Month: May 2008

Recounting Recount

by digby

I don’t know about you but last night after watching Recount, I had nightmares. Nightmares of screaming at the television for 30 days at the shameful spin of the Bush people. Nightmares of watching a purely political power game lay bare the rickety foundations of our democracy. Nightmares of Tim Russert and that stupid goddamned tote board of his.

It certainly brought back all the memories. As I’m sure is true with most of you who watched it in real time, it was obvious to me from the moment Gore retracted his concession that the Republican establishment and the Bush Florida machine had more levers of power to work with in a battle like this. But it wasn’t obvious to me that they would use it so blatantly, with the media egging them on with endless hand wringing about the “uncertainly” weakening the fabric of the country. Like all the Democrats in the movie, I completely dismissed the idea that the US Supreme Court, when put to the test, would end up as the final enforcer for the Republican Party. (I would say the last of my naivete died then — but that would be wrong. A little more of it reveals itself in its death throes every single day. It seems my idealism ran more deeply than I thought.)

It was interesting in the movie to see how the Bushies avoided the appearances of collusion with Katherine Harris’s office. I have a little detail, which I wrote about once before, that some of you who watched the movie last night might enjoy reading:

It seems that every day we hear of another example of the Bush administration politicizing the Justice department. Today we hear from a former career prosecutor in the civil rights division, filling in another piece of the puzzle:

I spent more than 35 years in the department enforcing federal civil rights laws — particularly voting rights. Before leaving in 2005, I worked for attorneys general with dramatically different political philosophies — from John Mitchell to Ed Meese to Janet Reno. Regardless of the administration, the political appointees had respect for the experience and judgment of longtime civil servants.

Under the Bush administration, however, all that changed. Over the last six years, this Justice Department has ignored the advice of its staff and skewed aspects of law enforcement in ways that clearly were intended to influence the outcome of elections.

It has notably shirked its legal responsibility to protect voting rights. From 2001 to 2006, no voting discrimination cases were brought on behalf of African American or Native American voters. U.S. attorneys were told instead to give priority to voter fraud cases, which, when coupled with the strong support for voter ID laws, indicated an intent to depress voter turnout in minority and poor communities.

Here’s another article debunking the “voter fraud” trope.

No surprise there. What is a surprise is how nobody seems to have seen this coming. The rough outlines were available when I wrote about what I saw as an emerging “illegal aliens are voting” theme almost a year ago. I thought they were preparing to use it for last November but I was a premature anti-purger.

But since I first started writing on-line, one of my recurring themes is that the modern Republican party has become fundamentally hostile to democracy.(And we already knew they were crooks.) This was first made obvious to me back in 1994, when Republican leader Dick Armey famously stated “your president is just not that important for us.” They went on to impeach that president against the clear will of the people.

But the biggest clue about what they were up to came in 2000 with the Florida recount. I know it seems like ancient history to go back to that but it is extremely important to remember just how outrageous their tactics were: the Gore campaign used legal tactics and the Bush campaign didn’t. There was the “bourgeois riot” and dirty trickster Roger Stone directing the street theatre from a van. (Here’s a list of what the Village Voice termed the five worst Bush recount outrages.) They used every lever of power they could to count illegally cast overseas ballots. They operated a hypocritical and situational media campaign that the press completely failed to properly analyze until it was too late. And after they did they helpfully told those who objected to “get over it.” And I guess we did.

The Republicans have been remarkably good about keeping their mouths shut about the Florida shennanigans, pretending that Jeb Bush’s electoral apparatus gave them no unusual help. Still, I was surprised to see a former Florida recount icon show up on the Lehrer News Hour last week to argue that the US Attorney firings were completely above board. His name is Michael Carvin and he was the lawyer who argued the Bush case before the Florida Supreme Court. Here’s his picture. I’m sure many of you will remember him:

The Newshour failed to identify him as one of the Florida recount team and instead named him merely as a former Reagan official. But he didn’t fail to carry the Bush water one more time:

MICHAEL CARVIN: I really think this is much ado about very little. I’m not saying that they haven’t mishandled this from a public relations perspective. They clearly have.

