Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Democrats Without A Conscience: Undermining A Moral Imperative

by poputonian

From the SeattlePI:

Washington Democrats Sen. Patty Murray and Rep. Jay Inslee requested last week that legislators drop bills calling for impeachment investigations of Bush and against the troop surge in Iraq.

They say such measures will increase political fighting at home while slowing the progress to get U.S. troops out of the fighting in Iraq.

Inslee and Murray are trying to tell state legislators that the efforts are a waste of time, said Inslee’s spokeswoman, Christine Hanson.

“At the federal level, impeachment talks are more distracting than productive,” added Murray spokesman Alex Glass.

State Sen. Eric Oemig, D-Kirkland, introduced the impeachment bill. Another bill that calls for the U.S. to refrain from increasing troop presence in Iraq is sponsored by Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles, D-Seattle.

Cheney and Bush have killed and maimed more than 700,000 people in our name, in the name of America, and Congress has better things to do?

Here’s another point of view:

Testimony for Impeachment Hearing

By David Swanson

FOR THE WASHINGTON STATE SENATE HEARING CALLING FOR THE CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES TO INVESTIGATE AND CONSIDER HEARINGS ON EVIDENCE THAT COULD LEAD TO THE IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH AND VICE-PRESIDENT RICHARD B. CHENEY

MARCH 1, 2007

I live in Charlottesville, Va., the home town of Thomas Jefferson, who feared we would not be able to maintain a republic and would slip into elected despotism. I am the Washington (DC) Director of Democrats.com and of ImpeachPAC.org. I am a co-founder of the AfterDowningStreet.org coalition, creator of MeetWithCindy.org, and a board member of Progressive Democrats of America, and of the Backbone Campaign, an activist organization based on Vashon Island in Washington State. I was the organizer in 2006 of Camp Democracy. I serve on the steering committee of the Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice and on a working group of United for Peace and Justice. I have worked as a newspaper reporter and as a communications director, with jobs including Press Secretary for Dennis Kucinich’s 2004 presidential campaign, Media Coordinator for the International Labor Communications Association, and three years as Communications Coordinator for ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. I am a member of and have served on the Executive Council of the Washington Baltimore Newspaper Guild. I obtained a Master’s degree in philosophy from the University of Virginia in 1997.

Democrats.com and After Downing Street have been keeping large lists of citizens in Washington State informed of the progress of this resolution. Generating enthusiasm has not been a problem. This is something people are passionately behind. It’s important to understand that passion, and I’m sure that many speakers today will help to communicate it. Jefferson and his colleagues in framing the Constitution intended the body of our federal government closest to the people, the House of Representatives, to have the power of impeachment in order to check abuses by the executive and judicial branches. And Jefferson’s Manual, rules used by Congress to this day, allows for a state legislature, a body still closer to the people, to petition the House to begin impeachment. Impeachment is supposed to arise from public concerns at the local and state levels. While an impeachment is merely an indictment, and initiating an impeachment hearing is only the equivalent of convening a grand jury, there is nothing more serious or solemn than this process. And my impression is that the vast bulk of the public enthusiasm for impeachment today is appropriately serious.

We must pursue impeachment of Cheney and Bush, not because of any animosity toward those individuals, and certainly not for electoral advantage. Rather, we must impeach because if we do not, we will be rewriting the rules for all future administrations. The greatest concern of those who put impeachment in the Constitution was that an executive could needlessly take the nation into war. We now face a case in which the President and Vice President began a war in secret with misappropriated funds, intentionally misled the Congress and the public about the need for war, launched a war that is patently illegal under the U.N. charter and U.S. law, began the construction of permanent military bases in a foreign nation with no consultation with Congress and continued that construction after Congress forbade it. Through the course of this war, which US intelligence and international studies conclude has made the world far more dangerous and the United States far less popular, and which has put our great grandchildren into financial debt, the Bush Administration has sanctioned illegal spying, kidnapping, extraordinary rendition, detentions without charge, torture, murder, the use of illegal weapons, and the illegal targeting of civilians, hospitals, and journalists. Numerous attempts by Congress to temper these policies have been unconstitutionally reversed by presidential signing statements.

Evidence of these crimes has been collected at afterdowningstreet/keydocuments

Please take some time to study it. No summary does it justice.

If we do not impeach, we can expect the same behavior Bush and Cheney have engaged in, and worse, from future administrations.

The President has made clear that he will not end the war or place himself under the rule of law. The Congress has made clear that it will not seriously attempt to end the war or to investigate the fraud that initiated it. The people of the United States and of the world are looking to state governments like yours for heroic leadership. And there can be no doubt that history, should our species weather the current storms, will look back on your actions as heroic if you successfully initiate the impeachment of Bush and Cheney.

Congress will not act without you. You are the people’s last recourse. If you let them down, democracy lets them down.

