Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Capital Offense
by digbyThe latest taser death:

A man died Saturday after a Sonoma County Sheriff’s deputy responding to a violent attack in a Santa Rosa home stunned him three times with a Taser, according to the sheriff’s office. Nathan Vaughn, 39, was throwing and breaking things inside a home on Brighton Drive when the deputy arrived at the house, the sheriff’s office said in a statement today. The deputy stunned Vaughn once, then hit him two more times when Vaughn continued to fight. The deputy, who has not been named, was able to handcuff Vaughn, but shortly thereafter Vaughn showed signs of medical problems, according to the sheriff’s office. An ambulance crew already on the scene treated Vaughn and took him to Kaiser Permanente Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead. The incident started at about 10:30 a.m. Saturday when Vaughn’s mother, Doris Vaughn, called 911 and told a dispatcher that her son was “very violent” and was “destroying the house” and “hitting his dad,” according to the Sheriff’s Department. Vaughn’s father, Ronald Vaughn, suffered multiple cuts and bruises in the incident, none of which required immediate medical attention, according to the Sheriff’s Department. Investigators later learned that deputies had responded to another disturbance at the same house at 4:30 a.m. Friday. No one was arrested in that incident, but Nathan Vaughn was taken from the home to stay with friends. Shortly after deputies left Vaughn, he went to a pay phone and made several calls to 911 but hung up on dispatchers, according to the sheriff’s office. Deputies then arrested Vaughn for making repeated, unnecessary emergency calls. Vaughn was cited and released from Sonoma County Jail at about 1:30 p.m. Friday. Vaughn had an “extensive” history of arrests and convictions in a 15-page criminal history report, according to the sheriff’s office. He had been convicted multiple times for drug possession and being under the influence. He also had several theft-related convictions and had served time in state prison for burglary, according to the sheriff’s office.

He does sound like a very messed up guy and I don’t doubt that the officers were in a dangerous situation. But the last I heard we hadn’t yet instituted the death penalty for making unnecessary emergency calls, drug addiction, throwing stuff or even assault. And even then, I would expect they’d have some kind of due process. But with our wonderful non-lethal taser weapons, the state seems to be saving a lot of time and money by frequently electrocuting people to death right on the spot.

h/t to teddysanfran

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Disaster Christianity

by digby

Stirling Newberry has an interesting post up at FDL about Rick Warren’s African AIDS ministry. It’s always seemed obvious to me that this was a thinly disguised conversion effort and it appears to be true. That’s not to say that it isn’t doing some good work, but the work could just as easily be done withouet religious proselytizing. (The ABC method — abstinence, be faithful, use condoms — works fine as a secular public health message.)

The idea was supposed to be that because churches were already present, they could be the disseminators of the message. But that’s not actually how it’s working:

… let’s take another PEACE project, the community in the Philipines:

We shall help bring Christ into the lives of these people by insisting in them to form into small groups and study small group materials that would direct them to God and to growth in character. Hopefully, we can also assist in building a network of support (government and non-government) for these people from whom they can appeal for financing assistance (livelihood loans and funding) and other things that can add to the welfare of the community. This would include building a network of churches that would be ready to receive new attendees coming from the small groups we have formed.

After the recitation of facts, the core of their proejct is laid out: set up a community they control, including the political leaders, and make them meet every week to study the Bibles that they pass out and the materials they send. This is Disaster Christianity. Find hopeless people, give them a few goods and services, and then build a theocracy. It is the model of Hamas in Palestine.

The difference, of course, is that a large amount of the funding for the Warren project comes from taxpayers who don’t know that they are paying to convert the third world to evangelical Christianity as part of the plan. Not that they have a choice in the matter. Their tax dollars a spent on this religious project whether they like it or not.

Meanwhile, the conservative argument for everything from the Hyde Amendment to these new “conscience clauses” is that people should not have to pay or provide services for things they find morally objectionable. But that’s only for Real Americans. The rest of us just have to eat dirt and do what we’re told.

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Forgetting The Purpose

by digby

Jonathan at A Tiny Revolution gives PJ O’Rourke a well deserved wanker award.

According to PJ, the conservatives took their eyes off the ball and forgot the essential point of their ideology: hippie bashing. Big mistake.

Conservatism can never fail. It can only be failed.

