Many people are wondering what in the hell was up with Katie Couric when she hammered John and Elizabeth Edwards last night on 60 Minutes. (Taylor Marsh wrote the definitive post on her egregious conduct, here.)
K-Drum thinks she was just trying to prove her “serious journalist” bonafides, which it seems to me should have been a pre-requisite for her current job, but there you go.
I think she’s just a mean, gossipy, twit who likes to put sick people in the dock. Why do I make such a harsh accusation?
Fox told Couric, “At this point now, if I didn’t take medication I wouldn’t be able to speak.”
The portion of the interview they broadcast was quite decent. But you can see the whole interview here — and listen to Katie Couric push him over and over again on the burning question of whether he manipulated his medication and ask him whether he should have re-scheduled the shoot when his symptoms were manifested as they were. And she does it while she’s sitting directly across from him watching him shake like crazy. Her questions imply that it was in poor taste or manipulative as if he can magically conjure a film crew to catch him in one of the fleeting moments where he doesn’t appear too symptomatic. The press seems to truly believe that it is reasonable to be suspicious of him showing symptoms of a disease that has him so severely in its clutches that if he doesn’t take his medication his face becomes a frozen mask and he cannot even talk.
Sorry. The woman is an insensitive, ratings-hungry tabloid gossip, not a journalist. That’s why she makes the big bucks.
Britain denies its personnel had left Iraqi territory when they were captured and detained by Iran — a contention backed by Iraq’s foreign minister, who called on Iran to release the group.
In comments read out by a newscaster, Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Mehzi Mostafavi did not say what Iran plans to do with the British sailors, but he said they were being interrogated.
Golly, I wonder who’s interrogation rules they are using — the US, China, Egypt, and Saudi’s — or the civilized world’s? Unfortunately, there’s a little proceeding going on down in Gitmo today that makes the abuse of these British soldiers all the more likely.
The potential for very serious consequences from this is quite high. I can’t believe we are in the position of having to hope the Iranians show more restraint and good sense than Dick Cheney, but we are.
Via Avedon Carol, I was reminded of this speech by James Madison on the subject of impeachment. (I say “reminded” not because I am a constitutional scholar but because impeachment was discussed at great length recently, as I’m sure you’ll recall, and the founders “intent” was debated ad nauseum.)
…let us consider the restraints he will feel after he [the president]is placed in that elevated station. It is to be remarked that the power in this case will not consist so much in continuing a bad man in office, as in the danger of displacing a good one. Perhaps the great danger, as has been observed, of abuse in the executive power, lies in the improper continuance of bad men in office. But the power we contend for will not enable him to do this; for if an unworthy man be continued in office by an unworthy president, the house of representatives can at any time impeach him, and the senate can remove him, whether the president chuses or not. The danger then consists merely in this: the president can displace from office a man whose merits require that he should be continued in it. What will be the motives which the president can feel for such abuse of his power, and the restraints that operate to prevent it? In the first place, he will be im-peachable by this house, before the senate, for such an act of mal-administration; for I contend that the wanton removal of meritorious officers would subject him to impeachment and removal from his own high trust.
Yes, impeachment was considered the remedy for such high crimes and misdemeanors as the promotion and protection of incompetent government officers and the “wanton removal” of good ones. The founders didn’t anticipate that serving and pleasuring the president would be casually accepted as politics as usual.
Instead, we now have a political party and pitiful press corps who think that all this manipulation of the justice system for partisan gain is just adorable, while this was worthy of impeachment:
The four House prosecutors who spoke for five hours on Friday painstakingly reviewed the chronology of alleged misconduct against the president — charges with which the public has long been familiar.
They detailed Monica Lewinsky’s affidavit in the Paula Jones case, her suprisingly successful job search after an interview she said went poorly, Betty Currie’s retrieval of the president’s gifts and excerpts of testimony and more testimony.
The prosecutors also produced more charts highlighting alleged contradictions in sworn statements from the president and the other participants in the drama. Lewinsky said the president touched her breasts many times, Clinton said he didn’t and many more examples.
I think it’s quite clear that when it comes to impeachment the Republicans and the media believe in a living, breathing, moaning and grunting constitution.
The Republicans are very good at innoculation and I think they were very lucky or very prescient in impeaching a president over trivial matters that had nothing to do with his performance in office. They turned impeachment into a crude partisan tool and effectively removed it as the only instrument that can be used to stop a crazed and incompetent president from doing whatever he chooses once he’s elected. These people really know how to plan ahead.
