Month: August 2008

Glitzy

by digby

Some of you may recall a post I wrote some time back riffing on a TNR article about Republican strategist and social maven Ed and Edwina Rogers and their house called Surrey Hill.

I think that what may have surprised me the most about this story is that Ed Rogers is married to a woman, but the large sums of money come in a close second. Property in McLean is more valuable that Greenwich or Malibu and there is something terribly wrong with that. These are the good ole boy Republicans who hold fancy “Pig Pickin’parties” and claim to represent Real Americans — it’s one of the greatest con jobs ever perpetrated. I’ve got no problem with people getting rich — I’ve got a lot of problems with people doing it by stealing money from the taxpayers while wearing a cross and condemning others’ morality.

Dover Bitch noticed that Ed had some things to say today about Obama’s problems with elitism:

Super lobbyist, McCain donor and loathsome GOP figure Ed Rogers decided to talk to the Washington Post about Barack Obama last week:

John McCain’s celebrity ad was effective. It wasn’t uncontroversial and it didn’t please all the political scientists, but it sure got noticed, and it made Barack Obama overreact. Questions about Obama’s desire for celebrity status will linger. He now has to be very careful about intersecting with Hollywood, pop culture and entertainment. Lee Atwater said the worst thing you can do in American politics is play to your negative stereotype. Well, Obama’s negative stereotype now includes the idea that he may be a little too glitzy. (Speaking of negative stereotypes, when Obama was talking about the pictures of presidents on dollar bills, was he introducing the presumptuous notion that his face belongs on American currency? I wonder whom he thinks he should replace.)

Glitzy? Ed and Edwina’s house makes the Liberace museum look like an Amish farmhouse.

Here’s DB with the kicker:

In other news, NBC has just completed the pilot for their new show, POWER HOUSE. In the first episode, we get to see how Ed Rogers and his wife live in their “Republican Shangri-La” — an 18-thousand square foot estate in McLean, VA.

Click over to Dover Bitch for the stills from the show. One, in particular, is priceless (in more ways than one.) DB writes:

That’s right. She’s standing in front of rows of her designer shoes cutting up sheets of freshly printed U.S. dollar bills with a pair of scissors so she can use them as wrapping paper.

You cannot make this stuff up. The middle class African American guy who made his own way and whose net worth wouldn’t cover the garage in this man’s house is nonetheless subject to criticism from him for being “too glitzy.”

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The Law of Unintended Consequences

by tristero

I found this buried in an article in the New York Times and was reminded again how deeply catastrophic a foreign policy blunder the Bush/Iraq war has been, and in so many different ways:

Moreover, by preparing Georgian soldiers for duty in Iraq, the United States appeared to have helped embolden Georgia, if inadvertently, to enter a fight it could not win.

At Least This Means He May Have Figured Out How To Use The Internet

by dday

John McCain’s statement today on Georgia, ripped off from Wikipedia.

First instance:

one of the first countries in the world to adopt Christianity as an official religion (Wikipedia)

vs.

one of the world’s first nations to adopt Christianity as an official religion (McCain)

Second instance:

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Georgia had a brief period of independence as a Democratic Republic (1918-1921), which was terminated by the Red Army invasion of Georgia. Georgia became part of the Soviet Union in 1922 and regained its independence in 1991. Early post-Soviet years was marked by a civil unrest and economic crisis. (Wikipedia)

vs.

After a brief period of independence following the Russian revolution, the Red Army forced Georgia to join the Soviet Union in 1922. As the Soviet Union crumbled at the end of the Cold War, Georgia regained its independence in 1991, but its early years were marked by instability, corruption, and economic crises. (McCain)

Honestly, I don’t care if he ripped off basic biographical facts from Wikipedia, though it kind of diminishes his pretensions to having a rich knowledge of the region (although, you never know, he could have been the original Wikipedia author! Ever think of that, liberals?).

I do mind McCain stealing his ideological outlook on conflicts with Russia from General Jack D. Ripper.

