Month: July 2009

Diagramming Disintegration

by digby

If you are in the mood for a really entertaining and insightful look at the current state of conservatism, give yourself a treat and click over to at Batocchio at Vagabond Scholar and read his post and the Venn Diagrams he’s done to illustrate it.

Here’s just one little excerpt:

This isn’t drawn exactly to scale, and it’s flawed of course, but I think it’s roughly accurate. Most pundits are hacks, but if we broaden out to the general population, we find people of good faith in addition to the professional hacks, their amateur brethren, and the true zealots. The circles represent a kind of compassion-asshole continuum of character and worldview: Cloistered-Indifferent-Callous-Spiteful-Evil. The diamonds represent a continuum of knowledge and wisdom: Thoughtful-Mistaken-Ignorant-Zealous-Devious. This latter continuum loops somewhat, in that both the thoughtful and the devious understand to some degree how the world actually works, but the devious are bent on exploiting that, with little to no concern about who’s hurt in the process.

The different strains of conservatism can be broken down several different ways, but Drew Westen has a pretty good set of five: libertarian conservatism, social conservatism, fiscal conservatism, national security conservatism, and an unnamed strain that’s basically… bigotry. Authoritarianism is also an important dynamic, and the full dishonesty, idiocy and lethality of the neocons can’t be underestimated (see the “Persistence” post for more).

Read the whole thing. It’s just great, especially as we watch one GOP circus sideshow after another.

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They Can Dish It Out

by digby

I really don’t want to write another word about Sarah Palin, but unfortunately people keep saying such stupid things there’s no escaping it. Take this for instance from Jonah Goldberg, for example:

I’m getting a lot of indignant left-wing e-mail for my statement yesterday re Palin: “It certainly is true that nobody in public life in recent memory has been as shabbily treated as she has.”

The gist of the complaints is that some right-wingers said mean things about Hillary Clinton or Janet Reno or some such. And it’s true, some mean and unfair things were said about those folks. But I think a lot of these lefties seem oblivious to the fact that the New York Times, the news networks (minus Fox), David Letterman, et al aren’t supposed to be scored as partisan outlets, but they are. And they’ve gone after Palin and her family in ways that I think are particularly egregious. Complaining about Richard Mellon Scaife’s treatment of the Clintons is perfectly fair. But comparing it to the mainstream and “respectable” assaults on Palin is not persuasive.

It’s mind boggling, isn’t it? First, there’s the absolutely insane assertion that the mainstream press was easier on Clinton than they’ve been on Palin, closely followed by his admission that Fox is a partisan outfit but that the New York Times isn’t, which has to have Brent Bozell looking for pistol right about now.

But let’s set those two astonishing assertions aside and just look at one outlet, shall we? And we won’t even go back to the 90s when Clinton was regularly excoriated by the right wing as a murderer while the mainstream merely portrayed her a corrupt, manipulative harpy who refused to behave like a proper woman.

We’ll just go back to last year instead:

National Review Online: In a sentence, what is “the truth about Hillary”?

Edward Klein:Hillary is not a victim (not of sexism, not of her husband, and certainly not of this book); she’s not a moderate (despite her effort to re-brand herself in the Senate). Even my sources on the left admit she’s positioning herself as a victim and moderate in order to win the White House.

NRO: Matt Drudge has highlighted the “rape” claim in your book. Which, to be upfront here, I thought was a terrible story to be highlighting, about a child and her parents. Why on earth would you put such a terrible story in your book? — that looks to be flimsily sourced at that. But even if it wasn’t — why tell it?

Klein: Let’s set the record straight here. Actually, I don’t make that claim in the book. I included the story about their 1979 trip to Bermuda because Hillary herself brings it up and spins it in her own book as an example of their supposedly romantic marriage. The point of the story is that my source, who was with the Clintons in Bermuda and quoted Bill’s boastful remarks to me, was stunned when Bill phoned him a few months later and told him he just learned of Hillary’s pregnancy by reading about it in the newspaper! Those who read the book will see this is hardly a “rape story” — rather it’s yet another example of a bizarre political union where a pregnancy is leaked to the largest newspaper in the state and treated as political gain rather than shared privately as a couple.