But the notion that firing eight U.S. attorneys with White House personnel involved is somehow shocking is like saying you’re shocked to discover there’s gambling in Casablanca. I don’t know where these people have been.

There’s not one member of that Judiciary Committee who hasn’t called the White House or the Justice Department and said, “My cousin or my law school roommate wants to be a U.S. attorney.”

So the notion that these kinds of appointments and removals in Walter’s administration — they fired all 93 in one slot — the notion that is isn’t influenced by the fact that the president needs his team in place, both at the main Justice Department and in the field, is really quite silly and quite counterfactual.

This would be typical Carvin. For instance, here’s something he said after Bush v Gore was decided:

The new deadline for all recounts to be submitted to Katherine Harris was 5 p.m. Sunday, November 26. Now, that Sunday afternoon you could watch any of the television coverage and see that Palm Beach was still counting. And by late afternoon you heard various officials in Palm Beach acknowledging that they were not going to be finished by five. Now, we maintain that was completely illegal, because the law said you had to manually recount all ballots. [See Village Voice top five outrages for why this is such a slimy position for him to take.]

But as five o’clock approached, we heard that the secretary of state was going to accept the Palm Beach partial recount — even though the Palm Beach partial recount was blatantly illegal. We were told that the secretary of state’s view was that unless Palm Beach actually informed her — in writing or otherwise — that the returns were only a partial recount, she could not infer that on her own.

So we made some calls to a few Republicans overseeing the Palm Beach recount. We told them to gently suggest to the canvassing board that it might as well put PARTIAL RETURN on the front of the returns that were to be faxed up in time for the deadline. The reason we gave was clarity — that the words PARTIAL RETURN would distinguish those returns from the full count that would be coming in later that night. I’m not exactly sure what happened, but I think the Palm Beach board did in the end write PARTIAL RECOUNT on the returns. We all know that the Secretary of State, in the end, rejected them. [By rejecting them, he means that she said that a partial return missed the deadline altogether and all the previously uncounted votes that were counted in the partial recount were never added to the tally. This had the effect of never allowing Gore to take the lead.]

I think the board members probably agreed to write the PARTIAL RECOUNT notation for two reasons. First of all, I think they hadn’t slept in 48 hours, so I think they’d sort of do anything. Second of all, I don’t think they or anybody else would have suspected that it would actually make any difference. Who would imagine that without the simple notation of PARTIAL RETURN the partial count would have been accepted as a complete count by the secretary of state? Even while the television showed them still counting?

But I don’t think it was Machiavellian to suggest to the board that it write PARTIAL RECOUNT, because that is what it was. I think it would have been sort of Machiavellian to suggest to pretend they were not partial returns. [Talk Magazine, March 2001, p. 172]

I know that virtually nobody cares about this anymore, if they ever did, but this was so full of nonsense that it amazed me that he got away with saying it. And the tale he tells, bad as it is, is still obviously not the whole story.

They were clearly colluding with Katherine Harris’ office throughout and they determined that she could reject all of the Palm Beach county votes they had counted by 5pm with this little gambit. Everything depended on not allowing Al Gore to ever take the lead or their whole PR campaign would start to fall apart.

It’s a small thing, I know, and probably one of thousands of such small acts of illegal and inappropriate collusion between Jeb Bush and the campaign during the recount. But it happened and we knew it happened. And it was done by people like Michael Carvin, former Reagan Justice Department official who now implies that the US Attorney scandal is nothing because everyone knows that the Bush Justice department is an enforcement arm of the Republican Party and that’s perfectly normal.

That is just how these people think. It’s why they hunted Clinton and Reno like dogs for eight years, determined to find evidence of wrongdoing. They either assume everyone does it because they do or they know they can innoculate themselves against accusations of their own bad acts by getting to the punch first. (And harrassing Democrats is rewarding in and of itself.)

I wrote to reporters Don Van Atta and Jake Tapper about this Carvin tid-bit when they were covering the media recount for the NY Times and Salon (and Tapper was writing a book about it.) Tapper was uninterested, but Van Natta called me and I told him where to find the quote. (Talk Magazine is not on lexis-nexis.) Then came 9/11, the recount story was pretty much shelved and the entire country was told we had to gather around the president.

