Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Dazed And Confused

by digby

There is a ton of chatter about this absolutely ridiculous blogger ethics piece on Greater Boston this past friday. If you haven’t read about it, you can get all the skinny on C&L and The Horses Mouth.

The most egregious error, of course, and the one that everyone is chortling over, is that the man who looked down his long professional nose at unethical blogging activity is the same man who took satire for reality and didn’t bother to do any fact checking before he reported it as true. It is almost hilarious in its goofiness. Almost.

Johnathan Carroll actually believed this and reported it:

Armstrong bragged this week that the other bloggers he’d farmed out his website to, were in reality, him, writing under those aliases the entire time. And the blogrolling didn’t stop there: Armstrong also posed as liberal blogger Scott Shields, who posted for pay for yet another Democratic candidate

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That Armstrong in an ironman, isn’t he?

The problem is that Carroll didn’t just make a fool of himself on that aspect of the story — he botched it even before he got to that part. He spliced in an interview segment with David Kravitz of Blue MassGroup out of context (which Kravitz objected to here), and he also sets forth a total misreading of the NY Times piece on which he based his segment:

Carroll (narrating): …The undisputed high point for the bloggeratti came last summer in Connecticut when they whipped up support for moneybags newcomer Ned Lamont who then whipped Senator Joe Lieberman in the Democratic primary.

(video) “My name is Ned Lamont and I approved this message! Thank you!”

Carroll(narrating): As it turns out some of Lamont’s money in that campaign went to — wait for it — political bloggers. The New York Times published a “pay for praise” chart showing which bloggers got paid which money from which candidate.

Local blogger David Kravitz of BlueMass Group, says there’s a delicate balance involved here:

Kravitz: I don’t have a problem with campaigns paying bloggers or campaigns paying anybody else to do whatever they want as long as they’re transparent and up front about it.

Carroll (narrating): Some yes, some no. According to the New York Times some of the “kept bloggers” appeared on some of the left wing’s glamour web-sites. From the Huffington Post to Daily Kos to MYDD.

Here is what the NY Times story actually said:

But this year, candidates across the country found plenty of outsiders ready and willing to move inside their campaigns. Candidates hired some bloggers to blog and paid others consulting fees for Internet strategy advice or more traditional campaign tasks like opposition research.

After the Virginia Democratic primary, for instance, James Webb hired two of the bloggers who had pushed to get him into the race. The Democratic Senate candidate Ned Lamont in Connecticut had at least four bloggers on his campaign team. Few of these bloggers shut down their “independent” sites after signing on with campaigns, and while most disclosed their campaign ties on their blogs, some — like Patrick Hynes of Ankle Biting Pundits — did so only after being criticized by fellow bloggers.

Throughout the segment and the roundtable, Carroll insisted that liberal blogs were offenders in this unethical non-disclosure, when in fact, the liberal bloggers were not implicated by non-disclosure at all in the New York Times piece. He got it completely backwards. The scenario in which bloggers are paid to secretly shill for a candidate on their own site happened one time that I’m aware of (aside from Hynes) and it was the notorious conservative Thune bloggers in South Dakota. I suppose it may have happened on the liberal side in this last election, but if it did, it was not revealed by that NY Times article or anywhere else. The dark speculation about the “kept” bloggers of the “left-wing’s glamour web-sites” simply has no basis.

But there’s also a very confused supposition that underlies both the NY Times article and John Carroll’s piece. They suggest that bloggers ought to give up their own sites if they sign on to a campaign and I can’t for the life of me think why that would be ethically necessary.(On a practical basis, I understand it completely.)

They seem to think that bloggers have some obligation to be “objective” like newspapers, when we are already openly partisan or ideological. They also seem to think that in the same way a writer for The New Republic cannot work on campaigns, neither can a blogger.

