Month: April 2008

Defined

by dday

RedState is planning their latest Hissy Fit, putting up a hit list of journalists “who need to be set straight” about John W. McCain’s 100 years in Iraq comment.

It’s amusing that wingnuts think that the media needs to correct the record, since they’ve been bending over backward to do so already. But the corollary to this is that it doesn’t much matter what McCain’s media constituency says about this. He’s already stepped in it with this comment and no amount of backpedaling is going to change the fundamentals. This fascinating Gallup poll shows that the reasons people name for disliking Obama or Clinton are largely personal, about experience or trustworthiness, but the reasons people name for disliking McCain are all policy-based:

McCain has pretty well been defined as a warmonger who has similar views as Bush and other Republicans, his protestations and the plaintive wails of the media to the contrary. And the fact that hardcore conservatives are rallying to his cause only reinforces this impression.

I know we’re all supposed to be scared that the media will knife our candidates and protect Teflon John, and that’s certainly a concern, but progressive media and advocacy groups have actually done a pretty darn good job of defining Republican candidates this year, including McCain. Traditional media was parroting progressive frames on Romney, Thompson and Giuliani throughout the campaign, and even Joe frickin’ Scarborough has characterized McCain as wanting “less jobs and more wars.” Let’s not forget that we have attained a certain amount of power to drive narratives in this Presidential campaign our own selves, and when the media reverts to focusing on irrelevant minutiae, we’ll be there to hammer them.

Here are the number of times, according to NEXIS, that various topics have been mentioned in the media over the past thirty days:

“Yoo and torture” – 102
“Mukasey and 9/11” — 73
“Yoo and Fourth Amendment” — 16
“Obama and bowling” — 1,043
“Obama and Wright” — More than 3,000 (too many to be counted)
“Obama and patriotism” – 1,607
“Clinton and Lewinsky” — 1,079

And as Eric Boehlert documents, even Iraq — that little five-year U.S. occupation with no end in sight — has been virtually written out of the media narrative in favor of mindless, stupid, vapid chatter of the type referenced above. “The Clintons are Rich!!!!” will undoubtedly soon be at the top of this heap within a matter of a day or two.

This is of course disgusting and deeply frustrating. But I’m kind of tired of fretting about how the traditional media, who has been pretty largely discredited by a significant segment of the population, will tip the scales of the election. This is not to say that they won’t try, but I think their effectiveness has lessened in a more fragmented media landscape, where people get information from so many other sources. Clearly McSame has a MAJOR problem with his history on Iraq that is not likely to be explained away. Maybe anti-McCain groups are having trouble with their fundraising, but people are failing to understand that he’s already been defined, and any further developments on the campaign trail will fit into all the pre-made narratives as a result of the work that’s already been done on him. The fact that McCain is having his own fundraising problems, particularly from the grassroots, where he raised a paltry $4 million the month after being handed the Republican nomination, is much more telling.

I think it’s hilarious that the right is somehow claiming media bias against McCain; it’s just not at all credible. And as to the notion that his showing in polls today presages the future, that’s nuts. McCain is at his HIGHEST POSSIBLE POINT in my view, as the presumptive nominee running the general election without opposition while the Democrats continue their extended primary battle. While he flits around at his old high school and his flyboy barracks, Democrats are organizing new voters and mobilizing on the ground. And as a woman at McCain’s disastrous appearance at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis said, “He’s a war guy, we’re for peace.”

I’m not worried. Bring it on.

UPDATE: Bill Scher has some really good substantive analysis of the 100-year Hissy Fit and how conservatives are trying to have it all, broadly calling Democratic options for Iraq “surrender” while seeking specificity on McCain’s statements.

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Storylines

by digby

Andrea Mitchell said today that Clinton has a “growing credibility gap” because she repeated a story on the stump about a woman who was denied health care and died. (I believe this is based on a bizarre and very badly written article which appeared over the week-end in the New York Times.)

Mitchell interviews Ann Kornbluth, a WaPo reporter who recently wrote a story about the anecdotes Clinton tells on the campaign trail which apparently got the attention of a hospital in Ohio. The hospital then decided to go on the record denying the veracity of this woman’s story.

Kornbluth tells Mitchell that Clinton merely repeated what she’d heard from a local sheriff, nearly verbatim (there’s Youtube of the moment to prove that) and admits there are questions as to whether this hospital is the hospital in question. (No mention of the weird fact that this hospital issued a press release to announce they weren’t guilty of something nobody had ever accused them of.)

Despite these holes and mysteries, Mitchell and Kornbluth both agree, however, that it doesn’t matter whether the story is true or false (or that there are millions of similar examples of people dying for lack of insurance and proper health care.) None of that is relevant:

Mitchell: The Clinton campaign finds itself in another credibility gap, this time over a heart tugging health care story. Senator Clinton has been telling this story for weeks now out on the campaign:

Video:
Clinton: The doctors and the nurses tried hard, but they weren’t able to save her baby. For fifteen days doctors and nurses worked heroically. But she died.

It is so wrong in such a good great and rich country that a young woman and her baby would die because she didn’t have health insurance or a hundred dollars to get examined.

Mitchell: Well, it turns out it’s not true. After reading about the story in the Washington Post, hospital officials demanded that the Clinton campaign stop using that anecdote. They say there is no indication that this woman was denied medical care, that in fact, she did have insurance.

