Month: November 2008

Losin’ It

by digby

The good news is that this country elected an African American Democrat. The bad news is that it seems to have inspired an uptick in threats and violent rhetoric:

Threats against a new president historically spike right after an election, but from Maine to Idaho law enforcement officials are seeing more against Barack Obama than ever before. The Secret Service would not comment or provide the number of cases they are investigating. But since the Nov. 4 election, law enforcement officials have seen more potentially threatening writings, Internet postings and other activity directed at Obama than has been seen with any past president-elect, said officials aware of the situation who spoke on condition of anonymity because the issue of a president’s security is so sensitive.Earlier this week, the Secret Service looked into the case of a sign posted on a tree in Vay, Idaho, with Obama’s name and the offer of a “free public hanging.” In North Carolina, civil rights officials complained of threatening racist graffiti targeting Obama found in a tunnel near the North Carolina State University campus.And in a Maine convenience store, an Associated Press reporter saw a sign inviting customers to join a betting pool on when Obama might fall victim to an assassin. The sign solicited $1 entries into “The Osama Obama Shotgun Pool,” saying the money would go to the person picking the date closest to when Obama was attacked. “Let’s hope we have a winner,” said the sign, since taken down.In the security world, anything “new” can trigger hostility, said Joseph Funk, a former Secret Service agent-turned security consultant who oversaw a private protection detail for Obama before the Secret Service began guarding the candidate in early 2007.Obama, of course, will be the country’s first black president, and Funk said that new element, not just race itself, is probably responsible for a spike in anti-Obama postings and activity. “Anytime you’re going to have something that’s new, you’re going to have increased chatter,” he said.The Secret Service also has cautioned the public not to assume that any threats against Obama are due to racism.

That’s true. They may be threats because he is a socialist, muslim, terrorist — or just because he’s allegedly “the most liberal senator.” Republicans have made it quite clear what should be done with Americans who they deem to be such:

Rush Limbaugh:

[Quoting from an AP report] “… The aid group Christian Peacemaker Teams has confirmed that four of its members were taken hostage on Saturday….”

[P]art of me that likes this. And some of you might say, “Rush, that’s horrible. Peace activists taken hostage.” Well, here’s why I like it. I like any time a bunch of leftist feel-good hand-wringers are shown reality.

Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev:

While praising the efforts of American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, Gibbons accused liberals, movie stars and song makers of “trying to divide this country.”

“I say we tell those liberal, tree-hugging, Birkenstock-wearing, hippie, tie-dyed liberals to go make their movies and their music and whine somewhere else,” he told the crowd, according to the Elko Daily Free Press.

He then said it was “too damn bad we didn’t buy them a ticket” to become human shields in Iraq.

His comments came a week after he apologized for calling those who oppose corporate donations for President Bush’s inaugural parties “communists.”

Kathleen Parker:

Miller is not alone, though some are more sanguine when it comes to evaluating the roster of contenders. Here’s a note I got recently from a friend and former Delta Force member, who has been observing American politics from the trenches: “These bastards like Clark and Kerry and that incipient ass, Dean, and Gephardt and Kucinich and that absolute mental midget Sharpton, race baiter, should all be lined up and shot.”

In the post those three were randomly from, Dave Niewert cataloged dozens of examples of eliminationist rhetoric during the Bush administration through 2007. Think about that. Even when they were riding high in popularity and in charge of the entire government, many of them were angry and violent in their rhetoric toward liberals. Now that they have destroyed the economy and are completely out of power and as popular as dirt, it’s only natural that people who think like this are going to be potentially dangerous. It’s not like they haven’t signaled their intentions.

More here:

Crosses burning. Children chanting, “Assassinate Obama.” Racial epithets scrawled on homes and cars.

Reports of incidents such as those across the country are dampening the glow of racial progress and harmony that bloomed after the election of Democrat Barack Obama, an African American, to the presidency.

From California to Maine, police have documented a range of incidents, including vandalism, threats and at least one physical attack. There have been “hundreds” of incidents since the election, many more than usual, said Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate crimes.

In Snellville, Ga., Denene Millner said that a day after the election, a boy on a school bus told her 9-year-old daughter that he hoped “Obama gets assassinated.” That night, Millner said, someone trashed her sister-in-law’s front lawn, mangled the Obama lawn signs and left two pizza boxes filled with human feces outside the front door.

“It definitely makes you look a little different at the people who you live with,” said Millner, who is black. “And makes you wonder what they’re capable of and what they’re really thinking.”

Potok, who is white, said he thinks there is “a large subset of white people in this country who feel that they are losing everything they know, that the country their forefathers built has somehow been stolen from them.”