But suppose a writer for the New Republic did go to work for a campaign and disclosed in the magazine that she was working for candidate X and her readers could take that into account? I realize this makes professional journalists uncomfortable, but what would be the ethical problem? These writers are assumed to have an ideological point of view, so nobody expects them to be politically neutral. Indeed, their ideological status adds to their credibility. If anyone thought they were just political mercenaries, hiring out their writing and argumentation skills to the highest bidder, they would be shunned. Except for the obvious dilemma as to which employer the person answers to and to whom they owe their ultimate loyalty (something that doesn’t affect bloggers), I honestly can’t see the problem. It happens on op-ed pages of newspapers every day (when they bother to disclose, that is.) I can see why the magazine would not want to do this for many reasons, and don’t expect that they would, but I don’t see how the writer is personally ethically compromised unless she writes lies or fails to disclose.

It actually strikes me as more ethical and honest than what we saw in the Scooter Libby case where it was revealed after many months that many in the Washington press corps knew more than they ever reported, out and out lied to the public and protected powerful people who blatantly used them for partisan political gain. So many of these phony constructs of “objectivity” and “impartiality” and “journalistic ethics” have no common sense to them. In fact, they seem to be rules that are designed to obscure the truth rather than reveal them — and keep control of the political discourse in such a way that the people have to interpret their morning newpapers through far more than simple political bias; they have to try to decipher an arcane language that requires the kind of specialized skill that is more common to Egyptologists or tarot card readers. “Bias” can have much more insidious shadings than simple partisanship.

When you watch the whole Greater Boston segment, you realize that the problem isn’t just Carroll, it’s every person in the group. They may be taking their colleague’s word for it that many liberal bloggers are on the take and using aliases to get paid by different campaigns for their nefarious deeds, but their knowledge of the new media is also nil in every other respect. Their comically pompous attitude, considering that they are, with every word, revealing themselves to be completely foolish, is a sight to behold.

They took Carroll’s misleading report even further than he did. A “payola” meme gained steam, until liberal bloggers ended up being compared to Armstrong Williams. They were incoherent on the subject of blogs endorsing candidates, which they equated with being on the candidate’s payroll. They seem not to be able to grasp that a political site might endorse a candidate the same way newspapers or unions or citizens groups endorse candidates — because they believe in them. Instead, they seemed to think that when an independent partisan blog endorses a candidate, that blog loses its credibility for some reason. They tut-tutted that when the liberal BlueMassgroup blog endorsed Deval Patrick, the campaign was disappointed because now it looked like the site was a shill for their campaign. That’s makes no sense at all, unless they were also disappointed when the liberal editorial page of the Boston Globe also endorsed him. Carroll did make it clear later in the program that BlueMassGroup was not on the payroll, but failed to explain why they should be assumed to be shills when they endorsed Patrick.

The fundamental question (again) is whether bloggers should disclose whether they are on the payroll of campaigns or any other entity that is related to the subjects they write about. Yes, they should. We all agreed long ago that this is the best way to keep order on this issue. It’s the same standard that’s required of op-ed writers and columnists, although you hardly ever see it applied to anyone who appears on the cable shoutfests. Many of those “strategists” who make television appearances and opine on all matters political really do fail to disclose their web of financial ties to the political establishment. I suppose that might be a simple matter of practicality. After all, the list of people and companies many of them take money from would be so long there would probably not be time for an actual show.

None of this disclosure stuff is a problem for readers and bloggers. It just seems to be a problem with certain journalists, who apparently can’t wrap their minds around the idea that if bloggers adhere to a basic disclosure rule, readers and voters use their eyes and ears and minds to fairly judge their credibility. You don’t have to create a bunch of highminded complicated ethical restraints — they figure it out all by themselves.

And don’t journalists know that everybody’s got a blog these days?

The blog at Greater Boston posted a correction and announced that the error will be addressed on next week’s program. Stay tuned.

