It’s illuminating to see, on the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war, what the architects of this nightmare have to say about it in their inevitable soundbites.
Removing Saddam Hussein from power was the right decision and this is a fight America can and must win … The successes we are seeing in Iraq are undeniable … No one would argue that this war has not come at a high cost in lives and treasure — but those costs are necessary when we consider the cost of a strategic victory for our enemies in Iraq.
The costs are especially necessary because they haven’t caused him any problems, money, worry… that must be why it seems so romantic to him – actions without consequences usually do.
“Certainly the first four years were about as disastrous as I could possibly imagine. Actually, they were more disastrous than I could have imagined. I am hard-pressed to find a single major decision where the U.S. didn’t make the worst possible choice …. Thirty years from now, when historians look back, where are they going to come out? If at the end of the day the U.S. screwed things up for four years and then in the end left Iraq a better place than they found it under Saddam, it may have still been worth it.”
Yes, I’m sure Pollack actually spoke out between 2003-2006 about the mistakes and disasters… oh wait:
Iraq, however, may not be doomed to the same fate. For one thing, Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari and his government are far more popular and better-intentioned than President Ngo Dinh Diem of Vietnam and his kleptocratic colleagues ever were. And, because the Iraqi insurgents are as happy to blow up Iraqi civilians as American convoys, they do not enjoy the broad appeal of the Vietcong (let alone the firepower of the North Vietnamese Army).
As we reach the fifth anniversary of the beginning of an unnecessary, pre-emptive, disastrous war with far-reaching consequences for Iraqis, Americans, and the whole globe, Dick Cheney has taken control of the effort to make sure this catastrophe lasts 100 years longer or more.
Vice President Dick Cheney played the part of backroom power broker for two days and came away on Tuesday with pledges from Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds to firm up a new blueprint for U.S.-Iraq relations that will stretch beyond the Bush presidency.
Cheney flew in a cargo plane to Iraqi Kurdistan in the north to finish two days of private meetings with powerful politicians in Iraq. On Monday, he had talks with officials in Baghdad — even venturing outside the secured Green Zone to dine and have private discussions.
Topics ranged from security in Iraq to Iran’s rising influence in Mideast, but a key item was about crafting a long-term agreement between the U.S. and Iraq, plus a narrower deal to define the legal basis for continued U.S. troop presence.
The deal would take the place of a U.N. Security Council resolution that expires in December, the same time Bush will be packing up to leave office. The administration says the deal will not seek permanent U.S. bases in Iraq or codify troop levels, nor tie the hands of a future commander in chief as some Democrats fear.
Not at all, there doesn’t seem any reason to fear that such an agreement “will stretch beyond the Bush presidency,” despite that being its essential goal.
Cheney – last seen continuing to push a discredited link between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and citing as proof the work of Stephen Hayes, who in turn cites as proof the work of… Cheney – has always been interested in a longer game in Iraq. He’s never had much use for the normal rules, and so ignoring Congressional approval of a treaty that will go far beyond a normal status of forces agreement is par for the course.
Read today’s comments by Iraq’s foreign minister about the perils of a too-sudden American withdrawal, and take into account that he said these things a day after Vice President Cheney and John McCain visited with him. After reading his comments and their timing, it isn’t far-fetched to assume the following:
1. His message was written and coordinated with McCain and the White House; and 2. The Iraqi government is now an active agent in support of the McCain candidacy.
It’s a little galling to see the Iraqi regime plead with us to continue the sacrifice of our soldiers, military readiness, and treasury when they are sitting upon billions of their own unspent oil monies, and still fail to move towards the necessary political reconciliation that would make our withdrawal possible. But Democrats need to realize that the al-Maliki government will be actively supporting the White House and McCain message to stay the course, and wants John McCain elected to ensure this and continue their existing free ride and graft.