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Pwnership Tick Tock

by digby

The New York Times published a great article this week-end about Bush’s contribution to the economic meltdown, specifically the measures his administration took in the housing sector. ( It’s in the business section instead of on the front page, unfortunately. It’s on the front page of the print edition, above the fold)

The global financial system was teetering on the edge of collapse when President Bush and his economics team huddled in the Roosevelt Room of the White House for a briefing that, in the words of one participant, “scared the hell out of everybody.”It was Sept. 18. Lehman Brothers had just gone belly-up, overwhelmed by toxic mortgages. Bank of America had swallowed Merrill Lynch in a hastily arranged sale. Two days earlier, Mr. Bush had agreed to pump $85 billion into the failing insurance giant American International Group. The president listened as Ben S. Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, laid out the latest terrifying news: The credit markets, gripped by panic, had frozen overnight, and banks were refusing to lend money. Then his Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., told him that to stave off disaster, he would have to sign off on the biggest government bailout in history. Mr. Bush, according to several people in the room, paused for a single, stunned moment to take it all in. “How,” he wondered aloud, “did we get here?”Eight years after arriving in Washington vowing to spread the dream of homeownership, Mr. Bush is leaving office, as he himself said recently, “faced with the prospect of a global meltdown” with roots in the housing sector he so ardently championed. There are plenty of culprits, like lenders who peddled easy credit, consumers who took on mortgages they could not afford and Wall Street chieftains who loaded up on mortgage-backed securities without regard to the risk. But the story of how we got here is partly one of Mr. Bush’s own making, according to a review of his tenure that included interviews with dozens of current and former administration officials.

We know how the Mayberry Machiavellis worked, so we also know that this was politics rather than principle. The term “ownership society” was essentially a campaign slogan to sell their plans to privatize social security, first and foremost. (It also applied to their generous proposal to allow us to pay for our own health insurance and educations.) They were trying to create a legacy phrase like The New Deal (by destroying the New Deal programs.)

But it’s also true that the policies they put into place on homeownership were used to try to expand their electoral base by encouraging minority home ownership and, of course, paying off their contributors in the financial world. No news there. But it was all politics, from beginning to end, even if Bush himself had some starry eyed delusion that he was making everybody in America an “owner.”

Mr. Bush populated the financial system’s alphabet soup of oversight agencies with people who, like him, wanted fewer rules, not more.The president’s first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission promised a “kinder, gentler” agency. The second was pushed out amid industry complaints that he was too aggressive. Under its current leader, the agency failed to police the catastrophic decisions that toppled the investment bank Bear Stearns and contributed to the current crisis, according to a recent inspector general’s report. As for Mr. Bush’s banking regulators, they once brandished a chain saw over a 9,000-page pile of regulations as they promised to ease burdens on the industry. When states tried to use consumer protection laws to crack down on predatory lending, the comptroller of the currency blocked the effort, asserting that states had no authority over national banks. The administration won that fight at the Supreme Court. But Roy Cooper, North Carolina’s attorney general, said, “They took 50 sheriffs off the beat at a time when lending was becoming the Wild West.”The president did push rules aimed at forcing lenders to more clearly explain loan terms. But the White House shelved them in 2004, after industry-friendly members of Congress threatened to block confirmation of his new housing secretary. In the 2004 election cycle, mortgage bankers and brokers poured nearly $847,000 into Mr. Bush’s re-election campaign, more than triple their contributions in 2000, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. The administration did not finalize the new rules until last month.Among the Republican Party’s top 10 donors in 2004 was Roland Arnall. He founded Ameriquest, then the nation’s largest lender in the subprime market, which focuses on less creditworthy borrowers. In July 2005, the company agreed to set aside $325 million to settle allegations in 30 states that it had preyed on borrowers with hidden fees and ballooning payments. It was an early signal that deceptive lending practices, which would later set off a wave of foreclosures, were widespread.Andrew H. Card Jr., Mr. Bush’s former chief of staff, said White House aides discussed Ameriquest’s troubles, though not what they might portend for the economy. Mr. Bush had just nominated Mr. Arnall as his ambassador to the Netherlands, and the White House was primarily concerned with making sure he would be confirmed.“Maybe I was asleep at the switch,” Mr. Card said in an interview.Brian Montgomery, the Federal Housing Administration commissioner, understood the significance. His agency insures home loans, traditionally for the same low-income minority borrowers Mr. Bush wanted to help. When he arrived in June 2005, he was shocked to find those customers had been lured away by the “fool’s gold” of subprime loans. The Ameriquest settlement, he said, reinforced his concern that the industry was exploiting borrowers.In December 2005, Mr. Montgomery drafted a memo and brought it to the White House. “I don’t think this is what the president had in mind here,” he recalled telling Ryan Streeter, then the president’s chief housing policy analyst.It was an opportunity to address the risky subprime lending practices head on. But that was never seriously discussed. More senior aides, like Karl Rove, Mr. Bush’s chief political strategist, were wary of overly regulating an industry that, Mr. Rove said in an interview, provided “a valuable service to people who could not otherwise get credit.” While he had some concerns about the industry’s practices, he said, “it did provide an opportunity for people, a lot of whom are still in their houses today.”

