Month: December 2008

A Voice For The Other Half

by digby

It’s been a rocky year for feminism, no doubt about it. First, the media let their sexist freak flags fly during the presidential campaign and lately we’ve been treated to the slick partriarchal gurglings of the good Pastor Rick Warren and the pathetic spectacle of the financial boys club strutting around as if they are wearing skins and wielding clubs as they marginalize and demean the female oracles who saw the writing on the wall (street.) It’s frustrating to say the least.

Still, I couldn’t help but feel a little bit uncomfortable when I heard Caroline Kennedy’s cousin say this:

KERRY KENNEDY, AUTHOR, “BEING CATHOLIC NOW”: … she‘s a mother and a woman. You know, we live in a country where one out of every five girls is sexually assaulted by the time she reaches the age of 21, where women still only make 79 cents on the dollar made by men; and we need a woman‘s voice and we need Caroline‘s voice and her strength and her determination in that seat. MATTHEWS: Do you think it‘s important—it sounds like you do—that a woman replace Hillary Clinton? KENNEDY: Absolutely. You know, there are only 16 women in the Senate right now, and Hillary Clinton is going, and we need Caroline to fill that seat.

What Kerry says about the Senate needing women’s voices is correct, but it doesn’t necessarily translate to Caroline, who hasn’t made any serious contribution to politics up to this point. Just being a woman and a mother isn’t really enough. (After all, Phyllis Schlaffley is a woman and a mother too …)

If I were a New Yorker, I’d be lobbying for Representative Carolyn Maloney to get the slot. She’s been in the congress for 16 years and is an unabashed liberal, feminist woman who has been fighting these battles for decades and knows whereof she speaks. Her recent book is called Rumors of Our Progress Have Been Greatly Exaggerated and it catalogs a list of institutional, political and cultural inequities which are still so embedded in our system that we hardly even know to question them.

For instance, after 9/11, when the government was putting together its compensation fund, the government was blithely planning to shortchange female victims’ families by hundreds of thousands of dollars because they were using discriminatory projected earnings tables that reflected the wage gap. It took a concerted campaign to persuade the government that the earnings estimates that determined the value of the payout should be gender blind. It wasn’t a matter of conscious discrimination. They just didn’t consider whether it made sense that the family of a woman who made the same salary as a man at the time of her death should be compensated equally. Maloney organized 11 members of the New York delegation to pursue the matter and reverse the policy. (Insurance companies around the country still use those outdated formulas, by the way.)

And speaking of Wall Street, Maloney compiles some stories about discrimination against women in the financial industry that make your hair stand on end. Morgan Stanley had paid out nearly $100 million in sex discrimination money to many of the top female employees in the past few years. Apparently, as with Sheila Bair and Brooksley Born, the common excuse was that these women just weren’t “team players” — mostly because they weren’t welcome at the strip clubs and golf courses where so many of the deals were made. And they just wouldn’t get with the program when it came to looking the other way at unethical or reckless practices. (The wimmin are always raining on the parade that way.) Maloney thinks that instead of giving tax deductions to companies for their strip club expenses, most citizens would prefer for that families be allowed to deduct their child care expenses — and has introduced legislation to do that.

I would expect that women are especially going to be facing some tough times in the near term as their lower level service jobs are going to be very hard hit and they tend to have less money in the bank to tide them over. An awful lot of them are hanging by a thread as it is. Having fewer women in the government right now hardly seems like a good idea (particularly when people need to be reminded that a fiscal stimulus that creates mostly construction and engineering jobs will only put money in the pockets of the 9% of women who work in those fields.) I think that if the argument is that women need a strong voice in the senate, we would probably be better served by a woman like Maloney who has a lifetime of experience in politics and a deep and thorough understanding of these issues than someone whose experience is very limited. I just wouldn’t expect Caroline Kennedy, no matter how dedicated and sincere, to be the kind of champion on these issues as someone like Maloney.

I don’t know much about New York politics, so maybe there is some other reason why Maloney couldn’t be the choice. But on the merits, she’s the one I’d choose if I were Patterson. The country badly needs the contributions of the Sheila Bairs and the Carolyn Maloneys if the government really means to clean up the mess the old boys club has made.

Update: It’s hard to believe, but I didn’t know there was a movement afoot to push Maloney when I wrote this. Here’s an article on the subject from the NY Daily News.

