Palin’s routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness. In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric’s questions for her “less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media.” At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, “Sit down, boy.”
The media gets the dirty hippie treatment right to their faces — with a little Bull Connor thrown in for good measure. Good times.
Everyone seems surprised that the right has the nerve to portray Katie Couric as some sort of ruthless gotcha journalist. But there’s actually nothing new in it. After all, she’s famously known on Free Republic as “little Katie Communist.” And that was from her days hosting the Today Show.
If you weren’t paying attention to the last Democratic administration (or are too young to remember) you’re in for a real treat when the right fully revives its liberal media crusade. The Villagers will soon yearn for the day when the DFH bloggers were sending in angry emails.
Obama also said he was surprised some of those attacks weren’t brought up by his opponent at the debate Tuesday night at Belmont University in Nashville, Tenn.
“I am surprised that, you know, we’ve been seeing some pretty over-the-top attacks coming out of the McCain campaign over the last several days, that he wasn’t willing to say it to my face. But I guess we’ve got one last debate. So presumably, if he ends up feeling that he needs to, he will raise it during the debate.”
I have a feeling the erratic, mean coot isn’t going to like that much.
I just heard Chris Matthews say that McCain seems to be building the case that Obama is in some sort of Muslim terrorist sleeper cell.
He’s actually quite right. This may very well end up being an ongoing right wing theme for the next four years:
What the desultory townhall-style debate last night in Nashville between presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama lacked in passion and focus on the most important issue of our time – the threat posed by Shariah (Islamic law) to our freedoms, way of life and form of government – was much in evidence in another debate held near Baltimore. Under the sponsorship of The Harbor League, Center for Security Policy President Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. squared off with Suhail Khan, the Bush Administration’s Assistant to the Secretary of Transportation for Policy.
As an article by Mr. Gaffney describing the highlights of “the Other Debate” (repoduced below) makes clear, Khan did little to dissipate serious concerns about his past associations with, and affinity for, those who minimize the threat posed by Shariah-adherent Muslims – including many who are prominent supporters of Shariah’s largely stealthy insinuation into this country.
Keep in mind that polling still suggests that people believe that Republicans are better on the issue of terrorism.
This “debate” was hosted by none other than ultra conservative Sinclair Broadcasting. And Frank Gaffney isn’t some obscure right wing blogger, he’s a longstanding member of the permanent neconservative establishment. Indeed, he was one of the members of the “Family Security Council” the wingnut welfare group that published this notorious essay on its website:
If President Bush copied Julius Caesar by ordering his army to empty Iraq of Arabs and repopulate the country with Americans, he would achieve immediate results: popularity with his military; enrichment of America by converting an Arabian Iraq into an American Iraq (therefore turning it from a liability to an asset); and boost American prestiege while terrifying American enemies.
He could then follow Caesar’s example and use his newfound popularity with the military to wield military power to become the first permanent president of America, and end the civil chaos caused by the continually squabbling Congress and the out-of-control Supreme Court.
President Bush can fail in his duty to himself, his country, and his God, by becoming “ex-president” Bush or he can become “President-for-Life” Bush: the conqueror of Iraq, who brings sense to the Congress and sanity to the Supreme Court. Then who would be able to stop Bush from emulating Augustus Caesar and becoming ruler of the world? For only an America united under one ruler has the power to save humanity from the threat of a new Dark Age wrought by terrorists armed with nuclear weapons.
Now that Bush failed to take that sage advice, it looks like they’re going to have to deal with the “enemy within.”
The interesting thing about Gaffney (besides promoting rightwing propaganda about a Muslim fifth column in the government) is that one of his main targets is none other than Grover Norquist:
I also reported on the role Norquist has played before and during the George W. Bush administration in facilitating Islamist influence operations involving – at key points, with Suhail Khan’s help at the White House Office of Public Liaison – the likes of now-convicted terrorist-supporters like Abdurahman Alamoudi and Sami al-Arian. Khan serves on the board of the Islamic Free Market Institute, the organization Alamoudi helped Norquist establish a decade ago in his Americans for Tax Reform offices, apparently for the purpose of credentialing Islamists as conservatives, promoting their agenda in Washington and placing their friends in government jobs.