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Hello?

by digby

Not that logic has played even the smallest role in the current debate on drilling, but this really seems like an important point, at least politically:

While the U.S. oil industry wants access to more federal lands to help reduce reliance on foreign suppliers, American-based companies are shipping record amounts of gasoline and diesel fuel to other countries. A record 1.6 million barrels a day in U.S. refined petroleum products were exported during the first four months of this year, up 33 percent from 1.2 million barrels a day over the same period in 2007. Shipments this February topped 1.8 million barrels a day for the first time during any month, according to final numbers from the Energy Department.
The surge in exports appears to contradict the pleas from the U.S. oil industry and the Bush administration for Congress to open more offshore waters and Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling. “We can help alleviate shortages by drilling for oil and gas in our own country,” President Bush told reporters this week. “We have got the opportunity to find more crude oil here at home.

I think most of you who are reading this know that we are dealing with a world market in oil and that this whole argument is brain dead. That’s one of the reasons why it’s so depressing to have “drill, drill, drill” be such a success. But it seems to me that this would have been a good line of attack against McCain, even though it’s equally stupid: “why are the oil companies selling off our good American crude to foreign countries when we need it so badly?”

I hate having to fight dumb with dumb, but it may be the better choice than to allow the Republicans to have the upper hand — or at least be able to neutralize their whorish fealty to the energy lobby — by being allowed to blur the differences on this issue. (Even the NY Times has gone over to the dark side on that, even though Obama’s energy plan is vastly, vastly superior to the energy company giveaway that McCain’s put out. ) Going along with this fiction that drilling “our own oil” will do anything to lower gas prices seems like the worst of all possible worlds.

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Calling Their Bluff

by dday

Somehow, the reporting on this has been very thin, but it’s extremely significant that the Iraqi government is gradually but insistently extracting the concession of a firm timeline for withdrawal from Iraq in ways that the Democratic Congress never has.

Iraq’s foreign minister insisted Sunday that any security deal with the United States must contain a “very clear timeline” for the departure of U.S. troops. A suicide bomber struck north of Baghdad, killing at least five people including an American soldier.

Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari told reporters that American and Iraqi negotiators were “very close” to reaching a long-term security agreement that will set the rules for U.S. troops in Iraq after the U.N. mandate expires at the end of the year.

Zebari said the Iraqis were insisting that the agreement include a “very clear timeline” for the withdrawal of U.S.-led forces, but he refused to talk about specific dates.

Yes, it’s conditions-based, and who becomes the next President matters as to its implementation. But the Iraqis have taken a page from George Bush’s playbook to force this concession – move toward a deadline and stubbornly refuse to concede. There were about 3 or 4 points where Democrats could have achieved the same thing, but their will never held out beyond a couple days.

There are still pitfalls in Iraq that could alter any timetable, of course. Suicide bombings continue and the military operations designed to root out insurgents are still telegraphed to allow them to slip away. The collapse of the provincial elections law is very disturbing, particularly because those in Iraq’s greatest trouble spots are growing increasingly angered.

The anger among the Awakenings movements is already palpable. The New York Times quotes Ali Hatem Suleiman saying that “We are running out of patience,” and Sheik Hamid al-Hayis saying “This is a slap on the face of Iraq… we couldn’t make a big change in the government structure. That pushed us to work to make change in the provincial council. But even that we can’t touch.” Dr. iRack, just back from Iraq, reports that the notoriously outspoken Ali Hatem “is deadly serious about returning to war against all the Islamic parties (Sunni and Shia) if the Awakening groups are not given the power they think they deserve.” That fits what I’ve heard from others less prone to hyperbole.