The Washington Post’s Ann Kornbluth has been writing about this story. Ann, thanks very much for joining us today. First of all, you write that the Clinton campaign first learned about this story from a sheriff in Ohio. Tell us about this. Why didn’t anyone check it out?

Kornbluth: Well, this deputy sheriff, Brian Holman, met with her during a regular campaign stop. She had Chelsea with her and Ted Strickland the governor. He told this story, it was almost exactly as she repeated it, in the clip that you played. Uhm and she went on and started using it on the stump. And you know we all sort of hear these stories, and she doesn’t use any names, so it’s difficult to check it out but, but a couple of weeks ago I wrote a story about stuff she says in her speeches and started to write about this woman.

After my story ran, the hospital, one of the hospitals the woman who died went to, came forward and said, “this isn’t us.” What is unclear now is whether there is another hospital involved. The young woman’s family has been quiet, they have been sort of overwhelmed by all this attention, upset that it’s now on the campaign trail, this tragedy that they endured.

What we’re trying to figure out now, and I think it’s a very live question, is whether there was another hospital that she was turned away from and so we’re trying to get to the bottom of it.

But you’re right, the central question is, should the campaign be vetting things before Senator Clinton says them on the campaign trail, especially given her recent problems with the story from Bosnia.

Mitchell: And that is the problem isn’t it? That this contributes to a perception, fair or not fair, that she’s got a problem telling stories that are accurate. Not to put too fine a point on it, it does damage her credibility.

Kornbluth: And we’ve seen this movie before. When Al Gore, the first time he was quote unquote caught saying something that wasn’t entirely accurate, again, fair or unfair, it became a storyline. After that, going forward, he was under extreme scrutiny for that.The same thing happened with John kerry, when he was seen as being for something before he was against it, constantly looked for flip-flopping in his stories.

So I think Senator Clinton has discovered that there is something out there that she has to be really careful about and it’s the facts of the stories that she tells, whether that’s fair or not.

Notice the passive voice: “whether that’s fair or not.” The press apparently have nothing to do with determining whether it is fair, setting the record straight or getting the facts. It’s all about “perception” — perception that is directly caused by lies they publish, spin they present as truth and “storylines” they create.

On the next segment with a different host and panel, they bring it up again, starting with the same video of Clinton telling the story. This time they don’t even give you the fact that Hillary was told this story by an Ohio man or that there are questions as to the responsible hospital.

The way it looks now is that she just made it up out of whole cloth:

Nameless Braindead Valley Girl MSNBC Hostess: Problem is, that’s not true. Hospital officials say the woman wasn’t denied medical care and she had insurance.The hospital wants her stop telling this story. AB, how does the Clinton campaign explain this one?

AB Stoddard: She can blame bad staffing. It’s not the first time a politician has run away with some compelling anecdote,that turns out to be not entirely true. The problem for Clinton is, as I mentioned before, she needs to change the subject from tax returns and her stumbling around with these untruths like what happened on the tarmac in Tuszla and these stories on the trail about some poor woman. Hillary Clinton has to have a couple of good days where she’s not stumbling through untruths and in damage control with her campaign.

Nameless braindead valley girl MSNBC hostess: Yeah, If you’re seeing this once again as an exaggeration and this follows on the heels of the whole Bosnia story does it harm her credibility, ok maybe this time not even with voters, but what about the superdelegates?

Ok, look. You can hate Clinton or love her, but this is the lowest form of campaign journalism and it should be condemned. At this point they have said, over and over again, that Clinton told “untruths” or “exaggerated” when the fact is that she repeated a story she heard from a citizen — a story which, without knowing the name of the person, which she didn’t, could not be verified by her campaign. And why should it? The sheriff told her this story on camera, it’s completely believable because every single day something like this happens multiple times across the country, she used no names, accused nobody specifically and didn’t claim to have personal knowledge of the story. She repeated something that was told to her. It’s not a lie or an untruth or fundamentally misleading in any way.

More importantly, there is no proof that this story isn’t true except that some hospital (hardly a dispassionate observer) says so, yet both Mitchell and the NBVGMH declare absolutely that it isn’t. Kornbluth at least says there is a “live question” as to whether there was a second hospital, which is something.

Evidently, the family isn’t talking to the press,so there’s no easy way to verify the facts through them. Kornbluth claims this is because they are “upset that the story has been used on the campaign trail” but she doesn’t say how she knows this. And anyway, Clinton never used the woman’s name — the press did, when they wrote about the story. The family had no reason to be upset at Clinton over this — if that’s even true, which I doubt. If Kornbluth knows that, then she would have to have been talking to someone who knows the facts of the case and it’s clear that she doesn’t.

The press assumes that if a hospital steps forward and disputes the accuracy of a story where no names were mentioned the hospital must be telling the truth. Why reporters wouldn’t wonder what would motivate a hospital to put this out there, when they hadn’t been accused publicly of anything, is evidently not the least bit interesting.

The lack of facts backing up the accusation of Clinton lying are bad enough, but the justifications for flogging it are stunning. Kornbluth and Mitchell admit up front, and without even the slightest bit of self-awareness as journalists, that this is about “perception” not reality. She blithely admits that both Al Gore and John Kerry were brought low by similar “perceptions” in exactly the same way. There is not even the slightest acknowledgment that these “perceptions” are often created by the political opponents of the candidates and then faithfully disseminated by their little minions in the press as what Kornbluth admits are “storylines.”