This is what comes of having the president’s political hit man intimately involved in policy.
None of this is to suggest that this wasn’t based on the noxious free market fundamentalism of the conservative movement. It certainly was. They would have tried to deregulate and remove all oversight of the industry no matter what. But Bush-Rove-Cheney were a unique trio who were able to use the federal government to not only advance their self-serving economic and foreign policy ideology for the benefit of their rich contributors, they were also obsessed with using every lever of government as political tools to advance their electoral prospects and destroy the political opposition. The problem is that they thought they could control forces that no government can control through marketing, lies and propaganda. And they got schooled. Unfortunately, everyone else is going to have to pay the price.
Read the whole article if you get the chance. It’s yet another illustration of the stupidity, myopia, greed, arrogance and incompetence of the Bush administration — and the total bankruptcy of conservative ideology when put into practice.

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It’s A Bloggy Holiday

by digby

Yes, it’s that time of year again, the time when I ask all of my loyal readers to pitch in a penny or two to keep Ye Olde Blogge up and running for another year. And this year it’s harder for me to make that request. Everyone is hurting a little bit, or scared they will be shortly. And we’ve all just spent an exhausting year throwing our spare money to politicians to try to end the horrors of the Bush years. So, I know it’s tough.

But I decided to ask anyway in the hopes that we will be able to keep this blog going, and the financial model that supports it, through this treacherous time ahead. A lot of businesses are going to fail and a lot of people are going to be out of work, but I’m hopeful that independent blogs like this one can continue to be a source of information, analysis and community while we all go through it together.

Thank the Gods and Goddesses of your choice that we have a new president, blessed with brains and common sense, during this period. (Seriously, if the Republicans had managed to extend their run I don’t think I could have kept doing this while I amassed my survival gear and headed out to the Brook Range in Alaska to await the end times.) But as it is, there is cause for hope (yes there is!) and good reason to stick this out and remain engaged as we face these tough times ahead.

Everything’s about to take a bit of a shift, of course. The netroots and the Progressive Movement are no longer strictly an oppositional force. And I, like bloggers everywhere, have struggled with how to deal with that. But I think I pretty much always come back to the same place, which is that I just muddle along daily like everyone else, sorting out what I think is happening and how I feel about it, right here in front of all of you. And I admit that with the new political order, it’s sometimes hard to figure out exactly what that is — I simply don’t know yet how the Obama revolution is going to affect the village or how they are going to react to it. It’s all unfolding in a most fascinating and absorbing way.

When I started this blog six years ago, we were a very tiny group of liberal political junkies fighting against an overwhelming tide of jingoistic conservatism everywhere. The community was intimate and friendly, like a small group of outcasts banding together for comfort and validation. Obviously, a lot has changed since then. The blogosphere has been professionalized and monetized and little blogs like mine are now dinosaurs. Indeed, Tina Brown’s new venture The Daily Beast is backed by Barry Diller with untold millions and she’s hired professional writers like Tucker Carlson(!) to write for big bucks. Reporters and editors are all blogging and tweeting and IMing like crazy these days. It’s a new world.

But I’m hopeful that there will still be room for the outsider types like me to keep doing this based on the shoestring model we developed back in the day — reader donations, ads and some help here or there from liberal institutions if it’s offered. It’s the freest form of writing there is, we do not answer to any single entity (certainly not Tina Brown and Barry Diller) and no advertiser pays enough to make it worthwhile to sell ourselves out. If we get any support from liberal institutions it’s with the understanding that it’s to keep doing what we’re doing. It’s a great model as long as you don’t have any ambition to get rich, but rather just want to maintain the privilege of writing your blog every day.

And I do mean every day. I realized last night as I was thinking about this that I haven’t taken a day off in over a year. Not one. But the amazing thing is that I didn’t realize that until I thought about it. Blogging isn’t work, it’s just … my life. But obviously, I have to generate money like everyone else and your kind contributions over the last three years have made it possible for me to keep this up. So, if you have it, and can spare it, I’d be grateful once again for any change you can put in the paypal tip jar over there (or via snail mail at the address shown) to make this a Very Bloggy Holiday.

On behalf of my friends and contributors, the fabulous dday, tristero and Dennis, I want to thank all of you for spending time with us, slogging through our scribblings, sharing our passions and keeping us on our toes whether we like it or not. There would be no Hullabaloo without community and none of us would do it weren’t for you fine folks reading and participating and always making us feel like it’s a worthwhile way to contribute.

Happy Hollandaise everyone.

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Saturday Night At The Movies

Frost/Nixon: Confessions of a dangerous mind

By Dennis Hartley

Conscience is but a word that cowards use,
Devised at first to keep the strong in awe.

-Wm. Shakespeare (from Richard III)

I’m saying that when the president does it…that means it’s not illegal.

