Month: April 2011

Tea Party populists serving the aristocrats

by digby

The other night I was talking to someone who doesn’t follow politics but who happened to randomly catch Andrew Breitbart on Eliot Spitzer’s show selling the notion that the Tea Party is hostile to Wall Street. He was convinced that this was true and told me that this was going to be a fruitful bipartisan coalition and that it was going to result in a huge change in politic.

Let’s set aside Brietbart for a moment. We all know he’s an unbalanced, racist con artists who will say anything. But Breitbart notwithstanding, there are a lot of people who believe that the Tea Party is anti-Wall Street. I don’t think this is true. The far right is anti-bailouts, but their reasoning is that the government should never “interfere” in the economy, not that Wall Street did something wrong. Indeed, if you look back at the famous Rick Santelli rant that’s credited with inspiring the Tea Party movement (beyond Ron Paul) it was rage at the idea of rewarding all the undeserving poor people who bought houses they couldn’t afford:

RICK SANTELLI: The government is promoting bad behavior. Because we certainly don’t want to put stimulus forth and give people a whopping $8 or $10 in their check, and think that they ought to save it, and in terms of modifications… I’ll tell you what, I have an idea.

You know, the new administration’s big on computers and technology– How about this, President and new administration? Why don’t you put up a website to have people vote on the Internet as a referendum to see if we really want to subsidize the losers’ mortgages; or would we like to at least buy cars and buy houses in foreclosure and give them to people that might have a chance to actually prosper down the road, and reward people that could carry the water instead of drink the water?

TRADER ON FLOOR: That’s a novel idea.

(Applause, cheering)

JOE KERNEN: Hey, Rick… Oh, boy. They’re like putty in your hands. Did you hear…?

SANTELLI: No they’re not, Joe. They’re not like putty in our hands. This is America! How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills? Raise their hand.

(Booing)

President Obama, are you listening?

TRADER: How ’bout we all stop paying our mortgage? It’s a moral hazard.

KERNEN: It’s like mob rule here. I’m getting scared. I’m glad I’m…

CARL QUINTANILLA: Get some bricks and bats…

SANTELLI: Don’t get scared, Joe. They’re already scaring you. You know, Cuba used to have mansions and a relatively decent economy. They moved from the individual to the collective. Now, they’re driving ’54 Chevys, maybe the last great car to come out of Detroit.

KERNEN: They’re driving them on water, too, which is a little strange to watch.

SANTELLI: There you go.

KERNEN: Hey Rick, how about the notion that, Wilbur pointed out, you can go down to 2% on the mortgage…

SANTELLI: You could go down to -2%. They can’t afford the house.

KERNEN: …and still have 40%, and still have 40% not be able to do it. So why are they in the house? Why are we trying to keep them in the house?

SANTELLI: I know Mr. Summers is a great economist, but boy, I’d love the answer to that one.

REBECCA QUICK: Wow. Wilbur, you get people fired up.

SANTELLI: We’re thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July. All you capitalists that want to show up to Lake Michigan, I’m gonna start organizing.

The far right does not care about Wall Street. They care about “government” the big boogeyman that’s taking their hard earned money and giving it to the wrong people. And while they may not have liked the TARP, they conflate it with the auto bailout and “cash for clunkers” and think it was socialism. So I’m afraid we aren’t going to find a lot of common ground on this.

But just in case, the Big Money Boyz are putting some of their spare change to work just to make sure. And they’re doing it in a very clever way, putting together a whole bunch of catch phrases, many of them contradictory, in scare quotes that simply reinforce the idea that the gummint is “taking over.” Think Progress reports:

In February, while attending the Tea Party Patriot Summit in Phoenix, Arizona, I came across the grand opening of a new front group called “Dodd Frank Exposed.” Two staffers for the new group were eagerly shaking hands of Tea Party activists while asking them to fill out a survey about their perception of the Dodd Frank Wall Street reform law passed last year.