Leaders of the Awakenings have been warning that they are “losing patience” and “the next few months will be decisive” so many times that I suspect some people have stopped taking them seriously […] We are potentially approaching a moment of truth. The consequences of building up these forces outside of the structures of the Iraqi state, while stringing them along with promises that require Iraqi government acquiesence to deliver may be coming due. I know well that US military commanders have been far more attentive to these issues than have the cheerleaders, and MNF-I and Ambassador Crocker have been working as hard as they can to resolve them. Their failure to deliver a compromise on the provincial elections law and their failure to deliver meaningful progress on SOI integration both suggest the limits of American influence in Iraq – a lesson which the advocates of “strategic patience”, who continue to view American decisions as the only ones which really matter, never seem to digest.

The Awakenings groups continue to be denied entry into the larger Iraqi security forces, which as we learned in the NYT today is where most of the jobs are in the country, on the government rolls. The provincial elections would have provided them some representation in the Parliament, and yet should they ever go through it would spell full-scale armed conflict in Kirkuk. There are also intra-Shiite battles that have not been extinguished. Because the root causes of the violence in Iraq have not been addressed, the potential for chaos always exists. And of course there are limits to the pressure that the US military can put on this situation.

And yet, the surge supporters are a victim of their own cheerleading. Their perception of success has led to the Iraqi Shiite ruling party believing they can pummel any challenges to their power and bribe the rest, so they feel free making the move to call for a withdrawal. They’ve caught Bush and Cheney in a real bind – you can only walk the tightrope between “we’re winning” and “it’ll all go to hell if we leave” for so long. In addition, that American-centric view of the state of play in Iraq is deeply misguided. We’ve set events in motion that we now will find difficult to control.

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Georgia And Other Stuff On My Mind

by digby

I’ve been casting about all week-end trying to figure out how to write something about the political implications of the two presidential campaigns’ responses to the Russia-Georgia situation. (I’m not in a position to comment on the policy implications — the situation is still too murky to make sense out of what’s really happened. The more prosaic domestic implications are easier to get a handle on.)

Then I was alerted to this piece over at Political Wire by my email acquaintance (and Barack supporter) Dan Conley. I’ll just steal the whole thing:

Crisis in Georgia

The following guest post is from Dan Conley, a former speechwriter for Virginia Gov. Doug Wilder and Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley.

While most of America is distracted with the Olympics and the Edwards scandal, the world is inching closer to a massive, destructive war between Russia and Georgia, one that could possibly draw in Ukraine as well. So far, the domestic political implications of this conflict have been minimal, but the actions of both campaigns raise troubling questions about how either Senator would perform as Commander in Chief.

For Barack Obama, the problem is foreign policy incoherence. Obama has become a willing pawn of foreign policy experts — to the point that he’s embraced Georgia’s entry into NATO without understanding the full implications of that strategy. As we now see, embracing Georgia in NATO means a willingness to defend that country in a war against Russia. Yet Obama’s response has been all over the map, matching consensus global opinion. At first, he blamed both Georgia and Russia, then called for Russia to withdraw, now he’s demanding an immediate cease fire. Events are in the saddle and Obama is going along for the ride — this matches President Bush’s approach to the crisis, and that’s not a good thing.

For John McCain, the problem isn’t coherence, it’s bellicosity. McCain has been the strongest global voice behind Georgia since the shooting began. The problem is, when does the McCain tough rhetoric end and World War III begin? The McCain team will argue that the only way to deter Russia, Iran and other global aggressors from taking actions like this is to stand up to them forcefully, with credibility. The problem is the second half of that equation — with U.S. troops in Iraq and even Georgia unsure how to get their 2,000 Iraqi troops back home in time to make a difference, how exactly would the U.S. help Georgia in this conflict, short of starting an all-out war with the second biggest nuclear power? At this moment, the U.S. has no credible way to threaten Russia. So unless McCain is willing to get the U.S. in the middle of every armed conflict on earth — giving new definition to his promise of “more wars” — a McCain Presidency would mean that we’re at least going to enter a new age of foreign policy brinkmanship that will demand a military sufficient to fight these battles. That means either getting out of Iraq or reinstating a draft, because the military today is incapable of matching McCain’s rhetoric.