Grant Griffin, a 46-year-old Georgia native who is white, expressed similar sentiments. “I believe our nation is ruined and has been for several decades, and the election of Obama is merely the culmination of the change,” Griffin said.

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Saturday Night At The Movies

Of second childishness and mere oblivion

By Dennis Hartley

Time – He’s waiting in the wings
He speaks of senseless things
His script is you and me boys

-David Bowie

“Did you see their faces?” my friend stage-whispered to me as we shuffled up the aisle toward the movie theater’s exit. “Yes,” I answered, staring glumly at my shoes, “I did.” He was referring to the ashen-faced patrons with the thousand-yard stares who remained pinned to their seats, following a Sunday matinee showing of Synecdoche, New York. “Well,” I deadpanned, in a half-hearted attempt to lighten the mood, “Should we just go outside now and throw ourselves under the nearest bus?” My friend appeared to actually be weighing the pros and cons for a moment. “What do you say we grab some pizza instead?” he finally countered. We decided on the pizza. After all, it was only a movie.

Well, technically, it was only a movie about a theatre director whose life is only a play. Or was it? Who were all these players, strutting and fretting about their two hours upon the movie screen? Were they just a Fig Newton of someone’s overactive imagination? And why didn’t the “play” in the film ever have an audience? Maybe we should ask the guy who wrote and directed it (I just happen to have Charlie Kaufman right here, under my desk on Floor 7 ½). Mr. Kaufman, what was that you once said about third acts?

Oh. You’re not helping (I’ve got a review to write here, and deadline is fast approaching). If you are just joining us (and wondering when the hell the review is going to start) we’re talking about screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, who, with his stubbornly insistent anti-multiplex sensibility and a resultant propensity for penning feverishly bizarre, densely oblique narratives (Being John Malkovich, Human Nature, Human Nature, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind) has become a hot property in cult/art house filmdom, and The Guy Everybody Wants To Work With (For Scale). Now someone has gone and given Kaufman a director’s chair, and the result is the most simultaneously brilliant and maddeningly indecipherable character study since (dare I say it?) Berlin Alexanderplatz (though the running time is 13 hours shorter).

First, let’s get something out of the way, regarding the film’s unpronounceable, Spell-check challenged title. “Synecdoche” is Kaufman’s cryptic non-de-plume for Schenectady, a real town in upstate New York. Even though I briefly lived in the Albany-Schenectady-Troy area, I’m afraid I cannot shed any light on the significance of the title (maybe Kaufman couldn’t come up with a clever misspelling for Massapequa?). Okay, I’m being a wee bit facetious; according to the dictionary, it means:

..a figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole or the whole for a part, the special for the general or the general for the special, as in ten sail for ten ships or a Croesus for a rich man.

Get it? Got it. Good. Er-let’s move on to the synopsis portion of this “review”, shall we?

Philip Seymour Hoffman eats up the screen five ways from Sunday as Caden Cotard, a struggling regional theatre director from Schenectady who gets a shot at moving downstate to mount his magnum opus on the Great White Way after scoring a coveted “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation. Obsessed with “keeping it real”, Caden ambitiously leases a huge Manhattan warehouse, and literally constructs a theatrical version of his life, replete with life-sized reproductions of the places he has lived and a large ensemble cast to portray himself and all the people he has known. Lest you begin to assume this is “Rocky on Broadway”, keep two things in mind: a) This was written by Charlie Kaufman, and b) Something that John Lennon once observed- “Genius is pain.”

Caden has his fair share of pain, both physical and emotional. He suffers from a strange, undiagnosed malady that is systematically destroying his autonomic functions. His first wife (Catherine Keener) has left him (with their daughter in tow) to pursue a career as an artist in Germany, where her literally myopic paintings (so small that they require special magnifying goggles for viewing) have won her great accolades. Caden has remarried, to one of his leading ladies (Michelle Williams), but things aren’t going so hot in that relationship either. His therapist (Hope Davis) is too preoccupied with marketing her self-help books and becoming the next Dr. Phil to offer any real substantive help. The only woman in his life that seems to understand him is his personal assistant (Samantha Morton) with whom he develops a complex, long-standing (mostly) platonic relationship.

As dark as this film is, Kaufman seems to be having some fun with the Chinese Box aspect of Caden’s completely self-referential, decades-long production. The very concept of an ongoing stage piece, presented in “real time”, as a metaphor for someone’s ongoing life brings up an awful lot of existential questions, like, how do you “rehearse” reality? Don’t you have to be psychic in order to do that? Kaufman’s narrative idea recalls some of Andy Warhol’s experiments, like his 1963 film, Sleep, a five hour epic depicting someone, um, sleeping for five hours. Some people called it genius, others a snore (heh).