On a television set up at the booth, a video played on loop claiming Wall Street reform is an “unconstitutional takeover of the U.S. economy.” The video, set to scary attack ad music, argued that Tea Party activists should be as angry at financial reform as they were against President Obama’s health reforms:

NARRATOR: From the same people who brought you Obamacare comes a controversial sequal: Dodd Frank. Last year, President Obama and the Democrat-run Congress rushed through the sweeping overhaul of healthcare amounting to the unconstitutional power grab followed quickly by Dodd Frank Wall Street Reform And Consumer Protection Act. Just like Obamacare it created a massive, unconstitutional regulatory bureaucracy. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is a runaway regulatory machine completely unaccountable to the president, the Congress, and the courts.

I spoke briefly to a young staffer for the group, who told me that the entire law had to be repealed. “All of it?” I asked. “Anything to stop the bleeding,” she replied. According to the survey results posted on the Dodd Frank Exposed website, Tea Party Patriots by a wide margin agreed: repeal the financial reform law.

Read on to find out who’s behind this. Nobody knows exactly where the money’s coming from but this may provide a little clue:

Notably, the Dodd Frank Exposed website applauds litigation sponsored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which is funded by banks like Citigroup and Bank of America, for challenging the constitutionality of Wall Street reform.

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Precedents

by digby

In case there remains any possible doubt that counting on the Democrats to hold fast against the Republican assault on the so-called entitlements is probably a fool’s game, Chris Bowers is here to remind us of something that happened not quite 18 months ago that should bring us up short:

[A] whole bunch of them joined with Republicans in a threat to not raise the debt ceiling without creating a deficit commission that would make onerous cuts to entitlement programs. Yeah, that happened:

Sens. squeeze Speaker over commission
By Jared Allen and Walter Alarkon – 11/10/09 09:14 PM ET Senators from both parties on Tuesday put new pressure on Speaker Nancy Pelosi to turn the power to trim entitlement benefits over to an independent commission. Seven members of the Senate Budget Committee threatened during a Tuesday hearing to withhold their support for critical legislation to raise the debt ceiling if the bill calling for the creation of a bipartisan fiscal reform commission were not attached. Six others had previously made such threats, bringing the total to 13 senators drawing a hard line on the committee legislation. “You rarely do have the leverage to make a fundamental change,” said Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), who said he hasn’t ruled out offering the independent commission legislation as an amendment to the healthcare reform bill.(…) “There are rare moments in this institution when you can implement fundamental change,” Bayh said during Tuesday’s hearing. “This is one of them.”(…) “While failing to increase the debt limit is not an option, the need to raise the debt limit should be accompanied by a serious discussion about possible actions we can take to deal with our fiscal challenge,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said in a statement. “Putting in place a mechanism to deal with our long-term fiscal shortfalls, as well as legislation restoring statutory pay-go, should be a part of that discussion.”

The result of this threat was the Simpson-Bowles commission

The Democrats who joined in this threat were —- surprise — Sens. Conrad, Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Mark Warner (D-Va.) plus turncoat Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.). Warner and Durbin are on the current bandwagon and I think they can easily count on Feinstein and Lieberman. Difi is running again as California’s Republican senator and Lieberman will do it out of spite. So they probably have five Dems at a minimum ready to vote for slashing entitlements.

The good news is that the House Republicans are getting a face full of grief from their constituents over Medicare which probably means that the “entitlement” play will have to fall on Social Security and Medicaid. The first is likely to be as dicey as Medicare, although they feasibly could do it with a complicated formula for benefits cuts that nobody but a bunch of boring wonks will bother to understand. Medicaid could be in deep trouble if Obama decides to abandon that part of the Health care reform.