One final point: yesterday, one Georgia official claimed that Russian jets targeted the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, which carries roughly one percent of the world’s oil to Turkey, bypassing Russian ports. The strike, if it actually happened, was unsuccessful. There has been no independent confirmation of the attack and considering how easy it’s been for Iraqi insurgents to knock out pipelines over the last five years, one would assume that if Russia really wanted this pipeline out of service, it would be blown to bits by now. Yet despite the dubious nature of these reports, the Drudge Report threw up a headline this morning entitled The Pipeline War and now every American news source has followed their lead. All based on one man’s unconfirmed report. Such is the ridiculous state of American news coverage in 2008 and another reason why the oil futures markets have become completely insane this year.

The right has gone completely nuts over this pipeline thing. If you want to get a good overview of their view of the pipeline story read the posts above this one from Powerline, which captures the spin on Obama’s take:

On Friday the Obama campaign issued a pathetic statement “strongly condemn[ing] the outbreak of violence in Georgia.” Strongly! Obama found no reason to distinguish between Russia and Georgia in strongly condemning the outbreak of violence. Or perhaps he found it too difficult to do so.

Obama has apparently continued to deliberate on the subject. Given some more time to think about it, one can infer from this Reuters story, Obama has made a big decision. Obama has decided that it’s better to sound like John McCain.

Yes, they’re shoot-from-the-hip, hawks who are apparently convinced that the US is prepared to fight the whole world at the same time, but the Obama campaign seems to have been sufficiently unnerved that they felt they couldn’t allow their original, sensible comment to stand. Perhaps it was unavoidable as events unfolded, but it’s discouraging nonetheless. Setting aside the real foreign policy implications, from a political standpoint, the right is always going to use any excuse to paint a Democrat as someone whose first instinct is capitulation. It’s what they do. This kind of response actually reinforces their theme.

Which brings me to Michael Tomasky piece in yesterday’s Washington Post:

… instead of talking about post-partisanship, Obama has in some respects been demonstrating it. His apparently close relationship with retiring Sen. Chuck Hagel, the Nebraska Republican who traveled with him to Iraq and shows many signs of intending to endorse him, is the clearest manifestation of this. The recent ad bragging about Obama’s nuclear nonproliferation work with Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), an ad that Lugar clearly green-lighted, is another.

I suspect that Hagel will speak at the Democratic convention and appear in ads for Obama down the road. And I wonder about former secretary of state Colin L. Powell and Lincoln Chafee (the former Rhode Island GOP senator, now an independent), and Susan Eisenhower (Ike’s granddaughter) and even Douglas W. Kmiec, a conservative legal scholar who is hardly a household name but whose endorsement of Obama was a huge deal in certain circles. If these folks are willing to speak for Obama, offering testimonials to his ability to lead us toward a new kind of politics, that could well do more to advance the national unity theme than any amount of rhetoric from the candidate.

Even so, I would like to see Obama return to the post-partisan, one-America idea himself. It’s an electoral winner and a governing essential, should he be elected.

It’s an electoral winner because Democrats can’t really triumph in divide-and-conquer elections. No, it’s not that they’re too noble for them. It’s just that they’re not as good at it as the Rove Republicans are, and progressive core positions don’t translate as well into fear-mongering rhetoric. The Democrats fear-monger pretty effectively about Social Security — as well they should — but beyond that, it’s hard to scare people into fearing that the other guy is going to cut your taxes too much or be too tough on our enemies.

[…]

And the one-America theme will be crucial if he actually wins. As president, Obama will need to unite liberals and moderates of both parties and isolate the conservative blocs in the House and especially the Senate to get anything done.

I guess I just don’t think it’s fear mongering or divide-and-conquer to tell the truth, which is that the Republicans have screwed things up royally and that the Democrats have a better idea. (And yes, I know that the Democrats have been complicit, blah, blah, blah — that’s what I think should change.) And my view is that governing is actually going to be impossible unless Obama is willing to leverage his power in a far more partisan fashion than he indicates he is willing to, even if he sings in dulcet tones about compromise and bipartisanship. They’ll eat him for lunch if he actually tries it. There is no “isolating” conservatives. They are the Republican party (and a fair number of Democrats too.) And they are not even close to the point of “changing.”