David Stockman, a former top budget official in the Reagan White House, and three other people were charged Monday in an alleged securities fraud case that embroiled one of North America’s largest auto parts companies before it collapsed into bankruptcy.
Stockman, who served as budget director under President Reagan, was the former chairman and chief executive officer of Michigan-based Collins & Aikman Corp.
Federal authorities declined to comment prior to a news conference on the case.
An indictment unsealed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan charged Stockman and three others with conspiracy to commit securities fraud, making false statements in annual and quarterly reports, making false entries in books and records, and lying to auditors as well as committing bank fraud, wire fraud and obstruction of an agency proceeding.
It’s not all that surprising since Stockman was actually a prototype of the more modern Bushie except he shot his mouth off and gave away the game. I assumed he’d found Jesus or something since then, but I suppose that’s yet to come. They always get religion in jail.
Stockman emerged as one of the most powerful and controversial OMB directors ever during a tenure that lasted until his resignation in August 1985. Committed to the doctrine of supply-side economics, Stockman took the lead in directing passage of the “Reagan Budget” (the Gramm-Latta Budget), which Stockman hoped to be a serious curtailment of the “welfare state”, gaining a reputation as a tough negotiator with House Speaker Tip O’Neil’s Democratic-controlled House of Representatives and Majority Leader Howard Baker’s Republican-controlled Senate. During this period, although only in his early 30s, Stockman played a central and highly visible role as the ultimate “budget guru” in the fierce debate and contentious political wrangling over the future direction of the role of the federal government in American society.
Stockman’s power within the Reagan Administration waned after the Atlantic Monthly magazine published the famous article, The Education of David Stockman, in its December 1981 issue based on lengthy interviews Stockman gave to reporter William Greider. It led to Stockman being “taken to the woodshed by Reagan” as the White House’s PR team tried to deal with the article’s damage to Reagan’s perceived fiscal leadership skills. Stockman was quoted as referring to the Reagan Revolution’s legacy tax act as: “I mean, Kemp-Roth [Reagan’s 1981 tax cut] was always a Trojan horse to bring down the top rate…. It’s kind of hard to sell ‘trickle down.’ So the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really ‘trickle down.’ Supply-side is ‘trickle-down’ theory.”
Of the budget process in his first year on the job, Mr. Stockman is quoted as saying: “None of us really understands what’s going on with all these numbers.”, which turned out to be the subtitle of the 1981 Atlantic Monthly article.
After his first year at OMB and on the heels of ‘being taken to the woodshed by the president’ over his candor with Atlantic’s William Greider, Stockman became disillusioned with the projected trend of increasingly large federal deficits and the rapidly expanding national debt as a result of the Reagan tax cut. In 1986, he left OMB and wrote a memoir of his experience in the Reagan Administration titled The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed that, in part, specifically criticized the failure of Congressional Republicans to support a reduction in government spending as necessary offsets to the large tax cuts that would have avoided the creation of large deficits and an exploding national debt.
Wow. That seems like it was just yesterday. In fact, it was yesterday.
I’m pretty much convinced that one of the main reasons the Republicans are failing is because their tired groundhog day bullshit is as out of date as a Flock of Seagulls mullet. Stockman was a little bit more candid than most, but he was a playah — more than 20 years ago. And here we are dealing with the fallout of the sloppy, indiscriminate, second generation of the same failed policies.
Look for the bestselling books from Republican’s jumping ship, saying that it was all due to the unwillingness to cut spending , blah, blah, blah, just like Stockman who knew very well that the “plan” was to lower taxes on the very rich so they could piss on the rest of the country (oh sorry, “trickle down” on the rest of the country.) Screwing the taxpayers is a GOP feature, not a bug. Always has been.
It’s good to see Zbigniew Brzezinski take on the “war on terror” brand in this op-ed in today’s Washington Post. Questioning this trope is long overdue:
The “war on terror” has created a culture of fear in America. The Bush administration’s elevation of these three words into a national mantra since the horrific events of 9/11 has had a pernicious impact on American democracy, on America’s psyche and on U.S. standing in the world. Using this phrase has actually undermined our ability to effectively confront the real challenges we face from fanatics who may use terrorism against us.