Please do not be like the neighbors who watch a murder out the window and all assume that someone else is phoning for help. Everyone else is failing. We are looking to you for leadership.

Please heed the warning of Congressman Abraham Lincoln, who heroically challenged President Polk’s fraudulent and aggressive war on Mexico:

“Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so, whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose – and you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after you have given him so much as you propose. If, today, he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada, to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, ‘I see no probability of the British invading us’ but he will say to you ‘be silent; I see it, if you don’t.’ The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making power to Congress, was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons: Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us.”

“Those Days Are Gone”

by digby

I am getting so tired of Republicans screwing things up so that the Democrats have to come in and clean up their messes. Tonight, I watched what could have been a vintage 1992 60 Minutes story about how the deficit is going to bankrupt the country unless somebody does something right now — which immediately translates into a story that insists we must radically scale back all spending and entitlement programs (except the military, of course) because it would be immoral to pass these bills on to our grandchildren.

And yet, in this vintage deficit fear mongering story, there is virtually no discussion of why we are in this situation. Here’s what they said:

He calls it a fiscal wake up tour, and he is telling civic groups, university forums and newspaper editorial boards that the U.S. has spent, promised, and borrowed itself into such a deep hole it will be unable to climb out if it doesn’t act now. As Walker sees it, the survival of the republic is at stake.

“What’s going on right now is we’re spending more money than we make…we’re charging it to credit card…and expecting our grandchildren to pay for it. And that’s absolutely outrageous,” he told the editorial board of the Seattle Post Intelligencer.

You have heard this before, from Ross Perot 15 years ago. You might have even thought the problem had been solved, when President Clinton announced, “Tonight, I come before you to announce that the federal deficit — will be simply zero.”

“Well, those days are gone. We’ve gone from surpluses to huge deficits and our long range situation is much worse,” Walker says.

That’s it? That’s all we’re going to hear about how this happened?

Excuse me, but where were he and 60 Minutes during the past six years when the Republicans blew a record surplus and dug us into a hole so deep he now says the republic is in danger?

Damn these people. Every single time these crooked Republicans get in power they line their pockets with taxpayer funded boondoggles and tax cuts for their rich supporters then start rending their garments over the looming fiscal catastrophe they created and demand the government stop spending on all those parasitic old people and children (whose “failure of citizenship” apparently dwarfs that of the corrupt thieves who stole the nation blind and threw buckets of money down the toilet in expensive failures like Iraq.) Oh, and raising taxes is completely unacceptable.

Republicans have proven once again that they are out of control children who completely trash the country’s fiscal integrity whenever they get a chance, requiring the Democrats to come in and do the painful things that are required to fix them. And every step of the way, they Republicans dog them with absurd “tax and spend” rhetoric.

It’s a great racket for the GOP but it’s long past time the nation put a stop to this insanity. It would be helpful if 60 Minutes at least put some of that in perspective when they get on the “responsibility” train and explain to the American people why this is. “Those days are gone” is not adequate.

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He’s Baaack

by digby

Bill Sher reports on Newtie’s little speech at CPAC which included this little gem:

There’s more to say about Newt Gingrich (who looks more like a presidential candidate after today) but let me call attention to this from his grand finale address to CPAC:

He blamed the residents of New Orleans’ 9th Ward for a “failure of citizenship,” by being “so uneducated and so unprepared, they literally couldn’t get out of the way of a hurricane.”

And he called for a “deep investigation” into this “failure of citizenship.”

Here’s the full quote:

How can you have the mess we have in New Orleans, and not have had deep investigations of the federal government, the state government, the city government, and the failure of citizenship in the Ninth Ward, where 22,000 people were so uneducated and so unprepared, they literally couldn’t get out of the way of a hurricane.

It pays to remember that the reason George W. Bush ran as a “compassionate conservative” was to try to distance himself from the discredited image of Newtie’s Republican revolution. That comment pretty much nails the problem in a nutshell. Newt is a jackass and the country as a whole has always pretty much hated him.

He’s extremely popular among the hardcore conservatives, however, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he becomes their standard bearer. They have always erroneously assumed that the rest of the nation loves his arrogant psuedo-intellectual meanness the way they do.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi continues to maintain solid job approval ratings throughout the nation, with 50 percent of adults approving of her performance in her first weeks of wielding the gavel.

According to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, Pelosi’s disapproval rating for her job performance is 31 percent, suggesting that Republican efforts at muddying the San Francisco Democrat’s image have not been successful.

The rating places Pelosi in a much stronger political position than the last time the House flipped control. Twelve years ago, Republican Newt Gingrich of Georgia became speaker and instantly became a public lightning rod.

According to a Jan. 29, 1995 Post-ABC poll, Gingrich’s approval rating was 40 percent while 48 percent of adults disapproved of his job performance four weeks into his tenure as speaker.