NRO: You do relay Bill Clinton claiming he was going off to rape his wife, however — and then a morning-after report that suggests that might, in fact, have happened. Surely you see how that would become the “rape chapter” of the book — and maybe the most obvious headline from the book? Might it have been more trouble than it was worth simply to relay that the Clintons have a “bizarre” relationship? Surely there are more polite examples.

Klein: Here’s why it’s not a rape claim: I don’t imply the source was in the room with the Clintons, for all my source knows they could have had a massive fight and then reconciled. My source doesn’t speculate, I don’t speculate. This whole story, “the rape story” as it’s being called by others, speaks more to how the Clintons communicate, their bizarre relationship. And, of course, the whole point of the story is how she leaked her pregnancy to the press — didn’t talk about it with her husband first.

NRO: Do you think more is being made out of some of the “dirt” — the more salacious gossipy stuff in your book — than should be?

Klein: The Truth About Hillary is a comprehensive biography, encompassing both her personal and political life. Vanity Fair chose to excerpt a part of the book about political life, while other news sources have chosen to focus on the personal. My book is much broader than any representation that has appeared in the media so far.

NRO: How many times do you use the word “lesbian” in your book? Why point out she had friends who were lesbians? Do we need to go there?

Klein: Hillary’s politics were shaped by the culture of radical feminism and lesbianism at Wellesley College in the 1960s. This is paramount in exploring the political life of Hillary Clinton.

How could someone write a comprehensive biography of Hillary Clinton without investigating the rumors that have long circulated about her? I’ve gone further than any other journalist in exploring the question of her sexuality, which is often the first thing people wonder about her: Is she misrepresenting herself as a doting wife to Bill Clinton? How can she stand his chronic infidelity?

As for the number of times the word appears in the book, I don’t know. But I’m sure there are some in the Clinton campaign counting right now.

NRO: One more sex thing. You write: “Hillary Clinton only had herself to blame for the talk about her sex life.” Can there ever really be a good reason for this, never mind in her case?

Klein: The Clintons themselves made sex an integral part of our national political discourse at the turn of the century. There’s no way of getting around sex when it comes to the Clintons.

My favorite thing about that interview is that all this dirt came out in the very first questions, as the interviewer (Kathryn Lopez) pretended to be “troubled” by it all. It’s such a stereotypical “Clinton story” you almost have to laugh.

Palin has certainly had her share of unfair stories written and said about her, some of it based on gender. But the idea that Hillary got off easily compared to her is totally absurd — Clinton has been the target of the mainstream press and the right wing noise machine for almost two decades and the things that have been said about her so vile and so outrageous that it’s a testament to her guts and her stamina that she managed to become one of the most important politicians in American life in spite of it. Even her legions of enemies have to give her grudging respect at this point. Palin has a long, long way to go before she can claim to be in the same league — in more ways than one.

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The Lessons Of Robert McNamara

by dday

Robert McNamara died today. McNamara was a smart guy, a business type who rose up through the ranks to run the Ford Motor Company after working at the Pentagon during the firebombing of Tokyo. Kennedy pulled a reluctant McNamara out of Detroit and back to the Pentagon in 1960, and he sought to manage it with corporate precision. But this precise structure and its focus on measurements crashed against the shoals of the Vietnam War. Night after night, McNamara would stand before the press in his rimless glasses, looking very much like Don Rumsfeld would decades later, talking of body counts and targeted airstrikes and victory, disassociated almost completely from the realities of the ground and the futility of the enterprise. If you’ve seen “The Fog of War” you know that the pressure certainly got to McNamara, and he understood his mistakes after the fact (though he never took full responsibility for them). He directed subordinates to write the study that would eventually become The Pentagon Papers, hoping that future generations would avoid the pitfalls that he and his colleagues did in Vietnam.