So, Fourthbranch rides into Iraq for a surprise visit to negotiate a deal that would ensure continued protection and enrichment of the Shiite theocracy that is the Iraqi government. In return they don’t have to give up the oil money they’re hording or allow Sunnis into the government or the security forces or meet benchmarks or anything – they just have to say quietly and with much solemnity that troop withdrawals will lead to chaos. It’s somehow perfectly aligned with McCain’s message, oddly enough, as well as keeping in concert with the permanent Middle Eastern presence Fourthbranch has envisioned for over a decade.
One can only imagine the riches he promised the propped-up regional leaders in return for their parroting his message. It’s worth noting that the Iraqis most often heard in the US media – in fact, the only Iraqis – have a powerful incentive for the US to stay, if only for their own self-preservation. Here’s Marc Lynch in a must-read think piece about withdrawal:
The current government, and more broadly the Green Zone political class, is one of the few Iraqi groupings which genuinely wants or needs a sustained American presence – as the guarantor of its political survival. At the same time, they have been one of the greatest obstacles to national reconciliation, and have proved largely resistant to American pressure. Since surviving a series of attempts to unseat his government, Maliki seems to feel politically secure and has spoken often about his belief that national reconciliation has already been achieved. Support for relatively unconditional American backing is similarly strong among the Green Zone Kurdish leadership. Even the Green Zone Sunnis, who have often been the most critical of the US in public and have long since quit the Maliki government, need the Americans to maintain their political positions.
The Green Zone dominant parties share a common situation, of disproportionate power in the national government and an eroding position within their own constituencies. The Sunni parties feel threatened by the rise of the Anbar Salvation Council and the Awakenings, and by their failure to achieve substantial national reconciliation legislation to strengthen their political hand with their constituency. The united Shia list of the UIA has long-since fragmented, with the Sadrists and Fadhila and other Shia parties now largely on the outside. By most reports, ISCI has lost ground with Shia voters, and would likely lose in elections (provincial or national). ISCI’s political leadership therefore depends on US support for its political weight, and despite its strong Iranian ties would likely be loathe to see the US leave. The Supreme Council’s response to a withdrawal would be clearly shaped by its terms, and by the role – implicit or explicit – of Iran in the presumed post-US order. At the same time, in the context of an agreement (tacit or overt) with Iran, its role could be guaranteed. Without such a guarantee, however, the incentives would be strong to unleash the Badr Brigades to stir up trouble in hopes of preventing the US from following through on its plans to depart.
No Iraqi actor would scream more loudly or offer more dire warnings of impending doom than the current Green Zone elite – and, not coincidentally, these are the voices most often heard in Washington and by politicians on short visits to Baghdad. But their warnings should be understood at least in part as expressions of their own political self-interest. No Iraqi actor is more likely to quickly readjust its behavior and calculations should such a withdrawal be announced. With the US set to depart, the whole range of national reconciliation initiatives which are currently seen as at best luxuries and at worst mortal threats would suddenly become a much more intense matter of self-interest. The integration of the Sunni Awakenings, for instance, would move from a challenge to Shia hegemony over the security forces into the best possible way to pre-empt their military challenge. The credible commitment to withdrawal would give the US much-needed leverage over the Green Zone leadership.
It’s like a parallel Village. And Cheney knows just how to placate them.
This came out a few days ago, but I couldn’t let it slip by. Yuma, Arizona is looking back to the Middle Ages for a solution to their border issues.
City officials in Yuma, in south-western Arizona, have come up with a scheme to create a “security channel” along the nearby border by reviving a derelict two-mile stretch of the Colorado river.
“The moats that I’ve seen circled the castle and allowed you to protect yourself, and that’s kind of what we’re looking at here,” Yuma county sheriff Ralph Ogden told the Associated Press. The scheme would see engineers dig out a two-mile stretch of a 180-hectare (440-acre) wetland known as Hunters Hole.
Of course we have a model for how a moat like this would work, as the 1,254 miles of the Rio Grande River along the Texas-Mexico border has been virtually impenetrable.