But it’s not looking all that bright for the good guys. All that talk about Ryan being a “courageous” and “serious” man filled with “brio” and “guts” did its work. The country is still polarized on these issues and the GOP base still backs their extremists:

GOP’s gamble on the budget pays off, so far

A new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds that House Republicans, who took a political risk in passing a controversial budget blueprint last week, have survived so far with some key advantages intact as Congress moves toward the debate on raising the debt ceiling, passing the 2012 budget and enacting a long-term deficit plan.

Americans are evenly divided between the deficit plan proposed by President Obama and the one drafted by House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan, and those surveyed put more trust in Republicans than Democrats to handle the federal budget and the economy.

Pessimistic about the economy and the nation’s course, they overwhelmingly blame too much spending for soaring federal deficits and want to rely more on spending cuts than tax hikes to get it under control.

It would have been a whole lot easier to make the case for higher taxes if a Democratic President and a Democratic congress hadn’t overwhelming extended Bush’s huge tax cuts just four months ago and then run around touting their achievement like it was the equivalent of winning World War II. And joining the spending cuts bandwagon hasn’t exactly helped their cause either. (But then, that assumes their cause isn’t to cut entitlements and lower taxes, in which case they may very well be successful.)

All is not lost, however:

The poll also shows the perils ahead for the GOP in moving from general principles to specific actions. Two-thirds of Americans worry the Republican plan for reducing the budget deficit would cut Medicare and Social Security too much.

Ryan and other Republican House members already have faced hostile questions at town-hall-style meetings in their home districts from seniors and others about the GOP proposal to turn the nation’s health care program for the elderly into what would essentially be a voucher system. The GOP budget blueprint would overhaul Medicare, turn Medicaid into block grants for the states and trim trillions of dollars in spending on discretionary programs. It would lower tax rates for top earners and corporations.

“The bad news for the Democrats is that even after the Ryan budget comes out and has been attacked for a little while, the Republicans have an advantage,” says Joseph White, a political scientist at Case Western Reserve University who studies budget politics and policy.

The Ryan budget was greeted with a huge amount of fanfare among people on all sides of the political spectrum and it took at least two weeks to begin to turn that impression around so I don’t think this is an accurate description of events. The radical nature of the plan is just now starting to permeate. And the poll shows that the devil is in the details -=– people don’t like any of the specifics, so there is still a whole lot of room to maneuver.

Unfortunately, the danger lies with the congress, particularly in the House of Lords, where a majority is on record wanting to get this done, come what may. With the Village, as usual, portraying defiance of the will of the people (who are commonly referred to as lazy and stupid because they just don’t understand how important it is for them to sacrifice their futures and well-being in order to soothe the sore feelings of the wealthy) as “courageous” this is a bigger lift than it would be in a functioning democracy.

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There is no Democratic Jesus

by digby

Some liberal religious types had the utter gall to ask “what would Jesus cut” as a way to draw attention to the actual human toll of some of these budget cuts. And the media is all in a tizzy over the “exploitation” of religion. On CNN this morning, Carol Costello used it as her morning question:

MALVEAUX: Jesus and politics. That combination inspiring our own Carol Costello with the “Talk Back Question of the Day.”

Carol, what’s your question? What have you got for us?

CAROL COSTELLO, CNN CORRESPONDENT: OK. Here it goes.

Coming off the holiest day in Christianity, politics is again rearing its ugly head. Take President Obama, who was framing his budget battle with Republicans in moral terms.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Their basic view is that no matter how successful I am, no matter how much I’ve taken from this country, that somehow I now have no obligation to people who are less fortunate than me

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COSTELLO: The progressive “Sojourners” magazine, influential during the health care battle, is even bringing Jesus into the debate. They’re asking, “What would Jesus cut?” Saying that increasing military spending should not come at the expense of the poor.

They’re sending letters to lawmakers. They’re selling bracelets, asking people to follow their conscience.

