Author: digby

All The World’s A Stage

Ellen Goodman asks:Presidential election or casting call?

I have long believed that it is a casting call. Just as I think, sadly, that for many people 9/11 and Iraq are now seen as reality TV shows from last season. Kind of like Survivor. The question in this election is whether they want to watch the re-runs.

It’s a little bit much, however, that a member of the fourth estate would act surprised by this. After all, Goodman and her ilk cover politics and news events as if they were television shows, critiquing the “performances” of the players, even (especially) themselves, and look at all events through the lens of a pre-ordained narrative.

The president of the United States plays the role of a cowboy rancher when he can’t ride a horse and didn’t buy his “spread” until he was running for president. He lands in a fighter plane on the deck of an aircraft carrier, prances around in a skin tight jumpsuit and the press never bothers to correct the erroneous impression that he actually flew the plane.

Why in the hell shouldn’t the Democrats get a little of that action too? If we are casting the role of “President” I’m definitely going for the face that belongs on Mt Rushmore rather than the one that appears on the cover of MAD Magazine.

This is the way it is, boys and girls, and while I’m not thrilled, I think it’s long past time that Democrats got with the program. The TV program.

Smite Me

Josh ‘n Matt are all shocked ‘n shit that the Bush administration is reportedly blocking an Israeli pullback from Gaza until after the elections.

I guess they forgot that our esteemed leader informed the players long ago that he was on a tight evil-smiting schedule and they had to move fast:

“God told me to strike at al-Qaida and I struck them, and then He instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me, I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them.”

Mideast peace will just have to wait. The elections have come and God has told him to strike the Democrats. He has no choice. He’ll get back to them next December after he smites the sodomites and takes a little R&R in Crawford.

Naderama

Over at Pandagon: Kerry vs. The Extremists, Ezra very wisely points out that Nader is probably not someone to be ignored, no matter how much we might like to. As I wrote last week, I think we ignore him again at our peril.

For some reason I’m reading a lot of overly optimistic commentary about this election that strikes me a naive. We have a good chance to win, but there is absolutely no reason to assume that it’s a slam dunk, either on the basis of poll numbers, money or enthusiasm. Both sides are loaded for bear. The smart move is to assume that this election is going to be very close and strategize accordingly.

I know that people don’t want to hear this, but Uncle Karl has a mountain of money and this being America, that mountain of money is power. And they’re not just using it for ads; they are building a turn-out operation the likes of which we’ve never seen. He has the power of his office to get Judy Botox to cut away at a moments notice to cover his boring flag draped stump speech every single day, replete with canned cultlike shrieks of approval and hand picked children of color. He can control world events in ways that we don’t even want to think about. Incumbency is very, very powerful.

All this means is that despite the fact that he is a manipulable moron and a demonstrable failure, he’ll be able to command the loyalty of his 45 percent no matter what he does. And, if they play their cards right he’ll get a few dumb swing voters who think they are watching American Idol.

Ralph is polling right now at 6%. I’m sure that’s too high and he’ll come nowhere close to that. But, he will continue to cause trouble and he’ll continue to have salience with some who might otherwise be persuaded to vote for Kerry on idealistic grounds. If this election is close — and I believe that we should plan for it to be — then it is important to deal with Ralph. If we are going to fight for every vote, all the way down to the precinct level, it’s foolish to ignore someone who could possibly get half a million votes, a fraction of which could make the difference.

Ezra’s advice is for Kerry to use Nader as a liberal foil. That was my first thought as well. It can only help Kerry look more moderate for Nader to be in the race. The strategy here is that we could possibly get more swing voters by running against both Nader and Bush as extremists.

On the other hand, maybe we could try to convert the Naderites. They were impossible to deal with during 2000, but perhaps we are dealing with a different phenomenon this time. It may be that they could be persuaded with a better knowledge of John Kerry’s history of fighting the Republican proclivity for supporting death squads and arming dictators around the world. And maybe if they knew that Kerry was the reigning expert (and senate prosecutor) on the single most corrupt multinational, bipartisan big money scam in history, BCCI, they might be persuaded that he isn’t such an establishment tool after all.

Of course, Nader supporters generally demand that a politican be a sort of Knight errant, pure of heart and spirit in every way. So, perhaps the best way to deal with this problem would be to expose their candidate to the same harsh spotlight they shine on Democrats. It wouldn’t be pretty, but it might be effective.

Josh Marshall quoted a Gore insider friend of his as saying:

We took Nader too lightly in 00. We didn’t challenge him. We didn’t point out his sizable personal fortune, his complete lack of assistance on any environmental cause for decades, his sources of funding. Oh progressives do not make this mistake twice in your lifetime or Nader’s.