I don’t know why we, the so-called Reality Based Community, shouldn’t just tell it like it is, as Thomas Frank does in his new book (but as a politician would say it…)

Fantastic misgovernment of the kind we have seen is not an accident, nor is it the work of a few bad individuals. It is the consequence of triumph by a particular philosophy of government, by a movement that understands the liberal state as a perversion and considers the market the ideal nexus of human society. This movement is friendly to industry not just by force of campaign contributions but by conviction; it believes in entrepreneurship not merely in commerce but in politics; and the inevitable results of its ascendance are, first, the capture of the state by business and, second, all that follows: incompetence, graft, and all the other wretched flotsam that we’ve come to expect from Washington. …

… The conservatism that speaks to us through its actions in Washington is institutionally opposed to those baseline good intentions we learned about in elementary school.

Its leaders laugh off the idea of the public interest as airy-fairy nonsense; they caution against bringing top-notch talent into government service; they declare war on public workers. They have made a cult of outsourcing and privatizing, they have wrecked established federal operations because they disagree with them, and they have deliberately piled up an Everest of debt in order to force the government into crisis. The ruination they have wrought has been thorough; it has been a professional job. Repairing it will require years of political action.

That’s not going to happen through compromise because they don’t want it repaired and will do everything in their power to stop it. The nature of the opposition makes compromise and consensus impossible, even if it were desirable, which I submit that it is not since the amount of repair that must be done is so enormous that there literally isn’t time to play these games.

It’s nice that Hagel and Lugar and Doug Kmiec are backing Obama, but I doubt it means a thing to anyone who isn’t a political junkie unless they come out swinging against McCain at the convention and cause a serious media buzz, which I’d be shocked to see happen. (And anyway, in most people’s minds, it will be “balanced” by the fact that our party’s nominee for VP just seven years ago will be speaking at theirs.)

By the time these guys are done, the only acceptable bipartisanship will be the Republican kind — the kind that results in more wars and tax cuts and deregulation. The “compromise” is that we might not have quite as many as we have under a Republican.

In foreign policy the president has more power to go his own way. But the military, the hawks and the media, (which is even more susceptible to accusations of lack of patriotism and the fetish for men in uniform than the Democrats), will be substantial barriers, particularly to a young, reputed liberal with no association with military culture. They are going to make his life very difficult and post-partisanship isn’t even relevant. Foreign policy is already post-partisan — and we’ve seen the results.

I do believe the world will very relieved to see a president Obama take over for Bush and that is an excellent and important thing. But he’s got his work cut out for him. His biggest foreign policy challenge will very likely turn out to be his own government.

Update: here goes the Village:

McCain prescient on Russia?

When violence broke out in the Caucasus on Friday morning, John McCain quickly issued a statement that was far more strident toward the Russians than that of President Bush, Barack Obama and much of the West.

But, as Russian warplanes pounded Georgian targets far beyond South Ossetia this weekend, Bush, Obama and others have moved closer to McCain’s initial position…

Pushing the prescience line, aides are circulating a pair of YouTube clips from 1999 and 2000 that feature some tough talk from McCain about the new Kremlin regime.

Right. As if a right winger waving his fist at Russia is “prescience.” Unless he did it in 1899 (which is possible) there have been millions who got there before him.

Update II: Also, Think Progress and Matt Duss point out that Randy Schueneman, McCain’s foreign policy advisor, was a long time registered lobbyist for Georgia. For more on Scheueneman, check this out from Lindsay Beyerstein. More from Salon.