A panel even discussed the issue on Fox News, with guests saying, the “What would Jesus cut?” campaign is both silly and pure partisanship.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

WILLIAM MCGURN, “WALL STREET JOURNAL”: I’m still waiting for the passage where Jesus says I am the way, the truth and the light, and the OMB director. OK? This is an effort to portray Republicans as somehow less Christian and actually not to have a moral debate on what spending accomplishes and does not accomplish.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COSTELLO: So, then, is politics really a moral debate? That’s what some conservatives have long been saying when it comes to things like abortion and same-sex marriage. This time, the political left is trying to steal a little religious thunder from the political right.

So, the “Talk Back” question today: Is “What would Jesus cut?’ appropriate or crass?

Facebook.com/CarolCNN, and I will read your responses later this hour.

MALVEAUX: I know a lot of people I talk to on both sides who believe that it is a moral issue, what — you know, who suffers, who actually sacrifices in this time of need.

COSTELLO: Yes. People on both sides may feel that way, but the question today is, should they be using it for political purposes? So it will be interesting to see what people have to say.

Right, there hasn’t been any use of religion in politics in recent years. It’s just another example of liberals not adhering to the constitution. Haven’t they heard of the separation of church and state?

And anyway, it’s highly inappropriate to use the prospect of human suffering in a government budget for political purposes.

Meanwhile, the ultra-devout Rush Limbaugh remarked:

The Left “Seek[s] To Co-Opt Jesus Christ As Simply Another Prop In Its March Toward The Decline Of America

Thank goodness the right is above using Jesus as a prop.

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Hubris: turning the tables on themselves

by digby

It continues to surprise me that the GOP allowed the Randian extremist Paul Ryan budget to see the light of day in this cycle. Doing so after their frontal assault on the Democrats in the last election with “death panels” and “pulling the plug on grandma” means that they actually ended up giving the Democrats the benefit of the corporate bought and paid for propaganda, which is unusual. Voters are using their own talking points against them now. It’s odd for the GOP to be this ham handed and it’s a sign that they are drunk on their own hype.

And they apparently have underestimated Harry Reid as well:

Senate Democratic aides expect Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to force Senate Republicans to vote on the Paul Ryan budget plan. ..

The idea is to drive a wedge through the GOP caucus and put vulnerable incumbents such as Sens. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) in a political jam.Senate Democrats felt encouraged Friday after Sen. Susan Collins (Maine) emerged as the first Senate Republican to publicly oppose the House-passed budget blueprint, named after Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.).”I don’t happen to support Congressman Ryan’s plan, but at least he had the courage to put forth a plan to significantly reduce the debt,” Collins said on WCSH 6, an NBC affiliate in Portland, Maine.If Reid can show that a bloc of Senate Republicans will not support the dramatic spending cuts and sizable tax cuts passed by the lower chamber, it would help his negotiating leverage with Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio).

Hubris is a very serious weakness… and it’s the one to which Republicans are most prone. Of course, the Democrats have some weaknesses as well and one of them is wasting opportunities to politically wound their opponents. We’ll have to wait and see which weakness prevails.

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Misdiagnosing the wrong problem

by digby

This is kind of a blockbuster if you ask me — if a blockbuster can be defined as something that nobody except Susie Madrak even notices:

On Friday, April 8, as members of the U.S. Congress engaged in a last-minute game of chicken over the federal budget, the Pentagon quietly issued a report that received little initial attention: “A National Strategic Narrative.” The report was issued under the pseudonym of “Mr. Y,” a takeoff on George Kennan’s 1946 “Long Telegram” from Moscow (published under the name “X” the following year in Foreign Affairs) that helped set containment as the cornerstone of U.S. strategy for dealing with the Soviet Union. The piece was written by two senior members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CAPT Wayne Porter, USN and Col Mark “Puck” Mykleby) in a “personal” capacity, but it is clear that it would not have seen the light of day without a measure of official approval. Its findings are revelatory, and they deserve to be read and appreciated not only by every lawmaker in Congress, but by every American citizen. The narrative argues that the United States is fundamentally getting it wrong when it comes to setting its priorities, particularly with regard to the budget and how Americans as a nation use their resources more broadly. The report says Americans are overreacting to Islamic extremism, underinvesting in their youth, and failing to embrace the sense of competition and opportunity that made America a world power. The United States has been increasingly consumed by seeing the world through the lens of threat, while failing to understand that influence, competitiveness, and innovation are the key to advancing American interests in the modern world. Courageously, the authors make the case that America continues to rely far too heavily on its military as the primary tool for how it engages the world. Instead of simply pumping more and more dollars into defense, the narrative argues:

By investing energy, talent, and dollars now in the education and training of young Americans — the scientists, statesmen, industrialists, farmers, inventors, educators, clergy, artists, service members, and parents, of tomorrow — we are truly investing in our ability to successfully compete in, and influence, the strategic environment of the future. Our first investment priority, then, is intellectual capital and a sustainable infrastructure of education, health and social services to provide for the continuing development and growth of America’s youth.

Damn hippies.

Seriously, this is a hugely important (and common sense) observation and coming from this source you’d think it would be taken seriously. We are worrying about all the wrong things. And it isn’t just Islamic extremism, although that does head the list of foolish obsessions. This deficit hysteria contributes to the same thing. Maybe it’s human nature or just a form of denial, but it seems that social change and globalization has made us create a bunch of false demons in order to avoid dealing with the real ones. It’s an extremely odd phenomenon.

And look at the list of priorities they say we should be concentrating on — it could be right out of the People’s Budget or President Obama’s better rhetorical moments. But it’s as if these concepts are perceived as being a sentimental nostalgic portrait of a soft America that could never exist again. We’re all id now, primitive “realism” no dreams. Damn hippies indeed.

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Keeping Them Out —Or Keeping Us In?

by digby

Remember when Alaskan extremist candidate Joe Miller cited East Germany’s border fence as a fine example and we all laughed and laughed because their fence was built to keep their own people in rather than keeping foreign people out?

Well, the laugh’s on us. We may not be literally building such a fence, but we are creating a virtual one:

If you don’t want it to get even harder for a U.S. citizen to get a passport — now required for travel even to Canada or Mexico — you only have until Monday to let the State Department know. The U.S. Department of State is proposing a new Biographical Questionnaire for some passport applicants: The proposed new Form DS-5513 asks for all addresses since birth; lifetime employment history including employers’ and supervisors names, addresses, and telephone numbers; personal details of all siblings; mother’s address one year prior to your birth; any “religious ceremony” around the time of birth; and a variety of other information. According to the proposed form, “failure to provide the information requested may result in … the denial of your U.S. passport application.”

The State Department estimated that the average respondent would be able to compile all this information in just 45 minutes, which is obviously absurd given the amount of research that is likely to be required to even attempt to complete the form. It seems likely that only some, not all, applicants will be required to fill out the new questionnaire, but no criteria have been made public for determining who will be subjected to these additional new written interrogatories. So if the passport examiner wants to deny your application, all they will have to do is give you the impossible new form to complete. It’s not clear from the supporting statement, statement of legal authorities, or regulatory assessment submitted by the State Department to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) why declining to discuss one’s siblings or to provide the phone number of your first supervisor when you were a teenager working at McDonalds would be a legitimate basis for denial of a passport to a U.S. citizen. There’s more information in the Federal Register notice (also available here as a PDF) and from the Identity Project.

What in the hell is this about?

If the worry is that non-US citizens are getting passports then they need to change the verification process in a way that’s possible to meet. If it’s about something else, then they need to explain what it is..

This is Big Brother stuff — they are setting up a series of roadblocks to use “just in case” they want to deny someone a passport. The question is, who and why? Basically, this will potentially deny US citizens the ability to travel outside the country. It may not be a wall, but it functions pretty effectively as one if they want it to.