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Progress
by digbyFor all the talk about liberating the people of Iraq, nobody gives a damn about the half of the population that’s demonstrably worse off than before, even in the most basic social and cultural respects. (I suppose that’s to be expected from people who repeat the phrase “the surge was successful” like a mantra.)

But some are worse off in ways that are unimaginable:

Sheelan Anwar Omer, a shy 7-year-old Kurdish girl, bounded into her neighbor’s house with an ear-to-ear smile, looking for the party her mother had promised.There was no celebration. Instead, a local woman quickly locked a rusty red door behind Sheelan, who looked bewildered when her mother ordered the girl to remove her underpants. Sheelan began to whimper, then tremble, while the women pushed apart her legs and a midwife raised a stainless-steel razor blade in the air. “I do this in the name of Allah!” she intoned.As the midwife sliced off part of Sheelan’s genitals, the girl let out a high-pitched wail heard throughout the neighborhood. As she carried the sobbing child back home, Sheelan’s mother smiled with pride.”This is the practice of the Kurdish people for as long as anyone can remember,” said the mother, Aisha Hameed, 30, a housewife in this ethnically mixed town about 100 miles north of Baghdad. “We don’t know why we do it, but we will never stop because Islam and our elders require it.”Kurdistan is the only known part of Iraq –and one of the few places in the world–where female circumcision is widespread. More than 60 percent of women in Kurdish areas of northern Iraq have been circumcised, according to a study conducted this year. In at least one Kurdish territory, 95 percent of women have undergone the practice, which human rights groups call female genital mutilation.The practice, and the Kurdish parliament’s refusal to outlaw it, highlight the plight of women in a region with a reputation for having a more progressive society than the rest of Iraq. Advocates for women point to the increasing frequency of honor killings against women and female self-immolations in Kurdistan this year as further evidence that women in the area still face significant obstacles, despite efforts to raise public awareness of circumcision and violence against women.”When the Kurdish people were fighting for our independence, women participated as full members in the underground resistance,” said Pakshan Zangana, who heads the women’s committee in the Kurdish parliament. “But now that we have won our freedom, the position of women has been pushed backwards and crimes against us are minimized.”[…]Kurds who support circumcising girls say the practice has two goals: It controls a woman’s sexual desires, and it makes her spiritually clean so that others can eat the meals she prepares.

Read the whole article if you can stomach it. I couldn’t read it again.Women are dirty and their urges have to be controlled because they’re always tempting men to do things they shouldn’t do. Same as it ever was. The good news is that this practice helps preserve the ancient definition of marriage, so that’s good. Maybe we can start practicing it here at those purity balls. If the men in pulpits told them it was required, have no doubt that the social conservative women would run with this one without a second thought.

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Endless

by digby

I don’t know what to say about what’s happening in Gaza. I’m frankly somewhat shocked that I’m watching explosions on CNN for a fourth straight day. The only thing I can recommend at this point is to sign this petition from J Street , demanding that the US support an immediate cease fire.

At this moment of extreme crisis, J Street wants to demonstrate that, among those who care about Israel and its security, there is a constituency for sanity and moderation. There are many who recognize elements of truth on both sides of this gaping divide and who know that closing it requires strong American engagement and leadership. Click Here

I support immediate and strong U.S.-led diplomatic efforts to urgently reinstate a meaningful ceasefire that ends all military operations, stops the rockets aimed at Israel and lifts the blockade of Gaza. This is in the best interests of Israel, the Palestinian people and the United States.

It’s really hard for me to believe that this is something people actually have to petition them to do, particularly after the birth pangs, cock-up in Lebanon. I guess that was considered a big success.

Meanwhile, I’m hearing the gasbags all speculate that this means the end of Obama’s domestic agenda for some reason. I’m not sure why they insist on that; I don’t actually think the domestic agenda can be shuffled off to the side even if he wanted to. It’s not like it’s expendable either. I’m pretty sure the president knows that he is going to have to do it all.

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Here Come The Obstructionists

by dday

Mitch McConnell is very concerned about the people’s money, and wants hearings.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) voiced skepticism today about the emerging economic stimulus plan, applying a brake to Democratic plans to quickly pass up to $850 billion in spending and tax cuts soon after President-elect Barack Obama’s Jan. 20 inauguration.

“As of right now, Americans are left with more questions than answers about this unprecedented government spending, and I believe the taxpayers deserve to know a lot more about where it will be spent before we consider passing it,” McConnell said in a statement, which will be publicly issued later today.

