Month: November 2010

Pedestrian Sloth

by digby

Ryan Grim has discovered a hilarious fact about George W. Bush’s magnum opus — it looks like he plagiarized big chucks of it:

Many of Bush’s literary misdemeanors exemplify pedestrian sloth, but others are higher crimes against the craft of memoir. In one prime instance, Bush relates a poignant meeting between Afghan President Hamid Karzai and a Tajik warlord on Karzai’s Inauguration Day. It’s the kind of scene that offers a glimpse of a hopeful future for the beleaguered nation. Witnessing such an exchange could color a president’s outlook, could explain perhaps Bush’s more optimistic outlook and give insight into his future decisions. Except Bush didn’t witness it. Because he wasn’t at Karzai’s inauguration.

His absence doesn’t stop Bush from relating this anecdote: “When Karzai arrived in Kabul for his inauguration on December 22 – 102 days after 9/11 – several Northern Alliance leaders and their bodyguards greeted him at an airport. As Karzai walked across the tarmac alone, a stunned Tajik warlord asked where all his men were. Karzai, responded, ‘Why, General, you are my men. All of you who are Afghans are my men.'”

That meeting would sound familiar to Ahmed Rashid, author of “The Mess in Afghanistan”, who wrote in the New York Review of Books: “At the airport to receive [Karzai] was the warlord General Mohammad Fahim, a Tajik from the Panjshir Valley …. As the two men shook hands on the tarmac, Fahim looked confused. ‘Where are your men?’ he asked. Karzai turned to him in his disarmingly gentle manner of speaking. ‘Why General,” he replied, “you are my men–all of you are Afghans and are my men.'”

Bush’s lifting of the anecdote, while disappointing on a literary level, does raise the intriguing possibility that Bush actually read Rashid’s article. Doubtful. It was excerpted in the Googleable free intro to his NYRB story. (Still, thinking of Bush browsing the NYRB’s website almost makes it worthwhile.)

What funny about this is that he’s been getting big kudos for writing the book himself rather than hiring a ghost writer.

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Lovers and Fighters Together Again

by digby

Dylan Ratigan discussed the poll I mentioned earlier in which a large majority of Republicans say they don’t want their leaders to compromise while half of Democrats want their leaders to do just that. Ratigan mumbled something about skewed questions and then asked Republican strategist Matt Lewis what he thinks accounts for this difference. He had a very unexpected and interesting reply:

Well some of this might just be that Democrats are demoralized after the election and conservatives are fired up and want to hit the ground running. But I actually think this poll is accurate. If you look at the success of conservative talk radio and you look at the success of some conservative television shows vs.say liberal talk radio, I think a lot of times, this is a microcosm here Dylan, a lot of liberals don’t want to listen to the liberal version of Rush Limbaugh they want to listen to NPR. And I think that speaks to their temperament rather than their ideology. A lot of liberals are sort of temperamentally modest, I would say. Conservatives are maybe a little bit more ready to fight. So I think the poll is accurate.

Sam Sedar went on to point out that left leaning people tend to have some measure of doubt and that they’re not so sure that they’re right all the time while the right tends toward zealotry. He said that’s why the left has been willing to compromise for a long time, while the right hasn’t.

Lewis, grinning like a jack-o-lantern, ended with this sage observation:

Well I think the real world implication here Dylan, is that if the Republican base does not want to compromise and the Democratic base is willing to compromise Republicans are going to win more public policy battles than they lose.

What can you say to that?

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Straight Talk In Troubled Times

by digby

In the wake of Rachel Maddow’s interview with Jon Stewart and his explanation as to why he does not think it’s right to call President Bush a war criminal, one of her readers sends in a very thoughtful email, explaining and agreeing with that position:

I agree that Bush is guilty of war crimes. I say this because I don’t want that point misunderstood.

Bush actually did an excellent job of demonstrating the damage that poor rhetoric can do to the world. He painted a broad stroke across a region of the world and referred to it as the axis of evil. In doing so, he redefined entire regions as evil. This redefinition included civilians, soldiers and terrorists alike. This redefinition even included Americans. This rhetoric is why we’re still debating things like the Mosque in New York and boarder issues in the south. It’s because he helped inspire fear throughout our country. He created a monster for us to hate. What else can you do with a monster after all, but hate it. You can’t talk to monsters, can’t learn from them and you certainly can’t have diplomacy with them. They are monsters once adequately defined as such and all you can do is grab your steaks, mirrors and garlic and go to work.