Now in this case, I don’t know where the story came from, but considering it’s a hospital coming forward for truly inexplicable reasons to say it wasn’t guilty of something no one had accused them of, I suspect Republicans. Or it could simply be that the press itself just pulled the storyline off the shelf in response to the Bosnia flap and ran with it all on their own. Whatever the case, it’s bad journalism, thick with innuendo and short on facts and used as an example of a character defect of a Democrat, creating a self-perpetuating “perception” that justifies the “storyline.” Same old shit.

After all, when is the last time you saw something like this pulled on a Republican, especially one named John McCain, who has flip-flopped so badly on the biggest issues of the day that he has to take seasick pills and who lies as easily as he breathes? Never. You see, the “storyline” about Republicans is that they are all “stand-up guys” and “straight-talkers” not hysterical liars and mincing flip-floppers. (Surely you can see the symbolism in all those “stand up” and “flip-flop” allusions.)

You may hate Clinton with everything in your being, and that’s fine. But this kind of journalism is what’s killing our political system and what gets people like John McCain and George W. Bush elected. Clinton was repeating a story about bad health care which she heard on the campaign trail from an American citizen. She wasn’t tooting her own horn or putting down her opponent in the telling of it. She was illustrating the plight of the uninsured in this country, which even if it turns out to not be specifically correct in the details, is certainly not something that doesn’t happen every day to somebody in this country.

In fact, I suspect this particular “gotcha” is being done to degrade the argument against universal health care as much as to embarrass Senator Clinton. The Clinton Rules state that if any part of a story is proven true, the entire story is true. The corollary is that if any part of a story about a Republican is proved to be false then the entire story is false. The same concept is at work with health care here. If any detail about bad health care in the US can be shown as false, then notions that our health care system is screwed up are also false. Get ready for more of this. I don’t know if it will work, but if they can get the media to play it like this, then the subliminal subtext going out there is that Democrats are lying about health care. They don’t have to convince everybody, just a few.

Meanwhile, as I wrote this past week-end, all John McCain has to do is sniffle twice and the entire media crawl over each other’s backs to “correct the record.” (And by the way, it isn’t just the usual suspects like Kornbluth. It’s “liberals” like Frank Rich too, as Somerby points out today.)

Trust em? You shouldn’t. Today they may be using these methods to rip the candidate you despise apart, giving you much joy and satisfaction. You may even tell yourself, that they have learned their lesson and are finally seeing things clearly. They aren’t. Kornbluth and Mitchell openly admitted today that Democratic nominees Gore and Kerry were skewered by these perception “storylines” and basically agreed that it doesn’t matter if they’re true or not. If you think it’s coincidence that this only seems to happen to Democrats then I have a bunch of condos in Miami Beach to sell you at 2006 prices.

*This story is so painfully reminiscent of the kind of journalistic atrocity that was perpetrated against Al Gore in 2000 — like this one, about his mother-in law’s arthritis medicine. Bush used that one in an ad — and it was total crap. Lot’s of nice liberals blamed Gore for losing that race, even though he came out ahead in the popular vote and had a third party candidate running on his left.(I won’t even bring up Florida) They said, “he should have run a better campaign.” Well, it ain’t easy when you have a sophomoric press corps that has decided they don’t want you to be president because you aren’t as much fun as the other guy.

Perhaps this time they will decide they like Barack Obama better than John McCain. I sure hope so. But you’ll have to forgive me if I feel that might not stand us in good stead in the long run. These people have their own agenda and it isn’t what’s best for the American people. They shouldn’t be picking our presidents even if once in a while they might inadvertently pick one you like. Nobody elected them to anything.

Update: Joe Scarborough just declared the “health care story” to be Clinton’s death knell, even worse than Bosnia. Ann Kornbluth was sitting on the panel and said nothing.

Update II: A fact check, finally. It’s worded oddly, as is typical of this story, but better than nothing.

Clinton erred in telling audiences that the Ohio woman lacked insurance when seeking help for her troubled pregnancy. But according to Casto’s account, Bachtel’s medical tragedy began with circumstances very close to the essence of Clinton’s now-abandoned account: the lack of insurance created a $100 barrier to needed medical attention close to home.

Don’t worry. Clinton won’t be telling the story on the trail anymore. Maybe if we’re lucky we can get all Democratic candidates to stop talking about health care at all in any human terms for fear of being “inaccurate” and becoming the subject of one of these ridiculous feeding frenzies. No wonder both of the Democrats keep the press at a far a distance as possible.

Meanwhile, John McCain will be swilling brewskis on the back of the bus with the Hannah Monata fanboys, spinning yarns about strippers he used to screw, calling his wife a cunt, revealing himself to be dumber than Bush on policy and regaling them with tales about how he’s gonna “get the Shia and Sunni in a room and tell them to stop the bullshit” — and they won’t breath a word of it. See, he might not be such a straight shootin’ stand up guy if they tell the public what he really says.

Update III: Kornbluth gets more of the story from a family member and puts it on her blog. It’s called, “Clinton told true tale of woe, says kin.” I’ll be looking forward to the corrections and clarifications in the papers and on MSNBC tomorrow.