Synecdoche, New York may or may not be a work of genius, but it is anything but a snore, thanks to a brilliant cast. It goes without saying (and I’ve said it here many times before) that Hoffman is one of the most amazing actors of his generation. The ensemble includes an embarrassment of riches in the actress department; in addition to the aforementioned, Emily Watson, Dianne Wiest, Jennifer Jason Leigh bring their formidable skills to the table as well. If you’re like me, you may not completely comprehend the whys and wherefores of all that commences during the course of this astounding 2-hour mindfuck, but you’re gonna love the pizza afterward (…in fair round belly with good capon lined).

All the world’s a you-know-what: The Truman Show, Pleasantville , Dogville, Stranger Than Fiction, The Singing Detective, Pennies from Heaven , The Stunt Man, American Splendor, A Double Life, Living in Oblivion, Finding Neverland , All That Jazz, Opening Night, After the Rehearsall, The Dresser, The Entertainer, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Shakespeare in Love , Swimming Pool, Mulholland Drive, The Player , Breakfast of Champions, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Deconstructing Harry, Stardust Memories, Annie Hall,8 1/2, Alex in Wonderland, Contempt , Sunset Boulevard – The Centennial Collection, The Day of the Locust.

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The Winners

by digby

Chris Cilizza explodes five myths of the election and what do you know? It’s all good for Republicans! This was actually a defeat for progressives, blacks and young people voting Democratic doesn’t mean much, McCain didn’t mess up — Republicans couldn’t have won anyway, Palin was a big plus and this is only a slight setback for Republicans.

There has been a lot already written about the pernicious meme that Obama didn’t win a mandate, and it may have had some effect. It’s fading a little bit. But the nature of the mandate is still being defined, and if Cilizza is indicative of beltway thinking, the fact that Democrats won seats from Republicans means that the country has rejected liberalism:

At first glance, the numbers do look encouraging for proponents of a new New Deal era in government: Obama claimed at least 364 electoral votes and more than 52.5 percent of the overall popular vote, while Democrats now control at least 57 seats in the Senate and 255 in the House.But look more closely, and you see a heavy influx of moderate to conservative members in the incoming freshman Democratic class, particularly in the House. Of the 24 Republican-held districts that Democrats won in 2008, Kerry carried just three in 2004. Democratic victories on Nov. 4 included Alabama’s 2nd district (where Kerry took 33 percent of the vote) and Idaho’s at-large seat (where Kerry won just 30 percent). In fact, according to tabulations by National Journal’s Richard E. Cohen, 81 House Democrats in the 111th Congress will represent districts that Bush carried in 2004.The fact that roughly a third of the Democratic House majority sits in seats with Republican underpinnings (at least at the presidential level) is almost certain to keep a liberal dream agenda from moving through Congress. The first rule of politics is survival, and if these new arrivals to Washington want to stick around, they are likely to build centrist voting records between now and 2010.

You see, when a Democrat wins a Republican seat it means his or her constituents really prefer Republicans.

Update: Here is a very welcome op-ed by Tod Lindberg, a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and an informal foreign policy adviser to the McCain campaign refuting the “center-right” meme in the Washington Post. Maybe a conservative saying it means it will have some salience inside the beltway.

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Talkers Revealed

by digby

This is a very interesting article written by a former right wing talk show producer revealing the secrets of the trade. I think the thing I find most interesting about it is that this fellow is obviously a fairly level headed guy but it took until the obnoxious talk radio coverage of Katrina for him to realize that their entire schtick was a fraud. I think that may be something that happened to a fair number of people. There was something so other-worldly about the way the right reacted to that disaster that it cracked the strange, post modern up-is-downism of the Bush years.

He confirms much of what we always knew about the relationship between the radio talkers and the Republican party:

Conservative talk show hosts would receive daily talking points e-mails from the Bush White House, the Republican National Committee and, during election years, GOP campaign operations. They’re not called talking points, but that’s what they are. I know, because I received them, too. During my time at WTMJ, Charlie would generally mine the e-mails, then couch the daily message in his own words. Midday talker Jeff Wagner would be more likely to rely on them verbatim. But neither used them in their entirety, or every single day. Charlie and Jeff would also check what other conservative talk show hosts around the country were saying. Rush Limbaugh’s Web site was checked at least once daily. Atlanta-based nationally syndicated talker Neal Boortz was another popular choice. Select conservative blogs were also perused. A smart talk show host will, from time to time, disagree publicly with a Republican president, the Republican Party, or some conservative doctrine. (President Bush’s disastrous choice of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court was one such example.) But these disagreements are strategically chosen to prove the host is an independent thinker, without appreciably harming the president or party. This is not to suggest that hosts don’t genuinely disagree with the conservative line at times. They do, more often than you might think. But they usually keep it to themselves.