I just don’t want to repeat Bush’s disaster from the other side. I’d rather keep things in perspective. Bush’s real crimes involved a lack of understanding regarding how to fight a just war. It involved too much faith in information, unjust torture and being too quick to go to war. We could call him a monster for these things but there’s a greater value to his presidency. We can learn from his tragic leadership. We can demand leaders who understand what a just war is. We can push for patience the next time we feel threatened and aren’t quite sure of who our enemy is. I’d rather Bush be a cautionary tale of poor leadership, poor rhetoric and impatience than a monster for us to chase with a stake. We may not get to see him to justice, but at least we can try to avoid such a leader in the future.

We can try. Many of us thought we had when we voted for the man who won the most votes and lost the election to Bush anyway.

It’s funny, because I actually think one of the few things Bush did very well was keep the domestic beast from rising up against Muslims in the wake of 9/11. He made a strong point of saying that Islam itself was not to blame and that it had been “hijacked” by extremists. There were certainly incidents of anti-Muslim violence but for all of his bellicose rhetoric, he was very careful to caution people against rank bigotry toward all Muslims, which is more than you can say these days about some of his stalwart defenders.

On the other hand, he admits that he approved torture, which is a war crime. And he created prison camps throughout the world where innocent people were tortured, abused and held without any kind of due process for years. And, obviously, he opportunistically invaded a country on a phony pretext which resulted in hundreds of thousands of lives lost. Letting that go without even any serious inquiry is an injustice of massive proportions.

So, I guess my question is, how do we “learn” from his presidency if in addition to giving him a pass on his crimes, we aren’t even willing to have an honest conversation, using real words with real meaning about what happened? If we dance around these things as if it’s wrong to call white white and black black and insist that someone who ordered war crimes shouldn’t be called a war criminal then I see a very different lesson being taken from that example than the one this commenter anticipates.

Yes, it’s pretty to believe that the country will self-evidently come to the right conclusion without any legal or even social condemnation of what went wrong. We’ll just “know” going forward that we need our leaders to have more patience, and be more thoughtful and less bellicose in the future. But I think this defies human nature and it certainly defies the reality of the world in which we live.

People are subject to a barrage of information and stimulation and the lessons they take from things are highly manipulable. There’s a reason that wealthy, conservative plutocrats (who know just a little bit about PR and marketing) are spending billions to influence elections and create an alternative media to sell their ideology and discredit liebralism. Being passive in the face of that onslaught, pulling our punches, being unwilling to be unpleasant and confrontational in this environment is highly unlikely to even be noticed, much less appreciated. It certainly will not create the space for average people to consider both sides and make a thoughtful, reasonable judgment about their government and their society — the necessary information simply can’t rise above the din to make itself heard.

I understand the impulse. If one believes that people are basically good and that they aren’t by nature irrational creatures, it’s reasonable to put your faith in their better angels to see them through times like these. But human civilization was created not just to allow our creative and social aspirations to flourish, but also to keep the not-so-better angels from overwhelming the good. And history has shown that there are times when being passive and failing to sound the alarm about those bad angels is a tragic mistake.

We are living in an era in which very powerful people are being allowed to commit crimes with impunity while millions of others are being imprisoned and worse. Regardless of how the people see that (and the plutocrats are working overtime to ensure they see it their way) it’s clear that the lesson the powerful are taking from this is not that Bush or any of them are “cautionary tales of poor leadership”. They are being perfectly insulated even from harsh words and uncomfortable references to unpleasant historical analogies, so they are being assured every day by well meaning liberals and cynical conservatives alike that they will not even suffer social disapprobation, much less be held personally accountable for what they’ve done. They have learned that they get away with anything.

And in perhaps the most clever turn of all, these same well meaning, thoughtful liberals are suggesting that their fellows turn the other cheek when they in turn are characterized to many millions of people every day as “vermin” and “infectious diseases” which must be purged from the body politic. It is a perfectly defensible moral position, proposed by a guy named Jesus Christ, so who am I to argue? But I’m not sure that passive resistance works without the resistance part. And in our cacophonous political culture I just don’t think you can persuade anyone to moral action without strong and meaningful rhetoric. “Yes we can” is great, but if the whole country is in distress and other side is calling you the “disease” that caused it, I’m not sure it gets the job done.

The conservatives created this hostile and aggressive discourse and now we all have to live in it. I wish I had the faith that others have that “good” will come to the fore without any necessity for liberals to defend themselves, but I don’t. I think it’s important to be truthful and to try to be fair, but I don’t think we’ll get anywhere by denying that war criminals are war criminals or covering over the fact that we have people on our airwaves dedicated to the dehumanization of their fellow Americans who call themselves liberal. Unfortunately, I see a strong liberal indication to pull back and rely on simple faith in the truth coming out in the end. I sure hope it works out.