I don’t know who is at fault for what’s happening in Georgia, but I do know that this group of neoconmen, (including our good friend Ahmad “Zelig” Chalabi) around John McCain are not trustworthy and just because he came out of the box screaming about Russia, it doesn’t automatically follow that he knew what he was talking about. Indeed, if his people are saying it, I would automatically be very cautious about believing anything they say. Like all neocons, they have always been wrong about everything.

Update III: It gets worse:

“Today, many are dead and Georgia is in crisis, yet the Obama campaign has offered nothing more than cheap and petty political attacks that are echoed only by the Kremlin,” said McCain aide Tucker Bounds in the statement. “The reaction of the Obama campaign to this crisis, so at odds with our democratic allies and yet so bizarrely in sync with Moscow, doesn’t merely raise questions about Sen. Obama’s judgment — it answers them.”

Obviously. He’s a foreigner, a muslim … and a commie.

Update XXXIVII:

Here’s one view of the Georgian situation. Here’s another. The first is from an independent academic expert on the region. The second is from the post partisan American foreign policy establishment.

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Presidential Peaking

by digby

Maybe it would have been better to just say no:

Although it must have been a thrill for Mr. Bush to shake hands with Kobe, Mello, King James and Coach K, it’s difficult to imagine that the president’s trip to Beijing didn’t peak [dear me…ed] when he received an up-close and personal beach volleyball lesson at Chaoyang Park from defending gold medalists Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh.

As if things weren’t hot enough for the president, who had just come off a sweaty mountain bike excursion, the AP reported that May-Treanor bent over to allow him an opportunity to experience a unique element of beach volleyball.

The president needs some work on his passing, mis-hitting a pair off his knuckles. When May-Treanor passed the ball back to him, he acted like he was going to dive after it but decided to stay on his feet.

Then May-Treanor turned her back to the president, offering her bikinied rear for one of the traditional slaps that volleyball players frequently give each other.

“Mr. President, want to?” she asked, repeating an offer she made when Bush gave a pep talk to the U.S. athletes before Friday’s opening ceremonies.

Bush smilingly gave a flick with the back of his hand to the small of her back instead.

He even had time to think about it and he couldn’t come up with a good line and an excuse not to actually touch the woman?

Whatever. He seems to be enjoying himself at the games and it’s keeping him out of trouble. Man, is he ever a smaller figure than he was four years ago when he was strutting all over the country scolding everybody and telling us all he was a leader who knew how to lead. I guess a little presidential grab ass is all he’s got left.

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Access For Accolades

by digby

The Man Called Petraeus is back to stroking right winger journalists again:

A soldier and scholar like Gen. David Petraeus, commander of Multi-National Force-Iraq, knows history is never over, but judgments must be made. This week, I spoke with Petraeus in a half-hour interview that touched on numerous difficult subjects, including establishing the “Rule of Law” in Iraq and the Iraqi Army’s “surge” in professional capabilities and numerical strength.

At one point, I suggested that the military-diplomatic “tandem” of Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker provides a model for improving “unified action.” That’s the dry, wonkish term for coordinating and employing every “tool of power” America possesses to achieve a strategic goal. Petraeus demurred on the compliment, but said: “I can just not imagine a better diplomatic wingman than Ambassador Ryan Crocker. … We were determined to achieve unity of effort.”

Petraeus said that began with their integrated campaign plan. In every governmental endeavor, but especially in an intricate, complex war, economic and political development programs must reinforce security and intelligence operations.

The question of achieving strategic goals in Iraq threaded the entire interview. At one point, I posed the question this way: In Iraq, are we at a moment of strategic change?

“We’ve been at moments of strategic change,” Petraeus replied. “These are not light-switch moments … what you have is more of a rheostat — many, many rheostat moments — where in small areas, local areas, districts and eventually provinces there is an ongoing transition and has been an ongoing transition for the Iraqi forces to step more into the lead and the coalition forces to step back and provide enablers.”

You’d think that Petraeus’ people would have learned their lesson from this earlier dustup with Glenzilla, who documented the right wing noise machine’s symbiotic relationship with the military even before it was revealed that the military had a program to lie to the MSM. And here they go again.