This is at least more environmentally sensitive than the idea of building big fences that cut off wetlands and damage the ecology, but the imagery of a moat – a moat! – just stokes our irrational fear about immigrants, as if they’re some kind of marauders. They’re coming to take our health care and education dollars, to take our jobs, and to commit crimes, and we must put up a drawbridge. Except that’s all, you know, totally untrue. (read the link.)
I’m pretty convinced that this is a political loser for Republicans, but the fearmongering on immigration, prodded along mainly by elements of the media and a conventional wisdom that “reg’lar Murcans” all believe the same thing about these issues, creates reactionary solutions like this which really reflect badly on the country as a whole. Fortunately, most locals by the border are smarter than this.
The latest from John McCain today, where he inadvertently admits that he doesn’t know the difference between Sunni and Shi’a, isn’t an isolated incident. In fact, he said the exact same thing on Hugh “I’m going to close my eyes and pretend you’re Mitt Romney” Hewitt’s show yesterday. It’s somewhat amusing that he was called on it by his own Senate delegation, but that won’t stop him from saying this zombie lie over and over.
Speaking to reporters in Amman, the Jordanian capital, McCain said he and two Senate colleagues traveling with him continue to be concerned about Iranian operatives “taking al-Qaeda into Iran, training them and sending them back.”
Pressed to elaborate, McCain said it was “common knowledge and has been reported in the media that al-Qaeda is going back into Iran and receiving training and are coming back into Iraq from Iran, that’s well known. And it’s unfortunate.” A few moments later, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, standing just behind McCain, stepped forward and whispered in the presidential candidate’s ear. McCain then said: “I’m sorry, the Iranians are training extremists, not al-Qaeda.”
By the way, Holy Joe corrected one lie with another lie, so let’s not consider him some voice of reason, either.
The AP’s story on this conveniently removed the “Al Qaeda” reference in McCain’s remarks, so this won’t be as teachable a moment as you could hope. But let’s make it clear: John McCain doesn’t know a whole lot about foreign policy, just like he doesn’t know anything about energy policy or health care policy or economic policy. I was at a panel discussion with Ezra Klein over the weekend, and he answered a question about John McCain’s health care plan by saying that “McCain doesn’t care about health care because there’s no honor in it. You can’t storm the hospitals or vanquish the doctors.”
But this is true of every aspect of McCain policy. It’s entirely based on “honor,” like a Klingon, with nothing behind it. We can’t leave Iraq because it would be dishonorable to do so. There’s no nuance or strategy behind that, beyond something like this:
“One of the things I would do if I were President would be to sit the Shiites and the Sunnis down and say, ‘Stop the bullshit,’” said Mr. McCain, according to Shirley Cloyes DioGuardi, an invitee, and two other guests.
In the previous link on McCain’s economic plan (which is basically, “Cut spending!” except for that magic defense spending which doesn’t cut any hole in the budget because it’s so honorable), Jared Bernstein talks about how he makes a lot of basic mistakes when talking about the economy. But that’s true in foreign policy as well. He says things like “Anybody who believes the surge has not succeeded, militarily, politically and in most other ways, frankly, does not know the facts on the ground,” when the commander of forces in Iraq has said the exact opposite. He has no overriding views on foreign policy from a historical perspective, engaging in the same method of taking any position that suited him at the time that has characterized his inconsistency on a host of other issues. And his war cabinet is a group of muddled thinkers who have been historically wrong about Iraq and foreign policy generally, people who say things like “Iraq has sponsored the 9/11 attacks” and that there’s no evidence that the Shi’a won’t get along with the Sunni and 100 other misstatements. They have no fealty to the truth and will continue to bungle around and trying to unify the whole mishigoss under the heading of “honor.”
Worf ’08. There is no honor in losing among suburban white women in Missouri.