-Richard M. Nixon

There’s an old theatrical performer’s axiom that goes “Always leave ‘em wanting more.” In August of 1974, President Richard Nixon made his Watergate-weary exit from the American political stage with a nationally televised resignation soliloquy, and left ‘em wanting more…answers. Any immediate hopes for an expository epilogue to this five year long usurpation of the American Constitution-cum-Shakespearean tragedy were abruptly dashed one month later when President Gerald Ford granted him a full pardon. Like King Lear, the mad leader slunk back to his castle by the sea and out of public view.

Time passed. Most Americans turned their attention to the recession of ’74-’75, and various shiny distractions like Pet Rocks, disco balls, and Charlie’s Angels. Some inquiring minds, however, still wanted to know. One of them was a British television personality/savvy self-promoter by the name of David Frost, who had been kicking around the medium since the early 60s in various guises, ranging from droll satirist (That Was the Week that Was and The Frost Report in the U.K.) to straight-up talk show host (Frost on America). Although he occasionally interviewed politicians and statesmen, he wasn’t generally thought of as a “journalist” prior to 1977. When he first started shopping an idea to tackle former President Richard Nixon in a series of exclusive TV interviews, he raised many an eyebrow and was ostensibly laughed out of a few network executive’s offices (it would be like David Letterman suddenly deciding that he wanted to become the next Mike Wallace… “Get out of here, you nut!”). Undeterred, Frost decided that he would fund the project himself and independently syndicate the broadcasts. Eventually, of course, the interviews did hit the airwaves, and the rest (as they always say) is History.

While the broadcasts themselves have become the stuff of legend to political junkies (being the closest anyone ever got to coaxing and capturing for posterity something resembling a pang of conscience and regret from The Tricky One for his crimes), the machinations leading up to the actual broadcasts may not sound like the makings of an engrossing tale, but it has inspired a popular Broadway play and now a riveting new film.

Guided with an assured hand by director Ron Howard, and adapted for the screen by Peter Morgan (from his own award-winning play), Frost/Nixon is a superbly crafted mélange of history lesson, courtroom drama, backstage tale, heavyweight championship boxing match, and (perhaps most importantly) another handy reference link for you to use in order to impress friends with your prowess at playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.

Morgan’s screenplay is deftly built around this perfect setup for a clash of the titans: The Consummate Showman vs. The Consummate Politician. The “oil and water” mix of the two personalities is also a natural for theatrical consideration; Frost was good-looking, charming, glib and well-appointed in personal appearance, whereas Nixon was shifty-eyed, socially awkward and brooding, topped off by a relatively rumpled countenance.

In this corner: Former President Richard M. Nixon (Frank Langella, reprising his Tony-winning stage role), his agent Swifty Lazar (Toby Jones), his former White House Chief of Staff/Man Friday Jack Brennen (Kevin Bacon!), and wife Pat (Patty McCormack). And in this corner: David Frost (Michael Sheen, also reprising his Broadway role), his chief researchers (Sam Rockwell and Oliver Platt) and girlfriend/Muse (Rebecca Hall).

Langella and Sheen are masterfully, perfectly in tune with each other onscreen; this is undoubtedly due to the fact that they already had ample opportunity to flesh out their respective characters during their Broadway run together. It’s one of the best movie performances I’ve seen by Langella (he already has a Golden Globe nom, we will see what happens come Oscar time). Armed with Morgan’s incisive dialog, and with Howard’s skillful yet respectfully unobtrusive direction to cover his flank, he is able to uncannily capture the essence of Nixon’s contradictions and complexities; the supreme intelligence, the grandiose pomposity and the congenital craftiness, all corroded by the insidious paranoia that eventually consumed his soul, and by turn, the soul of the nation.

All the supporting performances are wonderful, particularly from Platt and Rockwell as Frost’s tenacious strategists, who in a roundabout sort of way play out like Tom Stoppard’s re-imagining of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to Nixon’s Hamlet (if I may continue to run with the Shakespearean analogies here, with the exasperated reader’s kind permission). Indeed, it is Rockwell’s character who utters the script’s most insightful observation about Nixon’s Achilles Heel in this affair; he posits that no matter how cagily Nixon fancied himself to be putting one over on Frost, he was ultimately done in by something that never lies: “The reductive power of the close-up.” Anon. (Fade to black).

The Nixon library: Frost/Nixon: The Original Watergate Interviews, Nixon – The Election Year Edition, Secret Honor, All the President’s Men , The Assassination of Richard Nixon, Dick, The Trials of Henry Kissinger, The Final Days (TV), Missing , The Parallax View, The Conversation, Three Days of the Condor

Previous posts with related themes: The Hoax

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Protecting Their Own

by digby

Last week-end I wrote a long and I’m sure mostly unread post about uber-villager Stuart Taylor and his crusade to ensure that the Bush administration’s unitary executive torture regime goes unpunished. I talked about how Taylor was a major player in the Clinton scandals who believed that it was a serious breach of law and ethics for the president to lie about his sex life, but who now thinks it would be wrong to prosecute those who ordered torture based upon a clearly unconstitutional executive power grab designed to provide cover for anyone who broke the law. Taylor even goes so far as to say that Obama will probably need to preserve these powers because he will be faced with the need to do the same things.