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Rot At The Top

by digby

To Dodger fans like me and mine, this has been an embarrassing and horrifying season, and it has nothing to do with what’s going on on the field. The horrifying was the attack on a Giants fan by psychotic gang members on opening days, of course. The embarrassing was that of the tabloid divorce of the Dodger’s owners, the battlin’ McCourts. The first is largely a result of the lax security brought about because the second have spent all the Dodgers money on themselves and their lawyers.

But there is a bigger picture. This beloved team brought to this point by a venal moron going through a midlife crisis and his wife demands half of his ill-gotten gains is a metaphor for our times. Our business elites are greedy fools — and yet they own everything — including the political system, which gladly dances to their tune. This is out biggest problem, the one that feeds into all the others.

HaroldMeyerson has written a sad — and infuriating — piece about the downfall of the Dodgers and another storied LA institution, the LA Times. Even if you don’t care at all about LA and think we are a bunch of airheads who deserve what we get, read this piece and simply exchange the names with any number of other wealthy CEOs and sharpy operators who have taken down one institution after another over these past few years with their idiotic, short sighted “deals.” It’s epidemic. And it’s killing us.

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Taxing Problems

by digby

Robert Frank gives Ezra Klein an interesting critique of The People’s Budget here:

Robert Frank, an economist at Cornell University, is one of the more innovative tax thinkers I know. In particular, I’ve always been partial to his proposal for a progressive consumption tax (pdf). So I ran the plan by him, as well. “The progressive budget proposal is of course an enormous improvement over the bizarre Ryan budget,” he said, “which for all its chest thumping about facing up to the hard choices, does nothing — absolutely nothing — to reduce long-run deficits.” But like Gale and Burman, Frank wanted to see more simplification and reform. In particular, he wanted more attention given to what we tax with an eye toward two-fers: raising more money off of things we want less of. “When we enter congested roadways, or buy heavy vehicles, or drink to excess, or emit CO2 into the air, we impose costs on others,” he says. “Taxing such activities kills two birds with one stone: It generates much needed revenue, and it curtails activities that cause more harm than good. Because these taxes make the economic pie bigger, it makes no sense to object that we can’t afford them.” He recommended this piece (pdf) for more on those ideas.

Matt Yglesias adds:

So, yes, that. Tax consumption, tax traffic congestion, tax pollution, tax public health hazards.

Sadly, this is even less likely than raising rates seeing as they are all items that are defended by very wealthy special interests. And unfortunately, the way things look right now, the other way of attacking these problems, through regulation and tax incentives also seem unlikely to survive the current budget hysteria. Indeed, the incentive and subsidy structuresto encourage good behavior in those areas (aka “tax expenditures”) are the most likely to be cut — and then called a tax hike.

I think The People’s Budget works as a political document in a different way. It does a better job of balancing the budget than the ridiculous Ryan Plan and it does it by taxing the hell out of the wealthy. That may be no more realistic than the Ryan plan, but it has the virtue of showing that taxation and defense cuts are perfectly doable ways to reach budgetary nirvana. This is as important as the details. It sets a leftward political parameter that up to now hasn’t even exisated.

I think Frank’s critique works better with the President’s plan than the People’s Budget. He could have adopted this middle ground of a mix of tax hikes, targeted tax cuts, subsidies and spending cuts in his budget to get to the same place, thus saving the wealthy from the draconian tax increases that the dirty socialists are demanding. Unfortunately, we have a debate that is currently centered between Ryan and the Simpson-Bowles Catfood recommendations, which puts the President far to the right of both Frank and The People’s Budget. It’s a shame.

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Lying For Truth

by digby

Must read, do not pass go: Rick Perlstein, on the Lying Liars :

IT TAKES TWO THINGS to make a political lie work: a powerful person or institution willing to utter it, and another set of powerful institutions to amplify it. The former has always been with us: Kings, corporate executives, politicians, and ideologues from both sides of the aisle have been entirely willing to bend the truth when they felt it necessary or convenient. So why does it seem as if we’re living in a time of overwhelmingly brazen deception? What’s changed?