But then, we had been told that from the beginning, hadn’t we? The media were complicit in this, helping the Republicans along every step of the way during the recount with constant rending of garments about a constitutional crisis and fantasies about tanks in the streets if things weren’t settled instantly. (The deadlines! My god, the deadlines!) And when it was all done, they told us repeatedly to get over it.

And here we are, six years later, actually debating whether the Bush White House has been manipulating the electoral system. For god’s sake — of course they have been. This administration was installed through crude manipulation of the rigged levers of power in the Bush family’s political machine and they see such outrageous conduct as perfectly legitimate. Indeed, I’m sure they believe “it’s not Machiavellian” to use the Department of Justice to rig the vote — it would be Machiavellian not to.

Update: Here’s a nice little update from 2005 on the Bourgeois Rioters.

Update II: And lest we forget, Tim Griffin, the houseboy Rove insisted replace the Arkansas US Attorney was on the Florida recount team. So was Kyle Sampson.

It’s pretty to think that this is all ancient history and we can move on. Maybe we can. But just this week, Tim Griffin was hired to run the RNCs Obama opposition research team. And the voter fraud apparatus that Rove and others before him have built, which includes Republican lawyers like Carvin and Griffin, is still up and running. Maybe they are spent and useless now. I hope so.

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Bless Their Hearts

by digby

Republicans are so cute:

It sounds crazy at first. Amid dire reports about the toxic political environment for Republican candidates and the challenges facing John McCain, many top GOP strategists believe he can defeat Barack Obama — and by a margin exceeding President Bush’s Electoral College victory in 2004.

At first blush, McCain’s recent rough patch and the considerable financial disadvantage confronting him make such predictions seem absurd. Indeed, as Republicans experience their worst days since Watergate, those same GOP strategists are reticent to publicly tout the prospect of a sizable McCain victory for fear of looking foolish.

But the contours of the electoral map, combined with McCain’s unique strengths and the nature of Obama’s possible vulnerabilities, have led to a cautious and muted optimism that McCain could actually surpass Bush’s 35-electoral-vote victory in 2004. Though they expect he would finish far closer to Obama in the popular vote, the thinking is that he could win by as many 50 electoral votes.

By post-war election standards, that margin is unusually small. Yet it’s considerably larger than either Bush’s 2004 victory or his five-electoral-vote win in 2000.

“A win by 40 or 50 electoral votes would be an astonishing upset, just a watershed event with all the issues that were stacked against him from the very beginning,” said David Woodard, a Republican pollster and Clemson University political science professor. “But it could happen. I know this seems like wishful thinking by Republicans. I’m thinking that Republicans could win by 40 electoral votes. But I dare not say it,” he added. “Certainly what is possible could come to pass.”

Sure it could. Martians could land in Central Park and hand out Hershey’s kisses too. Anything’s possible.

This indicates that it’s nah gah happen:

They Aren’t Coming Back

by digby

I was going to link positively to Ezra’s post today about the Reagan Democrats and Atrios beat me to it. I agree with the notion that trying to “recapture” the Reagan Democrats is a losing proposition and I have, coincidentally, been saying it for years. People who drifted to Reagan in 1980 were driven by nationalism and animus toward social change. While they may have been sympathetic to equal rights in the abstract, things started to get dicey when their own lives were impacted by busing and housing integration and women’s rights. They made themselves heard by voting with the guy who ran as the one who would “make the country proud again,” which they interpreted to mean he would make the country like it used to be.

After the smoke had cleared a few of them drifted back when a less charismatic Republican took office and a few more when the Democrats offered up Bill Clinton in 1992. But those who’ve stayed until now have stayed because they found they felt extremely comfortable in modern Republican tribal culture and they aren’t likely to leave short of a cataclysmic 1932-style realignment

Up until quite recently, it was understood that a new Democratic majority was going to be built upon the base of African Americans, unions and liberals, then capturing the hugely important growing Latino bloc while getting out the liberal youth vote (particularly young, single women.) Of course the Democratic party (the party of unions, fergawdsake) cares about the working class voter and need to get some slice of that demographic to win, but the focus would be on working class women who have been far more willing to swing Democratic than the majority of (white, non-union) working class men have been in recent years — and have proven so in this primary campaign.