Obama’s advisers and congressional Democrats have been huddling in the Capitol trying to craft a massive stimulus plan that could cost anywhere from $675 billion to $850 billion, while some economists are pushing for a total package worth more than $1 trillion.

McConnell — the most powerful Republican in Washington, based on the filibuster-proof level of 41 GOP Senate seats — called for many congressional hearings on the stimulus plan and some undetermined safeguards to assure the money is being spent wisely […]

McConnell specifically called for a weeklong cooling off period between when the bill is drafted and when it is voted on, allowing time to dissect it for signs of “fraud and waste.”

I have no problem with a 72-hour rule between drafting a bill and voting on it, but I am touched by the newfound concern of Congressional Republicans about fraud and waste. They took an eight-year break from caring about this, and allowed giant bricks of money to be given away in Iraq, and a government concerned far more with profit taking than fulfilling its regulatory mission. But they can be forgiven for this temporary lack of attention to the destination of taxpayer money. After all, it’s a new year coming up, and change is in the air.

It was obvious that the GOP would work to obstruct a stimulus package early in Obama’s term. It’s worth asking why. I understand why they would want to stop increased union membership that would come from fair labor laws like the Employee Free Choice Act – more union members vote Democratic. And shutting down universal health care would deny Democrats the ability to provide a tangible improvement to the lives of millions of Americans. That’s part of why they would want to obstruct public works spending, but there may also be a political consideration, as explained nicely by Nate Silver:

So let’s think through the other couple of choices. First thing first: if the economy improves substantially by the midterm elections, you’re screwed. It won’t matter whether you voted for the stimulus or voted against it, and it won’t matter whether you achieved some kind of compromise or you didn’t. If, by the summer of 2010, GDP growth has miraculously recovered to 4% per year, that’s all the public is going to think about. Obama Save Economy!! Me Vote Democrat!! They aren’t going to care about whether you snuck some sort of capital gains tax cut in there.

But let’s say that the economy still sucks in 2010 — which, frankly, is a pretty good bet. That’s going to work much, much better for you if you’ve voted against the stimulus. Not only can you pin the blame on the donkeys, but you can campaign on tax cutting and fiscal responsibility — the stimulus will “prove”, once and for all, the wisdom of conservative economic principles. And then think about this: the Democrats are going to be trying to spend $800 billion in taxpayer dollars as quickly as they can possibly get away with it. Somewhere along the way, they’re going to wind up funding a Woodstock Museum or a Bridge to Nowhere. Somewhere along the way, an enterprising contractor is going to embezzle a bunch of stimulus money, or cook up some kind of pay-to-play scheme. Maybe if you’re really lucky, this will happen in your Distrct. Better to keep the whole thing at arm’s-length and make sure that Democrats get the blame for that.

That’s maybe part of it. But the simplest and therefore most likely explanation is that they oppose it because Democrats favor it. This is, in general terms, how modern Republicans practice politics – by being the biggest pains in the ass possible. “Because they can” is probably the most obvious answer. This is especially true when you have a rump conservative faction committed to fighting the pointy-headed elites to preserve Southern honor:

All the signs are that the stimulus spending will be opposed by congressional Republicans, whose shrunken ranks are increasingly dominated by right-wing Southerners who care not what their stance does to harm the party’s national image.

The spectacle of LaHood facing off in congressional testimony against those naysayers will dramatize a split that is crippling the GOP.

The danger became apparent as far back as 2007. With Bush weakened by the Iraq war, Hurricane Katrina and the midterm election losses of 2006, a Southern-led revolt killed his immigration reform bill. Junior senators such as Jim DeMint of South Carolina directed the rebellion, and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, unable to stem the insurgency, joined it.

The price was paid in the 2008 presidential campaign. Despite his personal credentials as a sponsor of comprehensive immigration reform, John McCain was caught in the backlash of anti-GOP voting by Hispanics. It contributed to his loss of Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Florida and other states.

The same thing happened this year when Bush supported a bailout for the Big Three auto companies. Led by Republican senators from Southern states where there are many foreign-owned auto plants, the Senate refused to cut off a filibuster against the bill to provide bridge loans to General Motors and Chrysler. This time, the opposition was led by Bob Corker of Tennessee and Richard Shelby of Alabama. When the Senate failed by eight votes to cut off debate, Southern and border-state Republicans voted 16 to 2 against the measure. On a similar vote on the 2007 immigration bill, the Southerners split 17 to 3 against.

