Vanity Fair is featuring a very entertaining couple of political articles this month. The first is by da man, James Wolcott, on the quaint, anachronistic stylings of the DC punditocrisy in the Obama era:
If it were possible to reach into the television screen and throttle the scrawny neck of the Washington establishment, shake it until the dice rattled and the stem came loose, would that be wrong? Would that be considered unsporting? It pains me, as a bringer of dharma and light, to feel driven to imaginary acts of symbolic violence, but even a man of peace can take only so much until frustration blazes to the upper floor. Watching ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, for instance, is like receiving an engraved invitation to apoplexy. When the panel that Stephanopoulos conducts after his “Newsmakers” interviews includes Sam Donaldson, George Will, and Cokie Roberts, longtime observers of Roman folly, it is like being swallowed by an hourglass; they saw away at the same old creaky strophes of received wisdom as if nothing short of divine revelation could awaken a new thought, eject the dust bunnies from their brains.
The other article is by Michael Wolf on the undisputed leader of the Republican Party:
The most elemental fact about the Limbaugh career might be that, outside of seriously corrupt dictatorships, nobody has made as much money from politics as Rush Limbaugh. Since this Top 40 D.J. and local talker in Sacramento went national, in 1988, as a right-wing voice, he has made hundreds of millions of dollars in salary, bonuses, participation in advertising revenue, and the sale of his show to the Sam Zell–controlled Jacor radio production company (Zell, a real-estate entrepreneur, now controls the Chicago Tribune), which was then sold to Clear Channel. His new contract, signed last summer, is worth a reported $400 million over eight years. There are, too, his newsletter, his paid Internet site with its voluminous traffic, his blockbuster best-sellers, his speaking fees, his half-dozen cars, including a Maybach 57S, his Gulfstream G550, and his Palm Beach estate with five houses.
Rush’s business plan seriously impacts on the future of the Republican Party.
Read both of these for the sheer enjoyment of the entertaining writing and keen observation.
Dahlia Lithwick wonders why liberal bloggers haven’t been beating back the rightwing on the Harold Koh nomination and I can only admit to ignorance of the controversy. (I will say in my own defense that if I addressed every batshit insane right wing controversy I literally would do nothing else.)
This one is really absurd, however, and Lithwick is right that it deserves some attention:
[B]y my most recent tally, every one of the anti-Koh rants dutifully repeats a canard that first appeared in a hatchet piece in the New York Post by former Bush administration speechwriter Meghan Clyne. She asserts that Koh believes “Sharia law could apply to disputes in US courts.” The evidence for her claim? “A New York lawyer, Steven Stein, says that, in addressing the Yale Club of Greenwich in 2007, Koh claimed that ‘in an appropriate case, he didn’t see any reason why Sharia law would not be applied to govern a case in the United States.’ “
Needless to say, if the future lawyer for the State Department wanted to apply sharia law willy-nilly in American courtrooms, it would be a terrifying prospect. And so Daniel Pipes can title his post “Obama’s Harold Koh, Promoter of Shari’a?” … OMG, people! Dean Koh wants to see women executed in the middle of the town square for wearing the wrong color burkha.
Yes, it’s really that stupid.
Lithwick clears up these ridiculous claims and explains how it all got started, (it’s the usual Malkin-style wingnut nonsense) and brings up the similar case of Dawn Johnson, Obama’s choice for the OLC, and how she is being slandered by the right wing noise machine.
It’s outrageous. But I have to confess that I’m a little bit surprised that Lithwick thinks something new is happening with this and that the left is somehow unaware of this. The fact is that the right always targets certain appointees and liberal voices for character assassination. That this now starts on certain well-chosen blogs rather than only on the radio or through their direct mail networks or (back in the day) at their John Birch Society kaffe klatches is only a matter of form. This has been one of their methods for more than 40 years. They do it to keep the troops engaged and to to symbolically draw lines in the sand.
Johnson has ostensibly been chosen for her abortion views, but the real agenda is, of course, to punish her for her stand on torture. And the rightwing hit squad is aided in her case by the serious village people who believe she was a little bit too honest about torture and detention policies and worry that it sends a bad message to validate her position. Koh has been the chosen target for the 9/11 hysteria/anti-state department crowd, for comments he didn’t even make. (This tells you haw deeply they are having to dig.)
