Month: January 2008

Rally ‘Round The Flag

by dday

This may be a little thing, but signs that a war where Americans are still dying is intractable doesn’t seem to me to be that little.

Officials in Iraq’s mostly Sunni Muslim Anbar province are refusing to raise Iraq’s new national flag, which the parliament approved earlier this week.

“The new flag is done for a foreign agenda and we won’t raise it,” said Ali Hatem al Suleiman, a leading member of the U.S.-backed Anbar Awakening Council, “If they want to force us to raise it, we will leave the yard for them to fight al Qaida.”

Why have the Sunnis in Anbar turned against the Iraqi flag?

A slim minority of parliamentarians approved the new flag, which doesn’t have Saddam Hussein’s handwriting or the three stars that represented his Sunni-dominated Baath Party.

It was rushed through parliament before a pan-Arab parliament meeting that’s planned for March in Irbil, in the Kurdish north, because the Kurdish Regional Government prohibits flying Iraq’s Saddam-era flag. The Kurds consider that flag a symbol of Saddam’s oppression.

Only 165 of the Iraqi parliament’s 275 lawmakers were present Tuesday, and only 110 voted for the new red, white and black flag with “Allahu Akbar” (“God is great”) in Kufic script, the ancient calligraphy developed in Mesopotamia.

You have a “country” which can’t even be united under something as symbolic as the same flag. Somehow the Administration still believes that steps are being taken toward reconciliation. And this is not just a Sunni-Shi’a thing:

Many Iraqis, including some lawmakers who rejected the flag, were angered at what they considered a change to the flag in order to please the Kurdish north and its president, Massoud Barzani.

“We don’t want to handle the problem of the Kurdistan region by causing problems with other regions that might refuse the new flag,” said Nassar al Rubaie, the head of radical Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al Sadr’s bloc in parliament, who voted against the new flag.

The country cannot be brought together under the same banner; at least, not in the fashion that has been attempted thus far.

Meanwhile, the over-under on sentences about Iraq in the State of the Union tonight is 3.

.

Stepping Up

by digby

Firedoglake reports that both Senator Clinton and Senator Obama are going to be in the Senate tomorrow to vote no on cloture on the FISA bill. Ari Melber at The Nation explains what’s going on:

President Bush is now daring Congress to defy his demand for more unchecked power to spy on Americans without warrants, vowing to veto temporary surveillance legislation and politicize his last State of the Union address for an attack on Democrats. Last week, Democratic leaders were considering a bill to grant a one-month extension of the administration’s spying powers, a “compromise” tilted in Bush’s favor, but Republican tactics have finally tried the patience of Majority Leader Harry Reid. He had been managing floor votes to advance the Republican bill and squash opposition from the majority of Democrats within his caucus, but that may change this week… read on

And he lays out what out two front runners might do about it:

And what, exactly, can they do? I see three major options:

1. Use their influence and political capital to recruit two more votes for the Leahy bill. That’s all Leahy, Feingold and Dodd need to keep their fight alive under the current rules. Obama and Clinton were endorsed by a total of seven senators who voted the wrong way last week. As DFA explains, “if these presidential hopefuls bring along the support of these senators, they can sustain a planned filibuster [and] defeat any cloture vote.”

2. Use their influence and political capital to press Reid to run the floor for the Leahy bill, instead of the Bush-Rockefeller bill. This is is tough for several reasons, but there’s an opening now that Bush has essentially slapped Reid around and drawn some rhetorical pushback.

3. Rally the Democratic Congress to confront Bush’s veto threat. Send the one-month bill to his desk and let this unpopular president remind the entire country of his irresponsible, cynical approach to governing. Maybe his approval ratings will drop into the teens like his Vice President. (I personally favor this third option the least, since it involves gamesmanship instead of a long-term policy, which Leahy’s bill offers.)

Or they could channel Harry Reid, complaining about Bush while essentially allowing him to win again.

Will it be door number 1,2,3 or 4? The truth is that it’s mostly a symbolic thing for the Monday leading up the SOTU, and that’s not a bad thing. It’s a hell of a lot better that they’re taking a public stand on this than if they weren’t. But the action is going to be on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday and I will be shocked if either of them come off the road that long to participate. It’s possible they’ll exert some of their power and round up their endorsers, but it doesn’t seem likely.

Still, on balance, this is better than I expected and maybe they can at least get the news media to pay attention to this issue with a couple of rousing speeches in defense of the rule of law. The gasbags can waste days talking about ephemeral, campaign trail dust-ups so maybe they can find a couple of minutes to talk about the constitution.