Obstructing on the basis of principle or holding out for a particular point of compromise is a very different animal than obstructing for obstruction’s sake, obstructing because, if a bunch of egghead economists say we need a massive public spending program, then real Murcans have to stand astride history saying “stop”. As we hear a lot about bipartisanship and Republicans and Democrats having to come together to solve the nation’s problems, as we hear from a President whose focus is “what works” instead of ideology, someone’s going to have to stand up and mention that the modern Republican Party defines ideology through negation. Someone might want to mention that there’s no compromise with those who reflexively oppose for no reason other than denying your opponent a victory is seen as a higher good than helping someone get a job or health care or a higher wage to support their family. Someone might want to suggest that accommodation is impossible.

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Return Of The Zombies

by digby

…in which the Village begins a campaign to revise history and redeem itself for its support of George W. Bush:

The idea that 44 might in the future continue to seek the counsel of 43 would until recently have struck partisans on both ends of the ideological spectrum as absurd. But that was before the transition commenced and Obama began to tip his hand in the area of foreign policy. Before the appointment of the power troika of Bob Gates, Jim Jones, and Hillary Clinton, each of whom plausibly could have filled the very same jobs in a John McCain regime. Before the hints that Obama might not be fully, rigidly committed to the rapid timetable for drawing down combat troops in Iraq that he advocated during the campaign. Before, in other words, the pat assumptions of the right and the left were blown to smithereens. That all this has come as such a shock to so many owes to a misreading of Obama as a starry-eyed idealist—when there was ample evidence that lurking just beneath the surface was a hard-eyed, sometimes hawkish realist. One obvious implication here is that the next four years may be marked as much by continuity with Bush’s policies as by radical departures from them. But a less conspicuous consequence is that, although the president and his supporters shared a dim view of Obama as a prospective commander-in-chief, the supposedly woolly-minded, lily-livered Democrat may wind up doing more to salvage Bush’s legacy than the grizzled Republican nominee ever would, or could, have done.

If Obama wants to join him in ranking as the worst president in US history, he’ll do just that. There is no salvaging this neocon nightmare and any attempt to try will drag him down with the sinking Bush family ship. (Not to mention that it would be disastrous for the country.)

Heileman goes on to assert that Bush isn’t really as much of a global miscreant as everybody thinks. Apparently he’s been pretty darned level headed these last few years, more like his Dad, who everyone in Washington now seems to agree was the model president. All Obama needs to do is follow the Bush blueprint, but add a little of that patented Obama smooth talk about hope ‘n change and it’s all good.

This entire thesis seems to me to have far less to do with Obama than with the villagers’ desire to legitimize their own failures during the past eight years. And predictably, the establishment line dovetails nicely with the embarrassingly obvious Republican efforts to co-opt Barack as a post-partisan keeper of the conservative flame. William Kristol today practically adopted him as the long lost son of Barry Goldwater:

I also have to admit that I look forward to Obama’s inauguration with a surprising degree of hope and good cheer. For one thing, there will be the invocation, delivered by Rick Warren. I suspect he’ll be careful to say nothing pro-life or pro-traditional-marriage — but we conservatives have already gotten more than enough pleasure from the hysterical reaction to his selection by the tribunes of the intolerant left. And having Warren there will, in fact, be a welcome reminder of the strides the evangelical movement and religious conservatives (broadly speaking) have made in recent decades.[…]

One more heartening tidbit — from my point of view — about the president-elect: he’s been in the past an intermittent smoker, and is now a nicotine gum chewer who admits that he’s occasionally fallen off the wagon this past year to indulge in a cigarette. He’s been chastised for this by some scolds. The editors of The Mercury News told him recently he needed to make “a very public show of quitting” to set a good example for young people. Bah, humbug. Those of us who dislike finger-wagging nanny-state-nagging liberalism relish the prospect of President Barack Obama sneaking a cigarette on the second floor of the White House while rereading Harry V. Jaffa’s great work on Lincoln, “Crisis of the House Divided,” then taking a break to stroll over to take a look at the White House’s copy of Emanuel Leutze’s painting “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” then going back to the family quarters to tell his kids to get back to memorizing some patriotic poetry, all of this interrupted occasionally by calls from Gen. David Petraeus and Gen. Ray Odierno — his Ulysses Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman — to discuss progress in the wars we’re fighting, or from Rick Warren to discuss their joint efforts to fight AIDS in Africa and to reduce the number of abortions in the U.S. Now that’s a presidency I can believe in.