But from what I gather, both people will be confirmed and whatever damage their reputations have born is the price that anyone can pay if they take a big job in a Democratic administration. That’s how the right wing rolls.
If there were any chance that Johnson and Koh could actually be denied their places, I would guess that the liberal blogosphere would be intensely engaged. But from what I understand, the filibuster threat on Johnson is just hot air and that nobody takes the nutty Koh critics seriously. There is a certain amount of procedural kabuki that these targets have to undergo, but in the end they’ll be confirmed.
It’s horrible that people have to put up with this, of course. But the modern conservative movement has a malignant, destructive impulse at its very core that will persist in doing this no matter what. It works for them. Right now, out of power, they don’t have the capacity to really affect the outcome but they do it anyway to keep their paranoid loathing simmering until they can once again get traction.
I wish I thought this could be changed in some way. But I don’t. This aspect of politics, particularly American politics, is always going to be with us in some form or another. It’s how (some) humans roll.
Zack Roth catches Chris Matthews mistaking Eric Holder’s dismissal of charges in the Ted Stevens case, due to prosecutorial misconduct, with the notion that Stevens was completely innocent and the charges should have never been filed.
It’s no surprise that Matthews has no idea how the criminal justice system works. And of course, the rest of the Village establishment has taken up for their pal Ted as well, deliberately misreading yesterday’s events and intoning gravely how this honorable man has been “besmirched.”
George Stephanopoulos of ABC News (via Twitter): “Whatever your politics, hard not to feel for Ted Stevens.”
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL): “This incredible man, he served his country well, he was a power player … he took care of Alaska.”
Sen. Robert Bennett (R-UT): “We’re delighted that it’s been demonstrated that Ted was telling us the truth all along. (Ed: Needless to say, nothing of the sort was demonstrated.) Obviously, we’re a little disappointed that this didn’t come out before the election….I think he can get his reputation back. I don’t know where he goes to get his legal fees back.”
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT): “Here’s a guy who gave 60 years of service to this country, and he was screwed [by federal prosecutors] … How does he get his reputation back?”
Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ): “That’s why we have the presumption of innocence … I never called for him to step down or resign or anything like that. I think those who did might regret it now.”
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK): “[I am] deeply disturbed that the government can ruin a man’s career and then say, ‘Never mind.'”
Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-HI): “I didn’t tell him this, but, you know, he’s really suffered … I don’t want to use the word ‘angry,’ but I’m just disappointed that prosecutors were involved in that type of misbehavior … Lawyers’ fees are not cheap. He’ll have to work the rest of his life.”
As Roth notes, the bulk of these quotes appeared in “responsibleBeltwaypublications,” without being challenged or balanced with a statement of the plain fact that nothing in the dismissal of the suits admits Stevens’ innocence.
For the record I think Holder did the right thing. The prosecutors clearly committed misconduct and that shouldn’t go by without consequences. I also hope this is just the beginning of restoring the assault on the rule of law committed at the highest levels of the Justice Department, and Don Siegeleman’s phone should be getting a ring shortly.
But this is classic Village behavior. Their friend, the guy they see shopping at the Safeway all the time, gets off on a technicality, and the collective water works come out, and these encomiums, these tales of woe. Meanwhile thousands of people are railroaded all the time in the criminal justice system, a key piece of our failed prison policy. But of course the Village doesn’t KNOW those folks.
On the subject of media, yesterday Chris Matthews was in Nathans for lunch. His guest was a political consultant from Los Angeles, who would have handled his campaign had he run for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania. He has publicly said he would stay in his job at MSNBC rather than become a candidate. I happened to stop in and sat with them for a while and tried to convince Chris to change his mind and run. The consultant said he has to decide in the next week. Chris had one reason for not running, and I did not think it is good enough. The consultant agreed. We tried, but I don’t think we convinced Chris to change his mind. I wish he would. Chris would be an interesting addition to the Senate. Can you imagine him and Al Franken there together, in the same club?