The damage these three words have done — a classic self-inflicted wound — is infinitely greater than any wild dreams entertained by the fanatical perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks when they were plotting against us in distant Afghan caves. The phrase itself is meaningless. It defines neither a geographic context nor our presumed enemies. Terrorism is not an enemy but a technique of warfare — political intimidation through the killing of unarmed non-combatants.
But the little secret here may be that the vagueness of the phrase was deliberately (or instinctively) calculated by its sponsors. Constant reference to a “war on terror” did accomplish one major objective: It stimulated the emergence of a culture of fear. Fear obscures reason, intensifies emotions and makes it easier for demagogic politicians to mobilize the public on behalf of the policies they want to pursue. The war of choice in Iraq could never have gained the congressional support it got without the psychological linkage between the shock of 9/11 and the postulated existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Support for President Bush in the 2004 elections was also mobilized in part by the notion that “a nation at war” does not change its commander in chief in midstream. The sense of a pervasive but otherwise imprecise danger was thus channeled in a politically expedient direction by the mobilizing appeal of being “at war.”
Read it all.
I wish I were confident that we could do anything to change this but just as communism was the basis of the right’s critique of the left in the post WWII world, the GWOT will perform that function for the forseeable future. The warhorse is unfortunately out of the barn. But if anyone has any ideas about how to roll this thing back, I’m listening. It’s going to curse this country for a long, long time.
Following up on Poputonian’s post below, let me just say that this is one case where we are in disagreement. I do not think that MoveOn or any of the other anti-war liberals who voted for the appropriations bill were sell-outs, clubby, “daddy party” or anything else. There is a difference of opinion among some in the grassroots as to whether the strategy was correct, but I do not believe that anyone’s motives were impure and I’m not sure it’s constructive to turn this into a battle over insiders vs outsiders.
Legislative sausage making is always somewhat unnerving to watch, but this one actually went quite well by historic standards. The progressives used all of their clout to get as strong a bill as possible and quite a few of the Blue Dogs made the hard choice to vote with the party. The Democratic party is a coalition not a monolith and the fact that they were able to get a bill with virtually everyone on board is a testament to the party’s strength not its weakness.
It’s very, very difficult for the congress to stop a war. The system is designed to allow the president to run them once the people have signed off and abruptly pulling the plug on funding is a very dicey move. Therefore, defunding is a process — members of any coalition that leads on such difficult legislation always tend to come together incrementally through various means. We all wish it could happen quickly, but there is simply no precedent for it and no simple means of making that happen.
There is a precedent, however, for some very wily legislative maneuvering to hasten the end of an unpopular war. Here’s an excerpt from Rick Perlstein’s recent article in Salon on how the congress stepped up in 1970:
Presidents, arrogant men, lie. And yet the media, loath to undermine the authority of the commander in chief, trusts them. Today’s congressional war critics have to be ready for that. They have to do what Congress immediately did next, in 1970: It grasped the nettle, at the president’s moment of maximum vulnerability, and turned public opinion radically against the war, and threw the president far, far back on his heels.
Immediately after the Cambodian invasion Senate doves rolled out three coordinated bills. (Each had bipartisan sponsorship; those were different days.) John Sherman Cooper, R-Ken., and Frank Church, D-Idaho, proposed banning funds for extending the war into Cambodia and Laos. Another bipartisan coalition drafted a repeal of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, the congressional authorization for war that had passed 98 to 2 in 1964. George McGovern, D-S.D., and Mark Hatfield, R-Ore., were in charge of the granddaddy of them all: an amendment requiring the president to either go to Congress for a declaration of war or end the war, by Dec. 31, 1970. Walter Shapiro wrote that a “skittish” Congress made sure its antiwar legislation had “loopholes” to permit the president to take action to protect U.S. troops in the field” — which means no genuine congressional exit mandate at all. But McGovern-Hatfield had no such “loopholes.” (Of course, McGovern Hatfield didn’t pass, and thus wasn’t subject to the arduous political negotiating process that might have added them.) It was four sentences long, and said: Without a declaration of war, Congress would appropriate no money for Vietnam other than “to pay costs relating to the withdrawal of all U.S. forces, to the termination of United States military operations … to the arrangement for exchanges of prisoners of war,” and to “food and other non-military supplies and services” for the Vietnamese.
