positions and policies and suggest that they’re going to get it wrong and you’ll get it right.

Certainly it was racist for Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani to make a big deal out of Obama’s teenage drug use up in New Hampshire and for Billy Shaheen to talk that up as a reason to vote against him. I don’t believe anybody thinks otherwise. But Dyson’s argument about the racist sub-text of him getting it wrong and her getting it right doesn’t seem persuasive to me. I’ll be interested to hear what people think about that.

Eric Dyson is a very, very smart guy and it appears to me that he’s setting up the South Carolina primary, with its large African American constituency with an argument that Clinton (and people who vote for her) have racist tendencies. Jesse Jackson Jr, made asimilar comments yesterday, so it’s likely a conscious campaign strategy. Perhaps it will work.

But making a big deal out of The Bradley Effect will end up weakening Obama overall in my view. Pat Buchanan shockingly wasn’t too far off in his assessment: if people begin to actually believe Obama can’t win even in a Democratic primary, because of hidden racism, it could become a self-fulfilling prophesy. I can’t see why Obama’s spokesmen would want to get this meme started. People who are on the fence could easily get the idea that it’s not worth voting for him because the racists are all lying to the pollsters and he can’t win.

I certainly don’t want people believing there’s no hope for an African American to win. That would be profoundly depressing — and I’m not at all convinced it’s true. And for a whole host of reasons it sure won’t help Democrats in the fall to give people any reason to believe that racism is still a deciding factor in American politics.

I suppose we’ll see in future contests if this same phenomenon presents itself. If it does, then we will have to face the music. But I see absolutely no reason for Democrats to be out there potentially making it a reality based upon one small sample of voters.

As that little display between Buchanan and Dyson shows, this is potentially an ugly road to walk and I really hope that none of the campaigns wander too far down it. Matthews will certainly be there pimping it every day: he and his friends have already shown their colors on gender and now they’re going to be flogging this “hidden racist Democrats” issue day in and day out. I don’t see why any Democrat would want to help him do it.

Update: The Hillary Effect may be another explanation for what happened. From my count there are about 377 reasons for why Hillary beat Obama in New Hampshire by three points, all of them fascinating, none of them provable. I think everyone’s overthinking it just a tad, including me. It’s just one primary.

Update II: Oh fergawdsake. Like clockwork, here comes a stupid Clinton surrogate, Andrew Cuomo, mouthing some racially charged nonsense. Ugh.

I guess we’re going there. Great. Wonderful. Perfect.

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Straits of Tonkin

by dday

After a few days of scrutiny, the Straits of Hormuz “incident” with Iranian gunships is completely falling apart. Not for the President – he’s still using it as a scaremongering tool – but for anyone who’s seriously looking at this thing.

It’s important to note that non-events like this happen in the Gulf with regularity. In military parlance it’s described as “free training”. And certainly, from the video released by the Pentagon, it doesn’t look like a whole lot more than that. I guess they felt like they had to spruce it up more. So they added this additional audio track that sounds like a random bad guy from Iron Eagle or something, threatening the American ships:

That audio really makes you laugh out loud. Apparently there are plenty of people at the Pentagon who feel the same way:

The list of those who are less than fully confident in the Pentagon’s video/audio mashup of aggressive maneuvers by Iranian boats near American warships in the Strait of Hormuz now includes the Pentagon itself.

Unnamed Pentagon officials said on Wednesday that the threatening voice heard in the audio clip, which was released on Monday night with a disclaimer that it was recorded separately from the video images and merged with them later, is not directly traceable to the Iranian military.

I think it’s more directly traceable to a Hollywood soundstage. There’s no background audio behind the “Iranian,” yet he’s supposed to be on a gunship with an outboard motor? This has to be the rationalization of the century from the spokesliars at the Pentagon:

Pentagon officials said they could not rule out that the broadcast might have come from shore, or from another ship nearby, although it might have come from one of the five fast boats with a high-quality radio system.

As emptywheel said,

Oh yeah. Those fancy Iranian motorboats have such high-quality radio systems that they filter out the ambient noise of an outboard motor working at full speed while the tape taken from the US ship, taken at least partially inside the bridge, itself has the noise of a ship at sea.

That extra audio, which is the only thread between this and a perfunctory and meaningless incident, could easily have been chatter from the shoreline about the incident, kind of a “Mystery Science Theater 3000” version of what happened. It sure isn’t credible that it came from the boat.

All ships at sea use a common UHF frequency, Channel 16, also known as “bridge-to bridge” radio. Over here, near the U.S., and throughout the Mediterranean, Ch. 16 is used pretty professionally, i.e., chatter is limited to shiphandling issues, identifying yourself, telling other ships what your intentions are to avoid mishaps, etc.

But over in the Gulf, Ch. 16 is like a bad CB radio. Everybody and their brother is on it; chattering away; hurling racial slurs, usually involving Filipinos (lots of Filipinos work in the area); curses involving your mother; 1970’s music broadcast in the wee hours (nothing odder than hearing The Carpenters 50 miles off the coast of Iran at 4 a.m.)

On Ch. 16, esp. in that section of the Gulf, slurs/threats/chatter/etc. is commonplace. So my first thought was that the “explode” comment might not have even come from one of the Iranian craft, but some loser monitoring the events at a shore facility.

The timing here is very ironic, and not because it matches up with the President’s trip to the Middle East (hey guess what, he can snap his fingers and deliver a Palestinian state! Presidentin’ is easy!). This comes in a week when newly released reports from the NSA reveal that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was definitively a hoax.