This is something that blogs have to be careful to avoid. There is probably going to be plenty of “outreach” from the powers that be to keep us from going off the reservation. And even if we resist that impulse, groupthink is always a danger:

Except in presidential elections, when they will always carry water for the Republican nominee, conservative hosts won’t hurt their credibility by backing candidates they think can’t win. So if they’re uncharacteristically tepid, or even silent, about a particular race, that means the Democrat has a good chance of winning. Nor will hosts spend their credibility on an issue where they know they disagree with listeners. Charlie, for example, told me just before I left TMJ that Wisconsin’s 2006 anti-gay marriage amendment was misguided. But he knew his followers would likely vote for it in droves. So he declined to speak out directly against it.

Blue America backs candidates regardless of their supposed ability to win because it is devoted to building progressive political power over the long haul. So in my case and those of my fellow BA principles, Howie Klein, Jane Hamsher and John Amato, “running with the winner” is not a problem and I doubt it will be with most activist blogs. But there is pressure not to go beyond our audience’s comfort zone. I’ve been doing this for nearly six years and until this past election I never had so many people writing to tell me they would never read my blog again because of some opinion they disagreed with. It’s hard to know where to draw that line so you have to rely on your instincts and hope you aren’t subconsciously pulling back out of fear that you’ll lose your audience.

Clearly, there are some disconcerting parallels between the right wing talk radio hosts and bloggers but I’m hopeful that the more open dialog between the blogger and the reader will make it less susceptible to the kind of alternate universe the radio gasbags perpetuate. But it’s something to be aware of. As much as the talk radio bubble helped the conservative movement build itself into a political powerhouse, it also helped to speed its decline. Reality always bites.

I think the potential pitfalls are fewer among progressives, simply because we don’t have the same reverence for authority as part of our overall worldview and we seem to have a bigger appetite for internecine struggle than anything else. In some ways our perceived weaknesses could end up being our greatest strengths. We’ll see.

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The Door Is Closed

by digby

Regular readers know that I’m skeptical of all this bipartisan, post-partisan stuff because it only seems to be relevant when liberals might have a shot at power. Feels like Charlie Brown with the football time to me. But be that as it may, I guess I can’t have a fit every time some vapid trendy decides that he or she wants to be on the liberal team now that conservatism has gone out of fashion.

Nevertheless, as God is my witness, if Dennis Miller tries to come back in the fold I will make it my life’s work to destroy him. I’ll show up at this concerts with pictures of dead Iraqi children. I’ll organize boycotts of every comedy club he tries to appear in. I’ll make it my business to ensure that nobody ever forgets what a fucking jackass he has been for the past eight years.

He was on O’Reilly earlier this week, revealing his puerile sexual imagination once again, but also giving a tiny hint that he might just be tacking back to the left in light of the fact that his affiliation with the right is no longer fashionable — even among them:

O’REILLY: Now, the Sarah Palin hysteria. I mean, can you believe she’s getting more ink now than the president-elect is getting? Didn’t she lose? It looks like she won. MILLER: Listen, she’s a great dame. People are fascinated by her because the left hate her. I think the left hate her — mostly women on the left hate her, because to me, from outside in, it appears that she has a great sex life. All right? I think she has non-neurotic sex with that Todd Palin guy. I think most of the women on the Upper East Side, their husbands haven’t been aroused since Mailer signed copy of The Executioner’s Song at Rizzoli’s back in the early ’70s. So they look at her, and they hate her. I think that snowmobile looks like mechanized foreplay to me, and that’s why people are fascinated by it. O’REILLY: So you think that — cutting through all of the metaphors that even I don’t even understand. Rizzoli’s used to be a bookstore. You think that because she looks like a happy, wedded mom with — MILLER: Yeah. O’REILLY: — not so much neurosis, that these people are going, “We have to hate her”? It’s — what, it’s schadenfreude? Is that — how do you say that? German? MILLER: It’s called schadenfreude. O’REILLY: Schadenfreude. [unintelligible] MILLER: The Germans concocted it. It’s one’s vague pleasure in another’s discomfort. Leave it to the Germans, by the way, to concoct an intricate glossary of pain terminology. But I think people have — I think people have schadenfreude about her. It’s like Tina Fey’s movie Mean Girls. Women are mean to other women. They look at her, she looks happy, a lot of them aren’t, and they’re cranky about her. Plus, you know, she’s still viable to me. Katie Couric is not going to be the interlocutor that turns me off Sarah Palin. For God’s sakes, does anybody remember Katie Couric during her first month on the job? Bill Paley and Ed Murrow were turning over in their graves so fast that they resembled the twin screws on the Thunderball boat, the Disco Volante, when they threw it into hydrofoil mode. O’REILLY: I guess that’s a James Bond reference there? MILLER: I don’t even — Billy, I have no idea. Help me. Help me, for God’s sake. O’REILLY: Miller, I hate to say this, but I think you may be beyond help. I think Bordello of Blood was it. Now, you’ve been reassessing in the last — in the last eight days the presidential vote. And what conclusions, Miller, have you come to? MILLER: Well, two. I’m kind of happy now that it’s over. Because when they showed Grant Park that night and I saw the looks on the face of some of the black elders looking up, who had been pushed aside to lunch counters and bathrooms, and I saw that catharsis, I thought, well, I intellectualized this would be good for the country in that way. I had no idea the depth of feeling. It pleases my heart. I’m happy for them. Also, the guy looks so smart to me. I didn’t believe anything he said when he was running. But now I know he’s so smart that when two dim, mindless magpies like [Senate Majority Leader Harry] Reid [D-NV] and [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi [D-CA] trundle down there to sell their tired Willy Loman wares, he’s going to pay them lip service. The moment they split, he’s going to look at [incoming White House chief of staff] Rahm Emanuel and go, “Sharp elbows, dull intellects. We’re not listening to those cats. Do you think I worked this hard to get to this point that I’m going to parrot what those two idiots say?” So I like the fact that he’s really smart. And you know something? He’s my president now. And I am not going to do what the left did to Bush. I find it unbecoming. I hope that Barack Obama does so well that four years hence, I am salivating to vote for him. I want this all to work, because I love my country. At some point, I make Lee Greenwood look like the Rosenbergs. And I hope he does great. But I will not turn my back on George Bush. Today, 2,619 days since a domestic terror attack on this soil. Thank you to my commander in chief, and thank you to the troops for providing us the safety to have an election like that. O’REILLY: Absolutely. Now, how skeptical are you going to — I think your sentiment is noble, by the way. And particularly in this dangerous economic time when people are really suffering, you’ve got to root for Obama to get the economy back on track and lessen suffering. But how skeptical are you going to be? And how — and what is my watchdog role? See, I’m setting myself up to watch Barack Obama. You know, and I’m going to be fair about it. There’s no doubt I’ll be fair. But I’m going to very — you know, watch him closer than I watched Bush because I didn’t watch Bush close enough. I didn’t. I admit it. I should have. So, how skeptical are you going to be about Obama? Are you going to bring a skepticism in from the beginning? MILLER: I’m always skeptical about guys who want to be president, because it seems like its own form of madness to me. But I’ll tell you, if he wants to earn my goodwill and the goodwill of a lot of people, he ought to flatten these punks at AIG who keep taking — these guys party. They make Caligula look like a shut-in. Enough is enough. We just gave them $150 billion. We’ve got to follow them around with hidden cameras. Take it all back, let them go away. It’s economic Darwinism. If they want to spend like that, they should go under. Forget the parties, you guys. And I think that he ought to come down hard on them right now. O’REILLY: OK, and then arrest Barney Frank, correct? MILLER: Barney might want to be arrested.

No how, no way, no Miller. You will never EVER be accepted on the left again no matter how much you want to. You don’t get to talk about how smart Obama is after worshipping that ignorant brand name in a suit for the last 8 years.

That exchange is the face of what’s left of the right. Bill O’Reilly the psycho and Dennis Miller, the opportunist who chose the wrong side. The big tent isn’t big enough for either one of them.

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Joining The Impact

by digby

Dday is tracking stories of the Prop H8 Join The Impact protests today over at Calitics. If you went, you can go over there and do a diary or you can leave a story in the comments to this post:

I’m headed down to the e-board meeting, but I wanted to again mention the Join the Impact rallies in support of marriage equality today, in over 300 cities in all 50 states. Organizers expect over 1 million people to attend nationwide. Stay with Calitics all day, we’ll have site reports from at least 7 locations across the state and the country – San Diego, Los Angeles, Ventura, San Francisco, Sacramento, Chicago, IL, and Albuquerque, NM. Hopefully we’ll have pictures and video from some of those events as well. If you’re going to a JTI event, write up a diary and we’ll post it on the front page. To find an event in your area, check the wiki.