The modern winning coalition for Democrats isn’t put together by getting the Reagan Democrats back. They’re long gone. But every damned election we have to obsess over getting the votes of a bunch of true blue Republican men like they’re the holy grail. They’re welcome to come over, of course, but after 30 years of pandering there’s no reason to believe they’re ever going to do it. Fuggedaboudit.

*It occurs to me after reading this over that I will need to make the standard disclaimer that this is not meant as any kind of endorsement of the candidates. As I have written endlessly, I think the fundamentals of this election are about massive GOP failure and a willingness among the electorate to embrace change. I don’t think the Republicans particularly want to win and I don’t think the Democrats have done anything to make themselves lose. I believe the party will be together in the fall and that there are going to be plenty of people who will cross over to vote for them this time for a variety of reasons. But that has nothing to do with building a new, lasting governing coalition which is what the endless “Reagan Democrat” dialog is all about.

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A Recounting

by dday

In my continuing quest to pinch-hit on every liberal site in the entire blogosphere, I’ll be filling in for the next couple weeks at Kevin Drum’s Washington Monthly blog, along with some great compatriots like hilzoy from Obsidian Wings, Eric Martin from American Footprints, Neil from Cogitamus, and Cheryl Rofer from Whirled View. I have my first post up about the HBO movie “Recount” premiering tonight and a media account from the time that happened to cross my path this week. Instead of reposting it here, I thought I’d just point you over.

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Nixonland’s The One

by tristero

So far, I’m only halfway through Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America but I can safely say it is one of the finest books on American politics I’ve ever read. It is compulsively readable. Go and get it, right now. You will thank me.

Saturday Night At The Movies

Standard Operating Procedure: Wish you were here

Auschwitz staff, 1944 (Holocaust Memorial Museum)

Abu Ghraib staff, 2004

By Dennis Hartley

There was a fascinating documentary that aired recently on the National Geographic Channel called Nazi Scrapbooks from Hell. It was the most harrowing depiction of the Holocaust I’ve seen, but it offered nary a glimpse of the oft-shown photographs of the atrocities themselves. Rather, it focused on photos from a recently discovered scrapbook that belonged to an SS officer assigned to Auschwitz. Essentially an organized, affably annotated gallery of the “after hours” lifestyle of a “workaday” concentration camp staff, it shows cheerful participants enjoying a little outdoor nosh, catching some sun, and even the odd sing-along, all in the shadow of the notorious death factory where they “worked”. If it weren’t for the Nazi uniforms, you might think it was just a bunch of guys from the office, hamming it up for the camera at a company picnic. As the filmmakers point out, it is the everyday “banality” of this evil that makes it so chilling. The most amazing fact is that these pictures were taken in the first place. What were they thinking?

This is the same rhetorical question posed by one of the interviewees in Standard Operating Procedure, a new documentary about the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal from renowned filmmaker Errol Morris. The gentleman is a military C.I.D. investigator who had the unenviable task of sifting through the thousands of damning photos taken by several of the perpetrators. Since this is primarily a movie review, I don’t feel a need to rehash the back story for you (especially when a Google search of “Abu Ghraib” yields over 3 million results). We’ve all viewed those thoroughly repulsive photos ad nauseam, and the cold hard facts of the case have been well-documented and endlessly dissected.

The next logical question might be, what was Erroll Morris thinking? What startling new insight could he offer on this well-worn subject? This guy is no slouch-he has been responsible for several of the most well-crafted and compelling American documentaries of the last 30 years, from his 1978 debut Gates of Heaven, (a knockout doc about pet cemeteries) to the true crime classic The Thin Blue Line (1988), and his most recent critical success The Fog of War (2003). Once again, Morris serves up a unique blend of disarmingly intimate confessions, delivered directly into a modified teleprompter by his interviewees, accented by the highly stylized recreations of certain events.