.

Rudy No Go

by digby

I’ve seen some spectacular political flameouts in my day, but this is one for the books:

Ex-New York mayor Rudy Giuliani took a further hit on Sunday, when a poll showed he dropped to fourth place ahead of Florida’s Republican primary, which looked set to be a tight race between John McCain and Mitt Romney.

And, just days ahead of Tuesday’s voting, McCain got a major boost with the endorsement of Florida Governor Charlie Crist, who enjoys popularity levels of around 70 percent in the state.

The Arizona senator and Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, both scored 30 percent of the vote in a Zogby poll out on Sunday.

Giuliani got only 13 percent, which placed him one percentage point behind former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee.

Now we know from hard experience that it’s possible that the polls are wrong, but there’s really no reason to believe that Rudy is going to pull this out.

What happened? My suspicion is that his absurd braggadocio about everything 9/11 just finally became too much. He was a mayor. He wasn’t Patton or Churchill and the only thing he did was wander around on the ground and hold press conferences, which was only meaningful by comparison to the president who ran around the first day like he didn’t know what to do.

His “foreign policy” was completely nuts, even in by the standards of the Republican nut grove. He sounds like he’s foaming at the mouth when he talks about “Islamofascism” and “staying on offense.” There’s just something a little bit crazy in his eyes that probably makes even right wingers worry that his aggressiveness might be a bit much. His domestic policy is even worse. He goes around saying stuff like “We’ve got to let them take the risk–do they want to be covered? Do they want health insurance? Because ultimately, if they don’t, well, then, they may not be taken care of.”

Mostly, though, I think it’s that he has virtually no appealing positive attributes. He’s not funny, he’s not compassionate, he’s not somebody you’d want to have a beer with and with all of his gloating and bragging, he’s just an unpleasant, creepy fellow. I honestly can’t figure out why New Yorkers elected him except that he must have been better than the other guy.

It was always going to be hard for twice divorced, pro-choice serial adulterer from New York City to win the nomination. He would have had to have at least been a flamboyant war hero to make all that national security stuff scan. But he was a mayor, not a general, and everything that has come out of his mouthabout 9/11 and “staying on offense” sounds like nothing so much as some sad small man trying to puff himself up to look bigger than he is. New York City doesn’t have an army and this guy tries to make it sound like he led the invasion of Normandy. He’s ridiculous.

How much money has Rudy blown to get absolutely nowhere? The latest fundraising reports are due January 30th. But as of last September 30th he had spent 30 million dollars.

.

White Flag

by digby

clammyc over at Dkos discusses this mindblowing article in today’s Boston Globe about what’s going on in Afghanistan and Pakistan. As he wryly observes, it’s not as exciting as watching Tweety and Blitzer slobber and squeal over every nuance of the candidates’ canned talking points, but it is actually important. The article says:

Sometime in mid-December, as the winter winds howled across the snow-dusted hills of Pakistan’s inhospitable border regions, 40 men representing Taliban groups all across Pakistan’s northwest frontier came together to unify under a single banner and to choose a leader.

The banner was Tehrik-e- Taliban Pakistan, or the Taliban Movement of Pakistan, with a fighting force estimated at up to 40,000. And the leader was Baitullah Mehsud, the man Pakistan accuses of assassinating former prime minister Benazir Bhutto.

The move is an attempt to present a united front against the Pakistani Army, which has been fighting insurgents along the border with Afghanistan. It is also the latest sign of the rise of Mehsud, considered the deadliest of the Taliban mullahs or clerics in northwest Pakistan.

That’s excellent news. Meanwhile, the Man Called Petraeus is doing another round of PR on television this morning explaining that troops are going to be in Iraq for years, although we know things are going very well because Iraqis “are shouldering more and more and more of the security burdens. And I think the most clear indicator of that, the clearest indicator, is the fact that their losses are about approaching three times our losses.” Man, what a “metric.”

clammyc points out, however, that even some in Cheneyland are getting a teensy bitconcerned:

And right on cue – only five years after neglecting Afghanistan and Pakistan as well as the Taliban and the real al Qaeda, the Bush administration is starting to realize that “shit” and “fan” have been on a collision course for quite some time:

In a shift with profound implications, the Bush administration is attempting to re-energize its terrorism-fighting war efforts in Afghanistan, the original target of a post-Sept. 11 offensive. The U.S. also is refocusing on Pakistan, where a regenerating al-Qaida is posing fresh threats. There is growing recognition that the United States risks further setbacks, if not deepening conflict or even defeat, in Afghanistan, and that success in that country hinges on stopping Pakistan from descending into disorder. Privately, some senior U.S. military commanders say Pakistan’s tribal areas are at the center of the fight against Islamic extremism; more so than Iraq, or even Afghanistan. These areas border on eastern Afghanistan and provide haven for al-Qaida and Taliban fighters to regroup, rearm and reorganize.