Meanwhile, I’m not sure that we need to walk on eggshells about the somewhat, shall we say, eccentric aspects of the Mormon church anymore, considering this. If you’re going to spend millions of dollars to be intolerant you have to expect that people are going to be intolerant right back.

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Kicking It Down The Road

By digby

More jockeying on torture:

Top Democrats on congressional intelligence panels could be heading for conflict with President-elect Barack Obama over interrogation policies, a subject over which they often clashed with President Bush. Obama said earlier this year he supported legislation that would have mandated that the CIA and other agencies subscribe to a 2006 Army field manual’s guidelines on interrogation practices, which would have the effect of banning harsh treatment of detainees such as waterboarding. But some media reports have raised questions about whether Obama would use his executive powers to mandate the same interrogation standards once he is in the White House. Sen. Dianne Feinstein , D-Calif., one of Congress’ leading proponents of banning harsh interrogation methods, is expected to take over the gavel at the Intelligence Committee. “Sen. Feinstein intends to introduce legislation that would require America’s intelligence agencies to follow the Army field manual in interrogations; to prohibit the use of contractors in interrogations; to grant the International Committee of the Red Cross access to detainees; and to close the Guantánamo Bay detention facility within one year,” said a spokesman, Phil LaVelle. “If President Obama accomplishes these goals through executive action, then we won’t need to pursue them legislatively as well.”

I wrote a few weeks back that I suspected that Gitmo could be Obama’s “gays in the military” if it isn’t handled correctly. It’s guaranteed to inflame the right and there is reason to believe that the military and intelligence communities would freak out as well. It’s very dangerous politically.
But it’s absolutely imperative if Obama wants to change this country’s foreign policy. If he is seen as dithering on this or gong back on his word, he will be squandering all of the tremendous good will he has going into his term and he’s going to need every bit of it:

“While an executive order will not remove the need for legislation on the issue, it is a way for President-elect Obama to put an immediate halt to our government’s use of torture during interrogations and to prevent secret detentions,” said Holt, chairman of the Select Intelligence Oversight Panel. “By exercising his authority and acting quickly, he will begin to restore our moral leadership on the issue and repair some of the harm that has been done to our international reputation.”

There have been a few trial balloons about Obama backing off his promise to enforce the use of the Army Field Manual throughout the government. This article implies that he means to set an even higher standard, but the language from advisor John Brennan is downright Bushian:

“He [believes] torture not be allowed in any form or fashion in any part of the federal government, and he would make sure that was the case,” said John Brennan, who served under former CIA chief George J. Tenet in a variety of capacities at a time when the agency has since acknowledged it waterboarded a small number of terror suspects. “Whether the Army field manual is comprehensive enough to cover all those tactics and techniques, that’s something I think he’d look to his national security advisers for,” Brennan said in an interview with CQ in August.

For more on Brennan, see Greenwald.

This is a difficult problem. Bringing the prisoners to US soil for trial is almost guaranteed to give the wingnuts a rallying cry and probably inspire a full blown hissy fit. But he cannot appoint a commission, wait to create a new system of justice or let it get bottled up in legislation. It is a deeply immoral nightmare that has to be dealt with quickly and cleanly or he risks all the global good will he has built up. Closing it is far more important than whether the right wing gets the vapors.

As I wrote earlier, the lesson of Clinton isn’t that he went “too far left.” It’s that he didn’t handle congressional egos or the media properly. If they really believe that he can’t “go left” (defined as doing something that will make conservatives and the political establishment upset) and see a move like Feinstein’s as something that has to be defeated, then they have learned the wrong thing from the Clinton experience and they are going to get rolled by the conservatives. Just like he did.

Think “General Betrayus” if you want a recent example of how the right wing hissy fit works and how Democrats react to it.

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Old Relics

by digby

E.J. Dionne thinks this is a good time for Democrats to reach out to anti-abortion conservatives to find common ground. Obama ran on that platform and he needs to change the party from the “pro-choice” party to the “abortion reduction” party. Whatever. If that means that Democrats work with Republicans on expanding health care for women and kids and providing access to birth control than that’s a “compromise” I’m more than happy to support it. (We won’t talk about the fact that pro-choice people have always been for those things — we’ll just pretend that we’re moving off of a fictitious position that everyone should be forced to have abortions and call it a compromise.)

Dionne writes:

Obama, who has shown he can draw lessons from Bill Clinton’s presidency, can find one on this issue. Picking up on the pro-choice movement’s most popular slogan, Clinton declared during his 1992 campaign that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare.”