Today Ruth Marcus proves that this has gelled into Beltway conventional wisdom, which is entirely predictable. Taylor is one of the”serious” people among the legal punditocrisy, a man who is trustworthy because while he is clearly a right wing hack, he tut-tuts just enough about right wing excesses to be considered “fair and balanced.” His and others’ assertion that some unknown extremist Justice Department functionary’s cracked legal opinion absolves those who ordered law breaking is now the default view among the beltway elites.Indeed, it was likely never in dispute.

Marcus discusses this in the context of Mark “Deepthroat” Feldt’s death this week-end and Ronald Reagan pardoning him for having illegally spied on Americans in the 1970s. She feels compassion, as many people do, for people of her own social class who find themselves in trouble with the law. And like all establishment types, she sees no good purpose in putting nice elites in the dock and convinces herself that pardons in these cases are always required in order to heal the country and move on. Except, as Glenn Greenwald points out in this masterful take down of her column today, the country is never actually healed and we never move on.

In fact, I have long argued that most of the past 35 years have been one long, horrific orgy of undemocratic political thuggery and conservative usurpation of the constitution. They get caught, they suffer some temporary public disapprobation, people like Feldt are caught in strange moral quandries, we define democracy down, but there is never any official sanction. It’s become so common that we now this as a natural part of our politics — the Republicans seize power, they use it in illegal and undemocratic ways, they are exposed, the Democrats win, they fail to hold them accountable and the cycle starts again. (Why, if we didn’t know any better, we might think they were all in on it together! Heavens…)

Meanwhile, the villagers know these people as friends. (Indeed, they resent the public for being unpleasant about all this.) I wrote a post a while back about the beltway’s reaction to the Christmas Eve pardons that illustrates how they think:

Here’s some world weary beltway wisdom from our old pal Richard Cohen in the Wapo’s December 30, 1992 issue, who had his suspicions, but in the end just shrugged his shoulders and moved on:

Back when Caspar Weinberger was secretary of defense, he and I used to meet all the time. Our “meetings” — I choose to call them that — took place in the Georgetown Safeway, the one on Wisconsin Avenue, where I would go to shop and Cap would too. My clear recollection is that once — was it before Thanksgiving? — he bought a turkey.

I tell you this about the man President Bush just pardoned because it always influenced my opinion of Weinberger. (In contrast, I submit the member of the House leadership who had an aide push the cart.) Based on my Safeway encounters, I came to think of Weinberger as a basic sort of guy, candid and no nonsense — which is the way much of official Washington saw him. It seemed somehow cruel that he should end his career — he’s 75 — either as a defendant in a criminal case or as a felon. The man deserved better than that.

And so when Weinberger was indicted by Lawrence E. Walsh, the special Iran-contra prosecutor, I despaired. Weinberger had been on the “right” side of the debate within the Reagan administration of whether to sell arms to Iran in exchange for the release of hostages held in Lebanon. He opposed the swap, but he did so in confidence. Clearly, he lost the argument, and he may have lost his good sense when he allegedly withheld evidence. That being said, I was pleased when he was pardoned.

[…]

We now know that Bush kept a diary that, until recently, he withheld from the special prosecutor. My guess is that we will eventually get even more evidence of Bush’s participation in the making of the arms-for-hostages policy but that, ultimately, his role will always be in dispute. That, in a way, is fitting. It conforms to his posture on raising taxes, on abortion, on civil rights and on judicial appointments, the misrepresentation of Clarence Thomas as eminently qualified for the court above all. A kind of haze, a political-ideological miasma, is the fitting legacy of the Bush presidency.

Cap, my Safeway buddy, walks, and that’s all right with me. As for the other five, they are not crooks in the conventional sense but Cold Warriors who, confident in the justice of their cause, were contemptuous of Congress. Because they thought they were right, they did not think they had to be accountable. This is the damage the Cold War did to our democracy.

And so it goes.

This all began with Nixon and the pardon, in my opinion. Many of us, myself included, believed as Marcus and Taylor still do, that forgiveness is a good thing, that the country needs to heal after a tumultuous time and there is no purpose in dragging people through the mud. But I was wrong then and they are still wrong today. How many times do we have to be hit over the head with this stuff before we realize that these people are getting more and more radical with each successive bite at the apple?