It only got worse. The more people saw him the less they liked him:

Gingrich proved more popular as a revolutionary than as a leader. Like Wright, he became entangled in an ethics imbroglio that eventually led to his reprimand by the House in 1997 and a $300,000 penalty.

After the Republicans in Congress shut down the government in 1995 in a showdown with President Bill Clinton, Gingrich’s popularity plunged, never to return to the heights of 1994. By 1996, nearly six in 10 voters had an unfavorable opinion of him. Some of his top lieutenants even plotted a coup against him, but Gingrich, ever the survivor, managed to keep his job.

On Tuesday, election night, Gingrich pointed to the fact that Republicans had won House majorities in three successive elections for the first time in 70 years. But each majority was smaller than the last, and his troops became restless. Exit polls showed that 58 percent of the voters had an unfavorable view of him, while just 36 percent viewed him favorably.

I’m quite enthusiastic at the prospect. He is a perfect representative of the toxic creepiness of modern conservatism. Run Newt, Run.

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Dirty Talk For Troubled Times

by digby

I can’t tell you how surprised I am that this guy only came up with 285 uses of some of George Carlin’s dirty words on my angry, unhinged, potty-mouthed blog. I honestly can’t believe it. Even factoring in the fact that my comments are on haloscan so my filthy leftist commenters weren’t counted (as they were on some other blogs), out of 5500 posts or so I know that I have used teh dirty words more than 285 times. There’s definitely something wrong with the methodology.

I have to admit that I’m even more surprised, however, that the manly warriors of the rightwing blogosphere are so genteel and restrained, which they seem inordinately proud of, as if they’ve won first prize from the Boston spinsters crochet society or something. There has always been a particular type of prissy conservative male who shares certain characteristics with fluttery Victorian ladies who get all breathless (and aroused) in the presence of muscular, earthy language. I didn’t realize that the alleged he-men of the rightwing blogosphere were like this but I suppose I should have. It certainly explains why they haven’t joined the military.

You’ll recall that a fussy little Annapolis grad named Ross Perot called on his Daddy to use his influence to cut his military career short because of all the vulgarity he was exposed to:

What a hilarious letter Ross Perot wrote the secretary of the Navy in 1955 explaining why he wanted to leave after two years, instead of the four he owed…

“I have found the Navy to be a fairly godless organization. I do not enjoy the prospect of continuing to stand on the quarterdeck as officer of the deck in foreign ports, being subjected to drunken tales of moral emptiness, passing our penicillin pills (we must assume this was not done to ward off pneumonia) and seeing promiscuity on the part of married men.”

Perot continued: “I have observed little in the way of a direct effort to improve a man morally while he is in the Navy, or even hold him at his present moral level.”
“I constantly hear the Lord’s name taken in vain at all levels,” wrote Perot. “I find it unsatisfying to live, work and be directed in an atmosphere where taking God’s name in vain is a part of the everyday vocabulary.”
— Molly Ivins
Austin American-Statesman, 27 May 1992

Dear me.

I’ll try to curb my brawny, robust language around these prudish little fellows if I find myself at one of their tea parties, but I can’t promise to do so on the blog. As far as I’m concerned, that chart shows that I have not been nearly salty enough. The state of our politics calls for big, bold angry rhetoric to express the level of outrage appropriate to the situation. Those with delicate rightwing sensibilities best cover their tender little ears.

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Family Value$

by digby

We have heard a great deal over the past few decades about how the elites are ruining the country with their libertine ways. In fact, the social conservative movement is based almost exclusively upon the idea that our society is going to hell in handbasket because the liberals are promoting immorality. And one of the main pieces of evidence is the decline of traditional marriage.

But what if the decline of marriage has little to do with a lack of traditional family values at all? And what if the salt of the earth regular working Americans who social conservatives claim as the backbone of their movement are the ones who are rejecting marriage in the greatest numbers?

Punctuating a fundamental change in American family life, married couples with children now occupy fewer than one in every four households — a share that has been slashed in half since 1960 and is the lowest ever recorded by the census.

As marriage with children becomes an exception rather than the norm, social scientists say it is also becoming the self-selected province of the college-educated and the affluent. The working class and the poor, meanwhile, increasingly steer away from marriage, while living together and bearing children out of wedlock.

“The culture is shifting, and marriage has almost become a luxury item, one that only the well educated and well paid are interested in,” said Isabel V. Sawhill, an expert on marriage and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

So traditional family values are becoming the purview of the rich and large numbers of Americans are living in alternative arrangements. Who knew?

I suppose it might be at least partially a coincidence that this change coincides with the rise of the free market fundamentalism of the conservative movement, but whatever underlying economic conditions which were present were likely to have been at least accelerated and made worse by Republican economic policy.