Abortions did become rarer during Clinton’s time in office, dropping by 11 percent. But since Clinton made no major public moves on abortion reduction, many pro-lifers who had been inclined his way felt he had ignored the third word in his motto. There’s no reason for Obama to make the same mistake—and no reason for advocates of abortion rights to get in the way of his trying to build a new consensus.

On Election Day, according to the exit polls, more than 60 percent of Obama’s ballots came from voters who described themselves as either “moderate” or “conservative.”

These voters don’t want Obama to be timid on his core economic promises, but they do expect him to govern as the cultural moderate he promised to be. He should not lose his chance to make cultural warfare a quaint relic of the past.

(I wonder if Obama will also be able to cure male pattern baldness and create an anti-obesity chocolate brownie too? If he can’t then I’m afraid he’s going to be quite a failure…)

I think we can see the problem here. Just actually reducing abortions won’t be good enough. He will have to do more than that. And whatever that is (he doesn’t say) he shouldn’t let pro-choice people stand in his way. Yessir.

But the idea that pro-choice people are the primary obstacle is kind of funny. You’ll have to pardon me for being a little bit skeptical that this is going to be enough to finally make this issue a “relic of the past” when things like this are happening:

A Greenville, S.C., priest who told parishioners those who voted for President-elect Barack Obama risked placing themselves “outside of the full communion of Christ’s church” is simply enunciating church teaching and has the full support of the Diocese of Charleston, a spokesman said Thursday. The provocative letter from the Rev. Jay Scott Newman to members of St. Mary’s Catholic Church has sparked controversy and yet another conversation about faith and public policy.”Voting for a pro-abortion politician when a plausible pro-life alternative exists constitutes material cooperation with intrinsic evil,” Newman said in the letter posted on the Greenville church’s Web site, www.stmarysgvl.org, “and those Catholics who do so place themselves outside of the full communion of Christ’s Church and under the judgment of divine law.” Newman said that those who did not choose the anti-abortion candidate, in this case U.S. Sen. John McCain, “should not receive Holy Communion until and unless they are reconciled to God in the Sacrament of Penance, lest they eat and drink their own condemnation.”Calling Obama “the most radical pro-abortion politician ever to serve in the United States Senate,” Newman went on to say Catholics must pray for the newly elected chief executive.”Let us hope and pray that the responsibilities of the presidency and the grace of God will awaken in the conscience of this extraordinarily gifted man an awareness that the unholy slaughter of children in this nation is the greatest threat to the peace and security of the United States and constitutes a clear and present danger to the common good,” Newman said in the letter.

If “reducing abortion” through greater access to birth control and more support for poor women will appease that fellow, then we may very well be able to end the culture wars and all live together in peace and harmony. What do you think the odds are of that happening?

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The Paranoia Industry

by dday

I know that everyone is scratching their heads over why every conservative and their brother is freaking out over how Barack Obama is going to reinstitute the Fairness Doctrine and kick Rush and Sean off the air, even though that was never part of his platform, no bill has been introduced in Congress to that effect since the Democrats got the majority, and the sum total of the “evidence” for this nefarious scheme is a couple off-hand comments made by two Democratic Senators. James Rainey writes about it today.

Now, you can argue out whether or not there should be a Fairness Doctrine. But the answer to why conservative hucksters keep harping on it, of course, is that this is how the conservative movement keeps flush with direct-mail cash during their years in the wilderness. During the Clinton Administration there were all sorts of crackpot delusions about what Bill Clinton was preparing to do to stick it to conservatives and bring about the second coming of Armageddon. But you always have to read to the end of these missives, when they ask for “just $5 or $10” to save the Republic and fight the efforts to silence their voices. Conservatives understood the sense of engagement that comes with small-dollar donations long before Democrats caught up to them. The difference is that conservatives basically use it as a con game, stirring up emotional furies to part unwitting folks from their money. Rick Perlstein has a phrase for this: Conservatives treat their constituents like suckers.

It’s exactly the same with this run on gun sales. While the actual evidence of an increase in gun sales since the election is somewhat thin (although FBI requests for background checks are way up), it is clear that gun sellers are using the spectre of Obama taking away Second Amendment rights to hawk their wares.

Some gun sellers like Wild West Guns in Anchorage, AK are holding “Obama Sale” events to take advantage of their customers’ misinformed fears and news outlets from NPR to Fox News have produced reports documenting the gun buying binge […]

What the major media outlets overlook is that the Obama gun sale boom appears to be the result of a multimillion dollar effort launched by the National Rifle Association last summer to misinform voters about Obama’s gun policy proposals. As Politico reported in June:

The National Rifle Association plans to spend about $40 million on this year’s campaign, with $15 million of that devoted to portraying Barack Obama as a threat to the Second Amendment rights. … This fall, NRA members will get automated phone calls, mail pieces and pre-election editions of the group’s three magazines making the case against Obama.