I want to discuss Barack Obama’s speech on race and politics, but first I want to say that I have a problem with these expected blog posts on expected speeches that the dynamics of 21st-century campaigns demand. This election has turned into some kind of bizarre series of rituals, like an season of Greek theater where everybody knows the plot and the audience is left to judge the work on the presentation. The parade of comment, counter-comment, conference call about comment, distancing from comment, and major speech incorporating remarks about comment is the real distraction in this campaign, diverting from a looming economic recession (a recession at BEST) and a tragic stalemate in Iraq. Rarely does anything good for the country come out of this exchange.
Furthermore, I’m sick and tired of this “action figure” conservatism where a bunch of stay-at-home bloggers decide for others what they should do in particular situations. “If I were Obama, I would have stood up during the sermon and fired a poison dart at Rev. Wright and talked about the need to cut the capital gains tax!” The imagined fantasies of these clowns resemble a Chuck Norris movie, when the realities involve far more Cheetos and nasal spray.
That out of the way, this speech by Obama, and I might as well embed the YouTube…
…does have value and merit, and actually stands alone as a beginning point, not an end to a controversy.
In answering the question “why didn’t you leave the church, Sen. Obama?” he offers a different question. “Why are you looking at one speech and one church and one moment when the issue, what we’ve been facing for 230 years, is race in America?” The distraction that I mentioned at the top is what takes these questions about race off into cul-de-sacs, detours, and blind alleys. This speech is actually the first true conversation about race in America in this campaign. It’s one that makes people uncomfortable and uneasy and hedging. I grew up in a predominantly white neighborhood; have seen up-close bias in particularly the older generations of my family; have lived in Chicago, where you can be in the Loop and see all the African-Americans on one side of the subway headed south and all the white people headed north; and have engaged with the issue of race from at best a detached viewpoint. What I do believe, and what Sen. Obama remarked upon today, is this issue of distraction, which feeds biases on all sides and disables us from working together to come to terms with race and solve the problems people of all races share. I thought this was an important moment. Obama talks about white resentment and anger, which play on racial fears, and how these have been skillfully used to “forge the Reagan coalition,” which is a pretty big admission for a political candidate.
Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.
Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze – a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns – this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.
This is where we are right now. It’s a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years […] But I have asserted a firm conviction – a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people – that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice is we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union […]
For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina – or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.
We can do that.
But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.
That’s a progressive critique of the class-based economy, wrapped in a larger critique of these ritualized resentments that keep everyone apart. I don’t know or really care if it will work electorally; but it was vital that it is said on a big stage out loud. The “bring us together instead of drive us apart” thematic of the Obama campaign has been viewed by some as a kind of high Broderism, as a false sense that through bipartisanship people with different ideologies and beliefs can work in harmony and peace. That misunderstands things a bit, in my view. Obama is talking about bringing together those Americans who already share the same beliefs but have had wedges driven between them. There’s nothing particularly novel about this concept but we’ve been so rightly skeptical of messages of unity that I think it’s gotten muddled.
Conservatives are already firing up the wedges again in reaction to this speech. I heard Rush say that Obama has “now become a racial candidate,” I guess because he said the word race. Their true nature is going to be coming out in this reaction; the fear, the anger, the desperation, the racism. Obama’s speech is large and has a lot of nuance that won’t play in soundbites. I don’t really care to get into the politics of it, but I think we’ll see in the ultimate result whether we’re a nation that still pays attention to these petty concerns and wedges, or whether we can judge a man on the content of his character.
(no pie fights if you can help it, please, I’m speaking generally about conservative divisiveness and how it’s played out in the context of race.)
Never do I want to hear again from my conservative friends about how brilliant capitalists are, how much they deserve their seven-figure salaries and how government should keep its hands off the private economy.
The Wall Street titans have turned into a bunch of welfare clients. They are desperate to be bailed out by government from their own incompetence, and from the deregulatory regime for which they lobbied so hard. They have lost “confidence” in each other, you see, because none of these oh-so-wise captains of the universe have any idea what kinds of devalued securities sit in one another’s portfolios.