Speaking of the audience, the packed room included a couple of car-loads worth of staff and associates of Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform. Several of them asked pointed questions taken straight out of the Islamist play-book: asserting a moral equivalence between the extremists of Islam and those of Christianity and Judaism; insisting that there was no problem with authoritative Shariah, only with a small number of terrorists who falsely claim religious grounds for their criminal conduct; and suggesting that if Jews and various Christian sects can have and observe their own laws, why can’t Muslims? The fervor with which these non-Muslim conservative activists parroted the Brotherhood line suggested that more than simple solidarity with their friend, Suhail Khan, is at work in Norquist’s Islamist influence operation.
And here I thought Norquist was just trying to build a political majority.
Gaffney’s cracked paranoia is aimed at certain conservatives for the moment, but I can see quite clearly where this is going. I don’t doubt that Gaffney truly believes that Norquist is dangerous. He’s been pounding this thing for years. But very soon we are likely to have a president who is believed by a substantial minority to be a secret Muslim who is friendly with terrorists and Gaffney’s dark vision of a government infiltrated by radical Muslims who want to overturn the constitution and force Sharia law on all Americans will suddenly have salience:
At its core, Shariah’s agenda is seditious since it is designed to destroy the constitutional government of the United States and replace it with Islamic rule.
This end-state will be achieved here as elsewhere through violent (or “hard”) jihad, if possible. Where that is not immediately practicable, the Muslim Brotherhood has established scores of organizations to promote what might be called “soft” or “stealth” jihad.
The objective, however, is absolutely the same: In the words of an internal planning document written in 1991, “[The Brotherhood’s] work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.”
I concluded with the following points:
* Every U.S. government official swears a solemn oath to uphold and defend the Constitution. Those officials who are Muslim have a special responsibility to reject Shariah and the Muslim Brotherhood organizations stealthily trying to impose it on all of us. * To do otherwise is to fail to act in the face of seditious behavior – a felony offense under the U.S. code known as “misprision of treason.” * We need the help of all patriotic, law-abiding, tolerant Americans who are Muslims in fighting our mutual enemy: Shariah-adherent Islamists in this country and elsewhere. * A key test of which camp they are in is whether they acknowledge the nature of authoritative Islam’s Shariah and the threat it represents to our country and Constitution, and work against – not with – the groups advancing this seditious agenda.
This is the kind of thing that really makes me fear for Obama. They are already screaming “terrorist” at Palin’s rallies and shouting “kill him.” The whole “Obama is a muslim” thing is bizarre, but with his name and childhood spent partly in a Muslim country — and the fact that he’s black, which makes everyone flash on Louis Farrakhan — the collective right wing lizard brain twitches uncontrollably. They will use this, I have no doubt. There is an entire wingnut industry devoted to stirring up tensions in the middle east and another on devoted to character assassination of Democrats. Obama brings them together in serendipitous loathing and paranoia. It’s going to be ugly.
In this clip, Robert Gibbs is humming along with the perfect response to Sean Hannity’s Ayers obsession, asking if Hannity is an anti-Semite because he had a known anti-Semite as the centerpiece of his recent smear job on Barack Obama, and Alan Colmes throws the lifeline:
Hannity is bobbing and weaving, knowing that he’s caught, hiding behind this idea that he’s a “journalist” and he talks to a lot of people with whom he disagrees, which is completely besides the point because he made this Andy Martin guy the centerpiece of his show and completely agrees with his thoughts about Obama (Greenwald has much more on Martin), and being forced to confront the toxic sewer in which he and his right-wing cohorts swim every single day… and along comes Colmes, defending his partner by saying “Sean is not an anti-Semite.”
That’s not the point, Alan. The point is how the common winger guilt by association tactic is simply idiotic. It’s called a logical construct. But I guess Hannity was feeling too much heat, and somebody in the booth zapped Colmes and told him to do his duty as the Fox News “liberal” lickspittle.