No kidding. (I know. It’s enough to make your head explode, isn’t it?)

Back in the day when we were all writing about Afghanistan and the Taliban that was common knowledge, conventional wisdom. John Kerry made a big deal in 2004 about Tora Bora and the wild absurdity of pulling the focus away from al Qaeda. People may have thought that was a political ploy but it wasn’t. Iraq was a massive distraction and waste of time and money right in the middle of a damned serious problem with Islamic fundamentalism. There’s a reason why Jim Webb called it the greatest strategic blunder in modern memory all the way back in ’04. It was.

It’s possible that this reconstituted Taliban are just a bunch of losers sitting in the mountains with big dreams. But if they actually did assassinated Bhutto (with the help of the Pakistan security services, which is likely) this is no joke. Pakistan is the most unstable nuclear armed country we’ve ever seen and the potential for catastrophe is actually quite real. The fact that we have the entire US military bogged down in a useless occupation, while the Republican candidates are running around muttering incoherently about staying there for a thousand years or waving the white flag of surrender to al Qaeda in Iraq is further testament to how delusional the GOP remains on this subject.

clammy continues:

[T]his month alone has seen major attacks and violence in Pakistan (other than the obvious being the Bhutto assassination), and there has been concern about NATO troops being defeated by the Taliban in Afghanistan for almost a year now. On top of this, I was in Canada less than two weeks ago, and there were a number of stories each day about their troops being killed in Afghanistan. And in today’s Winnipeg Sun, there is this stark assessment:

So far, most NATO countries have been deaf to Canada’s cries for help in the deadly Kandahar region where Manley says our troops are waging a losing battle without reinforcements. —snip— The U.S. recently said it would deploy 3,200 more marines to Afghanistan on a temporary basis — seven months in and out.

I’ll point out that the US is being so generous with their “renewed refocus” on Afghanistan that we are only sending 3,200 marines to Afghanistan on a temporary basis, haven’t come up with any kind of big picture strategy to deal with the mess that was made by ignoring the Taliban and al Qaeda for 5 years since cutting and running from Afghanistan.

There are so many lethal landmines the Bush administration has left laying around that it’s hard to know where to take the first step. From the economy to Iraq to the environment to energy to the engorged new police state to terrorism, everything is in so much worse shape than it was before they took office that it’s hard to know what to do first. But when it comes to national security, it doesn’t seem to be any more obvious than this. Afghanistan and Pakistan are dangerous and unstable and one hopes that a new administration will be prepared to deal with it being even more dangerous and unstable than it is today. The Bush administration is highly to leave this mess even worse than it is today.

I can’t help but be reminded of this once again:

The roots of the crisis go back to the blind bargain Washington made after 9/11 with the regime that had heretofore been the Taliban‘s main patron: ignoring Musharraf’s despotism in return for his promises to crack down on al-Qaeda and cut the Taliban loose. Today, despite $10 billion in U.S. aid to Pakistan since 2001, that bargain is in tatters; the Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan, and al-Qaeda’s senior leadership has set up another haven inside Pakistan’s chaotic border regions.The problem is exacerbated by a dramatic drop-off in U.S. expertise on Pakistan. Retired American officials say that, for the first time in U.S. history, nobody with serious Pakistan experience is working in the South Asia bureau of the State Department, on State’s policy planning staff, on the National Security Council staff or even in Vice President Cheney‘s office. Anne W. Patterson, the new U.S. ambassador to Islamabad, is an expert on Latin American “drugs and thugs”; Richard A. Boucher, the assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian affairs, is a former department spokesman who served three tours in Hong Kong and China but never was posted in South Asia. “They know nothing of Pakistan,” a former senior U.S. diplomat said.Current and past U.S. officials tell me that Pakistan policy is essentially being run from Cheney’s office. The vice president, they say, is close to Musharraf and refuses to brook any U.S. criticism of him. This all fits; in recent months, I’m told, Pakistani opposition politicians visiting Washington have been ushered in to meet Cheney’s aides, rather than taken to the State Department.