So they have stopped investing. The biggest, most respected investment firms threaten to come crashing down. You can’t have that. It’s just fine to make it harder for the average Joe to file for bankruptcy, as did that wretched bankruptcy bill passed by Congress in 2005 at the request of the credit card industry. But the big guys are “too big to fail,” because they could bring us all down with them.
Enter the federal government, the institution to which the wealthy are not supposed to pay capital gains or inheritance taxes. Good God, you don’t expect these people to trade in their BMWs for Saturns, do you?
This is so overdue. We’ve essentially in the Bush era set up a kind of corporate Marxism, where risk is socialized, but where wealth is privatized. And the middle class, in this case homeowners, are the only ones who ever feel any pain.
Ben Bernanke believes that he can save the economy by managing and financing the ultimate downfall of these financial institutions. Which is fine to a point, because the alternative is a massive meltdown of the entire system. But let’s call it exactly what it is. And let’s no longer allow the other side to say things like “let the market make its own decisions,” because they only believe that when they’re not affected. This is a selective bailout, and it’s government intervention into the markets to save them. Because they currently are non-functional and unregulated. It doesn’t have to be this way, but under a laissez-faire system it’s inevitable.
Can’t wait for some Wall Street honcho or BushCo official to go on about welfare queens or big government programs…
The New Yorker has a terrific article by Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris based upon an extensive interview with Sabrina Harman – the “thumbs up” soldier – and others. As of this writing, it’s not online, but excerpts from Morris’ new film are.
There are no conclusions that Hullabaloo readers haven’t already reached themselves about the culpability of higher ups and their evasion of punishment. The soldiers who carried out or witnessed the atrocities come across in the article as deeply troubled individuals, in all senses of the term. Its publication fast on the heels of Bush’s veto of a bill banning waterboarding and other techniques couldn’t be more timely.
It’s a shameful story. And it’s equally shameful that there isn’t a mass American movement to bring ALL those responsible for the criminal disgrace of Abu Ghraib to justice.
At this hour, the website for the Responsible Plan to End The War In Iraq has just gone live. I urge you to check it out and read the plan. Alternatively, you can read the following summary.
The beauty of this plan is in its recognition that the decision to invade Iraq was a catastrophe not just on its own merits, but because of what it said about the failure of our democracy to ably consider and implement solutions to national security challenges. A failed media, an executive drunk with power, and an emasculated Congress were all culpable in the systemic failure that was Iraq. And so for the first time, we have a comprehensive plan that seeks to address THAT side of the national security debate, the broken institutions, as opposed to simply setting up a timeline for a phased withdrawal with various dates and numbers.
We know that the right has long posited Iraq with the demonstrably false choice of stay and win or cut and run. As our failed media suffers from what CAP fellow Brian Katulis has called a “national security deficit disorder,” and as most of our national security elites are bestowed with “seriousness” based on their willingness to argue for continued war and intervention at every opportunity, it’s become impossible to reach a positive solution while boxed in by that “heads I win, tails you lose” framework. But a progressive national security alternative is possible, and is described in this plan. On the question of Iraq, the plan acknowledges, rightly, that there remains no military solution to the problems we face in Iraq. Which of course we know. Over the last five years, Iraqis have seen near-constant bloodshed (today’s bombing of Shiite pilgrims in Karbala on the way to the Imam Hussein shrine, by the way, could prove to be as destabilizing as the bombing of the Golden Done in Samarra in 2006), ethnic cleansing, the rise of dangerous militias, theocratic power-wielding zealots and warlords, a political stalemate verging on civil war, and no discernible improvement in basic services since the invasion. Dick Cheney and John McCain have to sneak into Iraq unannounced by night, while Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is greeted as a liberator. Iraqis believe we are a destabilizing force in the nation and the region, and our military is not built to do any more than what they already have done. So the plan recognizes that our military presence must end, and that diplomatic, humanitarian and economic missions must supplant them.