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Congealing CW

by digby

I keep hearing that this Deficit Commission draft is just a opening salvo and that nobody really takes the proposals literally. But if you watch cable news you wouldn’t know that:

Contessa Brewer: You have proposals here, in the case of social security, the whole point is gradually to raise the age of social security benefits, but people hear “touching social security,” that’s off limits, that’s a sacred cow and at some point something’s got to give.Do you think there’s political will to make this happen on Capitol Hill?

Democratic Senator Mark Udall: I think there has to be the political will. Otherwise, all that we hold dear whether it’s support of our military or social security or all the other ways in which the government makes out lives better will all be hollowed out. The point about social security, if you really look at the proposal, is that it strengthens social security, separates it from the General Fund and the activities of the Federal Government in the sense that it supports those in the lower income level, those who’ve been widowed, those who’ve been injured on the job. If you look carefully at this initial proposal it supports, it enhances and strengthens social security for the long run. That’s certainly my goal.

In case you didn’t notice, Udall’s a Democrat. And apparently this Democrat believes that anyone who makes more that 35k a year is at a “higher income level” — at least for social security purposes. For income tax purposes, people who make a quarter of a million dollars a year are living in grinding poverty and can’t afford to kick in even a few hundred more dollars to fix the deficit.

But I think what’s significant, aside from the congealing conventional wisdom on this, is the talking point — “it’s strengthening social security.” I don’t know if he came up with it himself or if this is an official line. But it sure rolled smoothly off his tongue.

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Fasten Your Seatbelt

by digby

We’re about to hit a huge amount of political turbulence and some of us are going to get sick. Greg Sargent reports:

Some interesting findings buried in the new Pew poll suggest Republicans and Democrats have starkly different expectations of their leaders: Republicans want their leaders to be less moderate and less compromising, while Dems want precisely the opposite.

I’m not kidding. The poll finds that 60 percent of Republicans and GOP leaners want their leaders to move in a more “conservative direction,” versus only 35 percent who want them to be “more moderate.” By contrast, only 33 percent of Dems and Dem leaners want their leaders to be “more liberal,” versus 57 percent who want them to be “more moderate.”

Meanwhile, a big majority of Republicans, 66 percent, want their leaders to “stand up to Obama,” versus only 29 percent who want them to work with him. But Dems, by contrast, are divided on this point, with fewer saying Obama should stand up to GOP leaders (43 percent) than say he should work with them (46 percent).

Maybe this just reflects Dem demoralization in the wake of last week’s shellacking. But whatever the cause, GOP leaders know they have no reason to blink in the coming showdowns. Rank and file Republicans want their leaders to eschew moderation and to refrain from backing down, while Dems want their leaders to do just the opposite.

Now I have very serious doubts that most Democrats want him to cut taxes on the rich, repeal HCR and destroy social security. But since nearly every American now recoils at being associated with liberalism — as Beck and Limbaugh say, it is an infection that must be removed from the body politic in order that it be healthy — they naturally assume that their disappointment at Obama’s failure can be attributed to the fact that he had too much of it.

The Republicans spent the last two years hysterically screaming that Obama was a leftist radical while watering down or totally obstructing any programs that might improve people’s lives in the short term. The suffering people see the results and follow the narrative that’s been laid out.

In the end, the Republicans told the story people could understand and the Democrats …. just didn’t tell one. So now we are going to move further rightward with our “too liberal” president and when his austerity plans don’t work either, they’ll be blamed on liberalism as well. These disaster capitalists know what they’re doing.

I keep hearing Villagers insist that the Republicans are going to have to move to the left over the next two years, which seems ridiculous. But I get it now. The Republicans are going to continue to move right and the Democrats will chase them. But when the policies fail miserably, it will be because the Republicans weren’t conservative enough. That’s another good story.

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Paul Krugman Breaks the Rules

by tristero

Look, people, everyone knows you’re not supposed to read government budget proposals. Math’s hard! Maybe, if you’re feeling like you want to be informed, you rifle the pages, then throw the huge mess of Powerpoint-ed arcana into your inbox, atop the other things you intend to get to Real Soon Now, like some overdue bills, the 20 page form letter from your agoraphobic uncle telling everyone what he’s been up to, and that 2-year supply of dental floss your dentist gave you.