Yes we can. After all, the Senate already features the comedy stylings of James Inhofe and John Cornyn.
Update: Of course, that’s nothing to the comedy revue that’s being performed daily in the House.
Rachel Maddow had her Frost/Nixon moment last night when she got to question Colin Powell about his role in authorizing and directing torture. He was part of the principals meetings where interrogation techniques were discussed, and while practically every journalist who has ever interviewed Powell in the past year has neglected that fact, Rachel did not.
Good for Rachel for pressing Powell on this – I’m sure the very serious people around NBC News tut-tutted the ignominy of their friend the noble soldier having to take this abuse. Except this is a familiar pattern for Powell. He’s been covering for abuses at the highest levels since he was merely an Army major:
As Powell notes in his 1995 autobiography, My American Journal, in 1969 he was an Army major, the deputy operations officer of the Americal Division, stationed at division headquarters in Chu Lai. He says that in March of that year, an investigator from the inspector general’s office of Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) paid a call. In a “Joe Friday monotone,” the investigator shot questions at Powell about Powell’s position at the division and the division’s operational journals, of which Powell was the custodian. The inspector then asked Powell to produce the journals for March 1968. Powell started to explain that he had not been with the division at that time. “Just get the journal,” the IG man snapped, “and go through that month’s entries. Let me know if you find an unusual number of enemy killed on any day.”
Powell flipped through the records and came upon an entry from March 16, 1968. The journal noted that a unit of the division had reported a body count of 128 enemy dead on the Batangan Peninsula. “In this grinding, grim, but usually unspectacular warfare,” Powell writes, “that was a high number.” The investigator requested that Powell read the number into the tape recorder he had brought, and that was essentially the end of the interview. “He left,” Powell recalls, “leaving me as mystified as to his purpose as when he arrived.”
It would not be until two years later (according to the orginal version of Powell’s book) or six months later (according to the paperbck version of the book) that Powell figured out that the IG official had been probing what was then a secret, the My Lai massacre. Not until the fall of 1969 did the world learned that on March 16, 1968, troops from the Americal Division, under the command of Lieut. William Calley, killed scores of men, women and children in that hamlet. “Subsequent investigation revealed that Calley and his men killed 347 people,” Powell writes. “The 128 enemy ‘kills’ I had found in the journal formed part of the total.”
Though he does not say so expressly, Powell leaves the impression that the IG investigation, using information provided by Powell, uncovered the massacre, for which Calley was later court-martialed. That is not accurate.
The transcript of the tape-recorded interview between the IG man–Lieut. Col. William Sheehan–and Powell tells a different story. During that session–which actually happened on May 23, 1969–the IG investigator did request that Powell take out the division’s operations journals covering the first three weeks of March. (The IG inquiry had been triggered by letters written to the Pentagon, the White House and twenty-four members of Congress by Ron Ridenhour, a former serviceman who had learned about the mass murders.) Sheehan examined the records. Then he asked Powell to say for the record what activity had transpired in “grid square BS 7178” in this period. “The most significant of these occurred on 16, March, 1968,” Powell replied, “beginning at 0740 when C Company, 1st of the 20th, then under Task Force Barker, and the 11th Infantry Brigade, conducted a combat assault into a hot LZ [landing zone].” He noted that C Company, after arriving in the landing zone, killed one Vietcong. About fifteen minutes later, the same company, backed up by helicopter gunships, killed three VC. In the following hour, the gunships killed three more VC, while C Company “located documents and equipment” and killed fourteen Vietcong. “There is no indication of the nature of the action which caused these fourteen VC KIA,” Powell said. Later that morning, C Company, according to the journal, captured a shortwave radio and detained twenty-three VC suspects for questioning, while two other companies that were also part of Task Force Barker were active in the same area without registering any enemy kills […]
There had been attempts at cover-up. Prior to Ridenhour’s letter, the Army promoted the story that C Company had killed 128 VC and captured three weapons in the March 16 action. (Note the 128 figure–which Powell, in his memoirs, uses in describing the number of enemy kills he supposedly found in the journals. In his book, he is repeating the cover story, not recalling what was actually in the journal.) And information pertaining to My Lai disappeared from the Americal Division’s files. A military review panel–convened after the Hersh stories to determine why the initial investigations did not uncover the truth of My Lai–found that senior officers of the Americal Division had destroyed evidence to protect their comrades. Powell keeps that out of his account.
