Month: February 2009

A Man Called Petraeus Storms The White House

by dday

Well, we expected this, didn’t we? From an excellent piece by Gareth Porter:

CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus, supported by Defence Secretary Robert Gates, tried to convince President Barack Obama that he had to back down from his campaign pledge to withdraw all U.S. combat troops from Iraq within 16 months at an Oval Office meeting Jan. 21.

But Obama informed Gates, Petraeus and Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen that he wasn’t convinced and that he wanted Gates and the military leaders to come back quickly with a detailed 16-month plan, according to two sources who have talked with participants in the meeting.

One thing we can say about Obama is that, for good or for ill, he has generally kept to his bigger campaign promises. In this case, he knows that his foreign policy success is in large part predicated on getting us out of Iraq, and he refuses to bend to both the foreign policy establishment and institutional military pushback. Not only that, but reneging on a signed agreement with the Iraqis would endanger American troops and ensure chaos in Iraq and abroad. Sure, the warmongers will get a war (Obama is likely to hold to his promise in Afghanistan), but not Iraq.

According to Porter, the Gates-Petraeus plan was to reclassify combat troops as “support troops” to get around that little status of forces agreement mandating set withdrawals of US forces. Apparently Obama wasn’t willing to risk American credibility in that shell game.

Of course, Petraeus is trying to circumvent his commander-in-chief, which I believe they call insubordination:

Obama’s decision to override Petraeus’s recommendation has not ended the conflict between the president and senior military officers over troop withdrawal, however. There are indications that Petraeus and his allies in the military and the Pentagon, including Gen. Ray Odierno, now the top commander in Iraq, have already begun to try to pressure Obama to change his withdrawal policy.

A network of senior military officers is also reported to be preparing to support Petraeus and Odierno by mobilising public opinion against Obama’s decision.

Petraeus was visibly unhappy when he left the Oval Office, according to one of the sources. A White House staffer present at the meeting was quoted by the source as saying, “Petraeus made the mistake of thinking he was still dealing with George Bush instead of with Barack Obama.”

Looks like Petraeus is using those handy Pentagon embeds to implement this strategy, too:

The opening argument by the Petraeus-Odierno faction against Obama’s withdrawal policy was revealed the evening of the Jan. 21 meeting when retired Army Gen. Jack Keane, one of the authors of the Bush troop surge policy and a close political ally and mentor of Gen. Petraeus, appeared on the Lehrer News Hour to comment on Obama’s pledge on Iraq combat troop withdrawal.

Keane, who had certainly been briefed by Petraeus on the outcome of the Oval Office meeting, argued that implementing such a withdrawal of combat troops would “increase the risk rather dramatically over the 16 months”. He asserted that it would jeopardise the “stable political situation in Iraq” and called that risk “not acceptable”.

The assertion that Obama’s withdrawal policy threatens the gains allegedly won by the Bush surge and Petraeus’s strategy in Iraq will apparently be the theme of the campaign that military opponents are now planning.

Here we go again. Honestly, I don’t know why anyone would even want the Presidency, beset as it is by palace intrigue on all sides. Then again, nobody told Obama to hang on to Bob Gates. By the way, this epic whine about Obama actually following through on his promise is all about properly assigning blame:

The source says the network (of military officials), which includes senior active duty officers in the Pentagon, will begin making the argument to journalists covering the Pentagon that Obama’s withdrawal policy risks an eventual collapse in Iraq. That would raise the political cost to Obama of sticking to his withdrawal policy.

If Obama does not change the policy, according to the source, they hope to have planted the seeds of a future political narrative blaming his withdrawal policy for the “collapse” they expect in an Iraq without U.S. troops.

I heard Bill Kristol parrot this strategy on Fox News Sunday, answering a question about why Obama hasn’t officially announced drawdowns in Iraq by saying “Because he’s a responsible man, and he won’t withdraw if it isn’t safe to do so.” Kristol, who has never met a disaster he wasn’t responsible for, has his own neocon fantasy agenda of keeping troops in the region to teach Arabs a lesson and enable them to fight in the 8 or 9 other wars he keeps in a list on his Blackberry. And the people who have been wrong about every foreign policy situation for decades upon decades are certainly not the people to listen to about “collapse.”