Perhaps in an attempt to avoid flogging a dead torture victim (in a manner of speaking) Morris makes an interesting choice here. He aims his spotlight not so much on analyzing the glaringly obvious inhumanity on display in those sickening photos, but rather on our perception of them. So just who are these people that took them? What was the actual intent behind the self-documentation? Can we conclusively pass judgment on the actions of the people involved, based solely on what we “think” these photographs show us? In a weird way, Morris’ insistence on drawing us “behind” the photo sessions made me flash on Antonioni’s 1966 classic Blow Up. The protagonist in that film is a fashion photographer who becomes obsessed with examining a series of seemingly benign pictures that he takes in a public park. He begins to believe that he has inadvertently documented a murder taking place in the background of the photos…or is he just seeing what he wants to see? The film challenges our perception of what we “see” as reality.

According to Abu Ghraib poster girl Lyddie England and several other of the convicted MPs who Morris interviews in the film, the “reality” behind the prisoner “abuse” was (in their perception ) “standard operating procedure”; they were merely “softening up” the subjects for the CIA interrogators. You know-just doing their job. One phrase you hear over and over is “everybody knew what was going on”, which sounds suspiciously like that old Nuremberg line “we were only following orders”. And so it goes.

Morris also plays up the bizarre “love triangle” aspect of the tale. When asked to explain her willingness to ham it up for the most infamous prisoner humiliation photos, England blames it on amore. “What can I say,” she shrugs, “I was in love.” She is referring to Charles Graner, her then lover/now estranged father of their lovechild, currently serving 10 years for his part in the scandal (Morris was denied permission by the military to interview him). As we now know, Graner was concurrently “dating” another MP, Megan Ambuhl, who has since become his wife (it’s all so…Jerry Springer). Here’s a sobering thought: Thanks to the methodical “softening up” of America’s prestige conducted by the Bush white house during its first four years, all it took was a taxpayer-funded white trash scrapbook from hell to drive the final nail into its coffin.

Morris has taken some flak for focusing only on those who some may consider the low-level “scapegoats” of the Abu Ghraib debacle; these critics seem to be implying that he is not targeting high enough in the food chain. There is some merit in this assertion; the only “brass” featured in the film is the palpably embittered ex-brigadier general and former Abu Ghraib overseer Janis Karpinski, who angrily asserts that she was treated to a dog and pony show whenever she visited the facilities. But in all fairness, Morris does not have the hindsight of history on his side in this case. We can’t expect anything close to that great final shot in All the President’s Men of the teletype keys pounding out the Nixon resignation bulletin. In a truly fair and balanced universe, the only satisfactory denouement to any story about the Iraq “war” should be a closing shot of a spinning newspaper, finally righting itself to declare “Bush and Cheney to be Impeached For War Crimes!” The Nixon administration is history. We’re still living this nightmare.

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Swooners In Heat

by digby

Bob Somerby has a barn burner up today about man-crushes that is not to be missed. He particularly excoriates Kurt Anderson for an appearance on Charlie Rose this week in which he admitted to “swooning” over Obama. Somerby reminds us of previous Anderson swoons:

ANDERSEN (9/13/99): I too like Bill Bradley, and expect to vote for him in the primary. A friend of mine who’s a theater director recently told me that I should tell another friend of mine who’s a speechwriter for Bradley that he, the director, would like to help coach the candidate in big-audience performing skills. Which I think would be a good idea. And which I also think is a very rich premise for a comedy sketch. But my problem with politics these days…is that politics don’t and really can’t matter all that much in this country right now. There are rough, large consensuses on all the big issues—economics, social welfare, civil rights, women’s rights, war and peace, even abortion. And they will continue as long as the economy chugs along like this and we stay out of wars any longer than a mini-series. Sure, there’s a biggish, scary lunatic right—the Gary Bauerite creationist anti-gay regiments—but they’re not going to be running the country or amending the Constitution any time soon. In fact, Pat Buchanan is right about the virtual indistinguishability of the Democrats and Republicans. I sympathize with both Buchanan and Warren Beatty viscerally, if not ideologically. I really think national politics kind of needs to be blown up and rebuilt. For the couple of weeks seven years ago before he revealed himself to be a horrible, crazy gnome, Ross Perot seemed to me like a great idea. And if next November the candidates are George Bush, Al Gore, and Jesse Ventura, it isn’t inconceivable that I would pull the lever for Ventura. And I certainly wouldn’t be very upset if Bush won, even if he can’t name a single book he’s ever read.