Radical stuff. Far more radical than today’s timid congressional critics are interested in going. But what today’s timid congressmen must understand is that the dare paid off handsomely. With McGovern-Hatfield holding down the left flank, the moderate-seeming Cooper-Church passed out of the Foreign Relations Committee almost immediately. Was the president on the defensive? And how. His people rushed out a substitute “to make clear that the Senate wants us out of Cambodia as soon as possible.” Two of the most hawkish and powerful Southern Democrats, Fritz Hollings and Eugene Talmadge, announced they were sick of handing blank checks to the president. A tide had turned, decisively. By the time Cooper-Church passed the Senate overwhelmingly on June 30, the troops were gone from Cambodia — an experiment in expanding the war that the president didn’t dare repeat. Congress stopped that surge. It did it by striking fast — and hard — when the iron was hottest. In so doing, it moved the ball of public opinion very far down the field. By August, a strong plurality of Americans supported the McGovern-Hatfield “end the war” bill, 44 to 35 percent.
[…]
McGovern-Hatfield did not pass in 1970. But the campaign for it helped make 1971 President Nixon’s worst political year (until, that is, Congress’ bold action starting in 1973 to investigate Watergate). By that January, 73 percent of Americans supported the reintroduced McGovern-Hatfield amendment. John Stennis, D-Miss., Nixon’s most important congressional supporter, now announced he “totally rejected the concept … that the President has certain powers as Commander in Chief which enable him to extensively commit major forces to combat without Congressional consent.” In April the six leading Democratic presidential contenders went on TV and, one by one, called for the president to set a date for withdrawal. (One of them, future neoconservative hero Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson, differed only in that he said Nixon should not announce the date publicly.)
This was a marvelous offensive move: It threw the responsibility for the war where the commander in chief claimed it belonged — with himself — and framed subsequent congressional attempts to set a date a reaction to presidential inaction and the carnage it brought. When the second McGovern-Hatfield amendment went down 55-42 in June, it once more established a left flank — allowing Majority Leader Mike Mansfield to pass a softer amendment to require withdrawal nine months after all American prisoners of war were released. Senate doves, having dared the fight, were doing quite well in this game of inches.
This is hideous sausage making, but it’s the way our system works. I would suggest that the proposed Lee Amendment (the bill that was discussed ad nauseum, but never actually presented) performed the same function as the “McGovern-Hatfield” Amendment in this negotiation by holding down the left flank and allowing the “moderate” bill to emerge. That’s the necessary first step.
The polls before the vote showed that the public was losing faith in the Democrats on Iraq. Had the first vote out of the House been a story of Democratic disarray and defeat (the Fox dominated media’s favorite meme), they may never have gotten another chance. The headlines that came out of this vote moves the ball forward and gives the Dems the opportunity to show the general public that they can work together to get this thing done.
Having said all that, let me just emphasize again that a strong left flank is tremendously important to making that happen. Without the grassroots pressure and the “out of Iraq” caucus publicly holding the line on the vote and then offering to free certain members who were willing to vote for the bill at the last moment, it wouldn’t have passed — and the liberals wouldn’t have collected the chits they need for the next round (or received a standing ovation from their caucus.) This is what a functioning political coalition that is working together looks like. It isn’t pretty, but it’s how things get done.
I absolutely believe that the party must have heavy liberal ballast or the right will take us over the cliff — and I know that the grassroots are absolutely necessary to ending this war.
In this fascinating article Scott McLemee discusses the necessity for “bottom-up” participation:
During the first administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (or so goes a story now making the rounds of American progressives), the president met with a group of citizens who urged him to seize the moment. Surely it was time for serious reforms: The Depression made it impossible to continue with business as usual. Just what measures the visitors to the Oval Office proposed — well, that is not clear, at least from the versions I have heard. Perhaps they wanted laws to regulate banking, or to protect the right of labor unions to organize, or to provide income help for the aged. Maybe all of the above.
The president listened with interest and evident sympathy. As the meeting drew to a close, Roosevelt thanked his guests, expressing agreement with all they had suggested. “So now,” he told them on their way out the door, “go out there and make me do it.”
This is less a historical narrative, strictly speaking, than an edifying tale. Its lesson is simple. Even with wise and trustworthy leadership holding power — perhaps especially then — you must be ready to apply pressure from below. (The moral here is not especially partisan, by the way. One can easily imagine conservative activists spurring one another on with more or less the same story, with Ronald Reagan assuming the star role.)