Kornbluth teased this story when she appeared on David Gregory earlier today and let Scarborough go on about how it had ruined Clinton’s credibility more than the Bosnia thing.

Of course, that’s probably true, but only because the press gleefully flogged it as a story about Clinton lying without having all the facts. It’s “out there.”

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Glib, Contemptuous, Ignorant, Incurious

by digby

You’ll recall that Ronald Reagan was very consciously turned into a mythic God by right wingers, for the specific purpose of embedding the idea that conservative philosophy is a blueprint for successful governance — and combating the belief among historians that Reagan was actually quite a mediocre president:

It was the Gipper’s ho-hum performance in a 1996 survey of historians that apparently triggered the right’s recent zeal to enthrone him in the public eye. It was in that year that presidential historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., in The New York Times Magazine, asked 30 academic colleagues and a pair of politicians to rank all US presidents, and when conservatives saw their undisputed hero languishing in the “average” column, they were aghast.

They put millions in to the project and succeeded in changing the names of airports, schools and highways all across the country. They have plan to put Ronnie on Rushmore and the ten dollar bill. Over time I would expect that someone will come up with the idea to declare Reaganism a religion.

But what can they possibly do to rehabilitate this? (via Scott Horton)

America’s historians, it seems, don’t think much of George W. Bush. Now in all fairness, historians should wait a while before passing judgment on a president’s who served recently, much less one still in office. But the current incumbent is a special case. After all, 81 percent of Americans, according to a recent New York Times poll, believe he’s taken the country on the wrong track. That’s the highest number ever registered. The same poll also says 28 percent have a favorable view of his performance in office, which is also in Nixon-in-the-darkest-days-of-Watergate territory. But, as George Mason University’s History News Network reports, the historians have a different measure. They want to stack him up against his thirty-three predecessors as the nation’s chief executive. Among historians, there is no doubt into which echelon he falls–his competitors are Millard Fillmore, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, and Franklin Pierce, the worst of the presidential worst. But does Bush actually come in dead last? Yes. History News Network’s poll of 109 historians found that 61 percent of them rank Bush as “worst ever” among U.S. presidents. Bush’s key competition comes from Buchanan, apparently, and a further 2 percent of the sample puts Bush right behind Buchanan as runner-up for “worst ever.” 96 percent of the respondents place the Bush presidency in the bottom tier of American presidencies. And was his presidency (it’s a bit wishful to speak of his presidency in the past tense–after all there are several more months left to go) a success or failure? On that score the numbers are still more resounding: 98 percent label it a “failure.”

Not that there’s any doubt really, but wow — 98%. Here’s one example of their commentary:

“No individual president can compare to the second Bush,” wrote one. “Glib, contemptuous, ignorant, incurious, a dupe of anyone who humors his deluded belief in his heroic self, he has bankrupted the country with his disastrous war and his tax breaks for the rich, trampled on the Bill of Rights, appointed foxes in every henhouse, compounded the terrorist threat, turned a blind eye to torture and corruption and a looming ecological disaster, and squandered the rest of the world’s goodwill. In short, no other president’s faults have had so deleterious an effect on not only the country but the world at large.”

Remember when only dirty bloggers like me used to say stuff like that? I do …

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A Minor Detail

by tristero

It’s a tiny little thing, and consequently terribly revealing. In the midst of a NY Times article describing the present chaos in Iraq, including fatal attacks on the Green Zone, we read this:

Over the past week, Mr. Maliki has also been trying to recoup the political damage he sustained when his American-supported military assault in Basra met with intense resistance from militias. After a six-day stalemate, high-level negotiations resulted in Mr. Sadr’s issuing a statement on March 30 ordering his followers to stop fighting.

Did you notice anything about that statement? Hint: It’s something missing.

Unless you had been following this story farily closely, you would never know that those “high-level negotiations” which temporarily ended the fighting in Iraq were held by Iran :

Iran helped end last week’s fighting between Iraqi government troops and a Shi’ite militia in Iraq’s oil-rich south, an adviser to a leading Iraqi Shi’ite politician was quoted as saying on Friday.

The comments by Mohsen Hakim, whose father Abdul Aziz al-Hakim heads the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, underlined Shi’ite Iran’s growing influence in Iraq after the U.S.-led overthrow of Sunni Arab strongman Saddam Hussein in 2003.

Washington accuses Iran of stoking violence in its neighbour by funding, training and equipping Iraqi militants. Iran denies this and blames the presence of U.S. troops for the bloodshed.

Mohsen Hakim told Iran’s Mehr News Agency an Iraqi delegation led by a prominent Shi’ite lawmaker held talks with Iranian officials during a visit to Iran last Friday.

Two days later, fiery anti-U.S. Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr announced a truce to end six days of clashes with Iraqi and U.S. troops in the southern city of Basra that spread through southern Iraq and Baghdad.

U.S. officials say Sadr is currently in Iran.

“Tehran, by using its positive influence on the Iraqi nation, paved the way for the return of peace to Iraq and the new situation is the result of Iran’s efforts,” Hakim was quoted as saying, without giving further details.[Iralics added]

Members of the Iraqi delegation have confirmed to Reuters they went to Iran just before Sadr announced the ceasefire but have declined to give details on any role Iran played.