This is a ridiculous person and so un-self aware that he’s actually proud of it.

I’m hoping that the current Obama swoon will help Democrats win in November. But let’s not forget that people like Anderson are just a little bit untrustworthy as advocates, so I wouldn’t take anything they say too seriously. He is a preening, puerile airhead, who may be useful in the short term, but presents a very clear danger to our system and our politics in the long run. These silly fellows tend to be just a bit fickle, if you know what I mean. Just read that excerpt again if you don’t believe me.

I’m a pragmatic sort and I am more than willing to take advantages where they come. But the fact that journalists like Anderson are all swooning over Obama is a very mixed bag. Right now it will be helpful in that the press corps also swoons over McCain so perhaps we’ll get a little balance. But boys like him tend to get very nasty when their idols turn out to be mortal.

This swooning between Obama and the press could very well end up being a classic Dangerous Relationship. One of the most important signs of a potential abuser is if they put you up on a pedestal:

Being on a pedestal may feel great at the time, but all idols are bound to fall. The higher the pedestal, the harder the fall.

Take notice if a person has assigned you a position or qualities that are completely unrealistic given where you are in the relationship. For a new lover to say, “you are the light of my life” or “you are everything to me” in the first few weeks of dating is scary. They are impossible to live up to. Your lover knows too little about you. Inevitably, he is projecting onto you all kinds of qualities you may or may not have.

It is flattering to have all these fops of the village press corps drooling all over a big Democrat. But they have issues. Big ones. They have the attention spans of a six week old ferret and the fidelity of a cat in heat. It’s extremely foolish to trust these abusers with our future. Caveat Emptor.

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Cheap Insurance

by digby

Glenn Greenwald writes today about all the money the telcoms have spent on lobbying this year, (quite a bit more, as it turns out, than the year before if they stay on pace.)

Just in the first three months of 2008, recent lobbyist disclosure statements reveal that AT&T spent $5.2 million in lobbyist fees (putting it well ahead of its 2007 pace, when it spent just over $17 million). In the first quarter of 2008, Verizon spent $4.8 million on lobbyist fees, while Comcast spent $2.6 million. So in the first three months of this year, those three telecoms — which would be among the biggest beneficiaries of telecom amnesty (right after the White House) — spent a combined total of almost $13 million on lobbyists. They’re on pace to spend more than $50 million on lobbying this year — just those three companies.

13 million bucks is a lot of money. But as I read the numbers, I was struck, once again, by what an incredible bargain these corporations get when they buy off politicians. This money wouldn’t even cover executive perks. Verizon has a 1.2 billion dollar advertising budget. Comcast paid 2o million to its CEO alone last year. Here’s the deal AT&Ts CEO got:

AT&T Chairman and CEO Randall Stephenson earned about $18 million last year-about $1.2 million in salary and the rest in performance-based bonuses and stock awards, according to BusinessWeek, which does not rely on company figures and uses its own methods to calculate such things. The non-salary compensation included more than $89,000 worth of personal use of a company plane, more than $15,000 for a home security system and more than $10,000 for a club membership.

Lobbying and campaign contributions are tip money to these people and yet politicians are so beholden to them for these financial crumbs that they sell out the American people and the constitution for them. Corporations get the best bargain in the world.

With respect to the FISA cases, they could easily afford to shoulder the financial burden of litigation. It’s hard to imagine that they are so exposed that there is any serious financial liability. But why should they pay for lawyers and risk some public relations fallout if they can just throw some chicken feed at the problem and let their political puppets take all the heat? It’s hardly even noticeable to the bottom line.

This problem is systemic. We know that Big Money will always have an outsized influence in politics. It’s just the way of the world. But one of the most hopeful things to come along in many moons is the revolution in individual donations made possible by the internet. If we can find a way to systematically empower millions of individuals to engage in politics with small donations, Big Business will automatically lose at least some of its clout. They will always find a way to spend money to their advantage, but it will at least be mitigated by the collective will of millions of citizens who are putting not only their votes, but their money, where their mouths are. That really is revolutionary.