Read the whole thing. He goes on to discuss a recent study about the anti-war movement that illuminates a political space called “the party in the streets”:
The idea that mass movements might constitute a fourth sector of the party – with the Christian Right, for example, being a component of the Republican “party in the street” – might seem self-evident in some ways. But not so for political scientists, it seems. “We met a lot of resistance to the idea of the ‘party in the street,’” Heaney told me … Speaking of the antiwar protests as manifestations of the Democratic “party in the street” will also meet resistance from many activists. (A catchphrase of the hard left is that the Democratic Party is “the graveyard of mass movements.”) And according to their own surveys, Heaney and Rojas find that just over one fifth of demonstrators see themselves as clearly outside its ranks.
But that still leaves the majority of antiwar activists as either identifying themselves as Democrats or at least willing to vote for the party. “Like it or not,” write Heaney and Rojas, “their moral and political struggles are within or against the Democratic Party; it actions and inactions construct opportunities for and barriers to the achievement of their issue-specific policy goals.” (Though Heaney and Rojas don’t quote Richard Hofstadter, their analysis implicitly accepts the historian’s famous aphorism that American third parties “are like bees: they sting once and die.”)
“We do not claim,” they take care to note, “that the party in the street has equal standing with the party in government, the party in the electorate, or the party as organization. We are not asserting that the formal party organization is coordinating these activities. The party in the street lacks the stability possessed by other parts of the party because it is not supported by enduring institutions. Furthermore, it is small relative to other parts of the party and at times may be virtually nonexistent.”
As Heaney elaborated when we met, a great deal of the organizing work of the antiwar “party” is conducted by e-mail – a situation that makes it much easier for groups with a small staff to reach a large audience. But that also makes for somewhat shallow or episodic involvement in the movement on the part of many participants. An important area for study by political scientists might be the relationship between the emerging zone of activist organizations and the informal networks of campaign consultants, lobbyists, financial contributors, and activists” shaping the agenda of other sectors of political parties. “If they remain well organized and attract enthusiastic young activists,” write Rojas and Heaney, “then the mainstream political party is unable to ignore them for long.”
Yes indeed. I am not one to discount the idealism and energy of the party in the street. People need to feel that social connection to their politics and sometimes that’s what it takes to affect big change. I have always believed that the Code-Pink, Cindy Sheehan, ANSWER folks are an important part of the equation. Indeed, as the study points out, most of them are either members in good standing of the Democratic coalition or are willing to throw in their lot with them, just as the Christian Coalition does on the right. They deserve respect.
But so do the legislators and the “insiders” of various stripes who are laboring toward the same goal. Everyone has their job to do and in the case of this very difficult vote, I feel that the party in government, the party in the electorate, the party in organization and the party in the streets performed admirably. I don’t know when this war will end, but I do know that Democrats of all the “parties”, working together (as difficult as that may be) are the only ones who will do it.
…but just who the hell does Joan Vennochi think she is?
But as a political observer, I also find it hard to read “Saving Graces” without noticing the frenetic new life she and her husband invented after their son’s death.
John Edwards ran for the US Senate, then for president, and then for vice president as John Kerry’s running mate in 2004.
Elizabeth Edwards had two more children, a daughter and son, who are now 8 and 6. She took on the daunting task of new motherhood in her 50s; they also have a daughter, Cate, 24.
Elizabeth Edwards also immersed herself in every aspect of her husband’s political campaigns, all the time thinking how much Wade would have relished the adventure. The Edwardses are building an extravagant 28,200-square-foot dream house, west of Chapel Hill, N.C.
This is not a judgment on the way this family chose to deal with their loss. Still, the memoir reveals a desperate effort, especially on Elizabeth Edwards’s part, to fill her life with anything — speeches, travel, lofty goals for America — that will fill the void left by her son’s death. She never will; no mother could. But she will keep on running until someone makes her slow down.
That is where John Edwards could step in, or should. But, for whatever the reason — her strong will, his strong ambition — the two keep racing forward.
This is one of the characteristics I viscerally loathe in certain members the human species — sanctimonious, busy-body, judgmentalism coming from people who have neither the insight, the perspective or the sensitivity to render any kind of opinion about other people’s personal lives and marriages. And yet they do it, with great confidence in their own ability to see inside other people’s most personal relationships.