As for Petraeus, it was clear that he was nothing more than a political animal for a while. He figured that his public stature was such that the President of the United States would have to take orders from him. And now he wants to use the media, which is enamored of him, to exact a price on Obama for disobeying him. Maybe he should just declare for 2012 now.

You could see this clash between the military and the young President coming. They don’t like taking orders from lowly Democrats and they don’t mind undermining their superior officer to make their point.

…By the way, defense spending will increase by 8% in the 2010 FY budget and unnamed sources at the Pentagon are pissed because it’s 10% less than what they asked for, portraying this increase as a spending cut. It never stops.

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Here We Go

by digby

I’m just surprised it took so long.

Based on my e-mail, a lot of folks think the solution to California’s state budget deficit is to round up all the illegal immigrants and truck them down to Mexico.

Wrong. Even if it were logistically possible and the deportees didn’t just climb off the truck and hitch another ride back up north, their absence from the state wouldn’t come close to saving enough tax dollars to balance a budget that has a $42-billion hole projected over the next 17 months.

Painful cuts in education, healthcare and social service programs still would be needed. Sharp tax increases would be required.

That said, let’s be honest: Illegal immigration does cost California taxpayers a substantial wad, undeniably into the billions.

But it hasn’t been PC for officeholders to talk about this for years, ever since Gov. Pete Wilson broke his pick waging an aggressive campaign for Proposition 187. That 1994 ballot initiative sought to bar illegal immigrants from most public services, including education. Voters approved the measure overwhelmingly, but it was tossed out by the courts.

Wilson was demonized by Democrats within the Latino community. And many think the Republican Party never has recovered among this rapidly growing slice of the electorate.

So it’s not a topic that comes easily to the tongues of politicians, even Republicans.

He goes on to lay out just how those illegals (particularly their US citizen children) are draining the coffers and then halfheartedly shrugs that since “they” are among us we probably need to care for the kids at least, so Obama had better do comprehensive immigration reform.

When times get bad immigrants are always scapegoated. Always. (California was still mired in recession in 1994…) It’s a testament to our growing maturity as a nation that we haven’t devolved into an orgy of immigrant bashing already. I’m surprised.

But it’s coming. California is just beginning to feel the consequences of its disastrous financial situation and it’s going to get worse. The wingnut talkers are already working themselves into a froth. It doesn’t matter that it won’t solve the problem. It doesn’t matter that our problems were actually caused by a bunch of rich, (mostly) white elites. The way right wing populism works is to compain about the wealthy, but kick the dark skinned and immigrant poor. I don’t know why — they just seem to need to do it.

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Pompous

by digby

So Jill Biden is pompous for calling herself Dr. I don’t know exactly why anyone even finds that noteworthy — it’s not exactly unprecedented in Washington for people to use their titles and it’s not like she didn’t earn it.

Consider these two paragons:

We couldn’t help but notice that Terwilliger is referring to his client as “Judge,” a relatively common practice we’ve noted before. Gonzales was once a judge, of course — a Texas Supreme Court justice, and while attorney general he preferred to be called “Judge” rather than “General,” which is what Ashcroft liked to be called

Now that’s pompous. (Ashcroft demanding to be called “General” is especially rich considering his record during Vietnam.)

I’m pretty sure that Gonzales is still forcing people to call him Judge, even though the legal profession should be embarrassed by his ownership of the title. No word on Ashcroft, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he still calls himself that and demands that people salute when they see him.

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Spin War

by digby

Chuck Todd just said that the Republicans have won the spin war on the recovery bill and says that Claire McCaskill even admitted it when she said the Democrats had larded the bill up with spending. He says it’s now known as a “spending bill” not a stimulus bill. (He doesn’t say “who” now sees it that way.) But I would guess it’s gasbags like Matthews who are going on and on about condoms and wondering how the Democrats didn’t understand that their job is to write a Republican bill.

I’m pretty sure the bill will pass. And maybe they will drag a couple of Blue State Republicans across the finish line and slap a bipartisan label on it. But from where I sit, the Republicans have already won the larger issue and going forward any spending is going to be even more difficult.(That’s why this stupid “centrist” talking point about how the programs are all worthwhile spedning but shouldn’t be in a stimulus package is just utter bullshit. They will never get passed on their own. )

They’ll reluctantly “accept” this and then use it as a weapon to tank health care, further needed stimulus and anything else that Obama wants to do, all in the name of “fiscal responsibility.” (I don’t even want to think about the hellish consequences of agreeing to this “entitlement reform commission.”)