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Eventually, We’ll Get To It

by poputonian

I’ve been reading a fabulous book called Dissent in America: The Voices That Shaped a Nation. It was compiled and edited by Ralph Young, a Temple University professor who teaches a very popular course on the history of American dissent. The book contains “400 years of speeches, articles, letters, and songs that made a difference.” I found the petition below interesting. It was written almost 100 years before the Civil War, and almost 200 years before the time of MLK. Professor Young writes an intro:

The notions of “freedom” and “liberty” that were echoing throughout the colonies in the 1770s sufficiently encouraged slaves that they began petitioning colonial legislatures for their own freedom. A few petitions were requests to be sent back to Africa, but most argued for either immediate or gradual emancipation. This 1777 petition to the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature was a appeal for gradual emancipation. Notice that the writers are apparently familiar with the Declaration of Independence.
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TO THE HONORABLE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF MASSACHUSETTS BAY, JANUARY 13, 1777

The petition of a great number of blacks detained in a state of slavery in the bowels of a free & Christian country humbly sheweth that your petitioners apprehend we have in common with all other men a natural and unalienable right to that freedom which the Great Parent of the Universe hath bestowed equally on all mankind, and which they never forfeited by any compact or agreement whatever. But they were unjustly dragged by the hand of a cruel power from their dearest friends and some of them even torn from the embraces of their tender parents–from a populous, pleasant, and plentiful country and in violation of laws of nature and nations–and, in defiance of all the tender feelings of humanity, brought here to be sold like beasts of burthen & like them condemned to slavery for life among a people professing the mild religion of Jesus–a people not insensible of the secrets of rational beings nor without spirit to resent the unjust endeavors of others to reduce them to a state of bondage and subjection. Your honours need not to be informed that a life of slavery like that of your petitioners, deprived of every social privilege, of every thing requisite to render life tolerable, is far worse than nonexistence.

In imitation of the laudable example of the good people of these states, your petitioners have long and patiently waited the event of petition after petition by them presented to the legislative body of this state and cannot but with grief reflect that their success hath been but too similar. They cannot but express their astonishment that it has never been considered that every principle from which Americans have acted in the course of their unhappy difficulties with Great Britain pleads stronger than a thousand arguments in favour of your petitioners. They therefore humbly beseech your honours to give this petition its due weight & consideration & cause an act of the legislature to be passed whereby they may be restored to the enjoyments of that which is the natural right of all men–and their children who were born in this land of liberty may not be held as slaves after they arrive at the age of twenty one years. So may the inhabitants of this state, no longer chargeable with the inconsistency of acting themselves the part of which they condemn and oppose in others, be prospered in their present glorious struggle for liberty and have those blessings to them, etc.

Lancaster Hill, Peter Bess, Brister Slenser, Prince Hall, Jack Pierpont, Nero Funelo, Newport Sumner, Job Look

Massachusetts abolished slavery three years later in 1780. I wonder what took the rest of the country so long? Perhaps the politicians were running the political calculations and just couldn’t come up with anything compelling.

Not Our Problem

by digby

Atrios links to this article which explores the idea of the US accepting Iraqi refugees. I’ve thought about this quite a lot over the last two weeks; as we contemplate the consequences of the violent, chaotic occupation that led to their civil war, it seems to me this is the least we could do.

Of course, for political reasons, the Bush administraton will have none of it:

Arthur E. “Gene” Dewey, who was President Bush’s assistant secretary of state for refugee affairs until last year, said that “for political reasons the administration will discourage” the resettlement of Iraqi refugees in the United States “because of the psychological message it would send, that it is a losing cause.”

But Dewey said a tipping point has been reached that is bound to change US policy because so many refugees are convinced that they will not be able to return to Iraq. That tipping point was further weighted by Wednesday’s report by the Iraq Study Group that called for the eventual withdrawal of most US forces.

“I think there will increasingly be a moral obligation on the part of the United States” to allow resettlement by Iraqis here, Dewey said.