Pathetic. But good on Robert Gibbs, if you’re going to go on TV with these clowns, this is how to do it.
There’s a story out today that the Presidential campaign has somehow “shifted back” to the economy because John McCain didn’t run out last night and tell Barack Obama to his face that he was a Muslim terrorist. And the Politico got these very nice little quotes from McCain staffers that “proved” this.
After days of attempts to persuade voters that Obama’s ties to ‘60s radical Bill Ayers are a crucial character issue, McCain didn’t mention Ayers’ name during the 90 minutes of Tuesday’s forum. His top aides suggested afterward that, going forward, the candidate wouldn’t focus on the former domestic terrorist nor invoke the name of Obama’s controversial pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Nicolle Wallace, a top McCain adviser, hinted McCain would not bring it up. “If asked about it, of course [he’ll talk about Ayers],” she said.
McCain’s chief strategist, Steve Schmidt all but said the controversial pastor remained off-limits.
“What Sen. McCain has said is that it’s not an issue he intends to talk about in the race,” said the aide, though he did note that Obama himself had called Wright ‘fair game.’
But Schmidt did say without prompting: “You’ve not seen Sen. McCain advertise on [Wright].”
Apparently, the institutional memory of the Washington press corps has been erased. These things aren’t meant to be frontal assaults – George H.W. Bush only brought up Willie Horton in a debate in 1988 after Dukakis approached the subject first. These things happen in the background, over email, through whisper campaigns, and once they’re in the ether they don’t need to be hyped again and again. It’s “out there.”
But McCain’s campaign isn’t as deft as those in the past, for a particular reason which I’ll get to in a moment. As for the idea that the McCain campaign’s given up on the character attacks, um, no:
ARLINGTON, VA — Today, John M. Murtagh made the following statement on Barack Obama’s relationship with William Ayers:
“When I was 9 years-old the Weather Underground, the terrorist group founded by Barack Obama’s friend William Ayers, firebombed my house. Barack Obama has dismissed concerns about his relationship with Ayers by noting that he was only a child when Ayers was planting bombs at the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol. But Ayers has never apologized for his crimes, he has reveled in them, expressing regret only for the fact that he didn’t do more […]
“Barack Obama may have been a child when William Ayers was plotting attacks against U.S. targets — but I was one of those targets. Barack Obama’s friend tried to kill my family.”
John McCain has a problem. He isn’t trusted by the base and so he must appeal to their darkest instincts, but every time he does so he turns off independents. Indeed, during the debate, every time he launched an attack, such as they were, the dials plummeted. But without his base he’s sunk and he has no ground game, so attack he must. That’s why Sarah Palin is taking the Agnew role and whipping crowds into a frenzy (and Joe Biden is right to call her on it), but McCain is backing away and hedging. That’s why his campaign is taking tentative steps in the water with the Ayers and Rezko and Wright stuff but never full steps. They know they must take the campaign into the gutter, but every time they do they destroy this carefully cultivated “honorable” brand, which was never true in reality, but also the only way he could ever win in a down Republican year.
The further problem is that the tentative steps are ugly enough to provoke anger and distaste. And of course, these are ill-suited times for the Republican playbook of smear and fear. Heck, even the racists are undecided.
An Obama supporter, who canvassed for the candidate in the working-class, white Philadelphia neighborhood of Fishtown recently, sends over an account that, in various forms, I’ve heard a lot in recent weeks.
“What’s crazy is this,” he writes. “I was blown away by the outright racism, but these folks are f***ing undecided. They would call him a n—-r and mention how they don’t know what to do because of the economy.”
I’m from Philly and I know Fishtown, and that rings very, very true.