“We seem to be reverting to a much older pattern, when elites marry and a great many others live together and have kids,” said Peter Francese, demographic trends analyst for Ogilvy & Mather, an advertising firm.

Much, much older. Feudal to be exact. When aristocracies form, marriage and children become important institutions for maintaining property and hence, power. Policies are enacted that favor those institutions and it becomes a somewhat superfluous institution for the rest of society. In fact, the additional economic stresses of these policies put enormous strain on marriages and they become an institution of unhappiness for many. That’s exactly what’s happening right now in this country.

As far as marriage with children is concerned, the post-World War II version of normal began to fall apart around 1970.

“Before then, if you looked at families across the income spectrum, they all looked the same: a mother, father, kids and a dog named Spot,” said Sawhill, of the Brookings Institution.

Around that time, rates of divorce and cohabitation were rising sharply — and widely publicized.

“What I don’t think the public knew then or knows now is that well-educated, upper-middle-class professionals did not engage in these activities nearly as much as less-advantaged families,” Sawhill said.

Despite what the right would have us believe about the 60’s, in those early years, the sexual revolution was not the primary reason for the change. My mother was a divorced woman with two young kids in the early 1950’s and her opportunities were almost nil. She was in her 30’s and had to live with her parents until she met a man who could support her and her children. Once the woman’s movement broke down some of those barriers in the next couple of decades, people like my mother had some adult choices in life. Of course that also changed marriage. Women like her who had been in terribly abusive or stifling marriages were finally able to live a decent middle class life on their own.

It was always mostly about economics and basic human freedom, not morals, even though in her day, my mother was considered something of a loose woman and certainly a failure by the society in which she lived — a deeply unfair characterization that the social conservatives are trying desperately to bring back with their hectoring about family values. They may say they don’t see traditional marriage as unfair to women, but in the hands of a bullying Promise Keeper, it most certainly can be.

Class, though, is a much better tool than race for predicting whether Americans will marry or cohabit, said Pamela Smock, co-author of the review and a University of Michigan sociology professor.

“The poor aren’t entering into marriage very much at all,” said Smock, who has interviewed more than 100 cohabitating couples. She said young people from these backgrounds often do not think they can afford marriage.

Arguments that marriage can mean stability do not seem to change their attitudes, Smock said, noting that many of them have parents with troubled marriages.

Victoria Miller and Cameron Roach, who have been living together for 18 months, are two such people, and they say they cannot imagine getting married.

She is 22 and manages a Burger King in Seattle. He is 24 and works part time testing software in the Seattle suburb of Redmond. Together, they earn less than $20,000 a year and are living with Roach’s father. They cannot afford to live anywhere else.

“Marriage ruins life,” Roach said. “I saw how much my parents fought. I saw how miserable they made each other.”

Miller, who was pressured by her Mormon parents to marry when she was 17 and pregnant, said her short, failed marriage and her parents’ long, failed marriage have convinced her that the institution is often bad for children. Shuttled between her mom and dad, she moved eight times before she was 16.

“With my parents, when their marriage started breaking down, my dad started to have trouble at work and we spent years on government assistance,” Miller said.

Her two young sons live with their father.

“For most Americans, cohabitation will continue to increase over the coming decades, and the percentage of children born outside of marriage is also going to increase,” Smock said.

If the Republicans want to turn this country into a feudal aristocracy they are going to have to accept what comes with that. — an unsettled and unhappy populace many of whom are mired in downward mobility, stressed out, unhappy and open to all kinds of political and social unpleasantness. It’s not their morals, it’s their dead-end futures.

(And by the way, there are no more licentious people anywhere than in the Aristocracies — including, as we know, their priests.)

I find it very interesting that nothing in our politics reflects these facts and instead we are dealing with a phony, idealized construct of middle and working class America that bears no relationship to people’s real lives. No wonder so many are apathetic. And no wonder that many of those who are interested, see politics as a sporting event — it’s just another reality show with rival tribes battling for a big prize. Like jousts, perhaps. Or Roman circuses.

Update: If you want to see something that will add stress to a marriage, try this:

For more years now advocates have been denouncing sub-prime loans and “exotic” mortgages – adjustable rate loans, “no doc” loans, interest only loans, etc. – as often abusive and predatory, and a leading contributor to mortgage defaults and financial instability among working and middle class people. Meanwhile sub-prime lenders have been losing profits, downsizing and going out of business because their loan porfolios are crumbling under the poor or non existent underwriting criteria. And an article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday reported how while prime borrowers seem to be paying back their loans, those who fall somewhere between “prime” and “sub-prime” are also defaulting at higher rates on their mortgages. Almost as troubling and predictable as the rapid collapse of Bush’s “Ownership Society” culture, which pushed homeownership at any price, literally (See my Op-Ed making this argument here), is the extent to which the press conflates sub-prime loans with bad credit risk borrowers. Research has already shown that people of color are receiving higher priced loans, period, even after credit scores are taken into account.After a while it becomes absurdist, yet convenient, self-fulfilling prophecy. Make double-digit, interest only, loans to the people who can least afford them – or loans in which the rate suddenly shoots up, or loans in which the borrowers’ income is not verified – and then sit back and marvel at how these borrowers are falling behind on their payments. It’s like selling cars with faulty brakes to housewives and then announcing that women are bad drivers when they get into accidents.