I know it’s unfashionably partisan and all, but I really hope that Kristol is forced to eat those words. Because if he isn’t, I’m afraid that conservatism will remain the default political identity of the villagers (and a good number of Americans) who will then gravitate back to the Republicans if they’re allowed to forget that it was conservatism that failed in the first place.

I know that most people believe it doesn’t matter if voters think progressive policies are conservative as long as they are progressive in reality. And certainly the policy is the most important part of the equation. But most people’s understanding of policy is vague at best and, in any case, politics has a number of moving parts and heuristic elements. For most voters politics are predicated on identity and affiliation as much as anything else and it matters to long term political success how most people see themselves on the partisan spectrum. As important to the country as it is that Barack succeed in enacting progressive policies, it’s equally important that he till the soil for other progressives to follow.

The modern conservative movement has been disastrous on both policy and politics in America and I think it’s a mistake to allow them to simply lay low and co-opt the successes of a center left president until they can regroup and come back to screw it all up again. Their economic and foreign policy radicalism has very nearly wrecked the world and I don’t think the “serious people” in the political establishment should be allowed to pretend that it was anything but what it was. And I certainly don’t think they should be allowed to state that Obama was elected to carry on the Bush family legacy without challenge. I’m pretty sure we’ll come to regret being complacent about such things when the next George W. Bush comes along pretending to be a compassionate conservative — and actually finishes what Junior started.

I realize that I’m out of step with my thinking on this. As Steve Benen reports in this post about Move On, most liberals don’t give a damn think it’s a top priority to hold the Bush administration accountable or reform politics and prefer that Obama devotes his time working on health care and global warming and getting out of Iraq. And I certainly can’t argue that those priorities are extremely important.

But somebody has to call bullshit on the Republicans and the media lest they successfully paper over their ongoing malpractice and succeed in convincing people that Obama represents some sort of continuity instead of the change the people actually voted for. It’s almost impossible to take them seriously at this moment, but if Obama succeeds we may very well find ourselves in a situation where the political establishment and the Republicans will take credit for his achievements to push their next aristocratic wrecking crew into power. Unless we challenge this new narrative, we could find ourselves right back where we were in 2000, with the country voting on the basis of who they’d like to have a beer with because the country is doing well and as far as they can tell there’s no difference between the two parties. And as we all know, it only takes a few short years of GOP dominance (and tepid, credulous opposition) to reverse it all.

Whether anyone likes it or not I’m going to keep an eye on the Village zombies. Remember:

Modern zombies, as portrayed in books, films, games, and haunted attractions, are quite different from both voodoo zombies and those of folklore. Modern zombies are typically depicted in popular culture as mindless, unfeeling monsters with a hunger for human brains and flesh, a prototype established in the seminal 1968 film Night of the Living Dead. Typically, these creatures can sustain damage far beyond that of a normal, living human (generally these can only be killed by a wound to the head, such as a headshot) and can pass whatever syndrome that causes their condition onto others. Usually, zombies are not depicted as thralls to masters, as in the film White Zombie or the spirit-cult myths. Rather, modern zombies are depicted in mobs and waves, seeking either flesh to eat or people to kill or infect, and are typically rendered to exhibit signs of physical decomposition such as rotting flesh, discolored eyes, and open wounds, and moving with a slow, shambling gait. They are generally incapable of communication and show no signs of personality or rationality, though George Romero‘s zombies appear capable of learning and very basic levels of speech as seen in the films Day of the Dead and Land of the Dead. Modern zombies are closely tied to the idea of a zombie apocalypse, the collapse of civilization caused by a vast plague of undead. The ideas are now so strongly linked that zombies are rarely depicted within any other context.

I’m just saying…

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Tearing Down Camelot

by dday

I’m fairly lukewarm on Caroline Kennedy’s Senate “campaign,” which has consisted of her hiring insider consultants affiliated with Bloomberg and Lieberman and ringing up elites and putting pressure on the Governor to appoint her. But I have to say that I respect her a bit more after this interview with the New York Times, where she says something that probably most politicians have thought at one time or another.

With several weeks to go before Mr. Paterson makes his decision, she is doling out glimpses of her political beliefs and private life. But when asked Saturday morning to describe the moment she decided to seek the Senate seat, Ms. Kennedy seemed irritated by the question and said she couldn’t recall.

“Have you guys ever thought about writing for, like, a woman’s magazine or something?” she asked the reporters. “I thought you were the crack political team.”