That’s the Bush/Cheney legacy: whatever they touched turned to shit. And they did it all with the enthusiastic encouragement of nearly the entire political and media establishment.

.

The New Field Frontier

by digby

One of the most interesting things about this primary race is something that nobody’s talking about, but it’s hugely important and may make the difference come November.

Matt Stoller wrote about it in The Nation this week:

About twice as many Democrats voted in Iowa as Republicans. “We’d better be careful as a party,” Mike Huckabee warned his fellow Republicans in the wake of the Iowa caucuses, “because if we don’t give people something to be for, and only something to be against, we’re going to lose that next election, and there are some fundamental issues that we lose with it.” Mike Podhorzer, deputy political director of the AFL-CIO, puts it this way: “You have dead turnout on the Republican side and insane turnout on the Democratic side.”

There are, no doubt, a number of factors driving the disparity: the amount of money Democrats have sunk into the early states has quadrupled since 2004, and polls show that Democratic voters are confident their nominee will eventually win, while half of Republican voters are so demoralized they’re considering a third-party option [see Micah Sifry, page 24]. But there’s also a more prosaic explanation: since 2004, because of a mixture of improved technology, better organizers and more investment in voter contact, Democratic campaigns have simply gotten better at talking to more people.

It is prosaic, but it’s important. One of the big successes of the Obama campaign, for instance, is the successful courting of the ever elusive youth vote, which has been touted as the promised land so often that older cynics like me are prone to dismiss it out of hand. But it seems to be real this time and it has to do with the inspirational style and generational identification with the candidate but also the technology the campaign is using to reach their potential voters.

Stoller gives a fascinating (to political junkies anyway) primer on how studies have shown that people make their decisions to vote and goes into detail about how this new field operation (which is not confined to Obama, by the way, but is merely being used effectively to tap into the younger voters who like him)was developed over the past couple of voting cycles.

Stoller concludes:

These systemic changes considered in isolation can seem arcane, but they all facilitate a larger cultural movement, one that points toward a very different kind of postbroadcast politics. As author Seth Godin, who analyzes consumer trends, explains it, “The key assumption in the analysis of typical field organizers is this: one persuaded equals 1.1 or perhaps 1.5 votes. In other words, the multiplier is very small. That’s why you need to run lots of ads and do lots of direct mail. It’s not very efficient, it’s very expensive, but you can really pile it on. The idea is that if you hit someone ten or twenty or a thousand times, sooner or later you’ll get some conversion. Obama and [Ron] Paul do different math. They assume a multiplier of three or even six. Which means that creating (and living) a story that turns people evangelical is far more efficient than hewing to the middle of the road. They assume that if they can create a passionate, raving fan, they’ll be able to translate that into a virus, an idea that spreads and scales over time. When that happens, they end up stoking the fire instead of lighting a lot of matches over and over again. Starbucks did this, believe it or not. They converted people into coffee fiends (particularly Starbucks fiends), who then converted their friends. And it happens on the net all the time.”

In the post-1972 TV era, Democratic campaigns didn’t have the tools or trained organizers available to direct large numbers of volunteers efficiently to where they needed to be. Now they do. And social networks like Facebook, Blackplanet, blogs and SMS, as well as basic e-mail, can be layered onto the clean new databases to reach voters wherever they are, for much less money than TV advertising. We are in the middle of a massive wave of campaign innovation, led by organizers who will eventually spread outward to every nook and cranny of progressive politics. The larger significance of this architectural revolution in progressive politics isn’t clear, but it is the first sustained challenge to the dominance of television and direct mail in the political system since those media displaced urban party machines in the 1960s. For now, it’s working against Republicans: “Democrats have a very significant natural advantage in the technology area, which is that younger people are much more Democratic,” said Podhorzer. But this advantage isn’t permanent. “If the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s have a lesson, it’s that the inherent character of the shift in technology, whether it’s to direct mail or broadcast or social networks, may have some bias toward one ideological side or another, but it also matters what the players do. Something may in its first, completely anarchic moments favor one side, but in the end it’s not like the major economic interests that create a right wing in the country say, ‘Oops, they’ve got the answer; now we’re not going to win anymore.'”