The truth is that they are larding this thing up with as many tax cuts as they can get in the name of “stimulus” (and paving the way to make the Bush tax cuts permanent) while simultaneously starving the beast. And so they are having it both ways.

Cutting taxes, rewarding their contributors and stopping any kind of government spending on things that don’t directly benefit them politically is how they do business.

Update: David Gergen sez:

“President Obama has to be very tough now on this spending. They can’t just load it up with more goodies. The perceptions is that it’s got way too many already.”

But you can never have too many tax cuts. No “goodies” there, right?

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Fractious Factions

by digby

Good for E.J. Dionne for injecting this into elite opinion. If it isn’t said by one of the village scibblers, it’s as if it doesn’t exist, so I really appreciate his bringing up the subject.

The dynamics of Washington aren’t new and they aren’t particular to these players. We have a two party system. As Dionne mentions, there’s always been a strain of anti-partisanship in America, particularly among a certain class of political elites, of which Obama is clearly one, for what appears to be philosophical and temperamental reasons as well as more pragmatic, political ones.

This is an argument that goes all the way back to the beginning of the country. The famous Federalist #10 (and #9) deals with the danger of factions and the need for several layers of check and balances to ensure that the majority doesn’t run roughshod. One of the problems, as Madison saw it, was that since the majority were not property owners, they would be likely to overrule those who did and we all know where that leads…

Garry Wills in his book Explaining America, wrote that Madison’s protection of the minority most often stands in the way of progress:

“Minorities can make use of dispersed and staggered governmental machinery to clog, delay, slow down, hamper, and obstruct the majority. But these weapons for delay are given to the minority irrespective of its factious or nonfactious character; and they can be used against the majority irrespective of its factious or nonfactious character. What Madison prevents is not faction, but action. What he protects is not the common good but delay as such.”

Let’s face it. We all hate partisanship when the other party has an edge. When we have the power, we think we should have the upper hand and when we don’t have the power, we believe in checks and balances. The very idea of partisanship is, therefore, partisan. (And in recent years the idea of faction stopping action, has been the hope among liberals anyway, that the Democratic faction would stop the radical program of the “conservative” movement, so it does go both ways.)

But it has always been part of the system. Madison’s idea was that the bigger the country the more factions there are and therefore the less effect any one group would have. What he didn’t foresee, and none of them did, was that this process they created would build a durable and unbreakable two party system. Candidates always say they want to stop the partisan bickering or be a united not a divider or break with the braindead politics of the past. But the reality is that we have two parties that represent different ideologies and they fight it out for supremacy, which moves back and forth between them. (It is worth noting that in the past 35 years or so, the Republicans have been more successful at advancing their agenda because the Democrats were on the decline in the South during much of it — and they failed to exercise their prerogatives when they were in the minority.)

This flawed system hums along most of the time fairly well, but in times of crisis it depends upon the good will of the minority to stop using its built in extraordinary powers to obstruct and join with the majority to solve the problem, whether its war or depression or, conceivably, environmental catastrophe. Unfortunately, we are dealing with a rump, regional minority party today which does not believe in compromise under any circumstances. They are very much like the people Lincoln spoke of in the famous Cooper Union speech I’ve referenced many, many times on this blog:

The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply this: We must not only let them alone, but we must somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. This, we know by experience, is no easy task. We have been so trying to convince them from the very beginning of our organization, but with no success. In all our platforms and speeches we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them. Alike unavailing to convince them, is the fact that they have never detected a man of us in any attempt to disturb them.

These natural, and apparently adequate means all failing, what will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly – done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated – we must place ourselves avowedly with them.

Much like the southern confederates of Lincoln’s time, the modern Republicans believe that until Democrats sign on to their ideology, openly and without any deviation, they must stop them, no matter what the consequences. When they are in the majority, they dominate without apology and when they are in the minority, they throw themselves into the machinery to obstruct anything that isn’t part of their agenda. They are perfectly willing to destroy the country.

In the current party permutations, bipartisanship only succeeds when the Democrats are in the minority. And that is precisely why the permanent political establishment only concerns itself with bipartisanship when the Democrats are in the majority. Going all the way back to the very beginning the biggest worry among the elites was that the rubes would get too much power. They’re still holding the line.