That’s the same logic driving this campaign to make the marriage failure rate a matter of “bad values.” Create a greed based economy so filled with stress and insecurity that all social institutions are straining at the seams and then blame the people for being immoral when they reject those same institutions.

H/T to reader MK
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Michelle Makes Her Move

by digby

…to displace Coulter as Queen Bee. (You can find the link if you want it.)

I remains to be seen if the rest of the Noise Machine is ready to anoint her:

MM: Ann Coulter was here yesterday. She gave a very, mostly funny, speech, and at the end of it, dropped a stinker where she used the term “faggot.” And I’m glad, I have to honestly say, I’m glad I didn’t bring my children here because that’s not the kind of language I would use. What was your reaction to that? Because, predictably, the left is in high dudgeon about it. Howard Dean wants every presidential candidate in the Republican Party to renounce it. Do you think that was a really bad move on her part and should be condemned?

Sean Hannity: I didn’t hear it. I’d rather see it before I comment on it and whatever. You know, no other person is responsible for what a person says except that person. And so, if they have a problem with what Ann Coulter says, blame Ann Coulter. You can’t blame somebody else for what she said. So I didn’t see it.

MM: Except that we’re all role models here. And there are so many young people they inspire–

Sean Hannity: –I don’t use that term, so that’s my answer to you if she used it.

She linked to her post from last year when she condemned Coulter for her use of the word raghead. She didn’t mention Coulters other comments, not even the one in which she claimed that her biggest moral dilemma was when she had a clear shot at Bill Clinton. Apparently Michelle sees incivility as solely being the use of dirty words and racial epithets. Death treats, eliminationism and dehumanization, not so much.

I wonder if the Washington Post will term this a “catfight.”

Meanwhile, Malkin shares her photos of the wounded Iraq war veterans attending CPAC, including the often spat upon and discriminated against Joshua Sparling, who won an award as a Defender of the Constitution.

Malkin says:

After the dinner, journalist/happy warrior Joel Mowbray quipped to me:

“At left-wing conferences, you leave hating America. At right-wing conferences, you leave loving America.”

That’s exactly how I felt at the end of the dinner after shaking the hands of the disabled vets who came by crutch and wheelchair from Walter Reed to spend a few hours at CPAC.

I am, quite honestly, speechless.

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Kohlmann’s Opinions On Iraq And Yours. Plus An Announcement

by tristero

I want to thank all you folks for such an intelligent batch of comments to my post on Evan Kohlmann’s opinion that the US should not withdraw from Iraq. Some people agreed with me, but many argued, as Terry Steichen did:

I agree with every single point you made, except for two things. One is your assumption that things will get far worse when we leave. I suggest that there is every reason to believe that our presence as occupiers is inflaming the situation, and that our absence may have a calming effect.

To respond, I most certainly agree that the US presence is inflaming the situation in many different ways. However, we cannot predict what the situation will be in 2009, which is the earliest that a serious discussion about what to do in Iraq can take place.* There are so many variables it is impossible to predict what the situation will be like then. But I think that among the options that will almost certainly have to be considered is what the world response (including the US response) to a potential (or ongoing) genocide in Iraq should be. One commenter correctly reminded us that the 650,000 Iraqi civilian deaths that one respected organization reported really is genocide, or close to it, already. Others discussed, in addition to the calming effects of our leaving, the fact that Iraq’s neighbors won’t permit genocide.

Perhaps. But perhaps not. My only point is that withdrawal now isn’t going to happen. As a political tactic, perhaps it makes sense to organize around it, but I think calling for impeachment makes even more** even if it has as little chance of happening as withdrawal. With Bush in the high 20’s for approval, a sober movement to impeach Bush AND Cheney has an opportunity to make clear to the world that the US is repudiating Bushism.

Which brings us to Terry’s other point:

The other is your concern about that the onsequences following our departure will result in a lot of blame being heaped on us (which, presumably, we’re not getting now, and are avoiding now). My view is worrying about being blamed is about the dumbest reason possible for staying (even if it made logical sense).

In fact, I have no such concerns because Bush has created a situation in which the US will be blamed for all atrocities committed whether the US withdraws or stays. It doesn’t matter whether it’s America’s fault, there will be nothing we can do to prevent most of the world from blaming the US.