In this case a smug, hostile columnist has written an uninformed and hurtful psychological profile of John and Elizabeth Edwards personalities, allegedly based upon the book “Saving Graces” — which I read and saw in a completely different light. I thought it illustrated an admirable courage and willingness to embrace life after tragedy. (Which just goes to show you that the “lessons” in such a book are in the eye of the beholder, doesn’t it?) This awful woman read it and came away believing there is something neurotic and troubled in Mrs Edwards’ behavior and has decided to throw that out into the public discourse via her syndicated column in a major newspaper as if her judgment about their marriage and psychological makeup is useful for something other than juicy fodder for a boozy lunch at Chez Bitchée.
Now, I’m sure she will immediately tell us all that we should care about her shallow “diagnosis” because it illuminates some aspect of the Edwards’ characters. That’s always the first refuge of the scandalmonger caught in flagrante and trying to spin her way out of being seen as a voyeur. But nobody can know what really goes on inside somebody else’s marriage. Even counsellors and psychologists who spend huge amounts of time delving into it with the partners have a hard time correctly diagnosing the problems. Marriage is the most complicated relationship in human experience and to think you can correctly analyze one from afar is a convenient delusion. Let’s face it, analyzing other people’s realtionships inevitably reveals more about you than them.
Back when the Clinton marriage was under the microscope for years on end, we were told by every tattler with a microphone that it was terribly important that we know all the dirty details of their lives because it allowed us to assess the president’s ability to do his job. That was nonsense. Our current president has what appears to be a very stable, traditional marriage (which everyone treated as if it meant they’d been ordained by god himself) and it said absolutely nothing about his ability to run this country. The awful results of using that political “metric” are clear for all of us to see.
I love to gossip as much as the next person. It’s part of being human to want to feel superior to others and experience all kinds of delicious schaudenfreude. But when it comes to politics and policy this gossipy “character” nonsense is a destructive distraction that has become a useless proxy for figuring out what citizens want their government to do and whether they think certain people are capable of doing it. Dissecting politicians’ marriages will not get them there and it’s time for the chattering classes to get off their well-fed behinds and start writing interesting stories that might actually educate and inform the citizens of this country. People can get plenty of nasty gossip elsewhere to fulfill their need to feel superior and virtuous. National political opinion columns should have a slightly higher calling.
*And can I just say how dreadfully inappropriate and cruel it is for Venocchi to write this column just days after Edwards announced she is fighting for her life with stage four cancer? What possibly made her think this was necessary?
Looks like Eli’s been stealing from the Daddy Party playbook, practicing message control to influence perceptions and reach desired outcomes:
The Congress that was elected to end the war just voted to fund the war. Congresswoman Barbara Lee was not permitted to offer for a vote her amendment, which would have funded a withdrawal instead of the war. Groups that supported Lee’s plan and opposed Pelosi’s included United for Peace and Justice, Progressive Democrats of America, US Labor Against the War, After Downing Street, Democrats.com, Peace Action, Code Pink, Democracy Rising, True Majority, Gold Star Families for Peace, Military Families Speak Out, Backbone Campaign, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Voters for Peace, Veterans for Peace, the Green Party, and disgruntled former members of MoveOn.org. … MoveOn polled its membership without including the Lee alternative, offering a choice of only Pelosi’s plan or nothing. Amazingly, Eli Pariser of MoveOn has admitted that the reason MoveOn did this was because they knew that their members would favor the Lee amendment. The following is from a report on Salon.com:
“Pariser defends his e-mail. He says that the group already knew that its members would have supported Barbara Lee’s plan, but whatever MoveOn did, it would never have passed. What MoveOn didn’t know was what its members thought about the Pelosi plan. ‘The choice that we needed to make as an organization was, Do we support this thing or not?’ Pariser says. ‘And so I think the e-mail was a very fair presentation of the choice that was actually in front of the organization.'”
Pariser is simultaneously admitting that he knew his members favored the Lee amendment to quickly end the war by defunding it, and claiming that he did not know whether his members preferred Pelosi’s weak anti-war gestures to nothing at all. This makes no sense. Are we supposed to imagine that Pariser honestly believed there was some chance that his membership would read his praise for Pelosi’s bill and then vote for nothing at all instead of supporting it? Of course not. The point of the poll was to allow MoveOn to announce that its membership supported Pelosi rather than Lee. Yet Pariser admits that he did not offer MoveOn’s membership a choice of Lee’s plan because he knew they would vote for it.