Today’s marquee fibs almost always evolve the same way: A tree falls in the forest—say, the claim that Saddam Hussein has “weapons of mass destruction,” or that Barack Obama has an infernal scheme to parade our nation’s senior citizens before death panels. But then a network of media enablers helps it to make a sound—until enough people believe the untruth to make the lie an operative part of our political discourse.

For the past 15 years, I’ve spent much of my time deeply researching three historic periods—the birth of the modern conservative movement around the Barry Goldwater campaign, the Nixon era, and the Reagan years—that together have shaped the modern political lie. Here’s how we got to where we are.

It’s a fascinating tale going all the way back to Hearst’s yellow journalism. But something new happened in recent years:

The Gipper’s inauguration ushered in the “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” era of political lying. But it took a deeper trend to accelerate the cultural shift away from truth-telling-as-patriotism to a full-scale epistemological implosion.

Reagan rode into office accompanied by a generation of conservative professional janissaries convinced they were defending civilization against the forces of barbarism. And like many revolutionaries, they possessed an instrumental relationship to the truth: Lies could be necessary and proper, so long as they served the right side of history.

“We ought to see clearly that the end does justify the means,” wrote evangelist C. Peter Wagner in 1981. “If the method I am using accomplishes the goal I am aiming at, it is for that reason a good method.”

This virulent strain of political utilitarianism was already well apparent by the time the Plumbers were breaking into the Democratic National Committee: “Although I was aware they were illegal,” White House staffer Jeb Stuart Magruder told the Watergate investigating committee, “we had become somewhat inured to using some activities that would help us in accomplishing what we thought was a legitimate cause.”

Even conservatives who were not allied with the White House had learned to think like Watergate conspirators. To them, the takeaway from the scandal was that Nixon had been willing to bend the rules for the cause. The New Right pioneer M. Stanton Evans once told me, “I didn’t like Nixon until Watergate.”
[…]
“We ought to see clearly that the end does justify the means,” wrote evangelist C. Peter Wagner in 1981. “If the method I am using accomplishes the goal I am aiming at, it is for that reason a good method.” Jerry Falwell once said his goal was to destroy the public schools. In 1998, confronted with the quote, he denied making it by claiming he’d had nothing to do with the book in which it appeared. The author of the book was Jerry Falwell.

Read on to see what really kicked this into high gear and what sustains it today.

This history provides an important foundation for my ongoing quest to understand the right’s ability to operate without the constraints of hypocrisy or consistency in an environment of epistemic relativism so extreme that we end up believing that wrong is right. It’s literally mind-boggling.

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Wiki Dump

by digby

Obviously the story of the morning is the Wikileaks Guantanamo documents and the go-to site for links and analysis of all things Wikileaks remains Greg Mitchell’s at The Nation.

I’m sure we’ll all be sifting through them over the course of the next few days, but there are a couple of articles that stand out right away. The first is this one by Amy Davidson in the New Yorker chronicling some of the reasons the “worst of the worst” were held in Guantanamo over the years:

Here are some of the reasons we’ve held people at Guantánamo, according to files obtained by WikiLeaks and, then, by several news organizations: A sharecropper because he was familiar with mountain passes; an Afghan “because of his general knowledge of activities in the areas of Khost and Kabul based as a result of his frequent travels through the region as a taxi driver”; an Uzbek because he could talk about his country’s intelligence service, and a Bahraini about his country’s royal family (both of those nations are American allies); an eighty-nine year old man, who was suffering from dementia, to explain documents that he said were his son’s; an imam, to speculate on what worshippers at his mosque were up to; a cameraman for Al Jazeera, to detail its operations; a British man, who had been a captive of the Taliban, because “he was expected to have knowledge of Taliban treatment of prisoners and interrogation tactics”; Taliban conscripts, so they could explain Taliban conscription techniques; a fourteen-year-old named Naqib Ullah, described in his file as a “kidnap victim,” who might know about the Taliban men who kidnapped him. (Ullah spent a year in the prison.) Our reasons, in short, do not always really involve a belief that a prisoner is dangerous to us or has committed some crime; sometimes (and this is more debased) we mostly think we might find him useful.