End U.S. military action in Iraq: There is no military solution in Iraq. Our current course unacceptably holds U.S. strategic fortunes hostage to events in Iraq that are beyond our control; we must change course. Using diplomatic, political, and economic power, we can responsibly end the war and removing all of our troops from Iraq.
Using U.S. diplomatic power: Much of the remaining work to be completed in Iraq requires the effective use of diplomatic power. Many of Iraq’s neighbors are currently contributing to instability and need to be persuaded to assist instead in stabilization.
Addressing humanitarian concerns: The humanitarian crisis caused by Iraq’s situation is destabilizing to the region and damaging to America’s moral credibility. We must both take responsibility for the Iraqis who are now endangered because of their assistance to the U.S. and begin to address the regional problems of displaced Iraqis.
The particular strategies with respect to Iraq are solid and necessary, and lean heavily on the more noble and more ignored aspects of the Iraq Study Group report. This includes renouncing permanent bases in Iraq and control of Iraqi oil, in addition to a diplomatic surge reaching out to the entire region (including Iran and Syria), aid from the international community for nation-building, fixing the horrible refugee crisis which is a human rights abomination, and giving an expanded role to economic reconstruction, where the Iraqis are reaping the benefits, not private military contractors.
The strategies with respect to changing the national security conversation and repairing broken institutions, ensuring that we never enter into such a misguided foreign policy blunder again, are transformative. The plan calls for an independent war crimes commission to gather testimonies and hold perpetrators accountable. It calls for incorporating all war funding into the normal budget process, so that war funding cannot be made separate from the fiscal realities of the nation and used as a club with which to beat political opponents. It calls for ending the practices of torture and rendition and warrantless spying and signing statements and the denial of habeas corpus, practices which have shredded our civil liberties, diminished our authority to lead, and expanded executive authority at the expense of the Congress. It calls for full funding of veterans care and the GI bill so we actually support the troops and factor in the basic dignity of soldiers who we send off to fight into that decision-making process. It calls for relentless oversight of waste and fraud and abuse in the contracting process, and no more outsourcing our security to private companies like Blackwater. Crucially, it calls for an end to media consolidation, so the public airwaves and a free press are no longer controlled by the unaccountable few. And it calls for a clean energy economy, so we need not consider foreign oil into our war calculus and so we can regain the capacity to control our economic future.
Fifteen of these proposals already exist in the form of legislation introduced in the House and Senate; current legislators ought to sign on to them. But they have not been combined and expanded in such a way to offer a comprehensive view of how to end the war and repair the broken institutions that got us there. While this plan is redolent of a kind of Contract With America, there is a crucial difference. Newt Gingrich supplied the Contract With America from the top-down, giving it to Congressional candidates as a tool to use in their campaigns (also, he didn’t do it until 6 weeks before the election and used it mostly as a media tool). This is a candidate-written, candidate-implemented, candidate-structured proposal from a group of progressive challengers who hold no current power in the Congress or the leadership of the party, culling from the ideas and concerns of the rank and file to put forth a full set of policy options to end the war and radically change how we view national security.
I know a lot of people that I talk to about the war feel impotent, powerless to do anything specific and tangible outside of railing at the feckless Democratic establishment that has offered little in the way of change in this area. This is finally an initiative where citizens have something to offer. They can extend their time, their energy, their talents, their enthusiasm, and their resources to get these 10 candidates into office. It’s rare to see Congressional candidates run on specific policy, and it shows a real courage and consideration into what their constituents actually want. That’s leadership that will be rewarded in November. All of the co-signers of the Responsible Plan can be found at this Act Blue. Donate, be it your time or your money or just by telling your friend about them. And tell the Democrat running in your neck of the woods that they can only earn your support by signing on to this plan.
As we hurtle forward into GOP smear season, this article in this week-end’s NY Times magazine may help us explain how these character assassinations damage Democrats so successfully:
…To determine the veracity of a given statement, we often look to society’s collective assessment of it. But it is difficult to measure social consensus very precisely, and our brains rely, instead, upon a sensation of familiarity with an idea. You use a rule of thumb: if something seems familiar, you must have heard it before, and if you’ve heard it before, it must be true.