That’s certainly true. But this election on the Republican side is so deranged that you have to assume they actually want to lose, which I think is actually the case. They need some daylight between them and the Bush administration failures. (The Republicans are very adept at advancing their agenda even when they lose. They actually prefer being the fly in the progressive ointment in many ways and the Democrats have never figured out how to deal with the fact that they get off on messing with their heads as much as messing with their agenda. But I digress…)

This is an exciting development. The conservative movement was built on direct mail. All the big movement strategists and GOP political strategists made their bones figuring out how to properly target their voters and build a bigger coalition. They aren’t up to speed on this new electronic frontier, largely because their message and agenda just don’t resonate with the younger people who are comfortable in it. As the article says, that will change, both as the Republicans learn how to harness it effectively and the population ages. But right now, it’s wide open for progressivism and that is good news.

Update: Here’s an interesting post on this subject pertaining to Mike Huckabee.

.

Saturday Night At the Movies

Divine Trash, Hidden Jewels-Part 5

By Dennis Hartley

This week I am continuing a series that I am posting on occasion, spotlighting some films you may have missed, and that your humble reviewer thinks are worth the search and a peek on a slow night (or this time of year, to keep you amused while you’re stuck in bed with the flu-like I was for most of last week). So drink plenty of fluids, infuse yourself with some C and echinacea, and take one of these every two hours:

Cabin Boy -This twisted little adventure tale is either a full-sail comedy classic or a rudderless shipwreck, depending on your opinion of star Chris Elliott. The man who created FDR: The One-Man Show and the short-lived cult TV series Get A Life embarks on a rollicking voyage through a sea of irony when his “fancy lad” books passage on the barely seaworthy fishing boat “The Filthy Whore”. It’s kind of like The 7th Voyage of Sinbad on crack. Look fast for David Letterman’s hilarious cameo. Great support by Brian Doyle-Murray, Russ Tamblyn (as a Mer-Man!) and especially Ann Magnuson as a sex-starved, multi-limbed wife of a cranky ogre. The late Brion James (who you may remember as the replicant Leon in Blade Runner) gets to deliver the best line: “Oh-purple lightning. THAT’S always a good sign.” Don’t throw this one back!

Withnail and I -This brilliant 1987 film was an instant cult hit in England and has slowly gained devotees on this side of the pond. Writer-director Bruce Robinson maps the metaphysical death of the “swinging” 1960’s through the story of two impoverished actors who slog through 1969 London with high hopes and low squalor. Richard E. Grant’s turn as the alarmingly pallid and decadently wasted Withnail is the stuff of acting legend, and he is ably supported by the “I” of the title, portrayed by Paul McGann. The two flat mates, desperate for a break from their cramped, heatless apartment, take a road trip to the “country” (remember the “locals” in Straw Dogs?), and harrowing hilarity ensues. There are so many great lines, you might as well put quotation marks at the beginning and end of the script! The overall tone is reminiscent of the substance-fueled paranoia that pervaded Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, but filtered through a very wry British sensibility. Richard Griffiths excels as Withnail’s creepy Uncle Monty, and you won’t soon forget the scene-stealing philosophical drug dealer, Danny (Ralph Brown).

No Such Thing -Director Hal Hartley’s subtly arch, deadpan observations on the human condition either completely grab you or leave you cold, and this modern Beauty and the Beast tale is no exception. A TV news intern (Sarah Polley) gets her Big Break when she is sent to Iceland to get the exclusive on a real “monster” (Robert Burke), an immortal nihilist who kills the boredom by drinking heavily and terrorizing whoever’s handy. After her plane goes down en route, her cynical boss (played with relish by Helen Mirren) smells an even bigger story when Polley winds up as the “miracle survivor” of the tragedy. The Monster agrees to come back to N.Y.C. if Polley helps him track down the one scientist in the world who can be his Dr. Kevorkian and put him out of his misery. The pacing in the first half is leisurely yet compelling, with the Monster’s morose, raving monologues set against the stark, moody Icelandic backdrop (I was reminded of David Thewlis’ raging, darkly funny harangues in Naked). Once the movie heads for New York, however, the story steers closer to satirical camp (a la Pecker) where the couple quickly become celebrities “du jour” with the trendy Downtown crowd. Obscure, but definitely worthwhile. This would make an interesting companion piece to the 2005 film, Beowulf and Grendel, in which Polley essentially reprises the same role.