Sadly, I have a sick feeling that a rather large number of Americans don’t have a problem with that.

The New York Times Charlie Savage published a story about the number of suicides at the prison and how vexing they were to the authorities. I was interested to see that a rehash of the old rationalization that suicides are a form of asymmetrical warfare. I wrote a lot about this back in 2006 and 2007 — the commandant sounded like some kind of cartoon character:

Hey, did you hear about the latest terrorist attack?

A Saudi Arabian detainee at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay apparently committed suicide Wednesday, the U.S. military said.

Lest you think I’ve gone nuts, recall that the US government considers prisoners committing suicide in Guantanamo an act of war. I’m serious. Remember this?

Rear Admiral Harris is adamant that the people in his care are well looked after and are enemies of the United States.

He told me they use any weapon they can – including their own urine and faeces – to continue to wage war on the United States.

The suicide of three detainees, he reaffirmed to me, amounted to “asymmetrical warfare.”

The state department disagreed. They saw the Gitmo suicides as a PR tactic:

“Taking their own lives was not necessary, but it certainly is a good P.R. move,” Graffy said of the deaths. Drawing on knowledge gleaned from work “on improving the United States’ image abroad, especially in Islamic countries” (a detail The New York Times pulled from her State Department bio), Graffy elaborated on her remarks on the BBC show “Newshour”: “It does sound like this is part of a strategy–in that they don’t value their own lives, and they certainly don’t value ours; and they use suicide bombings as a tactic.”

Keep in mind that the reason suicide was considered a form of warfare was because it made the US look bad. The existence of the prison itself, or the fact that huge numbers of innocent people were being held and tortured, some committing suicide was apparently not a big problem.

And it’s not going anywhere, apparently because the Obama administration couldn’t get its act together to properly handle the situation and didn’t have the bandwidth to deal with it because Obama was spending every minute of the day thinking about health care for the first year and a half. That last is interesting because it certainly didn’t appear as if he was engaged in the day to day of health care to that extent — it was supposedly hung up in the Senate for months while the president was attending to other business. (In fact, it has been a huge complaint from just about everyone that he punted to Baucus.) I wonder what the truth is?

Update: Amy Davidson’s New Yorker piece wonders what would have happened if they’d gone another way:

Here’s another question: why didn’t Obama declassify these documents himself? His Administration has professed to be frustrated at its inability to convey to the public, early on, why Guantánamo should be closed. (See Eric Holdier’s press conference last month for an example.) Might it have helped if Obama had pointed to close-up pictures of the fourteen-year old, or the taxi driver, and really told their stories? He can be good at that, after all. Maybe it wouldn’t have been enough; maybe, clumsily handled, it could have backfired. But it could have shifted the narrative, and it would have been true. Instead, Obama never effectively challenged the image of Guantánamo as a sort of Phantom Zone of super villains, rather than the humiliating hodgepodge it is. When confronted with scare tactics, his Administration, as the Washington Post recounted in a long piece Saturday, retreated again and again; and then it just gave up. The White House feared the fear itself.

And so, instead, on Sunday the Administration released a statement to “strongly condemn” the leak. It made a point of noting how cautious it had been about the prisoners, and how the Bush Administration had transferred many more of them out of Guantánamo than the Obama Administration had—as if that were a point of pride.

Meanwhile, members of CNN’s best political team on television, the conservative Dana Loesch and liberal Cornell Belcher agreed that Wikileaks’ release of these documents was terrible (no word on the newspapers that published them) and that they show that the prisoners were very dangerous people who deserved to be there. NPR is reporting that Obama released the worst of the worst. So I assume that’s that.