Whether that would convert any votes to Kerry, either swing voters from the middle or shocked and disappointed Naderites from the left, is another question. And that is the question that must be answered.

There are ways to deal with Ralph. But we must deal with him. We can’t afford to leave anything to chance.

Passionate Denial

Bob Sommerby is defending “The Passion” this week and I don’t have a lot to say about it because I haven’t seen, and have no intention of seeing, the film. However, I do find it interesting that Sommerby quotes Gibson as saying unequivocally that, contrary to his father’s views, he is not a Holocaust denier:

SAWYER: In that New York Times Magazine interview, [Gibson’s father] seemed to be questioning the scope of the Holocaust, skeptical that six million Jews had died. So what does Gibson think?

GIBSON: Do I believe that there were concentration camps where defenseless and innocent Jews died cruelly under the Nazi regime? Of course I do, absolutely. It was an atrocity of monumental proportion.

SAWYER: And you believe there were millions, six million?

GIBSON: Sure.

SAWYER: I think people wondered if your father’s views were your views on this.

GIBSON: Their whole agenda here, my detractors, is to drive a wedge between me and my father. And it’s not going to happen. I love him. He’s my father.

To be clear, Sommerby was responding to a correspondent who wondered why nobody had ever asked Gibson right out if he was a Holocaust denier. He isn’t trying to defend Gibson’s views, per se, although he does say that he didn’t find the film anti-Semitic.

Again, I haven’t seen the movie so I have no idea if it is or not. But, I did happen to read this Peggy Nooner interview with Gibson in Reader’s Digest while I was standing in the grocery store line and his answer was just a little bit more “nuanced”:

PN: I read that your father has some very conservative religious beliefs and that he has questioned some of the accepted versions of the Holocaust.

Gibson: My dad taught me my faith and I believe what he taught me. The man never lied to me in his life. He lost his mother at two years of age. He lost his father at 15. He went through the Depression. He signed up for World War Two, served his country fighting the forces of fascism. Came back, worked very hard physically, raised a family, put a roof over my head, clothed me, fed me, taught me my faith, loved me. I love him back. So I’ll slug it out until my heart is black and blue if anyone ever tries to hurt him.

PN: The Holocaust happened, right?

Gibson: I have friends and parents of friends who have numbers on their arms. The guy who taught me Spanish was a Holocaust survivor. Yes, of course. Atrocities happened. War is horrible. World War Two killed tens of millions of people. Some of them were Jews in concentration camps. In the Ukraine, several million starved to death between 1932 and 1933.

I don’t know about you, but that sounds to me like a guy who doesn’t think that the systematic genocide of Jews in WWII was much of a big deal. Moreover, like his father in the New York Times Magazine article that Sawyer references, he is clearly questioning the “scope” of the Holocaust. He even has some handy statistics to back him up as if he’s given it quite a bit of thought and has made the point before.

“Some” Jews were killed in concentration camps, sure. War is hell. Atrocities happen. What a bummer.

I can’t say absolutely that he is anti-semite based on this comment, but it’s not much of a stretch to make that assumption. No matter what, however, it’s probably a mistake to be too awfully impressed with his theological scholarship. The guy is clearly a cretinous airhead.

“Narrowin’ the Noose”

I have been on the case of this little group of Bush administration dirty tricksters called the Office of Global Communications(OGC) formerly the Coalition Information Center (CIC), for over a year and when the Plame thing was first revealed, this guy, Jim Wilkinson, was who I first suspected. When the story first leaked last July, I wrote:

It would be very wrong of me to speculate wildly that the infamous smear operation of the South Carolina primary that is now working right in the White House “communications shop” could possibly be behind this (or, more trivially but just as telling, behind the Drudge Report expose of the “Gay Canadian” reporter.)

[…]

I’m certain that these same people who now work extremely closely with George W. Bush and his advisors would never resort to such dishonorable and undignified behavior in the sacred office of the President of the United States. It’s merely a coincidence that the tactics are so very similar.

According to Newsday today:

Also sought in the wide-ranging document requests contained in three grand jury subpoenas to the Executive Office of President George W. Bush are records created in July by the White House Iraq Group, a little-known internal task force established in August 2002 to create a strategy to publicize the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

So, it now turns out that the “Iraq Group,” the supervisory marketing arm of the Iraq march to war is in the sights of the Plame grand jury. Jim Wilkinson is the one member of the administration who is simultaneously a member of the OGC and the Iraq Group.