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High Priest Of Not A Clue

by dday

There are two explanations for David Broder’s pig ignorance here, falling along the same lines of wondering whether the last President was “stupid or evil”.

Broder says that the last attempt at stimulus did not work. He was referring to the 2007 effort of handing out money in the form of rebate checks. That didn’t work because it’s well documented to be a terrible stimulus. Moody’s wrote this chart over a year ago:

Broder concludes that, since the first stimulus didn’t work, that “this is a gamble, and it’s much better off that it includes the best thinking available in both parties, not one party.”

Um, sir, WHAT DO YOU THINK THE FIRST STIMULUS WAS? It was a 100% tax rebate along the lines of the sum total of the thinking of one party. In fact, the “best thinking” of those people now is to weight the stimulus down with – wait for it – tax cuts, which would cost three times as much as the current plan because they want the tax cuts to be permanent, which is an even worse stimulus (There’s also the point that the Republicans would push more people onto the Alternative Minimum Tax and actually RAISE taxes for the middle class while dropping them for the rich, but that’s normal and besides the point I’m trying to make).

So, according to Broder, because a 100% tax rebate didn’t work, we have to come up with a “bipartisan” approach that includes the ideas of those who prefer what amounts to a… 100% tax rebate.

This is idiocy, and suggests one of two things: either most of the Beltway is trying to protect the assets of the rich, or they actually don’t know the meaning of the word “stimulus.” And we are seeing this kind of confusion all over the media. If it’s the latter, that’s at least partially the fault of the Administration, who isn’t doing the best job of explaining why exactly we need fiscal spending to make up the shortfall caused by plummeting consumer spending and private investment.

A correspondent raises an important point: there’s widespread public confusion between the fiscal stimulus plan — which should, on its face, be very popular — and the bank bailouts, which are deeply (and understandably) unpopular. Spending on infrastructure commands broad support; rescuing bankers from the consequences of their own folly, broad revulsion.

And the Obama administration hasn’t done much to make the distinction — and the result is much less public support for the stimulus plan than we should have.

Obviously the Obama folks are swimming against a biased media current in trying to differentiate the bailout from the stimulus. But whether this is because they want to appear above the fray and not make partisan statements in the middle of the negotiation or what, it would behoove them to clear up some of the muddle. The economy is on a very dangerous path, and yet the message to the public, from sources partisan and “nonpartisan”, is either ignorantly or deliberately conflating handing out money to banks with investing in the country and creating jobs. For example, Republicans know well – from their own pollster – that infrastructure spending is massively popular and they would have lots of trouble voting against it. Indeed, many of the Republican amendments in the Senate are tied to increasing infrastructure spending.

If people got the idea that the stimulus plan both creates jobs and leaves a tangible asset for the future, it would be hard for even the Broderellas of the world to agitate against it. But people have to get that idea from somewhere.

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Punk’d Part VII

by digby

This time it was I who got punk’d, and after I’ve been so skeptical of both the media’s and the intelligence community’s desire to show Obama as continuing the torture regime, too. You’d think I’d know better than to take a newspaper article about the intelligence community at face value by now but sometimes you slip, and so I did:

The Los Angeles Times just got punked. Its description of the European Parliament’s report is not accurate. (Point of disclosure: I served as an expert witness in hearings leading to the report.) But that’s the least of its problems. It misses the difference between the renditions program, which has been around since the Bush 41 Administration at least (and arguably in some form even in the Reagan Administration) and the extraordinary renditions program which was introduced by Bush 43 and clearly shut down under an executive order issued by President Obama in his first week. There are two fundamental distinctions between the programs. The extraordinary renditions program involved the operation of long-term detention facilities either by the CIA or by a cooperating host government together with the CIA, in which prisoners were held outside of the criminal justice system and otherwise unaccountable under law for extended periods of time. A central feature of this program was rendition to torture, namely that the prisoner was turned over to cooperating foreign governments with the full understanding that those governments would apply techniques that even the Bush Administration considers to be torture. This practice is a felony under current U.S. law, but was made a centerpiece of Bush counterterrorism policy. The earlier renditions program regularly involved snatching and removing targets for purposes of bringing them to justice by delivering them to a criminal justice system. It did not involve the operation of long-term detention facilities and it did not involve torture. There are legal and policy issues with the renditions program, but they are not in the same league as those surrounding extraordinary rendition. Moreover, Obama committed to shut down the extraordinary renditions program, and continuously made clear that this did not apply to the renditions program. In the course of the last week we’ve seen a steady stream of efforts designed to show that Obama is continuing the counterterrorism programs that he previously labeled as abusive and promised to shut down. These stories are regularly sourced to unnamed current or former CIA officials and have largely run in right-wing media outlets. However, now we see that even the Los Angeles Times can be taken for a ride.