J-Men Forever! -Woody Allen may have done it first (What’s Up, Tiger Lily?) and myriad installments of Mystery Science Theater 3000 may have since run the concept into the ground, but IMHO Firesign Theater veterans Phil Proctor and Peter Bergman did it best with J-Men Forever. I am referring to the comedic concept of taking footage from corny, no-budget films and dubbing new dialogue. I originally became a devotee of this film after it aired several times on the USA Network’s after hours cult show Night Flight back in the early-to-mid 80s (alright, raise your bong if you remember that one!) The creators obviously had a sizable archive from the old Republic serials to dip into, so they were not restricted by the original narrative structure of one individual film. As a result, J-Men Forever benefits from a quick-cut style that keeps perfect time with the rapid-fire one-liners, double entendres and high-energy rock music soundtrack. Fans of irreverent (but smart) comedy will not want to miss. Schtay high!

All of these titles are available on DVD. Oh-and get well soon.

In case you want more ideas, here are the links to previous installments in this series:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

.

Winning Large

by digby

Congratulations to Senator Obama! He has won South Carolina in a landslide and with 24% of white voters to boot. I think that should put to rest the idea that he has somehow become the “black” candidate and can’t compete. The Democrats aren’t going to win South Carolina in the general — it’s the most conservative state in the country — so this showing is meaningful.

It looks like Clinton came in far behind, although CNN is reporting that about 34% of her coalition was African American, which is a small bit of good news for her. Edwards’ voters were, perhaps unsurprisingly, nearly all white, with the majority being white males. (This is South Carolina, after all.)

So, this ugly race is over and it looks like all the racial talk was overblown and overplayed. The voters, once again, made their voices heard and the politicians will have to heed them.

I would hope that the media will take a little breather as well. Watching the concern trolling about Democratic racial divisiveness among people like Peggy Noonan, Joe Scarborough and Bill Bennett is enough to make me sick and should give progressives pause. As I wrote last night, I don’t think this helps Senator Obama any more than it helps Clinton.

It would be really nice if the media, both liberal and otherwise, would calm the hell down. They’ve been out of their minds since Iowa with the identity politics, pushing both the gender and the racial angles beyond all measure. But the fact is that this is much more complicated than they are letting on with lots of demographic information that they are ignoring. Obama, for instance, once again did extremely well among young people of all races, which it seems to me is much more salient than the media have yet to acknowledge. If he keeps this up, we will see an entire generation making its home in the Democratic Party and that is a tremendous advantage.

This is a great win for Barack Obama, and I’m genuinely thrilled that he was able to win a bi-racial majority in a three person field. It’s a nice bounce going into Super Tuesday, where, hopefully it will be so complicated for the press that they will actually be forced to report on the campaign instead of pontificating at length about things that are going to screw us in November no matter who ultimately wins.

.

Dragonslayer

by digby

Blue America is endorsing Alan Grayson of Orlando Florida for congress today. This guy is an exciting candidate, a real personality and he comes with a very important portfolio. He’s been suing war profiteers.

Vanity Fair did a profile on him in November:

On first meeting him, one might not suspect Alan Grayson of being a crusader against government-contractor fraud. Six feet four in his socks, he likes to dress flamboyantly, on the theory that items such as pink cowboy boots help retain a jury’s attention. He and his Filipino wife, Lolita, chose their palm-fringed mansion in Orlando, Florida, partly because the climate alleviates his chronic asthma, and partly because they wanted their five children to have unlimited access to the area’s many theme parks.

Grayson likes theme parks, too. Toward the end of two long days of interviews, he insists we break to visit Universal Studios, because it wouldn’t be right for me to leave his adopted city without having sampled the rides. Later he sends me an e-mail earnestly inquiring which one I liked best.

He can be forgiven a little frivolity. In his functional home-office in Orlando, and at the Beltway headquarters of his law firm, Grayson & Kubli, Grayson spends most of his days and many of his evenings on a lonely legal campaign to redress colossal frauds against American taxpayers by private contractors operating in Iraq. He calls it “the crime of the century.”

His obvious adversaries are the contracting corporations themselves—especially Halliburton, the giant oil-services conglomerate where Vice President Dick Cheney spent the latter half of the 1990s as C.E.O., and its former subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root, now known simply as KBR. But he says his efforts to take on those organizations have earned him another enemy: the United States Department of Justice.

Over the past 16 years, Grayson has litigated dozens of cases of contractor fraud. In many of these, he has found the Justice Department to be an ally in exposing wrongdoing. But in cases that involve the Iraq war, the D.O.J. has taken extraordinary steps to stand in his way. Behind its machinations, he believes, is a scandal of epic proportions—one that may come to haunt the legacy of the Bush administration long after it is gone

I like it. I like it a lot. We need people in congress who understand that the last seven years weren’t some bad dream from which we can awaken and simply carry on relieved that it wasn’t real. It happened and it has to be dealt with.