Actually, he doesn’t say that he knows Lee’s plan would have won out over Pelosi’s. But he certainly does not know that it wouldn’t have, and making that baseless and to my mind very unlikely claim was the only possible point of having done the poll. The rationale that Pariser offers is absurd. The poll could only have had one result. It served to give cover to progressive Democrats in Congress who gave their support to Pelosi after having intended to vote no on Pelosi’s bill unless it included Lee’s amendment. … Building a serious Out of Iraq caucus is key to getting us to another position that I suspect the majority of MoveOn members favor: the impeachment of Bush and Cheney. Of course, MoveOn has not polled its members on impeachment, but it won’t do so apparently until impeachment proceedings are well underway and a successful vote for impeachment can be safely predicted. (Though at that point, what will be the point?)
But, how can we be sure that Pariser viewed his poll of MoveOn members on Pelosi’s bill not as a contest between Pelosi and nothing, but as a contest between Pelosi and Lee? Well, because Pariser told the news journal the Politico just that:
“In the poll, MoveOn.org gave its members a choice of supporting, opposing or being ‘not sure’ of the plan proposed by the Democratic leadership, according to an e-mail sent to members Sunday by MoveOn.org official Eli Pariser. It did not mention a more aggressive withdrawal proposal backed by Woolsey, Waters and Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.). Pariser said MoveOn.org had held out as long as possible before backing the leadership proposal. ‘We were basically declining to take a position as long as we could to strengthen the hand of the progressives. We did the poll at the last time we felt we could have an impact on the final vote.’ He said he would support the progressive proposal if it came to a vote. ‘We’ll encourage people to vote for that and for the supplemental,’ he said. ‘We are trying to end the war. That’s the mandate.’
So, Pariser held off as long as possible to run a rigged poll and announce support for Pelosi’s bill, in order not to actively work against the Lee Amendment. But working to support the Lee Amendment never crossed his mind, and he avoided asking his members about it because he knew they would favor it. But the progressives were not at that point pushing for a pretentious and meaningless vote on Lee followed by backing for Pelosi. They were pushing for a Yes vote on Lee and a No vote on Pelosi unless it included Lee.
If Pariser thought he knew so much about what was possible and what was not, why didn’t he lay that case out to MoveOn’s membership? Why didn’t he offer the choice of backing Lee’s position but make his argument that it would be futile? Did he not trust MoveOn members to make the right decision? That seems strange given the lines that can be found at the bottom of a MoveOn Email:
“Support our member-driven organization: MoveOn.org Political Action is entirely funded by our 3.2 million members. We have no corporate contributors, no foundation grants, no money from unions. Our tiny staff ensures that small contributions go a long way. If you’d like to support our work, you can give now at….”
Clearly MoveOn needs to work on distinguishing “member driven” from “member funded.”
Shame on Eli, who it appears is still trying to defend the maneuver.
Pelosi’s plan, as I see it, extends America’s submit or die foreign policy for another year, until the eve of the 2008 elections. At that point, election fears will drive whatever sucky compromise happens next.
Meanwhile, at the Democratic party level, even though Bush admits to criminal conduct (bypassing the FISA court), and has committed, but not admitted to, other crimes, fidelity to the Constitution takes a back seat to sublimation. Tolerance in this case is equivalent to criminal empowerment and forever mucks up the political process. This is seen every day with the bluster and bravado of a President who, despite the devastation in his wake, feels absolutely no weakness whatsoever. Worse yet, with an empowered criminal in the top spot, it is impossible to correctly adjudicate the complex mess in Iraq. Impossible.
Likewise, the tactic of compromising with a criminal President risks serious fracture in the Democratic party. The separation is between the rational wing that refuses to sit by quietly while a criminal runs the country, and the club wing, who goes easy with one of its own.America: still an insider’s game.