Fat chance. Here’s the problem. There are a whole bunch of people in the United States who think of Iraqis as terrorists, including a fair number of the military who have been taught to use that language. Even the Democratic Party uses that term.

Here’s a headline from World Net Daily a few years back: “Iraqi terrorists head to U.S. via Mexico?” As recently as last summer, the Harris Poll reported, “sixty-four percent say it is true that Saddam Hussein had strong links to Al Qaeda” and “sixty-one percent of adults agree that invading and occupying Iraq has motivated more Islamic terrorists to attack the United States.” When Pete Hoekstra and Rick Santorum came out with that silly, bogus report that the WMD had been found, a large spike in the polling showed up due to the relentless flogging on wingnut radio. Kathryn Jean Lopez once gleefuly reported on The Corner that Americans “get the war on terror” because 70% believed that Saddam Hussein was tied to 9/11.

So, with right wing radio still going strong, the GOP being in the rabid minority once again whose only raison d’etre is the GWOT, a debate already raging about immigration and plain old racists like Trent Lott saying things like “they all look alike to me,” I doubt that the US will be taking in an influx of arab immigrants. It’s beyond the imagination.

It’s not like we haven’t been here before, is it?

The sad truth is that we have probably managed to make at least some Iraqis hostile enough to the US that they have turned to radical Islamic fundamentalism and have decided that we are The Enemy, even if their Shia or Sunni rivals are “the enemy.” As with so many things about this godforsaken war, it has many parallels to Vietnam — but it is more complicated and more dangerous by a factor of ten.

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Libertarian Lapdance

by digby

I have often felt that most of what is wrong with modern conservatism could probably be traced to the boys and girls of the right’s salad days when they stared dreamily into the dark, dark night thinking of the hottest man and sexiest woman they ever saw brought to the page: Dagny Taggert and John Galt. ***sigh*** They read “Atlas Shrugged,” found their adolescent self-absorbsion and callowness affirmed by a philosophy of greed and self-interest and that was it. “If I behave like an asshole, I will be doing the moral thing” (and hot chicks and dudes will want me!)
It is the last time many movement conservatives ever examined their beliefs again.

It turns out that the Ayn Rand Institute is busy indoctrinating another generation of 101st keyboarders, “libertarians” and wingnut welfare queens who will believe in magical thinking and politics as soap opera. They hold an Ayn Rand contest for teen-agers and college students and pay some pretty good prizes (for a contest that doesn’t actually produce anything useful in the world.)

It is quite serious — not in the mode of the Hemingway contest which delights in taking the minimalist master’s style to its most absurd. It’s possible that some of the contestants are just good All American opportunists who did it for the money. If so, good for them. (Talk about being hoist with your own petard.) But sadly, I suspect these kids are going to be the Kathryn Jean Lopez’s of their generations.

Behold, the winner of the “Atlas Shrugged” college essay contest, written in answer to this question: At his trial, Hank Rearden declares: “The public good be damned, I will have no part of it!” What does he mean? How does this issue relate to the rest of the novel and its meaning? Explain.

Throughout his life, Hank Rearden has been conditioned to accept guilt. He feels guilt because he cannot bring himself to value Lillian or Philip or his mother on the pretext of duty when no real value exists. He feels guilt because he is not capable of granting love undeserved. “You’ve got to be kind, Henry,” his mother insists. “You wouldn’t want me to think that you’re selfish” (433). This condemnation of selfishness oozes like poison from the world around him, overflowing his every accomplishment. He is trapped by the false conscience instilled in him: all that is done for the illusionary “public good” is virtuous; all that is done for the individual good is evil.