Dennis is reviewing Frost/Nixon tonight and I look forward to seeing it. I remember the original interviews quite well and I recall thinking I must have misunderstood when Nixon said “if the president does it it isn’t illegal.” (And the corollary is Gerald Ford’s dictum that an impeachable offense is whatever the congress says it is. ) But it is really that simple for these people. It’s about using the levers of power without restraint or concern for the spirit of the constitution to advance their agenda. Obviously the Bush administration created a more complicated set of legal arguments around the commander in chief and “wartime” but Nixon’s simple explanation was far more elegant — and honest — in its simplicity.

Nixon’s legacy is not just presidential lawlessness, although it is. It’s not just conservative belief in imperial prerogatives, although it’s that too. His legacy is also a political establishment that rejects legal accountability by pretending to be protective of the nation’s delicate sensibilities when it is actually covering up for it’s miscreant elders so as not to disrupt their own community. This is the essence of the village critique — it’s the parochialism, stupid. It’s all about them.

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Who Me?

by digby

Peggy Noonan is bemoaning the fact that all of her rich friends are suffering from the finacial collapse because there have been no grown-ups in charge.

Those who were supposed to be watching things, making the whole edifice run, keeping it up and operating, just somehow weren’t there. That’s the big thing at the heart of the great collapse, a strong sense of absence. Who was in charge? Who was in authority? The biggest swindle in all financial history if the figure of $50 billion is to be believed, and nobody knew about it, supposedly, but the swindler himself. The government didn’t notice, just as it didn’t notice the prevalence of bad debts that would bring down America’s great investment banks.

No word on how this could have happened:

Bush, a Modest Man of Faith
The president has to be trustworthy. by PEGGY NOONAN
Thursday, November 2, 2000 12:01 A.M. EST Readers of this page are familiar with the policy questions at issue in the election. As president, George W. Bush’s natural inclination and stated intention is and will be to lower taxes, not raise them, to clear away regulation rather than create it, and to reform Social Security in a way that makes it more lucrative for recipients, more secure as an entitlement, and more respectful toward those workers who will be allowed to redirect a portion of their contributions into markets. He will allow Americans once again to look for and develop energy resources, while opposing irresponsible treatment of precious unspoiled lands. In taking these actions Mr. Bush will strengthen the foundations of today’s prosperity so the long boom continues. Federal decisions of course can weaken prosperity. Al Gore’s proposals–new entitlements, new spending, a balanced budget and no tax increase–seem so contradictory as to be schizophrenic, and more likely to turn a downturn into a deep recession. In the area of public education Mr. Bush, unlike Mr. Gore, is sympathetic to the effort to extend choice to those at the middle and bottom of the economic ladder through charter schools and voucher scholarships. This–the school liberation movement–is the most promising development in American public education because, by its nature, it elevates the needs of children over the demands of unions. In foreign affairs Mr. Bush’s intentions are marked by moral modesty and a lack of illusions: America, he repeated in the last debate, must fully engage the world, but with humility. His first and most crucial foreign-affairs endeavor will begin, appropriately, at home: improving the national defense, remedying the effects of eight years of confusion and neglect, enhancing responsiveness to future challenges, increasing morale, restoring those aspects of the old military culture that are positive and needed. In all this he will differ from Mr. Gore, who, if he took such actions would rouse the anger of his base, parts of which are animated by a reflexive animus to, or indifference toward, American military might. Having been forced to fight to keep his base during the election, he will not soon defy it in the White House. In character, personality traits, history and attitudes, Mr. Bush seems the opposite of both Bill and Hillary Clinton and of Mr. Gore. Mr. Bush has an instinctive personal modesty, an easygoing sense of both human and governmental limits. He will know how to step aside and let the country take center stage; he will know how to show respect for others; he will not bray endlessly about his own excellence, will not compare himself to Nelson Mandela, Mark McGuire, or the heroes of the novels “Love Story” or “Darkness at Noon”; he will not discuss his underpants. Laura Bush will not announce that her husband’s power is hers, that she is co-president, and that she will soon nationalize 17% of the gross national product. Both Bushes seem not emotionally troubled but mentally balanced, which was once considered the lowest of expectations for our leaders but now seems like a gift to the nation. All of this will be a relief. What’s more, it suggests a restoration of civility and grace to the White House, and to political discourse. This will have happy implications for our democracy, and for the children who see it unfold each day. A Bush presidency would mark a cultural-political paradox: a triumph of class that is a setback for snobbery. Class–consideration, a lack of bullying ego, respect for others–has been not much present the past eight years. The Clintons and Mr. Gore have acted and spoken in ways that suggest they believe they are more intelligent and capable than others–superior, in short. They have behaved as if they believe they are entitled to assist others by limiting their autonomy; thus the tax policies in which they take our surplus and spend it for us, the social programs in which they limit what you might fritter away in your sweet but incompetent way. The Clintons and Mr. Gore, intelligent and ambitious, came of age at the moment in our history when America As Meritocracy took off like a rocket; and they had merit. They were educated at fine universities at the moment those universities became factories for manufacturing the kind of people who prefer mankind to men and government to the individual. To absorb those views was to help ensure one’s rise. They rose. In time they won power in the system they helped invent–command-and-control liberalism. In rising and running things they became what they are: vain and ruthless as only those who have not suffered could be. Not realizing they were lucky they came to think they were deserving; they were sure they had the right to show the inferior—that would be you and me–how to arrange their lives. Mr. Bush came from the same generation, lived in the same time, but became a very different sort of man. He wasn’t impressed by Yale; when he saw the elites up close he didn’t like what he saw. He was of Midland, Texas. He became a businessman, floundered, knew success, experienced disappointment, became a deep believer in God. His religious commitment has meant for him the difference between a clear mind and a double mind. It has helped him become a man who is attached to truth on a continuing basis, and not just an expedient one. It means he sees each person as a unique individual worthy of dignity, freedom and responsibility. Mr. Bush has the awkwardness of the convicted, meaning roughly, “I’m a mess, or at least have been; I’m not a hypocrite but I’ve been that too. I am utterly flawed and completely dependent; and I’m doing my best.” He knows he is better than no one. The man with the swagger and the smirk is humble. Mr. Bush has a natural sympathy for, and is the standard bearer of, the modest, the patronized, the disrespected. The lumberman of Washington state who wants to earn his living responsibly and with respect; the candy store owner of New Jersey who’s had it up to here with regulation and taxes; the Second Amendment-loving Louisiana housewife who keeps a gun high up in the closet; the Ohio nurse who worries about abortion and who knows that “You oppose abortion? Then don’t have one!” is as empty and unsatisfying as “You don’t like slavery? Then don’t own one!”; the courthouse clerk in Tennessee who says he’ll go to jail before he’ll take the Ten Commandments off the wall; and the tired old teacher who carries a copy of the Constitution in his pocket and knows that while it is a living document it is not the plaything of ideologues. All of these–the shouted down and silenced in what the Clintons and Mr. Gore call the national conversation–are for Mr. Bush, and he for them. That is a great irony of the 2000 election: The man who speaks for the nobodies is the president’s son, Mr. Andover Head Cheerleader of 1965. But history is replete with such ironies; they have kept the national life interesting. If Mr. Bush is wise he will continue as president to stand with them, and speak for them, so that in time their numbers increase, and a big but beset minority will grow and become again what it once was: a governing coalition. This election could in this sense be a realigning one. There is the question of intelligence: Is Al Gore bright enough to be president? Both Mr. Bush and Mr. Gore are intelligent men, but they have very different kinds of minds. George Bush respects permanent truths and is not in the thrall of prevalent attitudes. He thinks the Sermon on the Mount is the greatest speech ever given. This would strike some as an obvious thing to say, but it takes courage now to say the obvious thing, because to say the obvious is to declare that you see it, and to declare that you see it is to announce yourself . . . a bit of dunce. If you had a first rate mind you’d see what isn’t obvious, such as . . . the illustrative power of metaphor to speak to the existential challenge to postmodern man, which is to flourish within a democratic framework and negotiate its inevitable power centers while balancing the need for communal unity on the one hand with the necessity to find and unlock individual potential on the other. I don’t think that sentence made sense, but you could speak it in a lot of places–a faculty dinner, the vice president’s house–and elicit nods of approval. And not in spite of the fact that it is nonsense but because of it. The intellectually ambitious of the Clinton-Gore class seem willing to follow any small crumbs in their search for truths, perhaps because they can’t see so many of the older and enduring ones. Mr. Gore with his metaphor grids and his arrows and circles shows us not a creative mind at work but a lost mind in search of shelter. Henry Hyde once said of Newt Gingrich: “He’s always discovering new things to believe in.” He meant: a real grown-up doesn’t carry on like this, inventing new philosophies, drawing arrows and sparks; a real grown-up learns what from the past is true, and brings it into the present. Mr. Bush speaks of God and George Washington and Reagan, and the elites find it unsophisticated. But for many citizens it will be good to see in leadership one of such simplicity, grounded in such realities, respecting of such wisdom. Mr. Bush is at odds with the spirit of the past eight years in another way. He appears to be wholly uninterested in lying, has no gift for it, thinks it’s wrong. This is important at any time, but is crucial now. The next president may well be forced to shepherd us through the first nuclear event since World War II, the first terrorist attack or missile attack. “Man has never had a weapon he didn’t use,” Ronald Reagan said in conversation, and we have been most fortunate man has not used these weapons to kill in the past 50 years. But half the foreign and defense policy establishment fears, legitimately, that the Big Terrible Thing is coming, whether in India-Pakistan, or in Asia or in lower Manhattan. When it comes, if it comes, the credibility–the trustworthiness–of the American president will be key to our national survival. We may not be able to sustain a president who is known for his tendency to tell untruths. If we must go through a terrible time, a modest man of good faith is the one we’ll need in charge. That is George Walker Bush, governor of Texas.