But then, he probably has to. When he says things like, “I can just not imagine a better diplomatic wingman than Ambassador Ryan Crocker. … We were determined to achieve unity of effort,” you can hear a future campaign speech (although he may want to work on the mil-speak and cut the last sentence to “we were determined to work together to get it done.”) Keeping his relationships to the rightwing military hero fetishists well oiled is very important to building the myth of TMCP. Who cares what we think?

As far as what TMCP actually said in the interview, I haven’t a clue. It sounds something like, “we’ve made progress in many small ways that are impossible to measure and we won’t see results for years, but we know it’s a big success, huzzah!”

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All American Insult

by digby

Cokie Roberts said today that Obama shouldn’t be going on vacation anywhere that has the “look of a foreign exotic place” and should go to Myrtle Beach instead. Apparently, Hawaii isn’t quite American enough for Cokie and her provincial pals in the beltway, even though it’s one of the 50 states.

I remember that Clinton got dinged right after he was elected for vacationing in Santa Barbara because it was too “California.” Unless you’re a Republican presidential candidate apparently you shouldn’t go to any western beach, much less to Hawaii, unless you want to be called a foreign fag. You have to go to a Cokie approved place like Myrtle Beach where they have Real Americans. Maybe he could eat some pork while he’s there, this proving that he isn’t a Muslim. (Of course, then Cokie and her gossipy little village friends would condemn him for pandering and being “inauthentic.”)

Obama went to high school in Hawaii, his grandmother and his sister and her family still live there. It’s his real home state. The idea that he can’t go there because it’s too foreign is truly insulting to the Americans who live there. Evidently Obama isn’t going to be allowed to go anywhere but Iowa and Illinois without being suspected of some sort of traitorous foreignness by the beltway gasbags. Well played Mr Rove.

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The Nonexistent Crisis

by digby

I’ve written before about the “voter fraud” page on the RNC’s web site. They are “collecting stories” about voter fraud around the country. A reader informs me that their propaganda arm, Fox News, is on to the same thing and is promoting a special on the subject. (Raw Story has been following the Fox crusade as well.) It turns out they have a page devoted to it on their web site as well.

Here’s the most recent example:

Alabama was the cradle of the civil rights movement, where much of the battle for voting rights was waged more than 40 years ago, but now there are growing allegations of voter fraud across the state.

The claims have surfaced in eight counties in Alabama, and they include allegations that absentee ballots were sold and traded for cash, crack-cocaine and even piles of driveway gravel.

“They get them, and say, ‘I will give you 40 or 50 dollars,’ so a lot of people are unemployed and will jump for that,” voter Wanda Sanders said.

Some officials, though, are launching investigations in a move to make sure all votes are not only counted but counted fairly and honestly.

Alabama Attorney General Troy King, a Republican, seized absentee ballots from three primarily black counties after allegations of vote-selling surfaced in the June 3 Democratic primary.

“We are not going to allow these people to continue to steal elections with impunity. It cannot be tolerated,” King said.

You can’t fault them for lack of chutzpah.

I think the most darkly hilarious thing about all this is that the RNC web page is called “You Can’t Make This Up.” Of course, that’s exactly what the crisis of Voter fraud is: made up. It’s just not a problem. But bogus claims of voter fraud actually do suppress the vote — a win-win for the bad guys.

Whatever happens, all those horrible African Americans down in Alabama disenfranchising decent folks has got to stop. I fully expect to see a march across the Edmund Pettus bridge featuring Tom Tancredo and Trent Lott singing “We Shall Overcome” and holding signs saying “I Have A Dream” before November. It’s time somebody stood up for the rich, disenfranchised conservatives in this country.

Meanwhile, the McCain campaign anonymously put out the word that they aren’t going to aggressively pursue these kinds of charges in this election. McCain just isn’t that kind of guy. But they do admit that, sadly, even a mavericky, straight talking, man ‘o integrity can’t control what outside groups do.

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