If you read the transcript, you get a better sense of where that comes from. They were more than halfway through the interview at this point, and the whole thing had a certain People Magazine quality about it. The reporters asked Kennedy repeatedly about an imagined conversation they have in their heads, out of a bad biopic or something, a “moment of clarity” where she blurts out “I’m going to do this!” When Kennedy suggests that it didn’t actually happen that way, because, um, life pretty much doesn’t happen that way, they basically ask her to create a story where it does. That’s when the woman’s magazine crack comes in.

NC: So when in your own mind did it go from, ‘It’s kind of an interesting idea’ to ‘Maybe I should do this?’ (Pause) Or was that —

CK: Over the last couple weeks. (She chuckles.)

NC: Was there any moment where —

CK: No, I don’t think there was a moment, I mean, this kind of thing is too important for it to be, like, an on-off switch, right? This is a process, and as I became more serious about it, and talked to more people, you know, I thought — and then obviously I called the governor and expressed interest, and um, you know, so…

NC: The signs were on what day? Was it before you called the governor?

CK: The what? Oh yeah, that was a while ago.

NC: That was a while ago?

CK: Yeah.

NC: So that was after Senator Clinton had announced — so it was after the vacancy became possible?

CK: Well, yeah. Obviously.

NC: OK. (CK laughs.) I just wanted to make sure of the chronology.

DH: We just don’t know if it was after we started writing about you or —

CK: No, you guys had nothing to do with it. (Laughs.)

DH: No, we didn’t mean that. The timing.

NC: Uh, so sometime before those stories about your discussion with the governor, sometime after Senator Clinton had been tapped for —

CK: Yeah — yeah […]

NC: Was he the first person you told — do you know if you uttered the words, ‘I think I’m gonna go for this?’ Or, something like it?

CK: Well, I don’t know if I utter those kinds of words, but yes. You know, it was a mutual decision.

NC: Could you, for the sake of storytelling, could you tell us a little bit about that moment, like, where you were, what you said to him about your decision, how that played out?

CK: Have you guys ever thought about writing for, like, a woman’s magazine or something? (Laughter)

DH: What do you have against women’s magazines?

CK: Nothing at all, but I thought you were the crack political team here. As I said, it was kind of over a period of time, you know, obviously we talked about politics, we talked about what’s going on, we’ve been watching the team that the president-elect is putting together — Hillary Clinton is going to be a spectacular part of that team, you know, then there was a vacancy here, you know, just like everybody else, you know: who’s going to fill it, isn’t that interesting, there’s a lot of great candidates, you know, obviously I have become much more politically involved than I have in the past, so you know, I figure, why not try, I really think I have something to offer.

NC: But there was no one moment you can draw on —

CK: I know I wish there was, I’ll think about it.

NC: If there isn’t, that’s what it was, that’s fine too. We’re not the crack political team, we’re always looking for good anecdotes and good stories.

CK: I know, and I understand. I’ll think about it a little more.

Kennedy’s mistake is assuming that there’s any kind of marker or dividing line between political media and magazine personality profile at all anymore. Sometimes those kind of profiles elicit vaguely interesting questions, but they sure have nothing to do with being a Senator. They have everything to do with creating a mythical persona, and in this case, puncturing it, for no real reason other than it’s good for business, I guess.

When the “crack political staff” finally gets around to asking about an issue, which they back into by asking Kennedy why she sent her children to private school and if she really should be credited with raising money for public schools, the entire thing is framed along whether or not she would break with a “conventional Democrat”.

DH: Just to talk a little more about issues: a lot of your political positions seem pretty straight-up-the-middle, conventional for a Democrat.

CK: Does that surprise you?

DH: No. But I wonder, what are the biggest areas where you disagree with Democratic party orthodoxy? We want to know what sets you apart. You’ve cited a lot of examples and influences; what would be a subject that we would expect your position to be a real surprise on?

CK: Well, I think that there’s a range of views in the Democratic party. And you know, I am a proud Democrat, those are the values, you know — middle class tax relief, helping working families, fixing the health care system — those are the national priorities right now. So those are the issues that I would expect — I mean, I am a Democrat, that is, you know — I am trying to become a Democratic senator, so I don’t, um — I mean, there are issues along the way, that I’m sure that people have differences of opinion. There’s controversies in all these areas.

DH: One where you have a clear-eyed idea about where you stand on something that is diff —

CK: That is different from who? Anybody?