But somehow, the good doctor from Princeton never got the memo. Paul Krugman actually sat down and actually read what was wrought by the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (gotta hand it to them: that’s one hilarious name, if you’re in the mood for joking, that is). Read the entire column, but if you don’t, here’s the punchline:

…what the co-chairmen are proposing is a mixture of tax cuts and tax increases — tax cuts for the wealthy, tax increases for the middle class. They suggest eliminating tax breaks that, whatever you think of them, matter a lot to middle-class Americans — the deductibility of health benefits and mortgage interest — and using much of the revenue gained thereby, not to reduce the deficit, but to allow sharp reductions in both the top marginal tax rate and in the corporate tax rate.

Now, when I said Krugman’s read the budget proposal, I meant that by our standards he’s read it. By his own, he’s just started:

It will take time to crunch the numbers here, but this proposal clearly represents a major transfer of income upward, from the middle class to a small minority of wealthy Americans.

Wait a minute, wait a minute, you mean, you’re supposed to, you know, like, check that their numbers add up?

I never knew that. Y’learn something new every day.

(Seriously: Thank you, Dr. Krugman. I don’t have the training or time – not to mention the raw intelligence – to read and understand the report. But I can, and do, understand your columns, and deeply appreciate the work you’re doing.)

Catfood Dynamics

by digby

Lance Mannion sums it up nicely:

Those on the Right want to cut everything to the point that we’d pretty much be left with a federal government that does nothing but guard the borders and put out forest fires.

That’s horrifying, and a little nuts, but it’s serious and responsible in that we wouldn’t be enjoying services and benefits we weren’t paying for.

Those on the Left, liberal Democrats, want to sink the deficit by raising taxes back to Clinton era levels, reining in out of control Medicare costs, making meaningful defense cuts, and increasing revenue by creating more and higher paying jobs.

The people who aren’t serious are establishment Republicans and so-called moderate Democrats.

Establishment Republicans, which is to say the ones who will control the House and lead the minority in the Senate, only want to cut taxes on the rich, de-regulate Wall Street and Big Business, raise not lower defense spending, and screw the poor and the blue collar middle class in ways that don’t inconvenience their own white collar middle class voters. Their only “serious” plan to cut spending is to take nickels and dimes away from people for whom nickels and dimes are the difference between paying the rent and buying groceries this week.

“Moderate” Democrats are Democrats who think that their only hope for saving some liberal programs is to convince establishment Republicans to start acting like responsible conservative Republicans and then compromising on everything with them.

The result of this brilliant strategy is a Democratic President seeming to propose major cuts in Social Security!

Michael Scherer of Time Magazine assured me on TV today that the Republicans are going to move left over the next two years so this is going to work out perfectly.

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Catering The Revolution

by digby

I keep hearing about the civil war between the Tea party and the GOP establishment. If it’s true, it looks like they’re waging it in a conference room. TPM reports:

Reagan-era Attorney General Ed Meese, the head of the CAP (not to be confused with the liberal Center for American Progress), was scheduled to address the summit, which drew attendees with speeches from Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and Rep. Tom Price (R-GA). Press secretaries for both members did not respond to requests for comment about their remarks.

Republican strategist Kellyanne Conway was also on the summit agenda, along with Edwin Feulner, president of the Heritage Foundation, and former Rep. David McIntosh (R-Ind.). Press representatives for Conway and Feulner did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment, but a secretary for McIntosh confirmed that he was speaking at the summit.

A group discussion was to focus on the outcome of the election and the future of the conservative movement. Attendees were also invited to discuss economic, social and national security issues, judicial nominations and state elections and issues.

Organizations scheduled to be represented at the meeting included the National Organization for Marriage, the Media Research Center, Susan B. Anthony List, the Heritage Foundation, 60 Plus Association, the Federalist Society, the Family Research Council, Americans for Tax Reform, Concerned Women for America and the Tea Party Patriots.

Employees of the American Spectator, the Washington Examiner and Human Events were also invited, as were John Fund of the Wall Street Journal and Kathryn Jean Lopez of National Review Online (Lopez told TPMmuckraker she did not end up attending).

Republican House and Senate staffers from the Senate Judiciary Committee and the House Republican Conference made the guest list alongside conservative luminaries like Virginia Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Republican super-lawyer Cleta Mitchell, ATR’s Grover Norquist, the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins, RNC chair candidate Ken Blackwell, American Values President Gary Bauer and David Keene, the chairman of the American Conservative Union.

Frank Gaffney, the president of the right-wing Center for Security Policy who has raised fears over the imposition of Sharia law in America, attended the meeting, his secretary confirmed.

Kevin Gentry of Koch Industries — the oil and gas company which has funded Tea Party groups — was also invited, but declined to tell TPMmuckraker whether he attended, instead referring calls to Koch’s PR shop.