And Ryan Crocker, the US ambassador to Iraq, denies knowing anything at all about Iran’s involvement. Crocker is either lying, incompetent, or both. Why? Because another article from a mainstream source has details of the Iraqi/Iranian talks:

Iraqi lawmakers traveled to the Iranian holy city of Qom over the weekend to win the support of the commander of Iran’s Qods brigades in persuading Shiite cleric Muqtada al Sadr to order his followers to stop military operations, members of the Iraqi parliament said.

ht, Juan Cole.

Just a detail in a story, and a small one. Yet oh so telling. Crocker knew nothing about the Iraqi/Iranian negotiations but he knew enough , beyond a doubt, about details that just happened to support the Bush narrative:

He drew attention instead to the hail of rockets and mortars fired at the Green Zone government and diplomatic compound in Baghdad during the crisis that he said were made in Iran.

“Let’s start with the Iranian involvement not in ending it, but maybe in beginning it,” he said.

U.S. officials say rogue members of Sadr’s militia get support and weapons from Iran.

“We got the tail fins of what was dropping on us … This was quite literally made in Iran. All of this stuff was out of Iran and a lot of it manufactured in 2007,” Crocker added. [Iralics added]

Ah, that “maybe.” And note: those tailfins? He didn’t show them, or pictures of them, to the reporter. We just have Crocker’s word. The word of a man who expects us to believe he has no clue as to the real reason why the fighting briefly eased.

Please note: I’m not saying Iran’s motivations in engineering the cease-fire are an indication that Iran is some kind of Force for Good in Iraq. Nor do I think it is entirely out of the question that the bombs falling on the Green Zone are Iranian. The situation is fiendishly complicated.

What I am pointing out is that several sources , including Maliki allies. confirmed the Iranian peace talks, our ambassador claimed to know not a thing about it while pushing the pro-Iranian war line, and the NY Times buried the Iranian involvement. The effect is two-fold: to dangerously oversimplify the reality of Iraq and to demonize Iran. Man, I’m sick of reading Pravda in NY Times drag

Oh, and speaking of demonizing Iran, looks like The Man Called Petraeus will do a cheap imitation of Colin Powell before the UN:

IRANIAN forces were involved in the recent battle for Basra, General David Petraeus, the US commander in Iraq, is expected to tell Congress this week.

Folks, without unequivocal documentary evidence, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever, to believe a word of it. Does that mean I think it’s not true? Put it this way; Given how often the Bush administration has lied, Petraeus needs to offer incontrovertible proof. Congress should demand it or hold him in contempt..

The Blithering Idiocy of the DC Establishment

by dday

The Village, via Cokie Roberts, gives their very serious assessment of Iraq on ABC’s This Week:

STEPHANOPOLOUS: But this is going to be a split in the party. You all (at The Nation) are backing a plan that a lot of Congressional challengers are backing (The Responsible Plan) saying, immediate withdrawal, unconditional…

VANDEN HEUVEL: that’s right…

(crosstalk)

VANDEN HEUVEL: There are 42 Congressional challengers…

ROBERTS: But no major Presidential candidates are saying that, because they’re sitting there saying look, we’ve been there, we’ve seen it, we think it’s an irresponsible thing to do.

VANDEN HEUVEL: It is not, but you know what, the responsible thing to do is withdraw.

(you hear Cokie odiously chuckling at this point)

VANDEN HEUVEL: If we withdraw responsibly, the region would be more stable in the long term, America will be restored as a responsible global leader, and there are 42 challengers, you are absolutely right Cokie, who have a responsible plan to withdraw.

ROBERTS: Convincing the electorate of that I think would be very difficult, and I also agree that the notion that Sen. McCain and Sen. Graham you heard this morning putting forward, that Americans would prefer to win, is–

VANDEN HEUVEL: But what is winning? This war is unwinnable, there are no military solutions. And Cokie, Americans are already behind this, 2/3 of Americans believe this war was a mistake to fight. And when Dick Cheney said to ABC’s Martha Raddatz last week, “I don’t care what Americans think.” The contempt, the disdain for Americans and for what this war has done to the military, to our economy, and to our future as a nation. If you care about responsible…

Well, Katrina Vanden Heuvel handled that a bit better than I, because I don’t think I would have been able to hold down the bile after hearing Duchess Cokie of Versailles blather on about what Americans would prefer. Not that she’s likely to have talked to anyone who’s had to serve in this war or felt the burdens of this war, of course, but she just feels it in her very sensible and serious gut.

She doesn’t have a clue what the hell she’s talking about, and if she’s being informed about Iraq by “Sunni, Shi’a, po-tay-to po-tah-to” McCain and his man-servant Huckleberry Graham it’d be a wonder if she could pick the country out on a map. We have an important week coming up with A Man Called Petraeus and Ryan Crocker testifying before Congress, and if this is the sober analysis we can expect out of that, we’re all doomed. Because in point of fact, Iraq is at a major crossroads. The Basra offensive was a complete failure, as large swaths of the five-years-in-the-making Iraqi Army essentially refused to fight. Now Maliki is basically forming his own militia from the pro-Iranian Badr Brigade, and the intra-Shiite warfare is raging, with US troops dying today inside the Green Zone and at forward operating bases in Baghdad. The political situation is stalemated, tensions are rising within the Sadrist Shia and the Sunni Awakening groups and practically everyone else, and whatever gains have been made by the surge have vanished.