I have a confession to make: I started watching “24” this season (after ignoring the first five years, I caved in to the hype)-and I’m hooked (against my better instincts). Let me qualify that. I’m “hooked” on a purely visceral level (There’s always a car chase and stuff usually blows up real good-it’s a Guy Thing, I have no defense). In spite of the cartoonish right-wing histrionics exploiting the public’s fears about domestic terrorism, and the silly Darth Vader/Luke Skywalker dynamic with Jack Bauer and his father, I’m finding the show quite diverting (Just don’t ask me any questions about it five minutes later-all I can usually recall is Kiefer Sutherland barking urgently into his cell phone while everybody back at HQ stares purposefully into their PC monitors. Oh yeah, and then someone usually gets tortured and the odd L.A. suburb disappears in a mushroom cloud.)
When it comes to “ticking timebomb” wingnut nightmare scenarios, however, “24” cannot hold a candle to John Frankenheimer’s 1963 political potboiler, Seven Days in May The director was on a roll at the time; he had delivered The Manchurian Candidatejust one year prior. “Seven Days in May” eschewed the far-fetched plot of the former film for a more frighteningly believable speculation on how an American coup d’etat might occur.
Kirk Douglas stars as Colonel “Jiggs” Casey, an aide to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General James Scott (Burt Lancaster). The hawkish, right wing Scott is an outspoken critic of the President (Fredric March), who has created a polarized national climate after facilitating a nuclear treaty with the Russians. General Scott has become a bit of a rock star on the Right. He delivers politicized speeches at public rallies while methodically building the support of fellow joint chiefs and conservative congressmen.
Colonel Casey admires the General, but believes a dedicated military man should remain politically neutral; he is intuitively unsettled by Scott’s increasingly brazen public stance. When the stalwart Casey begins to suspect that an upcoming military “exercise” could be something more much more sinister, he feels duty-bound to inform the President. What follows makes for a nail-biting political thriller of the highest order.
Frankenheimer infuses his film with a sense of dread and suspense without firing one shot in anger (the creators of “24” should be so lucky). The cast includes Martin Balsam, Ava Gardner and Edmond O’Brien. Rod Serling’s taut, intelligent screenplay (remember those?) is adapted from the book by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II.
When I re-screened for this review, I was floored by the prescience of one particular piece of dialogue. In a pivotal scene toward the end of the film, the President confronts General Scott with the evidence of his sedition. After the general tells the President he deserves to be removed from office without due process, the President responds: “You want to defend the United States of America-then defend it with the tools it supplies you with…its Constitution. You ask for a mandate, General-from a ballot box. You don’t steal it after midnight, when the country has its back turned.” Remind you of anyone?
The Baghdad Security Plan is going so well that Iraqis displaced by sectarian violence are flocking back to their homes in Baghdad, so a number of officials are telling us. The only problem with that: it’s probably not true. General David Petraeus, in an interview with the BBC on March 18, said hundreds and even up to a thousand Iraqis had already returned, although he warned the plan is still in its early stages–a hopeful sign. On March 20, a Pentagon official, Major General Michael Barbero, gave a briefing in Washington during which that statistic morphed into hundreds of Iraqi families, which at a conservative multiplier of six to a family, bumps that number well above a thousand people. Meanwhile, Brig. General Qassim Atta al-Moussawi, the Iraqi spokesman for the Baghdad Security Plan, confidently asserted that 2,000 families had returned.
Good luck finding them all. Tufan Abdu-Wahab, head of the Baghdad section in the Ministry of Migration and Displaced People, said in an interview that only a handful of Iraqi families had returned, and most of those were Shias returning to Shia districts, rather than to formerly mixed communities. Officials have a pretty good handle on this, he said, because the government is offering a bounty of 250,000 dinars (about $192) to each family that returns to its home, and they also pay a small benefit to families who are displaced, so people both fleeing and returning have a big incentive to register. So as of the end of February, 35,000 families–210,000 people approximately–had registered as displaced, he said. Of those, Abdu-Wahab says that only about 1 percent have come back–which would be 350 families in the first month of the security plan–but many of those have only returned to check on their belongings and leave again. Meanwhile, families continue to flee at the rate of 25 a day, according to the ministry’s registration statistics, easily outstripping any returns.
I guess they figure nobody can check, which proves how out of touch they really are. Just because the American reconstruction effort couldn’t keep track of the billions it was handing out doesn’t mean the Iraqis can’t.
The director was on a roll at the time; he had delivered 
just one year prior. “Seven Days in May” eschewed the far-fetched plot of the former film for a more frighteningly believable speculation on how an American coup d’etat might occur.