If you feel like signing on to the revolution yourself, you can always donate a couple of bucks to Blue America candidates. They are all progressives who would be thrilled not to have to dial for dollars from rich elites who love to buy politicians cheaply and brag about it to their friends.

If you’d like to join in a chat with one them, Regina Thomas from Georgia, is over at FDL right now taking questions.

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Marriage And The Secular Conscience

by tristero

My friend, philosopher Austin Dacey, is in the Times today. I’ve posted before about his book, The Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life and it led to some lively discussions, with some of you strongly agreeing and others disagreeing with Dacey. (I hasten to add that I often disagree with Austin – and just as often agree with him. I value our friendship all the more for the opportunity to argue passionately with someone who is both intelligent and knowledgeable.) Here he has lost me, but probably because I don’t quite grasp the fundamental level at which philosophers approach a question:

Mr. Dacey illuminated his notion of a fundamental conversation with his reaction to last week’s California Supreme Court decision that barring same-sex marriage violates the State Constitution. In a lengthy e-mail message, he noted that such court decisions had provoked “a powerful (and pretty permanent) backlash,” with more and more states adopting “pre-emptive state constitutional bans.”

Secular liberals, he proposed, should pursue “another, more gradual strategy,” emphasizing public debate and legislation rather than court cases. Currently, “conservatives resort to secular-sounding sociological research about child development and slippery slopes,” he wrote, while “liberals try to debunk this pseudoscience, and accuse their interlocutors of bigotry.”

But neither side, he said, is addressing the moral heart of the matter: a core conviction that “marriage is a sacred covenant” that homosexual unions would violate. “Who is talking about that?” he asked.

“This culture war will be lost if we cannot engage in public conversation about the religious significance of marriage and the moral value of same-sex relationships,” he concluded.

Please note that Dacey’s problem is with the practical effects of the California Supreme Court ruling. He fears that by sidestepping, or short-circuiting a “fundamental conversation” on what exactly is meant by “the sacred covenant of marriage,” a backlash is all but inevitable. It is that conversation Dacey seeks, because he is quite confident that the position stemming from a liberal conscience – essentially, any two people who love each other should have the right to marry – is the more reasonable one and will prevail.

My difficulty with Austin’s position is that I can’t see much to have a conversation about. Of course, the state’s attitude towards any couple should be blind to the gender of the two people involved, including the right to be married. The only arguments in favor of discriminating the genders within a couple rest on interpretations of specific religious texts. Not merely do such arguments clearly violate the Establishment clause, they rest upon the fundamental fallacy of arguing from authority. If Austin wishes to have that argument, ie, challenging biblical authority, all well and good, but the proximate issue is marriage rights. And about that, there seems little to discuss.

Regarding the “sacredness of marriage,” Austin is surely devil-advocating here. Of course, he knows that marriages are often a matter of registering down at the County Clerk’s office and that there is nothing inherently “sacred” – ie, religiously special – about marriage at all. No one has shied away from discussing this. As no one has shied away from noting that marriages have often been pre-arranged, been entered into for financial reasons, political reasons, and even simply to assert citizenship in a new country.

As for the “morality of marriage,” I fail once again to see what there is to discuss without getting specific. It’s often a very good thing for two people to marry. And it’s often a lousy thing. But without specific examples, I fail to grasp the meaning of phrases like “morality of marriage” – or “sacredness of marriage,” for that matter.

Finally, I don’t think that a “permanent” backlash is a necessary result. Perhaps he’s unaware of this, but twice the California legislature passed gay marriage legislation and twice the piece of Hitler-loving garbage California has for a governor vetoed it. As Richard Kim points out in The Nation:

…gay marriage has become a thoroughly mainstream proposition [in California]. In 2005 and 2007 the California State Legislature passed bills granting gays and lesbians the right to marry; on both occasions, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed the bills. But by directly expressing their support for gay marriage through the democratic process, the State Legislature undercut the right-wing claim that gay marriage is something “activist judges” foist onto an unwilling public. Indeed, the majority on the state’s Supreme Court, comprising three Republicans and one Democrat, weren’t “legislating from the bench”; they were reaffirming legislative will. And despite his vetoes, Schwarzenegger has said that he respects the court’s opinion and opposes an amendment to the California Constitution, something he calls “a waste of time.”