We’re going to hear a lot of crap in the next week out of the Administration and their spinners, and robots like Cokie are going to lap it up because, you know, “Americans would prefer to win.” That’s just an ignorant and dismissive remark, and it sadly represents the depth of understanding of the tragedy in Iraq inside The Village. Of course, Cokie’s just repeating what “real Americans” think; that it happens to line up with establishment opinion and helps provide cover for their epic mistake of going along with the initial invasion is just a nice perk.

In the chaotic environment of Iraq, leaving 80,000 troops to babysit the Iraqis will do about as much as having 160,000 troops do the same; in other words, nothing at all (Russ Feingold understands this). Until the fundamental question – whether a continued presence in Iraq is making America safer now and in the future – is addressed, we’re doing nothing but spinning our wheels. Keeping troops in the region to try and put a lid on violence until George Bush is safely tucked away creates a huge moral hazard that simply adds to the potentially dangerous outcomes.

This explains why the Kagans’ “Iraq 4-Ever” strategy is actually worse than withdrawal. The Bush/Kagan strategy is simply to keep the maximum number of troops in Iraq as long as possible in the hopes a pony will appear. To maintain political support for the Pony Strategy, they need to peddle worse-case scenarios and paint pictures of genocide and all-out civil war.

I’ll fully concede that such events are possible – anyone who doesn’t is being dishonest. But my point is that our occupation makes them more likely, for the reasons explained above. Specifically, the longer and more indefinitely we stay, the greater the moral hazard we produce. As long as we stay indefinitely, parties will act more recklessly than they otherwise would. These actions, in turn, will have profound, unpredictable, and irreversible consequences.

The plan that Vanden Heuvel was referencing, the Responsible Plan, reflects a significant and growing wing of the Democratic Party that simply is not willing to wait around anymore while the leadership tries to come up with a coherent endgame strategy. Darcy Burner, the driving force behind the plan, has substantially improved her electoral position as a result. I don’t know how that fits in with Duchess Cokie’s pronouncements, other than the obvious fact that it doesn’t. Well over 50 Congressional challengers have endorsed the plan, understanding that a comprehensive strategy to end the war and repair the broken institutions that enabled the disaster not only makes political sense but is absolutely vital to our national security. Ilan Goldenberg sums up the plan nicely.

For the past two years, Democrats have been offering plan after plan to end the war in Iraq. But this one is different. As opposed to the usual broad language, combined with a laundry list of policy proposals that make up traditional party platforms, the plan has a sharp focus, with a clear strategic logic focused around two fundamental principles. First, the United States must find a way to sensibly end its military mission in Iraq–and use the political, diplomatic, humanitarian, and economic tools at its disposal to mitigate the negative consequences of the war. Second, the Iraq War has done irreparable damage not just to Iraq but to our country, and the time has come to reform our institutions and put the checks and balances in place to ensure that these mistakes are not repeated […]

Too often, candidates running for Congress make very specific proposals about foreign policy that are far outside of their purview. The “Real Security” plan of 2006 was ultimately about the executive branch; it was backed by a 120-page smattering of documents and reports that criticized the Bush Administration and catalogued hundreds of pieces of legislation that would reshape American foreign policy, but were, on the whole, too unwieldy to act as an agenda vehicle.

“A Responsible Plan” would instead serve as the congressional corollary to a Democratic presidency. It doesn’t include elements over which Congress has little control, but it does push for 15 pieces of existing legislation, which focus on issues such as improving healthcare for a new generation of veterans and phasing out our reliance on military contractors such as Blackwater. Only the president can end the war in Iraq, but Congress can do its share by focusing on institutional repair and funding the right programs.

This approach is apparent in the most creative part of the document, titled “Preventing Future Iraqs.” These policies focus on checking presidential authority and ensuring that Congress can’t easily give the president a free hand to go to war. It calls for incorporating war funding into the regular defense budget instead of using “emergency supplementals”; eliminating the president’s use of signing statements to alter the substantive meaning of a law passed by Congress; repealing parts of the Military Commissions Act that suspended habeas corpus; and ending the use of wiretapping without a FISA warrant. These are good policies for both Republican and Democratic presidents to abide by.

Without a robust Congressional counterbalance to executive power, we will not be able to stop more Iraqs. Darcy Burner and the dozens of endorsers are not only running to enter Congress but to restore the institution itself.

This Wednesday I’m helping host a low-dollar fundraising event for Darcy, where she will be flanked by a number of netroots activists (including myself and Digby) and at least two California candidates who have endorsed the plan, Ron Shepston (CA-42) and Mary Pallant (CA-24). If you want to reward and recognize true leadership and courage, and make Cokie Roberts cry, join me in Los Angeles on Wednesday night. All the information is at this ActBlue page, and you can donate at the link as well. Alternatively, if you’re not in the Southern California area, you can donate to Darcy and some of our other great progressive candidates at Blue America.

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Sunday Business

by digby

Please, please read James Wolcott’s epic tale of a week-end of vomit and bad movies. I know it doesn’t sound very appealing, but it is, it really is.

And then, as a gesture of goodwill for the laughs and fine writing, go on over to BTC news and help our pal Weldon out with a couple of bucks.

These two things will make you feel good for the rest of the day.