On the larger issue, whether world opinion of the US matters, of course it matters and it matters quite a bit. It matters In ways large and small. Plummeting world opinion of America will affect – has already affected – the ability of Americans to travel freely abroad, for pleasure and education as well as business; it affects the kinds of negotiations that take place on numerous issues, from trade to disamrmament to cultural exchanges. All of this has the potential directly to impact life for all US citizens, even those who have never ventured further afield than 75 miles from Springfield, MO.

Naturally, one doesn’t take world opinion exclusively into account, but it is plain foolish to ignore it. Need proof? The Bush administration has provided plenty of it. Sure, it makes good pr copy – uncompromising stance for principles and all that. But let’s get real here. World opinion matters.

Terry makes one final comment:

There is actually one more thing I’d add, and that is, beyond ‘internationalizing’ the Iraq situation, we need, even more pressingly, to ‘regionalize’ it.

Agreed. The question is how. And that is not a trivial question.

One final point. Several commenters suggested that it is racist to express the opinion that the US military is needed to keep Sunni and Shia from killing each other in Iraq. I’ve mulled the reasoning behind this opinion quite a bit but, quite frankly, I don’t see the racism. Or rather, I don’t see an intervention to prevent or halt genocide by the US as inevitably or predominantly racist. I believe each situation must be evaluated individually. To argue that the US must always stand aside, or must always intervene, seems like precisely the kind of foolish consistency Emerson warns against.

I realize that my position is sloppy, but that’s how the world works. There can be no “End to Evil” or other perfections. To a great extent, an intelligent theory of international relations has to have lots of room to take it as it comes and respond – not from idealism or realism – but with highly knowledgeable prudence. Such a theory must also have room for the interpersonal dynamics of the negotiators.

I realize many of you disagree and will take my refusal to condemn a possible US intervention to confront genocide as proof positive I’m a sell-out kind of a liberal, or that I’m really an American imperialist hiding behind a wimpy version of neo-con idealism. If you do, I think that would be a serious misconstruction of my position, perhaps more the fault of my inability to articulate both clearly and concisely what I mean than your failure to understand. I suggest, that if you really do feel I am advocating an Imperial America which has the right to impose its vastly clearly superior cooties on the rest of the world, you check out some of my posts on American Exceptionalism from my blog.

And now for something completely different.

I’m about to go off to an artist’s colony to start a major work. Basically, I will be in the middle of nowhere, at an undisclosed location, for two weeks with 7 other artists, a cabin with a piano (and electricity for my computer) and nothing (and no one) else. I’ve never done anything like it before and I’m excited about the chance to have such few distractions.

I’ll tell you more about it at a later date, but right now, I wanted to let you know my blogging will be extremely limited for the forseeable future. But, as you’ll see, that in no way means I’m abandoning the barricades. Just the opposite, in fact.

I’ve had a blast writing so often here, getting to know all of you. It’s striking to see how much liberal discourse has grown and diversified since 2003, not only in the diversity of political viewpoints but in terms of intellectual sophistication and toughness. I’m not terribly blogocentric, but even so, I’m convinced that if there are tendrils of improvement in the mass media discussions of politics, we, bloggers and commenters, contributed a great deal to that and have a continuing opportunity to contribute more. And man oh man is it needed!

But enough. I’ll be back in 2 weeks and tell all, or at least more.

* Until Bush leaves the White House, all one can hope to do is try to correct or minimize as many consequences of Bush’s incompetence as we can. We have a rogue president; it’s my opinion that Democratic congresscritters are trying to walk a fine line between doing what they can without precipitating a convulsive, overt constitutional crisis. In short, the Dems are hoping to wait Bush out by not taking up Bush’s childish dare to play chicken with the American system of governance. (Whether or not this is a good idea is a totally separate question.)

**Longtime readers will realize that I’ve changed my mind about this. Given the ongoing deterioration of the Bush administration’s standing, and their continued desire to break the law and create a modern America King to replace the presidency, the advantages of pressing seriously for impeachment far outweigh the dangers that concerned me earlier.

We’ve Lost Our Mindset

by poputonian

Back in September I wrote a post about the Revolutionary mindset and the conclusions it drew about institutions, power, and tyranny. If you are interested in this subject, please read the post along with the excellent contributions made in the follow-up thread. Both the post and the comments (see hv’s historical overview) serve as background and prelude to this one.

In connecting the prior post to this one, there are a few points to highlight. One is the Samuel Adams quote posted yesterday in which he lays down his opposition to the concept of a standing army. Hullabaloo regular pseudonymous in nc picked up on the point:

It’s actually important to take Samuel Adams’ words literally, too.
…
In fact, the cricket-chirps on Walter Reed from the right suggests it’s already happened: they’re supporting the concept of the standing army more than they support the people who are part of it. ‘Troops’ as abstract.