None of this will deter conservatives from pouring money, ground troops and vitriol into their campaign to get a marriage amendment passed, and they may well succeed this fall. But even that short-term victory won’t change two fundamentals: in the presidential race, California will go to the Democratic candidate, and the idea of gay marriage–endorsed by the State Legislature, accepted by the Republican governor and supported by growing numbers of gay-friendly voters–has become for Californians as banal as a Hollywood divorce.

…The California gay marriage debate illustrates important national trends for Democrats. Growing numbers of Americans favor gay rights, including some form of partnership recognition for same-sex couples, especially when framed as economic and legal rights. This is particularly true of young voters; in California 55 percent of voters under 30 support gay marriage, and nationwide 63 percent of voters under 40 support civil unions or domestic partnerships. But this trend also holds true for voters of all ages; a 2007 Field poll reported that Californians young and old were four times more likely to say they are becoming more accepting of gay relationships than less accepting. Moreover, when the symbolic weight of marriage is removed from the equation, support for gay rights becomes overwhelming. Nationwide, a whopping 89 percent of voters favor protecting gays and lesbians from employment discrimination.

And that’s about it. What more is there to discuss? “The symbolic weight of marriage?” I suppose so, but I don’t see it being amenable to reason. If you truly believe that your own marriage is diminished because two men have the right to marry, no amount of conversation or reason is going to convince you otherwise.

In short, it is hard to have a national fundamental conversation about objections to gay marriage for the same reason it’s hard to have a national conversation about the validity of “intelligent design” creationism: There is no there there. That is, there are no good rational arguments, period, for a gay marriage ban or for knowingly teaching lies as science. And given that lack of rational arguments, how is it possible to have a fundamental conversation?

In truth, marriage rights, like reproductive rights, are about the exercise of power. To control who may marry, or what a woman can do with her body, is to wield power. Therefore, as I see it, the only purpose a fundamental conversation has regarding these issues is as part of an effort to advance the progressive positions. But since the objections to the liberal positions are more emotional than rational, discussions of fundamentals are much less important to advancing marriage rights than discussions of specific legislative and legal strategies. I don’t think this is true of all issues, of course. Surely, there are many issues over reasonable people disagree (within evolutionary biology, for example, there are many important and exciting controversies ). I just don’t see marriage rights as that kind of an issue.

Again, I’m not a philosopher, so there may be some subtle nuance I’m missing. I simply fail to see the social controversy over gay marriage as one between two competing positions, honestly and reasonably held – I see it only as an attempt to exert power over people’s lives by the right. But if I am missing something, I’m sure you’ll tell me all about it (grin).

Governator Giggles

by digby

I still can’t stop laughing whenever our California Governor speaks (as he is this morning on CNN.). I know it’s not fair. He can’t help it that his entire career prior to becoming Governor was spent delivering stupid lines in a thick Austrian accent. I can’t help associating him with them either.

I’ve never really gotten over the fact that this state actually voted for this man. Twice. It’s not that he’s any worse than most Republicans, but then that’s a pretty low bar. It’s just that they knowingly voted for a man’s carefully crafted macho movie image as if that image was real — and didn’t think there was anything wrong with that. He hadn’t established his bona fides in any way other than creating a physical fitness program and marrying a woman from a political family and yet because he was a popular movie star he was catapulted into one of the most powerful political positions in the country. It was decadent and dumb. But then after George W. Bush was elected because people preferred to party with him, it wasn’t entirely unpredictable.

I predict that this era will be remembered by history as one of the most bizarre periods in American history. Maybe it’s just some sort of fin de siècle millenial weirdness and it will pass. But the last time, the strangeness lasted until WWI. Let’s hope the faster pace of the modern world makes this freakshow end sooner than that. Oy.

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