You can read more about Grayson and the Bush dog he’s trying to replace at Down With Tyranny and Crooks and Liars. And he’s at Firedoglake right now to chat live.

.

Pecksniffian Twit

by digby

Peggy Noonan:

There are many serious and thoughtful liberals and Democrats who support Mr. Obama and John Edwards, and who are seeing Mr. Clinton in a new way and saying so. Here is William Greider in The Nation, the venerable left-liberal magazine. The Clintons are “high minded” on the surface but “smarmily duplicitous underneath, meanwhile jabbing hard at the groin area. They are a slippery pair and come as package. The nation is at fair risk of getting them back in the White House for four years.”

That, again, is from one of the premier liberal journals in the United States. It is exactly what conservatives have been saying for a decade. This may mark a certain coming together of the thoughtful on both sides. The Clintons, uniters at last.

Mr. Obama takes the pummeling and preaches the high road. It’s all windup with him, like a great pitcher more comfortable preparing to throw than throwing. Something in him resists aggression. He tends to be indirect in his language, feinting, only suggestive. I used to think he was being careful not to tear the party apart, and endanger his own future.

But the Clintons are tearing the party apart. It will not be the same after this. It will not be the same after its most famous leader, and probable ultimate victor, treated a proud and accomplished black man who is a U.S. senator as if he were nothing, a mere impediment to their plans. And to do it in a way that signals, to his supporters, How dare you have the temerity, the ingratitude, after all we’ve done for you?

Watch for the GOP to attempt swoop in after the November elections and make profit of the wreckage.

Oh I don’t know, if there’s one thing almost guaranteed to bring the Democrats together it’s the prospect of Peggy Noonan convening a bipartisan “coming together of the thoughtful” to cluck about Bill Clinton. I think we’ve seen that movie.

Nobody on the planet is more unctuous and sanctimonious than the “thoughtful” Noonan when she’s going on about shameful Democratic politics (which is always so amusing coming from Lee Atwater and Karl Rove’s apologists.) This is, after all, the same person who actually wrote as “Paul Wellstone in heaven,” chiding Democrats for having no class and no souls for mildly booing Trent Lott at his memorial` tribute. She piles it on with a trowel.

But that’s not the problem with the piece. It’s the clever way she nearly infantilizes Barack Obama, portraying him as some sort of gentle, high minded eunuch who is just too good for this poor country, filled as it is with dirty Democrats and manly Republican fighting men who will have to step in and save us from the terrorists who are trying to kill us in our beds. “Something in him resists aggression … It’s all wind-up with him”

Is Noonan suggesting that the kindly, gentle Obama isn’t an impediment to Hillary Clinton winning the campaign? Last time I looked he was the only impediment and a damned serious one. If he weren’t the race would be over.

Barack Obama has been fighting and defending himself impressively down in South Carolina and across the board. He isn’t some fey mystic who needs to be treated with kid gloves. He’s not a “talented wind up pitcher who’s more comfortable preparing to throw than actually throwing.” (I don’t even know what that means, to tell you the truth.) He’s throwing hardballs right along with Hillary Clinton and he’s obviously getting some over the plate or this wouldn’t be the fight it is.

The punditocracy’s “protectiveness” toward Obama is patronizing and insulting. And this silly case of the vapors among the villagers over the “nastiness” of the race and how its going to tear the party apart is nearly guaranteed to make him look like a weak sister, which he isn’t, and his elite supporters are falling right into the trap. Watching David Brooks and Mark Shields elbow each other to get to the fainting couch about the unprecedented horror of the South Carolina campaign (which as D-Day pointed out in the post below is a complete joke) is not helpful to Obama or Clinton.

I would have thought that everyone would at least remember this little bit of negative campaigning. It was only four years ago:

A new Democratic group that is running advertisements against Howard Dean and has not yet disclosed its sources of financing has introduced by far the toughest commercial of the primary election season.

Though the advertisement, which began running on Friday in South Carolina and New Hampshire, is paid for by Democrats, it offers a taste of a likely Republican strategy against Dr. Dean should he win the presidential nomination.

The spot opens with a Time magazine cover featuring Osama bin Laden as synthesizer music seemingly out of a post-apocalyptic science fiction movie is heard.