Another revolutionary era statement on the resistance to standing armies is timeless and gives a perfect description of the Cheney-Bush regime. This was written in a Philadelphia newspaper circa 1774 by the pseudonymous Caractacus:

History is dyed in blood when it speaks of the ravages which standing armies have committed upon the liberties of mankind: officers and soldiers of the best principles and character have been converted into instruments of tyranny by the arts of wicked politicians.

War as an abstraction is exactly what the Founders wanted so deeply to avoid. It’s why they put the military under civilian control. Another regular here, benmerc, mentions this James Madison quote:

Of all the enemies of public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies. From these proceed debts and taxes. And armies, debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

Pseudonymous in nc goes on to another important and connecting point:

The Mutiny Act was introduced in 1689 as part of the Williamite settlement, on a one-year sunset, to ensure that parliaments would remain in session. That set the precedent for the Constitution’s enumeration of legislative authority over military regulations, and for the one-year military budget.

The suspicion of standing armies in the hands of the executive, funded without annual legislative approval, is bound into the structure of American governance.

But reader Charles sends in this link to Raw Story (original source Reuters), in which Joe Lieberman seeks to accomplish the exact opposite of everything the revolutionaries fought for. Lieberman demonstrates how the power now extracted by modern politicians allows the complete defiance of popular will:

Lieberman said on Tuesday that Congress should consider a tax to fund the U.S.-declared war on terrorism and reduce the need to cut domestic programs to pay for security spending.

A former Democrat who supports the Iraq war and backs President George W. Bush’s plan to send 21,500 additional troops to Iraq, Lieberman said the proposed increase in the Pentagon’s budget for next fiscal year will squeeze funding for critical domestic programs.

“I think we have to start thinking about a war on terrorism tax,” the independent Connecticut lawmaker said. “I mean people keep saying we’re not asking a sacrifice of anybody but our military in this war and some civilians who are working on it.”

Clearly there was a mindset among the revolutionaries that led them to safeguard against America becoming a warring empire. But today, politicians contemplate a standing tax, to fund a standing army, for a standing war.

It’s abundantly clear that we have lost our revolutionary mindset.

Saturday Night At The Movies

The Spy Who Came In From the Beltway

By Dennis Hartley

Early in 2001, the FBI capped off its investigation of the most serious national security breach in U.S. history by arresting Robert Hanssen, who had used his access as the Bureau’s top Soviet counter-intelligence expert to sell classified information to the KGB.

That case is dramatized in Breach, a superb new film starring Chris Cooper (in an Oscar-caliber performance) as Hanssen and directed by Billy Ray, who previously helmed Shattered Glass (another true tale dealing with deception and betrayal.)

The film opens just a few months prior to the arrest. A young, ambitious field agent, Eric O’Neill (Ryan Philippe) is “tasked” to work in Hanssen’s office as his assistant, while surreptitiously reporting on his boss’s “activities” (O’Neill has been told that Hanssen is under suspicion of engaging in “sexual perversion” while on the taxpayer’s dime).

The officious, guarded and inherently suspicious Hanssen is a tough nut to crack; when O’Neill introduces himself on his first day of work, Hanssen barks “Your name is Clerk, and my name is Sir” before slamming his office door shut. However, as O’Neill ingratiates himself into his boss’s life, he is surprised to find him admirable in many ways; he appears to be a true patriot, a good Catholic, and a dedicated “family man”. O’Neill can’t seem to dig up any dirt on the increasingly puzzling “perversion” charges.

When he confronts his “real” boss (Laura Linney) with his doubts, she lets the cat out of the bag and admits that he has been the victim of a ruse to ensure he could gain Hanssen’s trust. Hanssen, she tells him, is actually under investigation for something more ominous; he is suspected of selling information to the Soviets, possibly over a period of 20-odd years. The degree of damage from this breach is so devastating, that “We (the intelligence community) might as well have all stayed home (all those years).”

Some may find the film bereft of nail-biting suspense; but real-life espionage isn’t always as intriguing as a Le Carre novel or exciting like a Bond film. When the credits roll, Hanssen remains a cipher; although we are shown enough to quash any agent 007 comparisons (unbeknownst to his wife, he videotaped their lovemaking and got his jollies mailing copies to cronies-the very antithesis of suave and sophisticated, I’d wager). If Hanssen recalls any fictional invention, it would be a protagonist from a Graham Greene novel (typically a bitter, world-weary public servant, mulled in Catholic guilt).

The film abounds with excellent performances; it’s certainly the best work Philippe has done to date. Dennis Haysbert and Gary Cole lend good support, and Bruce Davison (as O’Neill’s father) makes the most of a brief, poignant scene with Philippe. Recommended!