The thing to remember about both the OGC and the Iraq Group is that they are not just spin artists. They are propagandists. They were very involved with Alisdair Campbell in the “sexing up” of the WMD threat, so it will be very interesting to see if these documents are turned over without a lot of national security hoo-hah.

There is a big story in those documents, perhaps much bigger even than Plame, although the subpoenaes are only for July 2003 so they won’t reveal the really interesting stuff about the blatent WMD lies. Because, not to go into too much tin-foil hat territory, there is a very interesting story to be told about the unprecedented “PR” sell-job that the White House coordinated to convince the American (and British) people that Saddam was a “grave and gathering” danger.

Many of you have probably read the paper written by Sam Gardiner, the retired colonel who taught at the National War College, the Air War College and the Naval Warfare College ( in PDF here) in which he claims to have found more than 50 instances of demonstrably false stories planted in the press in the run up to the war and charges the OCG and the Iraq Group as the culprits. This overview of the paper, originally published in The Edge brings up something quite interesting that ties it into the Plame affair:

Colonel Sam Gardiner (USAF, Ret.) has identified 50 false news stories created and leaked by a secretive White House propaganda apparatus. Bush administration officials are probably having second thoughts about their decision to play hardball with former US Ambassador Joseph Wilson. Joe Wilson is a contender. When you play hardball with Joe, you better be prepared to deal with some serious rebound.

After Wilson wrote a critically timed New York Times essay exposing as false George W. Bush’s claim that Iraq had purchased uranium from Niger, high officials in the White House contacted several Washington reporters and leaked the news that Wilson’s wife was a CIA agent.

Wilson isn’t waiting for George W. Bush to hand over the perp. In mid-October, the former ambassador began passing copies of an embarrassing internal report to reporters across the US. The-Edge has received copies of this document.

The 56-page investigation was assembled by USAF Colonel (Ret.) Sam Gardiner. “Truth from These Podia: Summary of a Study of Strategic Influence, Perception Management, Strategic Information Warfare and Strategic Psychological Operations in Gulf II” identifies more than 50 stories about the Iraq war that were faked by government propaganda artists in a covert campaign to “market” the military invasion of Iraq.

[…]

According to Gardiner, “It was not bad intelligence” that lead to the quagmire in Iraq, “It was an orchestrated effort [that] began before the war” that was designed to mislead the public and the world. Gardiner’s research lead him to conclude that the US and Britain had conspired at the highest levels to plant “stories of strategic influence” that were known to be false.

The Times of London described the $200-million-plus US operation as a “meticulously planned strategy to persuade the public, the Congress, and the allies of the need to confront the threat from Saddam Hussein.”

The multimillion-dollar propaganda campaign run out of the White House and Defense Department was, in Gardiner’s final assessment “irresponsible in parts” and “might have been illegal.”

“Washington and London did not trust the peoples of their democracies to come to the right decisions,” Gardiner explains. Consequently, “Truth became a casualty. When truth is a casualty, democracy receives collateral damage.” For the first time in US history, “we allowed strategic psychological operations to become part of public affairs… [W]hat has happened is that information warfare, strategic influence, [and] strategic psychological operations pushed their way into the important process of informing the peoples of our two democracies.”

Joe Wilson apparently knew that this propaganda machine inside the White House had something to do with his wife’s outing if he was handing out this inflammatory report by Sam Gardiner.

It could have been any one of the Iraq Group miscreants who leaked Plame’s identity. I still think that one of them is very likely to have been Jim Wilkinson. He was, after all, privy to the highest levels of information. As Gardiner notes in the paper:

One of the things that struck Gardiner as revealing was the fact that, as Newsweek reported: “as soon as Lynch was in the air, [the Joint Operations Center] phoned Jim Wilkinson, the top civilian communications aide to CENTCOM Gen. Tommy Franks.”

It struck Gardiner as inexplicable that the first call after Lynch’s rescue would go to the Director of Strategic Communications, the White House’s top representative on the ground.

As far as the honor and integrity of these fine people, we have only to look, again, at Jim Wilkinson, strutting around in a phony uniform (just like his boss) who told a member of the press in Iraq:

“I have a brother who is in a Hummer at the front, so don’t talk to me about too much fucking air-conditioning.” “A lot of people don’t like you.” “Don’t fuck with things you don’t understand.” “This is fucking war, asshole.” “No more questions for you.”

Presumably, he toned down his goosestep as he walked away.

Joe Wilson has a new book coming out in May. I can hardly wait.