DH: The party platform. I mean, pick some standard. Just something that would surprise —

CK: I support gay marriage, I support, you know, I’ve had problems with Nafta, I mean, I don’t — if we’re not comparing it to anybody specifically it’s hard to say where I’m going to disagree.

NC: How about Governor Paterson?

CK: But I’m a traditional Democrat, so that’s what I want to fight for, those are the values I want to fight for.

NC: Is there any issue on which you and Governor Paterson disagree that you can think of?

CK: Well, I think Governor Paterson has — I can tell you two of the areas where I think he’s done great work. Which is, alternative energy —

NC: That wasn’t the question. Is there anything on which you two disagree?

CK: No, I’m not going to talk about my disagreements with Governor — I think he’s done a great job as a leadership, yeah, absolutely.

DH: Two powerful, respected people are allowed to differ.

CK: They are. They are.

DH: We just wonder where we’ll find out that you differ.

CK: Well, you’ll find out over time. You know, as issues come along.

It’s a bizarre, accusatory tone, showing that typical reporter bias that the only way for a Democrat to show any integrity is to break with their own party. This fetish makes little sense to me, and the only explanation I have for it is that the reporters aren’t well-versed enough on the issues to talk about them substantively, so they use the “how are you different” shorthand even though they have little sense of what the Democrat should be different from.

Of course, the only reason a possible Senate appointee is getting grilled in this fashion is because she’s Caroline Kennedy, part of Camelot and American royalty and all that, and that belief that she sells papers, especially now that the narrative is set that she’s flailing about, which this interview is clearly designed to elicit. There are at least a dozen aspirants nationwide for Senate appointments – in New York, Illinois, Colorado – but none of them are being exposed to confrontational interviews where they are subjected to endless variations of the question “What makes you so special?” My preference would be for NOBODY to get appointed to a Senate seat, and all of them decided by special election. But while I think a Kennedy appointment ought to be open to questioning, we’d have to find another media to conduct that questioning, if we want any insight other than how ridiculous 21st-century reporting has become.

Most fitting in all of this is the Politico’s takeaway, as insubstantial as the interview itself:

One thing Caroline Kennedy would bring to Washington: A new, distinctive Kennedy verbal tic: She said “you know” 142 times in her Times interview.

Journalism par excellence.

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Who’s Their Daddy?

by digby

Newtie is becoming just insufferable lately and he’d better watch it or even some of his friends on the right are going to call bs on him. In response to that idiot sending out Limbaugh’s “Barack The Magic Negro” CD, he tells the New York Times:

“This is so inappropriate that it should disqualify any Republican National Committee candidate who would use it,” Newt Gingrich, a Republican former House speaker, said in an e-mail message. Referring to Mr. Obama, Mr. Gingrich said, “There are no grounds for demeaning him or for using racist descriptions.”

Please. I am all for conservatives coming over from the dark side. But the leadership of the movement that turned our politics into a cesspool simply can’t be taken seriously as arbiters of proper civility now that they are out of fashion. It “demeans” the whole idea.

Here’s a little reminder of Gingrich’s past advice on such matters:.

I think one of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty. We encourage you to be neat, obedient, loyal and faithful and all those Boy Scout words, which would be great around a campfire but are lousy in politics.

He also said this (in 1998) which proves what an astute political leader he is:

“Mr. President, we are going to run you out of town”

We know how that turned out don’t we?

I don’t mind Newtie trying to make a GOP comeback. And that he would do it by riding the post partisan zeitgeist is exactly what I would expect of a sleazy operator like him. But I will absolutely lose my grip if I see any Democrat embracing this wicked little bastard. He is as responsible for what the Republicans did to this country as Bush and Cheney, maybe more. To allow him even the slightest bit of credibility for this predictable oozing insincerity is to sow the seeds of their own demise.

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Long Run Fantasy

by digby

Condi Rice and Laura Bush are insisting that the administration will be vindicated by history for all the wonderful work it has done around the world. Rice, especially, is intent upon making the case that if the world gets better some time in the future, Bush will be given the credit for it. (This isn’t the first time she and Bush have made this stupid comment.)

This definition of success would mean that you have to reevaluate Tojo since Japan has since become a prosperous, first world country. After all, if it weren’t for him, the world wouldn’t be where it is today. Hell, where would Western Europe be if it weren’t for that bad man in the mustache — or Eastern Europe if it hadn’t been for Stalin? Hey, even Caligula can be seen to be a hero if you believe that the world is better off today than it was during Roman times.