Traitor Joes:The Falcon and the Snowman, Aldrich Ames: Traitor Within, Heir to an Execution: A Granddaughter’s Story, Cambridge Spies, Yuri Nosenko: Double Agent, Benedict Arnold – A Question of Honor.

Normalizing Crazy

by digby

Glenn Greenwald does a nice job today dealing with yet another example of journalistic double standards, dealing with the predictable excretory spew of Ann Coulter at this year’s CPAC vs Howie Kurtz’s recent spell on the fainting couch over few anonymous comments that were removed from the Huffington Post. But he highights this comment from Andrew Sullivan which just floored me

When you see her in such a context, you realize that she truly represents the heart and soul of contemporary conservative activism, especially among the young. The standing ovation for Romney was nothing like the eruption of enthusiasm that greeted her. . . .

Her endorsement of Romney today – “probably the best candidate” – is a big deal, it seems to me. McCain is a non-starter. He is as loathed as Clinton in these parts. Giuliani is, in her words, “very, very liberal.” One of his sins? He opposed the impeachment of Bill Clinton. That’s the new standard. She is the new Republicanism. The sooner people recognize this, the better.

I am very glad that Sullivan finally recognizes this. But Ann Coulter and her vicious tongue has been a huge star on the right since her first vomitous anti-Clinton screed. That was ten years ago. She’s been receiving riotous ovations at conservative meetings for years. Rush Limbaugh has been blowing his bile for even longer and he too is a highly respected member of the GOP establishment. The annual CPAC gathering has been selling items like “Happiness is Hillary’s face on a milk carton” and “Muslim = Terrorist” bumper stickers like they were going out of style since they started.

This hideous face of the Republican Party has been obvious to those of us who have been paying attention for a long, long time. It is the single most important reason why our politics have devolved into a filthy grudge match.

For a long time liberals were paralyzed or indifferent as the GOP demonized liberalism as the root of every problem and pathology in American society. We were derided as unamerican, treasonous and evil. After the congressional harrassment of the 90’s, the partisan impeachment, the puerile coverage of campaign 2000 and the resulting installation of a Republican president under very dubious circumstances, Democrats of all stripes heard both the Republicans and the media smirking at our outrage and telling us to “get over it.”

And all of this was after Bill Clinton had moved the party to the center, had governed as a bipartisan compromiser and the Republicans impeached him anyway. Clearly, the Democratic party was blind if they didn’t take the Republicans at their threatening words.

When Limbaugh said, “I tell people don’t kill all the liberals. Leave enough so we can have two on every campus – living fossils – so we will never forget what these people stood for,” we didn’t doubt him anymore.

When Ann Coulter said “we need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too, otherwise, they will turn out to be outright traitors,” to rapturous applause at the 2002 CPAC, we knew she wasn’t just kidding.

And, yes, when Andrew Sullivan said that we liberals in blue enclaves formed a fifth column, you’ll have to forgive us for assuming he was among the people who wished to see us jailed or dead.

It continues today. Dinesh D’Souza just published a book saying that liberals are the cause of terrorism. Ramesh Ponneru calls us “The Party of Death.” And when Michele Malkin then creates a career out of calling the left “unhinged” the Washington Post treats her like she’s discovered the Holy Grail.

This is why it is so shocking to us when we see people like Howard Kurtz and various others call for the smelling salts when some members of the left have reacted in kind by saying hateful, violent things about Dick Cheney’s assassination attempt. (These anonymous commenters, by the way, are not best selling authors making a personal televised appearance at a gathering that includes most of the Republican presidential candidates, members of congress and even the Vice President himself.)I certainly agree that such appalling comments are not to be accepted. Indeed, I recall how my stomach turned when when I read what Coulter had to say at CPAC last year:

On Democrats: “Someday they will find a way to abort all future Boy Scouts.” College professors: “sissified, pussified.” Harvard: “the Soviet Union.” John Kerry: the other “dominant woman in Democratic politics.” Her post-9/11 motto: “Rag head talks tough, rag head faces consequences.” For good measure, she threw in a joke about having Muslims burn down the Supreme Court — with the liberal justices inside.

Then came questions. A young woman asked Coulter to describe the most difficult ethical decision she ever made. “There was one time I had a shot at Bill Clinton,” Coulter said.

Howard Kurtz didn’t say anything about that. I don’t recall Michelle Malkin having the vapors. Nobody apologized. Perhaps if they had, some random anonymous commenters on the left wouldn’t make the mistake of thinking that such ugly statements are acceptable. After all, that kind of disgusting rhetoric has been thoroughly acceptable in the highest reaches of the political establishment for years now and nobody but us unhinged liberals have said a word about it.

And you know what’s truly sad about the press’s indifference to these violent creeps? It isn’t just us they think should be killed:

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