Monster

CNN has Ann Coulter on Blitzer’s show defending the president’s ad camapign. Ann Coulter. The hideous, evil slag who just two weeks ago claimed that Max Cleland was not a war hero:

Cleland lost three limbs in an accident during a routine noncombat mission where he was about to drink beer with friends. He saw a grenade on the ground and picked it up. He could have done that at Fort Dix. In fact, Cleland could have dropped a grenade on his foot as a National Guardsman ? or what Cleland sneeringly calls “weekend warriors.” Luckily for Cleland’s political career and current pomposity about Bush, he happened to do it while in Vietnam.

This is, naturally, a lie.

Ed Gillespie must be sorely desperate if the RNC has to resort to being serviced by the saber toothed harpy of West Palm Beach. Too bad Ailene Wuornos isn’t available. She would have made a helluva campaign spokewoman, too.

This liar should never be allowed to comment on the air without the “journalist” host of the show confronting her about her years of outrageous lying and slanderous insults. (George W. Bush should also be asked whether he stands by her statements. That seems to be required for Democrats, anyway.)

Somebody ought to tell Wolfie a thing or two about the GOP spokespersons he has on his show.

King Mook Has Been Radicalized

Whether it’s true, nobody yet knows. But, the fact that Howard Stern is telling his loyal radio audience that he was fired by Clear Channel because of his antipathy for Bush is good news for our side. And, it wouldn’t be the first time Clear Channel did it.

From Salon:

From the moment last week when Clear Channel Communications suspended Howard Stern’s syndicated morning show from the company’s radio stations, denouncing it as “vulgar, offensive and insulting,” speculation erupted that the move had more to do with Stern’s politics than his raunchy shock-jock shtick.

Stern’s loyal listeners, Clear Channel foes and many Bush administration critics immediately reached the same conclusion: The notorious jock was yanked off the air because he had recently begun trashing Bush, and Bush-friendly Clear Channel used the guise of “indecency” to shut him up. That the content of Stern’s crude show hadn’t suddenly changed, but his stance on Bush had, gave the theory more heft. That, plus his being pulled off the air in key electoral swing states such as Florida and Pennsylvania.

This week, Stern himself went on the warpath, weaving in among his familiar monologues about breasts and porn actresses accusations that Texas-based Clear Channel — whose Republican CEO, Lowry Mays, is extremely close to both George W. Bush and Bush’s father — canned him because he deviated from the company’s pro-Bush line. “I gotta tell you something,” Stern told his listeners. “There’s a lot of people saying that the second that I started saying, ‘I think we gotta get Bush out of the presidency,’ that’s when Clear Channel banged my ass outta here. Then I find out that Clear Channel is such a big contributor to President Bush, and in bed with the whole Bush administration, I’m going, ‘Maybe that’s why I was thrown off: because I don’t like the way the country is leaning too much to the religious right.’ And then, bam! Let’s get rid of Stern. I used to think, ‘Oh, I can’t believe that.’ But that’s it! That’s what’s going on here! I know it! I know it!”

Stern’s been relentless all week, detailing the close ties between Clear Channel executives and the Bush administration, and insisting that political speech, not indecency, got him in trouble with the San Antonio broadcasting giant. If he hadn’t turned against Bush, Stern told his listeners, he’d still be heard on Clear Channel stations.

[…]

Walker, South Carolina Broadcasters Association’s 2002 radio personality of the year, is suing Clear Channel for violating a state law that forbids employers from punishing employees who express politically unpopular beliefs in the workplace.

“On our show we talked about politics and current events,” she tells Salon. “There were two conservative partners and me, the liberal, and that was fine. But as it became clear we were going to war, and I kept charging the war was not justified, I was reprimanded by [Clear Channel] management that I needed to tone that down. Basically I was told to shut up.” She says she was fired on April 7, 2003.

Phoenix talk show host Charles Goyette says he was kicked off his afternoon drive-time program at Clear Channel’s KFYI because of his sharp criticism of the war on Iraq. A self-described Goldwater Republican who was selected “man of the year” by the Republican Party in his local county in 1988, Goyette — more recently named best talk show host of 2003 by the Phoenix New Times — says his years with Clear Channel had been among his best in broadcasting. “The trouble started during the long march to war,” he says.

While the rest of the station’s talk lineup was in a pro-war “frenzy,” Goyette was inviting administration critics like former weapons inspector Scott Ritter on his show, and discussing complaints from the intelligence community that the analysis on Iraq was being cooked to support the White House’s pro-war agenda. This didn’t go over well with his bosses, Goyette says: “I was the Baby Ruth bar in the punch bowl.”

Soon, according to Goyette, he was having “toe-to-toe confrontations” with his local Clear Channel managers off the air about his opposition to the war. “One of my bosses said in a tone of exasperation, ‘I feel like I’m managing the Dixie Chicks,'” Goyette recalls. “I didn’t fit in with the Clear Channel corporate culture.”