Part of the framing of “The Fog of War” as well as one of McNamara’s later books was the 11 causes and lessons that he listed coming out of Vietnam. It’s worth listing them here again.

We misjudged then — and we have since — the geopolitical intentions of our adversaries … and we exaggerated the dangers to the United States of their actions.

We viewed the people and leaders of South Vietnam in terms of our own experience. We saw in them a thirst for – and a determination to fight for — freedom and democracy. We totally misjudged the political forces within the country.

We underestimated the power of nationalism to motivate a people to fight and die for their beliefs and values….

Our misjudgments of friend and foe alike reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of the people in the area, and the personalities and habits of their leaders….No Southeast Asian [experts] existed for senior officials to consult when making decisions on Vietnam.

We failed then — and have since — to recognize the limitations of modern, high-technology military equipment, forces and doctrine in confronting unconventional, highly motivated people’s movements. We failed as well to adapt our military tactics to …winning the hearts and minds of people from a totally different culture.

We failed to draw Congress and the American people into a full and frank discussion and debate of the pros and cons of a large-scale military involvement … before we initiated the action.

After the action got under way and unanticipated events forced us off our planned course … we did not fully explain what was happening and why we were doing what we did….We had not prepared the public to understand the complex events we faced…confront[ing] uncharted seas and an alien environment. A nation’s deepest strength lies not in its military prowess, bur rather in the unity of its people. We failed to maintain it.

We did not recognize that neither our people nor our leaders are omniscient. Our judgment of what is in another people’s or country’s best interest should be put to the test of open discussion in international forums. We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our image or as we choose.

We did not hold to the principle that U.S. military action — other than in response to direct threats to our own national security – should be carried out only in conjunction with multinational forces supported fully (and not merely cosmetically) by the international community.

We failed to recognize that in international affairs, as in other aspects of life, there may be problems for which there are no immediate solutions … At times, we may have to live with an imperfect, untidy world.

…We thus failed to analyze and debate our actions in Southeast Asia – our objectives, the risks and costs of alternative ways of dealing with them, and the necessity of changing course when failure was clear….

If this isn’t an accusatory note toward the practitioners of American foreign policy during the entire post-war period up through today, I don’t know what is. And although I’d like to think that some statesman could learn from these lessons and take America off such a self-destructive course, given the nature of the people who rise to power in this country I don’t know if that’s possible. Certainly McNamara’s lessons represent the experience of a man who lived in the crucible and at least appears to have judged his actions against some moral set of precepts. But the peculiar dynamics of the political world, the need to act tough in foreign policy, the seeming inability for leaders to step outside themselves and view things through the lens of others, the narrow and incomplete renderings of history often at work, and of course the lure of money and power and the industry of war, resist politicians coming to any of these conclusions in the moment. We have so frequently bungled into conflicts, presuming our role in them when the other participants see it differently, making shortcuts while rationalizing ourselves as heroic, changing the rules if found to violate them, and controlling the message of moral rectitude rather than the actions. I find these cautions from McNamara to be crucially important, but even in my most optimistic moments I don’t believe America is even wired to live up to them. Just read the post below for proof.

This is from The Fog of War, with McNamara talking about the firebombing of Tokyo in World War II:

Curtis LeMay said, “If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.” And I think he’s right. He, and I’d say I, were behaving as war criminals…. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?

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Green Light

by digby

Yesterday, I described Joe Biden’s comments about Israel’s sovereign right to bomb Iran on Stephanopoulos as “startling” and wondered why everyone seemed so sanguine about what he said. There wasn’t any walk back that I could discern and the people I respect on this issue didn’t seem to be concerned, so I figured I was off base.

Today, Marc Lynch illuminates the situation saying that regardless of what Biden meant, the middle east is taking the statement as a green light to Israel, which is bad:

UPDATE: a senior White House source tells me that this is being misreported, and points me to this from White House spokesman Tommy Vietor:

“The Vice President refused to engage hypotheticals, and he made clear that our policy has not changed. Our friends and allies, including Israel, know that the President believes that now is the time to explore direct diplomatic options, as with the P5+1.”