I agree with that, and I wrote about it at the time. I should have known better than to take any reporting that features unnamed intelligence people credulously.
Unfortunately, because of that article, it still remains important for Obama to make clear that he is not going to be sending prisoners to countries like Syria or Egypt, which one could loosely describe as having a “criminal justice system.” Closing down the black sites is important. But there can’t be any more Maher Arar’s either and because of the example of the Bush administration, these things have to be explicit.Update: It occurs to me that this more benign definition of rendition as transferring someone to another criminal justice system, used to be called extradition. Can someone explain the difference to me?

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Back To Basics

by dday

Hale “Bonddad” Stewart explains why we need a stimulus, and in turn explains what “stimulus” means. It’s been successfully framed by the right as a tax cut and nothing else, but that’s completely bogus, so it’s important to break down what’s happened to the economy and why extraordinary measures must be taken. There are a lot of graphs showing the historically low data points on the economy, and then:

Let’s look at this from another angle. The equation for GDP (Gross Domestic Product) is Consumer spending (C) + Investment (I) + Net Exports (E) + Government Spending (G) = GDP.

We’ve already covered personal consumption. It’s dropping hard and fast (see the chart above). As for total private domestic investment, consider the following percentage changes from the preceding quarter starting in the 4th quarter of 2007: (-)11.9%, (-)5.8%, (-)11.5%, 0.4%, (-)12.3%. Because the US is a net importer the exports part of the equation is moot. That means the only thing holding up the US economy is government spending. And considering the mammoth drops in investment and consumer spending in the latest report (-12.3% and -3.5%, respectively) neither of these numbers appears ready to turnaround anytime soon.

There are some Republicans who are arguing that tax cuts are the answer. But there are several problems with that. The first is tax cuts were advertised as an engine of job creation in 2003 and we got one of the lowest rates of job creation on record […]

In addition, recent history demonstrates that tax cuts will go to savings and paying down debt rather than consumption. In addition, there is little reason for business to invest in production right now.

That leaves pure spending […] There’s an old maxim in business: you’ve got to spend money to make money. That’s where we are now as a country. We’ve exhausted the possibilities of the buy everything you can on the planet school of economic thought. We’re in debt up to out eyeballs — we are in fact choking on all of the debt we have wrapped up in consumption. We need to change models. That means we need to invest in new technologies and improve our basic infrastructure to attract and support this new business. It’s really that simple.

Let me add one other tangible way to prove that government spending is all that’s left: the buildup of unused goods in warehouses and stock rooms.

Consumers didn’t consume, businesses didn’t invest, overseas buyers of American goods didn’t buy and unsold products piled up in warehouses in the final months of last year. Those factors combined to drive the economy to its weakest quarter in nearly three decades and signaled that the worst is still to come.

New government data showing that the economy contracted at a 3.8 percent annual rate in the fourth quarter was not as grim as economists had forecast. But the data on gross domestic product, released yesterday by the Commerce Department, were a portrait of an economy in a deep and broadening recession. Business inventories swelled as consumer appetites waned, suggesting that companies will cut their excess stockpiles and curtail new orders this year, pulling down growth in the months ahead.

There’s no consumption, no investment, and no trade. Lump-sum payments to consumers will pay down debt and do nothing for the economy. Government spending is the only answer. This is not being done to fulfill a Democratic wish list, it’s being done because we have no choice.

We need better surrogates on the stimulus, and we all can play a role in that. And that said, it’s good to know the very basic reasons why, which most of you might now, but it’s good to see in print.

One way to start being a positive surrogate is to call your representative. According to reports, calls are running overwhelmingly against the stimulus on Capitol Hill. Lawmakers use that as an indicator of the relative popularity of legislation. Rush’s minions are out-organizing us on this point. The number for the Capitol switchboard is (202) 224-3121. If you think the American economy is worth saving, call all of your representatives in Washington. The details are up to you, but you might want to tell them that they need to pass something that spends because nobody else will.