It’s not that Bush is necessarily as bad as those examples, but the logic behind Rice’s view inexorably leads you to evaluate everyone in history through the lens of human progress — which means that none of the great villains can be held responsible for their deeds and nothing can ever be learned from bad decisions of the past. As long as the world goes on you can always make the case that things will probably turn out ok in the long run. And that’s hardly any comfort —as the old saying goes, in the long run we’ll all be dead.

In fact, in the short run a whole lot of Iraqi people are dead because of the United States’ inexplicable decision to invade their country. It is what it is and it’s offensive to compare temporary political resistance to a pragmatic humanitarian policy like The Marshall Plan to the worldwide revulsion at an invasion for reasons that made no sense, as Rice does. If Iraq becomes a sane and prosperous nation some time from now, it will never render that policy, based on lies and propaganda, to be a good one — and Bush, Cheney and Rice will never get credit for any future progress because of it. They need accept that the best they can hope for is to end up among history’s inept clowns instead of history’s villains. It’s not much, but it’s all they’ve got.

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Patterns

by digby

CSPAN3 History is showing a fascinating look back at the Iran Contra affair today if you are interested, including press conferences by the likes of Weinberger and Lawrence Walsh.

If you want to know where the Bush administration got the idea that they could get away with anything, this is a good place to start. Bush Senior pretty much pardoned himself by pardoning those who could have implicated him, thereby shutting down the investigation. If there are no political ramifications, the presidential pardon is the checkmate. And since Democrats have shown they will never pursue such things while Republicans have proved without doubt that they will leave no stone unturned, even to the extent of impeaching a president over a trivial personal matter (and turning the independent counsel’s office into a partisan freak show) the result is the lawless Bush administration. I shudder to think what the next Republican administration will do.

*And once again, to those who have been convinced by some very hysterical people in the left blogosphere who have reading comprehension problems that I was against the impeachment of Bush, well, they’re wrong.

Just Right

by digby

At some point in the last few years I saw some conservative wag saying that the first part of the 20th century may have belonged to Keynes but the second half belonged to Hayek. I don’t know if that’s exactly true — after all, governments have turned tax cuts into holy rituals on the basis of Keynesian ideas about stimulus. But it is at least somewhat true. Free market fundamentalism (which Hayek didn’t actually believe in — he was more of an evangelical) has certainly been the order of the day for at least a quarter of a century and animated the arguments of the aristocracy, the Randians and the political anti-commies for longer than that.

But, just as with liberalism in general, when the shit comes down after the conservative ideologues have been allowed to pillage and destroy everything in their wake, it’s back to Keynes. And via Krugman, here’s an excellent article by Martin Wolfe in the Financial Times that explains that the ideological poles were between market fundamentalism and socialism, not Hayek and Keynes, the latter of whom was essentially a technocratic pragmatist. And so it also implies that electing a technocrat like Obama at a time like this may be the best possible news. I have a lot of problems with the idea that ideology doesn’t matter, but when put into an economic context it appears to be just what the Doctor (Keynes) ordered.

One of the weirdest things I’ve seen in the past few weeks has been the bizarre, reflexive loathing of FDR crop up again. I hadn’t actually seen anything like it since I was a kid and the old folks would rail against “that man.” It seemed ancient even then and that was a long time ago. And when I was in school it was taught without any caveat that Roosevelt saved capitalism, period. The historical context of that statement, in the middle of the cold war, was that communism was on the rise during that period and had Roosevelt not been able to get the country through the depression, there may have been revolution or a political overthrow on the order of Germany.

But that’s no longer a given — or perhaps it is, but the rise of conservative media makes the old FDR hating seem more mainstream then it did back when I was a kid. We are suddenly being bombarded with the convenient revisionism of crackpots like Amity Schlaes and the confident gibberish of Fred Barnes, who Susie at C & L catches blithly passing on the popular contrarian fiction that FDR actually made the depression worse. The stuff about how Ronald Reagan saved the world by destroying the air traffic controller’s union is especially rich. (The antidote to such lies and misrepresentations, is here, in this excellent article about FDR and the auto unions)

So, just as we seem to have finally been able to put the Vietnam era behind us (at least for the moment), we’re taking a trip back to the 1930s and we’re going to have those same stupid arguments all over again. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, yadda, yadda, yadda. It never really ends.

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