Good. This needs aggressive pushback though, because the regional media is overwhelmingly reporting the ‘green light’ headline interpretation of Biden’s remark. Time to flex those public diplomacy and strategic communications muscles, folks…

LAST UPDATE (Monday morning): a variety of comments from assorted well-placed worthies have come my way over the last day, some online and others privately. Most suggest that Biden’s comments were not meant to change U.S. policy, and that if anything he meant to distance the U.S. from any Israeli strike (though a few speculate that it was actually meant to strengthen the U.S. bargaining position ahead of the Moscow talks). If that’s the case, then it is only that much more important to repeat that his comments are being nigh-universally presented in the Middle Eastern media (Israeli and Arab, at least) as a “green light.” If that wasn’t the intended signal, then the administration needs to recognize that its signaling has gone awry and clear it up before it’s too late…

Read the whole post if you are interested in this subject. It’s possible that this is what they intended or that Biden himself just misspoke, but it sounds as though this may have been a line they wanted him to give but they misjudged the reaction. (Or maybe not — it’s hard to tell.)

One thing is clear — it’s a very weird thing to have a Vice President who is obviously very close to the president and with a wide ranging portfolio, be someone who has such a history of misspeaking that when he makes foreign policy pronouncements nobody knows if he’s carrying an official line. As I wrote yesterday, it’s possible that they’ve decided to use that to their advantage. It’s also possible that he’s just being Joe.

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Krugman On Health Care Reform

by digby

Go 29 minutes in to see the interview. Interesting stuff:

Via The Big Picture

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Tea Service

by digby

I hate to say it, because it’s so pathetic, but the tea party movement is actually finding a coherent theme that may just resonate over time, even though it is a perfect example of the rubes being useful idiots for the aristocrats:

Concerned about taxes, bailouts, government “pork,” and rising deficits, thousands of Americans will spill out in cities from Atlanta to San Francisco this weekend, as part of a “Tea Party” movement that began earlier this year in protest of the economic stimulus bill.

The recent NY Times poll showed that by far the most important issue to Americans at the moment is the economy, followed by jobs and health care. Unfortunately, the problem with the economy isn’t defined and neither is the solution, so the teabag message may very well speak to that broad concern for a lot of people.

But what’s interesting is the the melding of the traditional populist messages with the usual elite obsessions with deficits. The bailouts have made that work and it could be quite potent if they can find a way to market it right. If the right can successfully meld concerns with bailouts for the rich with concerns for deficits — which is actually another bailout for the rich — they will have a message that serves their purposes grandly. They can blame the Democrats for failing to restore the economy by serving the wealthy (which, frankly, is true, but no less true of them, of course) while at the same time putting in place all the pieces necessary for their successors to also serve the wealthy. If they can wrap it up in a down home, grassroots “movement” package, all the better.

Update: There were lots of signs against cap and trade, as if any of these people have the slightest clue what that means to them or why they should care. Like other obscure pet wingnut slogans such as “tort reform” and “secret ballot,” this one seems to have really captured their imagination.

And then there’s this funny person who apparently thinks he’s really getting off a zinger:

It’s possible that it’s an ironic infiltrator, but I doubt it. These people really do believe Sweden is a hellhole.

Update: Apparently, this lovely stuff was also heavily featured again, so it looks like we’re in no danger of having the teabaggers being taken too seriously any time soon.

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Biden Time

by digby

Is it just me or were Joe Biden’s comments on Stephanpoulos this morning somewhat … uhm … startling?

Plunging squarely into one of the most sensitive issues in the Middle East, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. suggested on Sunday that the United States would not stand in the way of Israeli military action aimed at the Iranian nuclear program.

The United States, Mr. Biden said in an interview broadcast on ABC’s “This Week,” “cannot dictate to another sovereign nation what they can and cannot do.”