Writing in the February issue of American Conservative magazine, Goyette put it this way: “Why only a couple of months after my company picked up the option on my contract for another year in the fifth-largest city in the United States, did it suddenly decide to relegate me to radio Outer Darkness? The answer lies hidden in the oil-and-water incompatibility of these two seemingly disconnected phrases: ‘Criticizing Bush’ and ‘Clear Channel.'”

[…]

At least one radio pro suggests Stern’s sudden turn against Bush could prove costly to the administration during this election year. “Absolutely it should be of concern for the White House,” says Michael Harrison, the publisher of Talkers magazine, a nonpartisan trade magazine serving talk radio. “Howard Stern will be an influential force for the public and for other talk show hosts during the election. Despite the shock jock thing, Stern has credibility. He’s looked upon as an honest person.

I think he was probably dumped because Clear only had him on 6 stations and they could make their point without losing much money. But, it was a political decision whether it was designed to support the wing-nut agenda or because of Stern’s “incorrect” opinion of Bush. It’s really the same thing.

The only thing that matters is that Stern is pissed and he’s connecting the dots for his audience. It’s another weapon in our arsenal. This election isn’t going to be polite anyway and as we know, radio is hugely influential. It’s helpful to have have somebody with a large and loyal audience openly on our side for a change.

Back In The Tent

I’m relieved. Primaries are tough. It’s never comfortable fighting among your philosophical brethren even when you know it’s absolutely vital to give the candidates an exhibition season. This one’s been a doozy. It’s the most memorable primary since 1980, maybe even 1968, despite the early finish.

I’m glad to see that the candidates have been so gracious as the field has been winnowed these last few weeks. They have shown a lot of class by endorsing the winner and pledging their support for the party. In fact, I’m impressed by our bench, generally. It may be the best group of candidates I’ve seen in my lifetime in one presidential nominating race. It’s nice to know that we’ll have the necessary talent available to put immediately to work undoing the damage that Junior and the Retreads have caused in virtually every sector of the government . (The sheer volume of destruction they’ve managed to create in three short years is amazing.)

But then Democrats have often been called upon to clean up the messes that Republicans make of our foreign and economic policy. It seems to be our special burden. And, if we are lucky we are able to advance the cause of progress a bit along the way.

The Democratic Party is on fire right now, thanks to this primary and the perfidy of the opposition. If we can stick together for another eight months, the GOP is going to have to raise the dead to beat our turnout. (Don’t think they won’t try to do just that, if that’s what it takes.)

Now the REAL campaign begins. Good.

Beat Me, Hurt Me

Schwarzenegger, Gray Davis to appear jointly on ‘Tonight Show’

Is there anyone out there who believes that even one Republican would support Davis if the shoe were on the other foot? Jayzuz, will we ever learn?

Empowering Schwarzenneger like this is a recipe for disaster for California Democrats. As I wrote on American Street, he is hugely popular and is going to put every bit of his popularity on the line for George W. Bush. I’m not saying it will work, but he can guarantee that Kerry is going to have to spend money and time in super expensive California, which he should not have to do.

Boxer, Feinstein and even John Burton are giving Arnold big slurpy BJ’s and lending support to these two propositions as if they were sacred texts from Mt Sinai. It’s ridiculous. These propositions are band aids at best and simple GOP propaganda at worst. They are not going to solve the budget crisis but they are certainly going to cement the dominance of the Cult of Arnold in the electorate.

The Republicans always fight, even when they don’t have to. We, on the other hand, say “thank you sir, may I have another.” We have given up the moral high ground on the undemocratic recall travesty and are actively empowering the cyborg they used to seize power. It’s pathetic.

Schmuckrakers

Am I the only one who thought that Elizabeth Bumiller made an ass of herself this morning in the NY debate? I know they probably told her to try to keep it moving, but she certainly seemed to relish interrupting with what were usually non-sequitors. She was inappropriately hostile, as if she were upset that the candidates were not giving her proper respect. It was odd, I thought. She should keep her day job as a Heather because she certainly isn’t ready for day time.

Not that the others were great. Dan Rather looked as if he needed a double shot of espresso. I don’t know what’s happened to that guy. At one time he was right up there with Woodward and Bernstein in exposing a corrupt president. He personally turned poor Ron Zeigler into a walking rolaids commercial.

Oh wait. He ‘s still just like Woodward and Bernstein. Just like them he’s part of a fat and flaccid establishment press that is paid to write historical fiction about Junior’s bravery and go on television and profess to be willing to sign on to whatever the president wants him to do. I forgot.