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Compulsory Ring Kissing Under Fire

by digby

John Amato caught the winner of this week’s McCain manlove contest:

ACOSTA: But it was earlier this week in Alexandria, Virginia, where he [McCain] visited a high school—a uh, high school…Episcopal high school in Alexandria, Virginia–where apparently a student there started heckling the Senator and John McCain then had to respond. So here is John McCain responding to what appears to be a student heckler earlier this week in Alexandria, Virginia:

STUDENT: We can see that this isn’t completely absent, uh, political motivation isn’t completely absent, yet we were told this isn’t a political event. So, what exactly is your purpose in being here, not that I don’t appreciate the opportunity, but I’d just like some clarification.

MCCAIN: I knew I should have cut this thing off. [laughter] This meeting is over. [laughter] Um, this is an opportunity and part of a series of visits that I’m playing…paying…we started in Mississippi, uh, where my family’s roots are back to the middle of the 19th century, to here. We’re going from here to Pensacola, Florida, to Jacksonville, Florida, and a couple of other places where…we’re going to Annapolis, where I obviously attended the Naval Academy. And it’s sort of a tour where we try to not only emphasize the values and principles that guided me and I think a lot of this country in the past, but also portray a vision of how I think we need to address the challenges of the future, and a lot of that is in retrospect, but a lot of it is also advocacy and addressing certain challenges that face the nation. I hope that attendance here was not compulsory.

ACOSTA: So there you have it, John McCain, who is no stranger to incoming fire, able to handle that heckler there…

First of all, the question was perfectly legitimate, not a heckle at all. Second McCain tries to claim it isn’t political, which is completely absurd since he’s the presumptive Republican nominee for president of the United States. And then this bozo compares this perfectly reasonable question to McCain taking incoming fire!

Is there really no occasion where the McCain’s Hannah Montana fanboys don’t find it necessary to mention his mighty warrior mien? Even questions from high schoolers?

I can’t take another four years of codpiece worship. I just can’t.

*A little side note apropos of nothing much: Back when I was in high school a thousand years ago, a country singer named Wanda Jackson gave a concert and used the compulsory occasion to bring students to the Lord. I was interviewed by one of the reporters for the school paper about the experience and I complained vociferously about being forced to take part in a religious ceremony. And in my first exposure to the press, I was misquoted at length, saying I thought it was “a great thing that so many people were brought to Jesus in my school.” It was, to say the least, a formative experience.

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Reason #5789

by digby

Not to trust the Bush Justice Department:

[N]ow comes a disturbing prosecution in Miami of an attorney who helped to represent Al Gore during the 2000 election recount fight.

Ben Kuehne, one of South Florida’s pre-eminent lawyers, has been charged with conspiracy, money laundering and obstruction of justice and is looking at a potential 20-year sentence. The charges stem from a series of opinion letters he wrote in the federal prosecution of Colombian drug kingpin Fabio Ochoa Vasquez.

In 2002, Kuehne was hired by Roy Black, Ochoa’s lawyer, to determine the origin of payments made by Ochoa to Black. It is a crime for an attorney to accept money that he knows was obtained through drug sales, and Black was being careful not to accept tainted fees.

Kuehne’s investigation, which included traveling to Colombia, determined that the money for Ochoa’s defense was from the proceeds of cattle, horse and real estate sales. The Ochoa family ranch is an asset that predates Ochoa’s drug involvement.

Kuehne was paid about $200,000 for his advice. All told, he allowed $5.2-million in legal fees and costs to be transferred to Black, after having determined that it had been derived from legitimate sources.

But the government in its indictment says that Kuehne knew that at least some of the money was the proceeds of drug trafficking and sent through money launderers. Reports are that FBI and IRS agents found that some of the Ochoa family assets were auctioned off to known cartel members.

Kuehne and two Colombian defendants — an accountant and lawyer who had worked with Kuehne — pleaded not guilty on Feb. 7 in federal court in Miami.

Part of the reason I’m writing about this case is that I know Ben Kuehne. He was a volunteer lawyer when I headed the ACLU of Florida. I remember him as a meticulous lawyer of the highest professionalism and integrity. His reputation is that of a “lawyer’s lawyer,” and some of the most prominent members of the Miami legal community say it is impossible that Kuehne knowingly broke the law, as such a thing is beyond him.

Also, Kuehne is a high-profile progressive. In addition to his representation of Gore, he spent a number of years as a board member of Legal Services of Greater Miami. And in 2006, the liberal group People for the American Way gave Kuehne its “spirit of liberty” award as a “champion of constitutional rights.”

Sure, they might just be trying to stop criminal defense lawyers from defending accused criminals with money. That would be par for the course for hard core prosecutors.

But this stinks to high heaven of the usual partisan prosecution bullshit that’s come out of the Bush Justice department. It’s the way they roll. They should not receive even the slightest bit of additional power going into a vital election.

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Saturday Night At The Movies

Surge Protectors

By Dennis Hartley

“Stop-loss was created by the United States Congress after the Vietnam War. It has been used on the legal basis of Title 10 , United States Code , Section 12305(a) which states in part: “… the President may suspend any provision of law relating to promotion, retirement, or separation applicable to any member of the armed forces who the President determines is essential to the national security of the United States” and Paragraph 9(c) of DD Form 4/1 (The Armed Forces Enlistment Contract) which states: “In the event of war, my enlistment in the Armed Forces continues until six (6) months after the war ends, unless the enlistment is ended sooner by the President of the United States.” Furthermore, every person who enlists in branch of the Armed Forces signs an initial contract with an eight (8) year obligation, regardless of how many years of active duty the person enlists for.” -excerpted from Wikipedia

One year ago (almost to the day) I wrote this post, where I tied in some classic “vets coming home” films with a war weary nod to the (then) 4th anniversary of the interminable debacle in Iraq. At the time, Hollywood was yet to tackle a story about our latest generation of walking wounded; I was starting to wonder; did the studios have a case of cold feet on the subject, like they did throughout the duration of the Vietnam War, or was it simply “too soon”?