“Israel can determine for itself — it’s a sovereign nation — what’s in their interest and what they decide to do relative to Iran and anyone else,” he said, in an interview taped in Baghdad at the end of a visit there.

The remarks went beyond at least the spirit of any public utterances by President Barack Obama, who has said that diplomatic efforts to halt Iran’s nuclear program should be given to the end of the year. But the president has also said that he is “not reconciled” to the possibility of Iran possessing a nuclear weapon — a goal Tehran denies.

Mr. Biden’s comments came at a particularly sensitive time, amid the continuing tumult over the disputed Iranian elections, and seemed to risk handing a besieged President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a new tool with which to fan nationalist sentiments in Iran.

What was not immediately clear was whether Mr. Biden, who has a long-standing reputation for speaking volubly — and sometimes going too far in the heat of the moment — was sending an officially sanctioned message.

I haven’t heard any outcry about this so far, so perhaps I’m just not up to speed on the latest thinking. Does this seem like a good idea to anyone at this particular moment? The biggest headline on the front page of the NY Times today was “Leading Clerics Defy Ayatollah on Disputed Iran Election” Does this strike you as a good moment for the US to be talking about Israel bombing the place?

In other news, in answer to a question about whether the stimulus was adequate, Biden also said that everyone had misread how bad the economy was back in January, which I think is nonsense. Everyone knew that the economy was in very, very deep trouble. It was politics that made the stimulus inadequate, not imperfect knowledge.

I understand why he would say it, but I don’t think it rings true considering all the talk about the “worst economy since the Great Depression” at the time. Plus, I think it’s a weak play. They knew that even the best stimulus would take time to kick in — they said so then — so they should just stick to their guns. “No one could have predicted” excuses are lame in most cases, but especially lame in this one.

It would be interesting to know if Biden is on message or if he did his usual free association. And I suppose it’s always possible that the administration has begun to use his reputation for freelancing to get out messages they don’t necessarily want to officially endorse. You always get the feeling that Biden is actually blurting out truths that nobody else wants to take credit for so maybe they are putting that to work for them.

(I’m still not sure why anyone would think that chattering about Israel’s sovereign right to bomb Iran at this particular moment is a good idea, but maybe they think this will help lower the temperature somehow?)

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The Village Is Very Sorry For Being The Village

by dday

In the Apology of the Week (all respect to Harry Shearer), Katherine Weymouth requests a mea culpa for trying to profit off of connecting insiders in government to the lobby community.

So what happened? Like other media companies, The Post hosts conferences and live events that bring together journalists, government officials and other leaders for discussions of important topics. These events make news and inform their audiences. We had planned to extend this business to include smaller gatherings, a practice that has become common at other media companies.

From the outset, we laid down firm parameters to ensure that these events would be consistent with The Post’s values. If the events were to be sponsored by other companies, everything would be at arm’s length — sponsors would have no control over the content of the discussions, and no special access to our journalists.

If our reporters were to participate, there would be no limits on what they could ask. They would have full access to participants and be able to use any information or ideas to further their knowledge and understanding of any issues under discussion. They would not be asked to invite other participants and would serve only as moderators.

When the flier promoting our first planned event to potential sponsors was released, it overstepped all these lines. Neither I nor anyone in our news department would have approved any event such as the flier described.

The shorter version of this pretty much tracks with my assessment at the time the scandal broke and Weymouth cancelled the dinner: “Now the Post can go back to being influenced by lobbyists and setting conventional wisdom in Washington without all that dirty money changing hands.”

The only difference between this proposed salon and the other “conferences and live events that bring together journalists, government officials and other leaders for discussions of important topics” is that the proceeds went more directly into the pockets of the Post in this case. As Marcy Wheeler notes, Weymouth never disavows the actual content of the salons or the even the exchange of money (as long as it’s indirect) to set up meetings between lobbyists and politicians – just the fact that this particular salon would be off-the-record.

I don’t suspect for a second that lobbyists have much trouble finding their way into the upper echelons of Washington to speak their peace, anyway. The Washington Post simply wanted to charge for drinks to this particular cocktail party. Other than that, they cannot imagine how any of this could be a problem.