Powell has never been implicated in any of the wrongdoing involving My Lai. No evidence ties him to the attempted cover-up. But he was part of an institution (and a division) that tried hard to keep the story of My Lai hidden–a point unacknowledged in his autobiography. Moreover, several months before he was interviewed by Sheehan, Powell was ordered to look into allegations made by another former GI that US troops had “without provocation or justification” killed civilians. (These charges did not mention My Lai specifically.) Powell mounted a most cursory examination. He did not ask the accuser for more specific information. He interviewed a few officers and reported to his superiors that there was nothing to the allegations [see “Questions for Powell,” The Nation, January 8/15, 2001]. This exercise is not mentioned in his memoirs.
Concurrent with this, Powell brushed off a soldier’s complaint about routine brutality of civilians by US forces in Vietnam. He was part of a military establishment that sought to cover up crimes like My Lai. So this dodging Maddow’s questions on principals meetings and torture comes very naturally to him, I would imagine.
Of course, today Colin Powell is a very serious person, so he should never be questioned on such uncouth subjects. But recognize that this shame cannot just be wished away. Just today a federal judge ruled that subjects held at Bagram AFB in Afghanistan can challenge their detention in US courts, something the Obama Administration resisted. The torture regime will have ramifications for years, and the establishment, as represented here by Colin Powell, will continue to deny the problem, allowing it to fester.
In my ongoing quest to find ways to explain the current situation, I thought I’d pass this little instructional video along for those who might have friends or family who could benefit from a basic primer. It’s not perfect, but it’s imperfections (particularly about the CDSs)aren’t fatal.
The goal of giving form to a complex situation like the credit crisis is to quickly supply the essence of the situation to those unfamiliar and uninitiated. This project was completed as part of my thesis work in the Media Design Program, a graduate studio at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. For more on my broader thesis work exploring the use of new media to make sense of a increasingly complex world, visit my website here
I realize that it is a fundamental tenet of their philosophy — they really believe that wealthy people are morally superior and that when the economy sputters due to their ineptitude and greed, average working people should step up and dedicate a portion of their income to ensuring that the rich don’t suffer the loss of their well deserved compensation. That’s what serfs are for.
Still, it just strikes me as being a tad politically impractical, all things considered:
American voters say 81 – 16 percent that the government should limit executive compensation at companies receiving federal help, and say 47 – 44 percent that boards of directors and top managers at these companies should be forced to resign, according to a Quinnipiac University national poll released today.
Support for income limits is strong among Democrats, Republicans and independent voters and in all income groups, but the call for forced resignations drops as income rises.
And voters oppose 64 – 30 percent trying to limit compensation at firms which do not receive federal bail-out funds. Low-income voters oppose such a move 56 – 35 percent.
American voters say 51 – 45 percent that President Barack Obama’s new budget, which doubles the national debt in 10 years, is needed to fix the economy and address issues such as education and health care, the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University poll finds. President Obama’s budget wins 80 – 16 percent support from Democrats and 50 – 46 percent support from independent voters, while Republicans say 76 – 20 percent it is too costly.
Executives at failing companies are victims of circumstances, 14 percent of voters say, but 39 percent say these executives are incompetent and 35 percent say they are guilty of fraud.
“President Barack Obama may be trying to dampen the populist rhetoric, but the American people are mad as hell and aren’t taking it anymore. They want to vent their anger on the wealthy and on business. They think the folks who got the country into the financial mess are both stupid and crooked and want the government to burn them at the stake,” said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.
You can certainly understand why the Republicans have decided to back the billionaires. They’re just that good.
Look at that, a leading Democrats offers a bill on the otherwise unspeakable subject of prison reform, and contrary to popular expectation he is not forced to resign in disgrace!