In the interim, however, a few filmmakers have tested the water, with admirable efforts like In the Valley of Elah, Grace Is Gone and Robert Redford’s Afghanistan-themed drama Lions For Lambs ( (which I reviewed here). Unfortunately, none of the aforementioned films have received little more than a nibble at the domestic box office (sadly, College Road Trip has already grossed more than any of those films have to date). It will be a damn shame if Stop-Loss, a powerful and heartfelt new drama from director Kimberly Peirce, elicits the same yawning indifference from the American public. With echoes of The Best Years of Our Lives, The Deer Hunter, Coming Home and Born on the Fourth of July, this could arguably be billed as the first substantive film to address the plight of Iraq war vets.

Co-written by the director along with Mark Richard, this is Peirce’s belated follow-up to her haunting 1999 heartland noir, Boys Don’t Cry, which was based on circumstances leading up to the tragic real-life murder of trans-gendered Teena Brandon, who re-invented herself as Brandon Teena (interestingly, the protagonist in Peirce’s latest film shares the same first name).

As the film opens, we are introduced to Sgt. Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe), an infantry squad leader who is leading his men in hot pursuit of a carload of heavily armed insurgents through the streets of Tikrit. The chase ends in a harrowing ambush, with the squad suffering heavy casualties. Brandon is wounded in the skirmish, as are two of his lifelong buddies, Steve (Channing Tatum) and Tommy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). They return to their small Texas hometown to a bestowment of Purple Hearts and a hero’s welcome, infusing the battle-weary vets with an initial euphoria that soon gives way to varying degrees of PTSD angst among the three friends. Brandon, who has had a bellyful of war horrors, has decided to pass on his option to re-enlist. Steve, a crack marksman who is also up for re-enlistment, is on the fence. His company commander (Timothy Olyphant) is pressuring him to re-up and return to combat duty; but his long-time fiancée, Michelle (Abbie Cornish) is concerned about Steve’s sometimes violent flashbacks and may leave him if he opts to stay in the Army. Tommy, who is suffering the most mental anguish, dives into a maelstrom of alcohol and textbook self-destructiveness.

Brandon appears to be holding up better than his two friends; that is, until he is ordered to report back to his unit and finds out that he is to be shipped back immediately for another tour of duty in Iraq, on the very day he is slated for his official discharge. When he starts asking questions, he is curtly informed that he has been “stop-lossed, under Title 10 of the United States Code…” (see above) and is summarily dismissed. Even though he has served in good faith and with a sense of patriotic duty, it now appears that the government has betrayed his trust (and why are we not surprised?). Determined not to take this sitting down, Brandon confronts the company commander, who views his protestations as “mutinous” and orders him to be thrown in the stockade. Brandon gives his M.P. escorts the slip and goes AWOL; Steve’s fiancée Michelle offers to tag along.

Brandon and Michelle’s subsequent road trip drives the film’s third act; it becomes both a literal and metaphorical journey through the landscape of the returning American vet’s zeitgeist. Peirce and her co-writer admirably skirt the usual clichés; although there are a few obligatory nods to the genre (for instance, I believe that there is a rule that stipulates every war vet film must contain at least one scene where the protagonist gets goaded into a street fight and goes temporarily medieval when it triggers a flashback).

Aside from a brief (and eye-opening) depiction of an “underground railroad” network that enables U.S. expatriates to flee to Canada, the filmmakers manage to remain low-key on political subtext; this is ultimately a soldier’s story. After all, the bottom line in any appraisal of our current “war” (or any war, for that matter) is (or should be) the human cost. The irrefutable fact here is that young people are dying, and many who do survive their tours of duty are left to deal with horrendous physical and/or mental damage for the rest of their lives. A beautifully played scene centered on a visit to a V.A. hospital brings this sad point home quite poignantly. Anyone with an ounce of compassion should find Stop-Loss to be sensitively acted, wrenchingly believable and frequently quite moving.

It is interesting to peruse the discussion boards on the Internet Movie Database regarding this film. As you might guess, there is predictable wing nut blather condemning the film as anti-American, anti-war hippie propaganda. But the most telling comments are coming from Iraq veterans, who for the most part seem to indicate that the film rings true. Hmmm, I wonder which of those two camps is more likely to know of what they speak?

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Making A New Generation Of Republicans

by digby

From Feministing:

One more reason for comprehensive sex education A survey in Florida showed that some teens believe drinking a cap of bleach will prevent HIV and that a shot of Mountain Dew will stop pregnancy. Lawmakers in the state say the myths are a direct result of Florida’s abstinence-only sex education.

Another Bush Family legacy.

Whatever they do, I hope they don’t tell them about condoms. Much better to have them drinking bleach to cleanse their dirty little minds. Maybe they could even kill themselves in the process, which would be God’s will. Especially the Jezebels.

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