Patrick Pizzella, a former Bush administration official who is the only paid member of the Conservative Action Project, was out of the office and at a CAP event, according to the individual who picked up his phone. An e-mail to Pizzella was not immediately returned.

I wonder what they had for lunch?

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Yeah Baby! Debtor’s Prisons Are Back!

by digby

Matt Taibbi said something interesting on CNN the other day when he was asked about whether or not people understood the origins of the financial crisis:

What I’m finding, as I travel the country, is that more and more people actually do understand what happened. And the reason that they understand is because they are personally confronting some aspect of the financial services industry, whether it’s because, you know, I met somebody in Kentucky a little while ago who lost 20 percent or 30 percent of his pension fund value, because the state had invested in mortgage-backed securities, or whether they’d been wiped out by credit card debt or they’re being foreclosed upon, people are being forced to get an education in all these things and they’re slowly coming around to what happened in the last 10 or 15 years, but it’s a very, very gradual progress.

I thought of that when I read this story and wondered whether some of those people were among those mentioned in this story:

As a sheriff’s deputy dumped the contents of Joy Uhlmeyer’s purse into a sealed bag, she begged to know why she had just been arrested while driving home to Richfield after an Easter visit with her elderly mother.

No one had an answer. Uhlmeyer spent a sleepless night in a frigid Anoka County holding cell, her hands tucked under her armpits for warmth. Then, handcuffed in a squad car, she was taken to downtown Minneapolis for booking. Finally, after 16 hours in limbo, jail officials fingerprinted Uhlmeyer and explained her offense — missing a court hearing over an unpaid debt. “They have no right to do this to me,” said the 57-year-old patient care advocate, her voice as soft as a whisper. “Not for a stupid credit card.”

It’s not a crime to owe money, and debtors’ prisons were abolished in the United States in the 19th century. But people are routinely being thrown in jail for failing to pay debts. In Minnesota, which has some of the most creditor-friendly laws in the country, the use of arrest warrants against debtors has jumped 60 percent over the past four years, with 845 cases in 2009, a Star Tribune analysis of state court data has found.

Not every warrant results in an arrest, but in Minnesota many debtors spend up to 48 hours in cells with criminals. Consumer attorneys say such arrests are increasing in many states, including Arkansas, Arizona and Washington, driven by a bad economy, high consumer debt and a growing industry that buys bad debts and employs every means available to collect.

Whether a debtor is locked up depends largely on where the person lives, because enforcement is inconsistent from state to state, and even county to county.

In Illinois and southwest Indiana, some judges jail debtors for missing court-ordered debt payments. In extreme cases, people stay in jail until they raise a minimum payment. In January, a judge sentenced a Kenney, Ill., man “to indefinite incarceration” until he came up with $300 toward a lumber yard debt.

“The law enforcement system has unwittingly become a tool of the debt collectors,” said Michael Kinkley, an attorney in Spokane, Wash., who has represented arrested debtors. “The debt collectors are abusing the system and intimidating people, and law enforcement is going along with it.”

I’m sure the federal and state governments can divert some of that sacred Homeland Security money to devote to some of this. It’s about justice, after all. And moral hazard. It’s vitally important that the plebes understand that it’s wrong for them to avoid responsibility for their bad decisions. (Some people, of course, are too important to our system, so that’s different.)

One can’t help but wonder what would happen if people with bully pulpits were drawing attention to this kind of thing (and place the proper blame) in order to speed up the enlightenment process that Taibbi has been seeing. Oh well, we have blogs …

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Self-destruction For Dummies

by digby

Not that reality is relevant in this “deficit” argument, but this is still worth keeping in the back of your mind, just so you don’t lose your sanity:

That’s via Kevin Drum who writes:

To put this more succinctly: any serious long-term deficit plan will spend about 1% of its time on the discretionary budget, 1% on Social Security, and 98% on healthcare. Any proposal that doesn’t maintain approximately that ratio shouldn’t be considered serious. The Simpson-Bowles plan, conversely, goes into loving detail about cuts to the discretionary budget and Social Security but turns suddenly vague and cramped when it gets to Medicare. That’s not serious.

There are other reasons the Simpson-Bowles plan isn’t serious.[click here]

He concludes:

Bottom line: this document isn’t really aimed at deficit reduction. It’s aimed at keeping government small. There’s nothing wrong with that if you’re a conservative think tank and that’s what you’re dedicated to selling. But it should be called by its right name. This document is a paean to cutting the federal government, not cutting the federal deficit.

That a Democratic president was the one who created this commission is what makes this much more difficult to deal with. The Republicans couldn’t have dreamed that they would do this for them. It’s a real gift.

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