So the NRA whips up fear about the imminent loss of gun rights, leading to a run on gun sales that benefits gun stores and manufacturers. Quid, pro, quo.

Fortunately for them, there’s a conservative born every minute. (though hopefully more liberals!)

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Brokeback Press Corps

by digby

Reader Bill wrote in to ask “why can’t the press quit the Clintons?” I will never know. Today we are watching them have another one of their squealing bitchfests over the fact that Obama has her on the list for Secretary of State. You’d think he’d just asked a Republican or something. Oh wait —he has a bunch of Republicans on his short list and that’s just fine. I forgot. This isn’t about Obama or the State Department or the possible “team of rivals.” This is about the bizarre and freakish relationship between the political press and the Clintons.

Eric Boehlert writes:

… any interaction between Obama and Clinton is now part of an on-going “soap opera,” and that she’s forever inserting herself into the process. That’s the angle ABC’s The Note takes today:

So much for no drama. Surely a certain soon-to-be-ex-senator knows this by now, but here’s the thing about Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton: She tends to steal the scenes she’s playing in. Until the subject of her “private business” Thursday in Chicago is resolved — and maybe until and even beyond the press conference announcing the new secretary who’s headed to Foggy Bottom — it will be 3 am in the transition process.

Will Clinton become Secretary of State? We have no idea. Would she be qualified? Most people would likely say yes. Is there any evidence that by reportedly reaching out to her for the post the Obama campaign has created “drama” or a crisis? Of course not. What is clear is that Obama and Clinton are conducting themselves as adults trying to help lead the country, while the portions of the press corps (sadly, it’s the so-called ‘elite’ portions) continue to behave like juveniles.

They just can’t let it go. But then, they’ve never been able to resist turning into a bunch of nasty schoolkids over Bill and Hillary Clinton — it’s like some switch is turned on and they instantly regress to junior high. It’s a psychological disorder.

I don’t care if Hillary becomes Secretary of State. I assume Obama will run his foreign policy the same no matter who it is. I do think it’s preferable for members of his administration to be beholden at least in part to the Democratic side of the aisle if only to show that it’s not only Republicans who have credibility, especially in foreign affairs. If Obama keeps Gates at defense (which I sincerely hope he does not) then I think he has to pick a Democrat for State and pull from the more progressive ranks for the national security posts at CIA and elsewhere. The same is true for the economic jobs. Otherwise, he’s just reinforcing the GOP’s main argument that only Republicans can be trusted in such positions. If he has to bring in Republicans, put them in charge of HHS or some other counterintuitive place. Put Democrats in charge, succeed, and then you can longterm political power. (Of course, if you believe that Obama has ended the two party system and repealed human nature then it doesn’t matter.)

Joe Trippi just said on CNN that he thinks Obama should ask McCain to join the administration as well. (What do you think? Special envoy to Tehran?) This is because “Obama only won 52%” of the vote and he needs to be sure he doesn’t get “too cocky.” GOP strategist Leslie Sanchez agreed wholeheartedly, pointing out that he must resist the crazy left and govern from the center. Trippi nodded sagely.

This appears to me to be a losing battle. We’ll just have to see if the bipartisan propensity to kick “the left” in the teeth has any application in policy, which is the most important thing. But the rhetorical battle is pretty much over. Maybe that’s the way it needs to be considering the the circumstances. If he can placate the village he may get some extra running room. And progressives may still play an important role by being the omega dogs who are beaten for the “common good” to create solidarity among the pack. The partisan divide will be bridged through their mutual loathing of liberalism. It could work.

Update: Here’s Ron Brownstein with some advice for Obama:

On many issues, the initial impulse of most Hill Republicans will probably be to oppose Obama. The last two elections have decimated congressional GOP moderates. More dominated than ever by conservatives, the congressional Republicans won’t be inclined to cooperate with Obama unless they believe they must. That’s why he would be smart to reach around GOP elected officials and engage directly with interests that usually ally with Republicans — oil, automobile, and utility companies on energy; insurers and small-business owners on health care.

[…]
None of this requires Obama to abandon his principles. Elections have consequences, and the magnitude of the Democratic victory shifts the entire spectrum of debate toward that party’s priorities. But a strategy of inclusion would require Obama to show flexibility in addressing the needs of voters and interests beyond his coalition — an approach that would inevitably be met with resistance from the most-ardent activists within it. For Obama, as for all presidents, disciplining the coalition that elected him will be the first step toward enlarging it.

Hit me baby, one more time.

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