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We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Fantasies!

by tristero

Krugman on Obama’s plans for Lemon Socialism:

“Say I’m a banker and I created $30 million. I should get a part of that,” one banker told The New York Times. And if you’re a banker and you destroyed $30 billion? Uncle Sam to the rescue!

There’s more at stake here than fairness, although that matters too. Saving the economy is going to be very expensive: that $800 billion stimulus plan is probably just a down payment, and rescuing the financial system, even if it’s done right, is going to cost hundreds of billions more. We can’t afford to squander money giving huge windfalls to banks and their executives, merely to preserve the illusion of private ownership.

The question is, in the middle of the worst financial crisis since You Know When, who cares so freakin’ much about preserving such illusions that they would rather perpetuate and deepen the real crisis than face reality?

Yes, you got it. And why president Obama, the most powerful man in the world, would want, even for a second, to pander to the modern Republican party, whose illusions – scratch that, make it “delusions” – have created planetwide misery and havoc on every front, looms as a larger and larger puzzle with every passing minute.

Buckets In The Lake

by digby

Serious people talking to other serious people about serious issues:

KING: A total of 39 analysts, pundits, and critics made the rounds on the Sunday talk shows this morning. Each week, one person gets the last word right here. Today it is Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform and a leading conservative activist.

Welcome.

NORQUIST: Glad to be with you.

KING: You just heard the debate about the economy between Steve Forbes and Secretary Reich, senators who have been out all week long talking about this. It is a critical test for the new president, but it is also a defining moment for the conservative movement and the Republican Party.

What do they do with this new administration? You saw not one Republican voted for it in the House. Now the debate moves to the Senate. I want to read you something from humanevents.com this past Friday about the challenge here for conservatives and Republicans.

“It is much to be hoped that the Republicans in the Senate will display similar fortitude,” referencing the House vote there. “That seems unlikely, given the number of senators who think the way to show sophistication and flexibility is to sell out. A sellout of this sort here will hurt the American people and seriously damage their own party.”

So should Republicans just vote no?

NORQUIST: Well, Republicans should offer a real alternative as the Republicans in the House have, reducing those government — those things the government does, which hurt job creation: high tax rates, long depreciation schedules; and offer instead of the spending programs, lower taxes and more pro-growth policies.

What Obama and Reid and Pelosi want to do is they show up at one side of a lake and put a bucket in and take a bucket of water out, then the three walk around to the other side of the lake, hold a press conference and pour three buckets of water into the lake and announce they’re filling up the lake with water.

That’s what Robert Reich believes will fill up the lake with water. If you look at that and say, wait a minute, you took three buckets out, you put three buckets in the lake is the same amount, you take $800 billion out of the economy in taxes or debt, then you wander over to the other side of the economy and throw the money up in the air and announce you’re stimulating the economy.

Every dollar spent by the government only exists because it was taken out of the economy somewhere else. As pointed out, Japan did this for 10 years, and it was a lost decade. Argentina did it for 30 or 40 years. And it hasn’t helped. You don’t want to go that direction.

KING: And so as this debate unfolds in the Congress, your party has a new leader, at least at the Republican National Committee. George W. Bush is gone from town. The Republican National Committee had an election. Michael Steele, the former lieutenant governor of Maryland, and an African-American, is the new leader of the Republican Party.

I want you to listen to something he said after winning the election.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MICHAEL STEELE, CHAIRMAN, REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE: Failure to communicate on the war, Katrina, the bailout. Yes, we’ll stop there.

(LAUGHTER)

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: He is laying the blame there on George W. Bush. Failure to communicate on the war, Katrina, the bailout, we’ll stop there. Is just — getting George W. Bush out of Washington, is that enough to revive the conservative movement of the Republican Party?

NORQUIST: Well, it’s step one. Because, as long as George Bush was president, he was the leader of the modern Republican Party. He spent too much money. He didn’t get permanent tax cuts. He spent six years being mayor of Baghdad, rather than president of the United States.

That’s problematic, in terms of then looking to him for leadership of the Republican Party or the conservatives.