The rule obviously invites many opportunities for error. The seniors in Skurnik’s study couldn’t remember the context in which they had heard the health claims (research shows that we are quick to forget “negation tags,” like whether something is said to be false or a lie), so they relied, instead, on a vague sense of familiarity, which steered them astray. Repetition, psychologists have shown, easily tricks us. Kimberlee Weaver of Virginia Tech recently found that if one person tells you that something is true many times, you are likely to conclude that the opinion is widely held, even if no one else said a thing about it.
The right has been on top of this for decades now, repeating lies about Democrats over and over again until everyone just accepts them as true. The mainstream media as often as not apply Cokie’s Law and run with it too. (It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, it’s “out there.”) From candidate smears to “tax and spend” to “unamerican” they repeat it like a bunch of wind up dolls until people have internalized it and don’t even know why they believe it, they just do.
I don’t have any answers, and neither does the article. Indeed, it suggests that his may be getting worse rather than better, with the advent of the internet. (As this article shows, the right is still at it and achieving amazing success with chain emails.) They are like machines with this stuff and the left has never found an adequate way of combating it. It’s very difficult.
So I’m here inside the belly of the beast. The Villagers eye me warily. The Hillshills and the Bamabots circle one another with barely leashed antagonism. (Don’t get stuck in an elevator with members of the opposing tribes — the crossfire is lethal.)
Seriously, Take Back America a great gathering of DFH’s from across the land and much good information and good will is exchanged. You can catch up on what’s going on over at the Campaign For America’s Future site.
I’m going to be on a panel tomorrow discussing the future of the blogosphere, specifically its relationship with the media. I’ve always felt that one of our primary missions was to challenge the press on its bias, narratives and conventional wisdom. It’s why I got into this thing in the first place. If any of you have any thoughts on that topic, please leave them in the comments. (No primary stuff, please. This is a Big Picture presentation.)
Meanwhile, I’m off to this event. It’s not on the TBA schedule, but if you happen to be here and are obsessively reading your RSS feeds, do stop by. (Firedoglake will post the live feed, if you want to watch it.)
Ten Democratic Challengers to Issue Plan for Congressional Action to Bring Iraq War to a Responsible Close
Washington, DC (March 17) – A group of top-tier Democratic congressional challengers will launch a major new grassroots effort on Monday around a comprehensive strategy to bring the war in Iraq to responsible close.
Darcy Burner (WA-8), Chellie Pingree (ME-1), Donna Edwards (MD-4), Jared Polis (CO-2), Tom Perriello (VA-5) and Sam Bennett (PA-15) will be in attendance at the unveiling of a detailed strategy document at the Take Back America Conference in Washington, DC. The release of the document will take place at:
Palladian Room
Omni Shoreham Hotel
2500 Calvert St. NW Washington, DC
5:30 pm EST
Other challengers .participating in the effort but unable to attend include Eric Massa (NY-29), Larry Byrnes (FL-14), George Fearing (WA-4), and Steve Harrison (NY-13).
Originating outside the Beltway and based on consultations with retired generals and other national security experts on a path forward to end the war, the challengers’ document lays out a series of actions for Congress to take to end United States military involvement in Iraq, strengthen America and improve our standing around the world, restore accountability and checks and balances to our government and work toward energy independence.
“I wholeheartedly endorse this plan as a responsible and forward looking plan for ending the war in Iraq. As Burner and her colleagues correctly note, bringing our troops home is the first, but not the only step that must be taken to ensure a debacle like Iraq never happens again,” said Dr. Lawrence Korb, former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration. “This plan addresses the root causes that allowed the Bush Administration to lead this country into this mess, and sets us in the right direction. I applaud their efforts on this ambitious and sound strategy. This is progressive strength on national security in action.”