Good thing Peggy Noonan bears no responsibility for where we are today.

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Tweety’s Run

by digby

Jamison Foser’s column this week does a masterful job of illustrating what the Democratic Party can look forward to dealing with if it is stupid enough to back Chris Matthews for the Pennsylvania senate. Here’s just one stomach churning example:

Matthews’ praise for Bush was at its most effusive when Bush gave his “Mission Accomplished” speech in 2003. Praising Bush’s “amazing display of leadership,” Matthews gushed:

He won the war. He was an effective commander. Everybody recognizes that, I believe, except a few critics. … He’s like Eisenhower. He looks great in a military uniform. He looks great in that cowboy costume he wears when he goes West. I remember him standing at that fence with Colin Powell. Was [that] the best picture in the 2000 campaign? … The president’s performance tonight, redolent of the best of Reagan … He looks for real. What is it about the commander in chief role, the hat that he does wear, that makes him — I mean, he seems like — he didn’t fight in a war, but he looks like he does. … Look at this guy!

Later that day, Matthews was back at it:

We’re proud of our president. Americans love having a guy as president, a guy who has a little swagger, who’s physical, who’s not a complicated guy like Clinton … They want a guy who’s president. Women like a guy who’s president. Check it out. The women like this war. I think we like having a hero as our president. It’s simple. … We want a guy as president.

There are some embarrassingly stupid members of congress and some who are more than a little bit theatrical, but Matthews would bring a level of absurdity to the senate that may just be unprecedented.

Foser says that this could be an opportunity to bring accountability to the press and hold at least one gasbag to the same standards to which they hold (some) politicians. It is certainly pretty to think so. But sadly, I think the village would rally around their pal and stage a full blown hissy fit over Matthews’ “swift boating” when the right used his silly words against him. Still, this stuff is just so embarrassing that it’s hard to see how would vote for him no matter how vociferously the media defends him.

But, I could be wrong. After al,l California elected a vapid, muscle bound movie star who literally campaigned using bad movie dialog and bumper stickers. I take nothing for granted. (And look where it got us…)

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Midnight Riders

by dday

This is the most unconscionable of Bush’s “midnight regulations.”

The Bush administration, as expected, announced new protections on Thursday for health care providers who oppose abortion and other medical procedures on religious or moral grounds.

“Doctors and other health care providers should not be forced to choose between good professional standing and violating their conscience,” Michael O. Leavitt, the secretary of Health and Human Services, said in a statement on his department’s Web site.

The rule prohibits recipients of federal money from discriminating against doctors, nurses and health care aides who refuse to take part in procedures because of their convictions, and it bars hospitals, clinics, doctors’ office and pharmacies from forcing their employees to assist in programs and activities financed by the department.

This will have profound consequences for women’s health. There is nothing here that doesn’t bar doctors from refusing to deliver birth control, for example, or the morning-after pill, or even let someone know where those services or family planning services can be provided. As Hilzoy said, this is a lazy person’s dream.

This is a wonderful rule for slackers, since it provides a legally protected way to get paid while doing no work at all. Here’s the plan:

(1) Get an MD, and a job as a doctor.
(2) Become a Christian Scientist.
(3) Announce your religious objection to participating in any medical procedure, or to supporting such procedures in any way (e.g., by doing the other doctors’ paperwork. This refusal would be protected under the rule.)
(4) When your employer protests, explain that your right to refuse to participate in any medical procedure at all is legally protected under this rule.

Voila: white-collar welfare! See how easy?

I guess that makes it the Bartleby rule?

If you’re not totally proud of your country right now, I’ll give you another reason:

Alone among major Western nations, the United States has refused to sign a declaration presented Thursday at the United Nations calling for worldwide decriminalization of homosexuality.

In all, 66 of the U.N.’s 192 member countries signed the nonbinding declaration — which backers called a historic step to push the General Assembly to deal more forthrightly with any-gay discrimination. More than 70 U.N. members outlaw homosexuality, and in several of them homosexual acts can be punished by execution.

Co-sponsored by France and the Netherlands, the declaration was signed by all 27 European Union members, as well as Japan, Australia, Mexico and three dozen other countries. There was broad opposition from Muslim nations, and the United States refused to sign, indicating that some parts of the declaration raised legal questions that needed further review.

It’s a good thing we have a new President who would never validate anyone with beliefs like we see here with the conscience rule or criminalizing homosexuality. Oh wait…

(I should note, in the interest of fairness, that the Obama transition team is committed to reversing the provider conscience rule.)

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