The author of the report “demonstrates that not only is it not true, as (then US) secretary of defense Robert McNamara told Congress, that the evidence of an attack was ‘unimpeachable,’ but that to the contrary, a review of the classified signals intelligence proves that ‘no attack happened that night,'” FAS said in a statement.

“What this study demonstrated is that the available intelligence shows that there was no attack. It’s a dramatic reversal of the historical record,” Aftergood said.

“There were previous indications of this but this is the first time we have seen the complete study,” he said.

I don’t think this Straits of Hormuz incident is going to have the same impact as the Gulf of Tonkin, except in maybe making “I’m coming at you” the “Don’t tase me bro” catchphrase of 2008. But it’s clear that both incidents share the desire to generate propaganda for the purposes of serving foreign policy goals. In 1964 they pulled it off. In 2008, with little credibility for this government, they had to show their work. And it’s about the level of a junior high school crank call.

An Argument

by tristero

Awe-inspiring.

Her Own Favorite Theory

by tristero

Gail Collins thinks she’s solved the profound mystery of why Clinton won in New Hampshire:

My own favorite theory is that this week, Hillary was a stand-in for every woman who’s overdosed on multitasking. They grabbed at the opportunity to have kids/go back to school/start a business/become a lawyer. But there are days when they can’t meet everybody’s needs and the men in their lives — loved ones and otherwise — make them feel like failures or towers of self-involvement. And the deal is that they can either suck it up or look like a baby.

Oh, I could write megapixels on the serial misconceptions in just those few sentences. But let’s go on:

The women whose heart went out to Hillary knew that it wasn’t rational. She asked for this race, and if she was exhausted, the other candidates were, too. (John McCain is 71 and tired and nobody felt sorry for him.) The front-runner always gets ganged up on in debates. If her campaign was in shambles, it was her job to fix it or take the consequences. But for one moment, women knew just how Hillary felt, and they gave her a sympathy vote. It wasn’t a long-term commitment, just a brief strike by the sisters against their overscheduled world.

Don’t you just love it when someone in the mainstream media tells us that women behave irrationally? In the 21st Century no less?

Okay, to her credit, Collins does consider an alternative:

Or it could just have been a better get-out-the-vote operation.

Well, yes, I admit it. A good “get-out-the-vote operation” is probably helpful in winning the New Hampshire primary. I suspect that bathing every day and changing your clothes every once in a while is also helpful. But normally, I wouldn’t think it was worth mentioning something so obvious in a column for what was once the most prized op-ed page in the country.

Now what you’ve read so far from Collins’ column, dear reader, are all too typical examples of the kind of boilerplate stupidity that passes for public discourse in these…interesting times. Nothing special, merely infuriating.

But don’t touch that dial! For I’m about to reveal what makes Collins’ column so incredibly weird. She actually seems to know why Clinton won. But either she can’t believe it matters or she simply can’t resist being a clown (or both). I’ve quoted above from the end of her column. Here are some excerpts from earlier moments. I don’t have to tell you to notice the “tedium” and the gratuitous hedging:

Clinton actually seems most genuine when she’s being dull. She’s gone back to talking about policy with voters. That’s just the way she saved her first Senate campaign by disappearing into the depths of upstate New York for an endless listening tour that drove reporters mad with tedium but seemed to make the citizens very happy…

…when she started answering questions, she got very Hillary — talking about carbon neutrality and H.M.O. payments and procurement reform, ticking off her five-point plans and three-part explanations. The large crowd, which had been standing in a high school gym for nearly two hours before she arrived, seemed to enjoy it. Her bond with the people isn’t a passionate one, but when it works, it’s a genuine connection that starts with the belief that she will work really, really hard on their behalf.

Apparently, to Collins, the reason Clinton won had very little to do with the fact she’s willing to listen to voters. Or that she knows what she’s talking about on a myriad of issues, any one of which is far beyond the capability of Collins’ pea brain to master. Or that voters actually do care about these issues and care that someone has thought them through and can be articulate and organized in discussing them (flashback: “Is our children learning?” Oh such a charming manly codpiece of a man!). Or that voters weighed what Clinton proposed and concluded they were pretty good ideas, and that she made a better case than her rivals.

No, sez Collins. Clinton won because women – and all New Hampshire women are multi-tasking city slickers like Collins and her friends – identified with Clinton. And you know what that is? That’s pseudo-psychoanalytic horseshit. It assumes adults are still inevitably grappling first and foremost with issues of separation/individuation and failing. It assumes grown up women are simply incapable of making a mature decision based on rational appraisals of information. It is not only specious crap. It is insultingly elitist and sexist specious crap.

In other words, it’s high time for Gail Collins to recognize that while she, and Chris Matthews, and so many others who opine for a living, are condemned to go through life with a 3-year old’s capacity to reason (and feel), those voters who stood for 2 hours while Clinton explained her policies are not.

But, of course, they never will. People as immature as Collins simply can’t imagine anyone different from themselves. That’s the point. They have as much business having an opportunity to influence American public opinion as a seven-year old has flying a plane. The consequences are most likely to be, and have been, catastrophic.

As the campaign continues, voters will continue to listen to what Clinton and the other candidates have to say. Perhaps they will continue to believe her ideas and approach will be the most helpful. Perhaps they will find someone else, Obama or Edwards maybe, more persuasive. The debate over ideas and proposals won’t make a bit of difference to Gail Collins and her ilk.

Oh, yes, emotional appeals and perception are certainly important factors in choosing a candidate. Maybe all that research is right and they are the most important factors. But maybe it’s also the case that ideas matter, that voters do care about the substance of what the candidates say, and maybe, just maybe, it would be a good idea every one in a while to focus on that, without condescension and with real comprehension about what’s at stake in this terribly critical election.