One can hardly blame a struggling newspaper wanting to open up another revenue stream. The problem lies in the barely-discernible difference between essentially a pay-to-play scheme and the normal social and political transactions in Washington.

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The New Deaniacs

by digby

David Broder is so wedded to the idea of bipartisanship that he’s reduced to asserting that begging and borrowing to get eight House Republicans to vote for the cap and trade bill and compromising the economic recovery to get two Republican Senators to vote for the stimulus is a sign that reaching out to the other party is the best way to ensure that legislation is juuust right.

We don’t know yet just how much watering down the cap and trade bill will affect its efficacy, but we are already seeing what those compromises with the ladies from Maine have added up to on the stimulus: the money they insisted be cut was mostly money that would have gone to the states to mitigate much of the disasters that are about to hit. As many people said at the time, the stimulus was too small and they will probably need to try to take another bite of the apple, a most daunting task — all because President Collins decided on some arbitrary number for no good reason other than to please David Broder.

But in fairness, these compromises weren’t actually with the ladies from Maine or indeed anyone who is formally affiliated with the Republican party. The true “leadership” on this came from Presidents Nelson and Lieberman and their Democratic cohorts in the Broder Fan Club. Bipartisanship in 2009 has absolutely nothing to do with the political sideshow formerly known as the Republican party. I don’t know why he’s even talking about them. But he needn’t fear that the DFHs have come to town and are trashing the place: there are more than a handful of timorous, corporate owned Democrats who will make sure that things don’t get out of hand.

The congress has moved a tiny bit to the left from where it was, which is to say that it is still a deeply conservative institution, by tradition, process, class and ideology. The Dean can sleep well at night knowing that his precious bipartisanship is safe in the hands of the New Deaniacs of the Democratic Party.

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Over There

by digby

I wrote an unpopular post last week about health care systems overseas in an attempt to show that there are different ways to successfully deliver universal health care to the US. Jonathan Cohn, a certified health care wonk, has written a much better article on the same subject for the Boston Globe which some of you may find more persuasive:

But no serious politician is talking about recreating either the British or the Canadian system here. The British have truly “socialized medicine,” in which the government directly employs most doctors. The Canadians have one of the world’s most centralized “single-payer” systems, in which the government insures everybody directly and private insurance has virtually no role. A better understanding for how universal healthcare might work in America would come from other countries – countries whose insurance architecture and medical cultures more closely resemble the framework we’d likely create here.

Last year, I had the opportunity to spend time researching two of these countries: France and the Netherlands. Neither country gets the attention that Canada and England do. That might be because English isn’t their language. Or it might be because they don’t fit the negative stereotypes of life in countries where government is more directly involved in medical care.

Over the course of a month, I spoke to just about everybody I could find who might know something about these healthcare systems: Elected officials, industry leaders, scholars – plus, of course, doctors and patients. And sure enough, I heard some complaints. Dutch doctors, for example, thought they had too much paperwork. French public health experts thought patients with chronic disease weren’t getting the kind of sustained, coordinated medical care that they needed.

But in the course of a few dozen lengthy interviews, not once did I encounter an interview subject who wanted to trade places with an American. And it was easy enough to see why. People in these countries were getting precisely what most Americans say they want: Timely, quality care. Physicians felt free to practice medicine the way they wanted; companies got to concentrate on their lines of business, rather than develop expertise in managing health benefits. But, in contrast with the US, everybody had insurance. The papers weren’t filled with stories of people going bankrupt or skipping medical care because they couldn’t afford to pay their bills. And they did all this while paying substantially less, overall, than we do.

Again, I’m not saying that what we are going to end up with will be as good as these systems. I have no idea at this point what the final legislation will look like and anyone who says they do is mistaken. All I’m saying is that it’s possible. There are systems around the world that do a better job of covering everyone for less money and equal or better outcomes that are not designed like the English or Canadian models. It can be done. Whether we can do it is another story.

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