Jim Webb stepped firmly on a political third rail last week when he introduced a bill to examine sweeping reforms to the criminal justice system. Yet he emerged unscathed, a sign to a political world frightened by crime and drug issues that the bar might not be electrified any more.
“After two [Joint Economic Committee] hearings and my symposium at George Mason Law Center, people from across the political and philosophical spectrum began to contact my staff,” Webb told the Huffington Post. “I heard from Justice Kennedy of the Supreme Court, from prosecutors, judges, defense lawyers, former offenders, people in prison, and police on the street. All of them have told me that our system needs to be fixed, and that we need a holistic plan of how to solve it.”
Webb’s reform is backed by a coalition of liberals, conservatives and libertarians that couldn’t have existed even a few years ago.
Webb’s bill calls for the creation of a bipartisan commission to study the issue for 18 months and come back with concrete legislative recommendations.
Liberals, who for decades were labeled “soft on crime” by conservatives, crept out to embrace Webb’s proposal. The bill was cosponsored by the entire Senate Democratic leadership and enthusiastically welcomed by prominent liberal bloggers. The blogosphere, dominated by younger activists, has been particularly open to calls for drug and criminal justice policy reform.
Support for the proposal has come in from the right, too. The Lynchburg News and Advance a conservative paper that publishes in the hometown of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, weighed in favorably.
“America’s prisons — both federal and state — are overflowing with prisoners. The United States has about 5 percent of the world’s population; we have about 25 percent of the world’s known prison population, Webb estimates,” offered the editorial board. “Something, somewhere is seriously wrong.”
It was jarring to see Webb’s advocacy of major prison reform in my Sunday copy of PARADE Magazine, where Webb has published before. Yet he has unyielding and, as Glennzilla says, deeply courageous for tackling this issue which is such a blight on our national character. Something is seriously wrong with the broken prison system in California, as I’ve documented extensively. Decades of failure to lead, adherence to the “tough on crime” label and willingness to lock up non-violent offenders has led to some of the worst outcomes in the nation.
Most interesting about Webb’s proposal is that he connected the prison crisis to our absolutely failed drug policy. After 30 years of interdiction and mass arrest, drug production is up and consumption is up, and the objectives of the so-called “war on drugs” have yet to be achieved in any substantive way. You cannot talk about prison reform without ending the characterization of drug addiction as a crime instead of a medical dependency requiring treatment.
I am hopeful that Webb has the desire to keep pushing this forward; obviously it will take years if not decades to get a sane prison policy in this country. But the need is so great.
I’m not the type who gets too exercized when people use metaphors that can be construed by someone, somewhere as condoning violence. When somebody says ‘string ’em up” or “they should be taken out and shot” I usually see it as colorful but unimaginative rhetoric that isn’t a literal threat.
But when there is a history of actual violence, I think it’s probably a mistake to go on television and speak in the terms that Dick Morris does below. From Oliver Willis:
Seniors On The Roller Coaster by digby Brian Beutler reports:
One of the fun little tidbits in the Republican Budget roll out today is here:
The substitute gradually converts the current Medicare program into one in which Medicare beneficiaries choose the most affordable coverage that best suits their individual needs. For individuals 55 or older, Medicare will not be changed (other than income-relating the prescription drug benefit): the budget preserves the existing program for these beneficiaries. To make the program sustainable and dependable, those 54 and younger will enroll in a new Medicare Program with health coverage similar to what is now available to Members of Congress and Federal employees.
This is an idea that’s been kicking around in conservative circles for some time, and it’s an expensive one. Well, it’s expensive unless you’re an insurance company, in which case it’s extremely lucrative.
Because the one thing that’s really missing from the lives of older Americans is haggling with insurance companies. It’ll keep ’em from “overusing” the system. Of course, they’ll be dead.
In case anyone’s still uninformed about just what kind of fun sick people have in this country when they deal with insurance companies, watch last night’s Frontline called “Sick Around America.”
The answer to the problem is to get any shit job that provides insurance, no matter what it is, and then prostitute yourself as long as possible to keep it. If the company goes under in the recession, or your boss walks in one morning and decides she hates you, you’re just out of luck. It’s kind of like a thrill ride. Without a net.