The end result is that you get this lurching, haphazard, erratic campaign. Last night we saw the “compassionate conservative” asking for the government to buy out struggling mortgages (an idea that is far less than meets the eye – he would buy homes at full face value instead of what they’re actually worth – a huge payoff to the banks). In the same breath, by the way, he calls for a spending freeze on all but the most vital programs. And by this morning, there are Ayers attacks and new ads calling Obama “secretive”. There’s no rhyme or reason to any of it because of the enormous self-generated bind, having to please the wingnuts and simultaneously cut them off, having to strike a populist tone and simultaneously please his corporate paymasters and lobbyist staff, having to play to win while every attack hurts his own image.
Having learned the lessons of Herbert Hoover, the Republicans are working overtime to solve the financial crisis. They are creating a full blown PR offensive to blame Democrats:
American Issues Project is launching the second phase of a major television advertising campaign today spotlighting the role congressional liberals played blocking oversight and reform of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which spurred the housing bubble and led to the failing economy. The initial ad buy is one million dollars and will begin running today on FOX News, CNN and CNN Headline News.
“Our ad seeks to set the record straight and let the American people know who is responsible for this $700 billion catastrophe,” said Ed Martin, the organization’s president. “While liberals and some in the media try to affix blame to the Bush Administration for the housing crisis and resulting financial meltdown, this is one case where the real impetus for all these troubles is crystal clear. It was not the free market but government supported and propped-up institutions Fannie and Freddie that are the root cause. All roads for this failure lead back to liberals and their close ties to these two government institutions.”
Keep in mind that this isn’t really about the election at all. This an attempt to shape the narrative about the economic meltdown and the very real possibility of Republicans being in the wilderness for some time to come. They may not have learned from their historical economic errors, but they certainly learned from their historical political errors.
And, as we’ve noted before, this is one of the crudest racist attacks we’ve seen in a while. The liberals who ran Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac gave mortgages to blacks and Mexicans who everybody knows can’t be trusted to manage their money and they ruined the economy for hardworking Real Americans.
As others have already noted, it’s important that everyone remember this:
“…if you own something, you have a vital stake in the future of our country. The more ownership there is in America, the more vitality there is in America, and the more people have a vital stake in the future of this country.”
-President George W. Bush, June 17, 2004
The Challenge: America’s Changing Society
Life in America is changing dramatically, and President Bush believes that the Federal government should change too to help meet the challenges of our times. American families should have choices and access they need to affordable health care and homeownership; Americans should have the option of managing their own retirement; and small businesses, which employ over half of all workers, need lower taxes and fewer government mandates so they can grow.
President Bush’s Policies Promoting the Ownership Society
* Expanding Homeownership. The President believes that homeownership is the cornerstone of America’s vibrant communities and benefits individual families by building stability and long-term financial security. In June 2002, President Bush issued America’s Homeownership Challenge to the real estate and mortgage finance industries to encourage them to join the effort to close the gap that exists between the homeownership rates of minorities and non-minorities. The President also announced the goal of increasing the number of minority homeowners by at least 5.5 million families before the end of the decade. Under his leadership, the overall U.S. homeownership rate in the second quarter of 2004 was at an all time high of 69.2 percent. Minority homeownership set a new record of 51 percent in the second quarter, up 0.2 percentage point from the first quarter and up 2.1 percentage points from a year ago. President Bush’s initiative to dismantle the barriers to homeownership includes:
o American Dream Downpayment Initiative, which provides down payment assistance to approximately 40,000 low-income families;
o Affordable Housing. The President has proposed the Single-Family Affordable Housing Tax Credit, which would increase the supply of affordable homes;
o Helping Families Help Themselves. The President has proposed increasing support for the Self-Help Homeownership Opportunities Program; and
o Simplifying Homebuying and Increasing Education. The President and HUD want to empower homebuyers by simplifying the home buying process so consumers can better understand and benefit from cost savings. The President also wants to expand financial education efforts so that families can understand what they need to do to become homeowners.
Now, we all know that George W. Bush is a dirty liberal from way back, so perhaps this doesn’t count. Of course he would promote homeownership for lazy minorities who are trying to steal your money.