KING: And so — we only have a minute left. This moment, back in 1993, was, quote/unquote, “good” for conservatives and Republicans.

NORQUIST: Yes.

KING: Bill Clinton came to town, and then you had the Contract with America. Newt Gingrich came in.

In a condensed version, what you are doing now that, in your view, will bring that about?

NORQUIST: Yes, there are two models. In 1990 George Bush Sr. got together with the Democrats and they spent too much money. He lost the presidency in ’92. That’s the failed model: get together and do something bad bipartisanly.

The good model is to offer a solid conservative alternative, as Republicans did in ’93 and ’94, and as they’re doing now in the House. In ’93 and ’94, they refused to join the Clintons in spending too much and taxing too much. They offered an alternative vision of limited government and pro-growth policies.

The Republicans, right now, are wisely moving in that path.

KING: The last word goes to Grover Norquist today. We’ll have you back on the program, as this debate folds out.

And, up next, your voices and your struggles. We look at the state of the economy up close through the eyes of workers losing their jobs at a big manufacturer that had, until now, escaped the pain.

“State of the Union,” from the floor of Caterpillar and the living rooms of devastated families, just ahead.

Grover never even mentions the recession, pain or those devastated families. In his world it’s irrelevant. It’s all about what he sees as political opportunity.

And he didn’t mention his latest “pledge” requirement either (click on the image to enlarge):

Keep in mind that this is aimed exclusively at Democrats since no Republicans voted for the bill. It isn’t about keeping the conservatives in line. This is purely an intimidation tactic. I suspect Jack Abramoff’s BFF is actually gearing up an anti-corruption, reform campaign. (You can’t say they don’t have chutzpah.)

Obviously Grover wants to relive his glory days. But this isn’t 1994 when the country was about to ride an epic bubble likes of which nobody’s ever seen before and there was no military quagmire. If the Republicans come back it will be because the country is so screwed up it’s no longer functional and people are lookingh for a man on a white horse. They have absolutely nothing of substance to offer at this moment..

Yet they seem to be intent upon dictating policy:

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said Sunday the massive stimulus bill backed by President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats could go down to defeat if it’s not stripped of unnecessary spending and focused more on housing issues and tax cut.

McConnell and other Republicans suggested that the bill needed an overhaul because it doesn’t pump enough into the private sector through tax cuts and allows Democrats to go on a spending spree unlikely to jolt the economy. The Republican leader also complained that Democrats had not been as bipartisan in writing the bill as Obama had said he wanted.

“I think it may be time … for the president to kind of get a hold of these Democrats in the Senate and the House, who have rather significant majorities, and shake them a little bit and say, ‘Look, let’s do this the right way,'” McConnell said. “I can’t believe that the president isn’t embarrassed about the products that have been produced so far.”

[…]

“I am confident that by the time we have the final package on the floor that we are going to see substantial support, and people are going to see this is a serious effort. It has no earmarks. We are going to be trimming out things that are not relevant to putting people back to work right now,” Obama said.

[…]

“Look, the important thing is getting the thing passed,” Obama told NBC’s Matt Lauer during a live pre-Super Bowl interview. “And I’ve done extraordinary outreach, I think, to Republicans because they have some good ideas and I want to make sure those ideas are incorporated.”

[…]

Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, said he was seeing an erosion of support for the bill and suggested that lawmakers should consider beginning anew.

“When I say start from scratch, what I mean is that the basic approach of this bill, we believe, is wrong,” Kyl said.

Among the major changes Kyl said would be needed to gain Republican support in the Senate was the tax rebate for individuals and couples, which he criticized as going to too many people who didn’t pay the tax to start with. He also criticized the bill for seeking to create nearly three dozen government programs and giving states far more money than they need.

Who the hell do these people think they are? They’ve always strutted around like rock starts after elections they barely win. but this is new. They are acting as if they won an election they actually lost. It’s quite impressive:

But, hey, they sher is smart.

Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson, Republican of Texas, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that she wanted cuts to “social spending provisions” that total about $200 billion in the bill. Additional tax cuts, Ms. Hutchinson and other Republicans said, would be more effective than large-scale government spending programs.“The whole idea is to stimulate the economy immediately,” she said. “I think we can do it more effectively with less money.

But what about the buckets and the water, huh?

If Obama wants to do “what works” he’s going to have to stop listening to these people.

.