As the camera focuses on Mr. bin Laden’s eyes. the following words flash on the screen: ”Dangerous World,” ”Destroy Us,” ”Dangers Ahead” and ”No Experience.”

”Americans want a president who can face the dangers ahead,” an announcer intones. ”But Howard Dean has no military or foreign policy experience. And Howard Dean just cannot compete with George Bush on foreign policy. It’s time for Democrats to think about that — and think about it now.”

The advertisement is the latest salvo in what amounts to a ”stop Dean” campaign sponsored by the new Democratic group, Americans for Jobs, Health Care and Progressive Values.

The group’s president, Edward F. Feighan, a former Ohio congressman, donated $2,000 to the campaign of Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, records show, and its treasurer, David Jones, has worked as a fund-raiser for Mr. Gephardt. Its spokesman, Robert Gibbs, recently resigned as the press secretary for Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, another presidential candidate.

Those bare knuckled dirty fighters, Dick Gephardt and John Kerry. (You can see the ad here.)

I haven’t seen or heard anything quite that aggressively ugly in this campaign. Remember, in 2004, the country was still getting terrorist warnings every time Bush needed a bump in the polls. That was about as below the belt as it comes. A lot of Dean supporters were upset by it, but I don’t remember any “thoughtful” members of both parties getting together and deciding it was beyond the pale. Certainly nobody suggested that it was somehow disrespectful to the delicate, high minded Howard Dean or that it would tear the party apart. Of course, it was unlikely the Democrats would win, so the establishment didn’t feel the need to step in and make sure the candidates and the voters didn’t get the crazy idea in their heads that they were actually running things. (I didn’t join the blogospheric outcry over it at the time, because, well, it’s primary politics. Primaries suck.)

And guess what, that allegedly frail ascetic, Barack Obama agrees with me:

“I don’t feel the candidates are being bloodied up. This is good practice for me for me so, you know, when I take on these Republicans I’ll be accustomed to it.”

And asked specifically whether he worried that Clinton’s criticisms of him might come back to haunt the Democrats in the form of diminished black voter turnout in November, if Clinton is the nominee, Obama demurred. “Black voters shouldn’t blame senator Clinton for running a vigorous campaign against me,” he said. “That should be a source of pride. It means I might win this thing. When I was 20 points down I was a ‘person of good character’ and my health care plan was ‘universal.’ The fact that we’ve got this fierce contest indicates I’m doing well and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.”

Damn straight. All this handwringing about how this is tearing the party apart is just Villagers working themselves up into a hissy. And it’s this kind of thing that makes me want to see him win the nomination so he can make that Pecksniffian twit Peggy Noonan choke on her Pinot Grigio when he throws a hard, high fastball right between John McCain or Mitt Romney’s eyes.

Oh, and do read the second half of Noonan’s column, where she blames George W. Bush for ruining the Republican Party. Apparently she was only kidding when she was writing all those paeans to his male, manly manliness and macho competude all those years. Big joke.

* Also, I think the best line of the day had to be John Edwards saying that Clinton and Obama had brought their “New York and Chicago style of politics” to South Carolina.” He’s funny.

.

Straight Talk

by dday

There were several moments in last night’s Republican debate that you may see in November. Mike Huckabee saying that Iraq hid their WMD in Jordan, a US ally, is an example. But for my money, this moment will be the most damaging, if John McCain becomes the nominee.

John McCain has said on numerous occasions that he doesn’t have much understanding or even interest in economics. He’s said it plenty of times in plenty of different settings over the years. Here it is in The Boston Globe. And The Wall Street Journal. And The Baltimore Sun. And Russert brings it up and he just lies about it.

I know that McCain is the media’s fave and he’s got Liebercrat support and all. But people are really hurting out there thanks to 30 years of Republican economic mismanagement, and I don’t think they want any part of another stooge.

Meanwhile, this is supposed to be the most honest American to ever set foot in Washington outside of Abe Lincoln, someone so very scrupulous and just chiseled in stone. Only he’s actually as much a political animal as anyone else. And puncturing that bubble of honesty would spell doom for McCain. This little white lie on the economy is not the first but it’s perhaps the easiest to refute.

I know the media will jump on this grenade and call it “dirty politics” and maybe send Chris Matthews out there dressed up as Edward R. Murrow demanding a cease and desist, but they’re going to have to work overtime to turn McCain into some kind of deep economic thinker.

.