Before this year, officials here enthusiastically praised subprime lenders for helping millions of families buy homes for the first time. “I was aware that the loosening of mortgage credit terms for subprime borrowers increased financial risk,” Mr. Greenspan wrote in his recent memoir, “The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World.” “But I believed then, as now, that the benefits of broadened home ownership are worth the risk.”
Ok, ok. Those guys are now discredited bleeding heart liberals. But what about this guy:
Grover Norquist, an influential conservative tactician, said the ownership society could solidify the Republican Party just as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society were the foundation of a Democratic Party majority for generations.
“If this is successful, this will define the Bush administration for the next 100 years,” Mr. Norquist said. “People who are more independent and don’t feel dependent on the government are more likely to be available to the Republican Party.”
That didn’t go as planned, did it? It was a scam, as most Republican policies are, to benefit a few rich operators and aristocrats. It’s the oldest story in the book.
And when it falls apart the only thing they have to fall back on is blaming liberals and their lazy clients, racial minorities.
As we try to grok this financial crisis, it’s important to remember that there is a larger economic challenge beyond just the immediate fallout from the mortgage meltdown.
To that end, the Institute for America’s Future has taken out the following ad in the NY Times:
Big problems need big solutions. You can go here for some progressive thinking on the issue.
Lunatics in South Dakota are trying again to bring back coathanger abortions bigtime. The first time, it failed by a distressingly small margin because there were no exceptions in the case of rape and incest. This time they have indeed written “exceptions” into the law. But they’re bogus exceptions:
According to Marvin Buehner, a pro-choice Rapid City doctor who specializes in high-risk pregnancies, the law, even with these exceptions, would ‘amount to a total ban.’ As Dr. Buehner told the Washington Post, ‘If there’s a risk of a Class 4 felony if I don’t meet the ambiguous standard of ‘serious risk of substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily organ or system,’ there’s no way I would consider doing an abortion for health reasons. This represents incredible government interference in the practice of medicine.’
It is high time to corner McCain and Palin on the South Dakota initiative, pin them down as to whether or not they support it.
Having just finished Jane Mayer’s awesomely infuriating account of America’s descent into torture and murder, The Dark Side, I was struck by how mundane the really effective anti-terrorism tactics are. If you have a high-value prisoner, you don’t need perverse and complex torture regimens but you do need to establish rapport. You don’t need elaborate high tech monitoring, but you do need native-language speakers (if I remember Mayer’s book correctly, on 9/11, the FBI had exactly 5 translators fluent in Arabic). And you need plain luck coupled with a quick mind, the two factors that thwarted the millennium attacks, for example. Of course, it also helps if you upgrade your internet phone connection from 14.4 to 28k – or even higher – and can make a pretty good google, but mostly, it’s the simple ideas that make the difference.
It turns out that, in addition to torture and murder, two other anti-terrorism tactics so enamored of the right (remember Total Information Awareness, run by a former Iran/Contra criminal?) have no scientific basis and can, in fact make us less safe:
Two methods the federal government wants to use to find terrorists — “data mining” and “behavior detection” — are dubious scientifically and have “enormous potential” for infringing on law-abiding Americans’ privacy, a consortium of scientists said.
Some Transportation Safety Administration officers use behavior detection at U.S. airports.
Data mining involves searching databases for suspicious and revealing relationships and patterns. But while the technique is useful in commercial settings to detect credit card fraud, it is questionable whether data mining can detect and pre-empt terrorist attacks, the National Research Council said.
Behavior detection, used by the Transportation Security Administration and some police departments to isolate possible criminals from crowds, likewise falls short of meeting scientific standards, the group said.
“There is not a consensus within the relevant scientific community” that behavior detection is “ready for use … given the present state of the science,” the group said.
The group cautioned that “inappropriate … responses to the terrorist threat … can do more damage to the fabric of society than terrorists would be likely to do.”
However,
Behavioral observation techniques have “enormous potential for violating the reasonable expectations of privacy of individuals,” the report says.
And therefore we can expect the McCain/Cheney/Palin rightwing to embrace it wholeheartedly.