Hank Rearden’s most selfish act is his relationship with Dagny. Although his most noble ideals draw him to Dagny, he can at first see their relationship only as society views it: an immoral act fueled by the animal selfishness that is lust. “I don’t love you,” he declares after their first night together at Ellis Wyatt’s house. “I’ve given in to a desire which I despise” (238). Although Rearden recognizes his actions as “wrong,” he also knows that he cannot give them up. Subconsciously, he realizes that he is pursuing something of great value, but still he despises himself for being too weak to resist the “ugly weakness of man’s lower nature” (106), as he has come to acknowledge it. He is caught in the doctrine that he must always feel guilty for his pleasures, that joy in itself is sin

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It’s always the hot stuff that gets ’em. Selfishness and sex. Can you imagine what an utter disaster these people must be in bed?

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Why Can’t They All Get Along?

by digby

Last night I wrote a snarky (and controversial) post about Sandra Day O’Connor getting something wrong and I was soundly chastised for ignoring the basis of the original Kevin Drum link which was an embarrassing interview in Congressional Quarterly with the new Democratic chairman of the Intelligence Committee, Silvestre Reyes. The truth is that I just didn’t have the time last night — I’m not at home — and didn’t get a chance to fully appreciate how embarrassing that interview is. It’s a cringer.

Here’s a little excerpt:

To his credit, Reyes, a kindly, thoughtful man who also sits on the Armed Service Committee, does see the undertows drawing the region into chaos.

For example, he knows that the 1,400- year-old split in Islam between Sunnis and Shiites not only fuels the militias and death squads in Iraq, it drives the competition for supremacy across the Middle East between Shiite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia.

That’s more than two key Republicans on the Intelligence Committee knew when I interviewed them last summer. Rep. Jo Ann Davis, R-Va., and Terry Everett, R-Ala., both back for another term, were flummoxed by such basic questions, as were several top counterterrorism officials at the FBI.

I thought it only right now to pose the same questions to a Democrat, especially one who will take charge of the Intelligence panel come January. The former border patrol agent also sits on the Armed Services Committee.

Reyes stumbled when I asked him a simple question about al Qaeda at the end of a 40-minute interview in his office last week. Members of the Intelligence Committee, mind you, are paid $165,200 a year to know more than basic facts about our foes in the Middle East.

We warmed up with a long discussion about intelligence issues and Iraq. And then we veered into terrorism’s major players.

To me, it’s like asking about Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland: Who’s on what side?

The dialogue went like this:

Al Qaeda is what, I asked, Sunni or Shia?

“Al Qaeda, they have both,” Reyes said. “You’re talking about predominately?”

“Sure,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

“Predominantly — probably Shiite,” he ventured.

He couldn’t have been more wrong.

Al Qaeda is profoundly Sunni. If a Shiite showed up at an al Qaeda club house, they’d slice off his head and use it for a soccer ball.

That’s because the extremist Sunnis who make up al Qaeda consider all Shiites to be heretics.

Al Qaeda’s Sunni roots account for its very existence. Osama bin Laden and his followers believe the Saudi Royal family besmirched the true faith through their corruption and alliance with the United States, particularly allowing U.S. troops on Saudi soil.

It’s been five years since these Muslim extremists flew hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center.

Is it too much to ask that our intelligence overseers know who they are?

This is pretty basic stuff that doesn’t require a working knowledge of Muslim theology or even history, ancient or recent. What do these people, (Reyes isn’t alone) think is meant by the term “sectarian violence?” Aren’t they even curious about which side is which and why Iraq is splintering? How can you possibly try to make sense out of what is going on without even a rudimentary knowledge of the tribal and religious factors that feed the turmoil.

I think what amazes me the most os this is familiar to anyone who has been reading newspapers since the 70’s, at least. The religious rivalries have been around for centuries, of course, but the United States has been intimately involved in mid-east politics for decades and the press has been writing about it. We had the Iran hostage crisis and Iran-Contra and Lebanon and the first Gulf War and the rise of terrorism and 9/11. There always seems to be a crisis of some sort. You do not have to be a mid-east scholar or an expert to have simply absorbed the contours of the disputes — all you had to do was read the paper regularly. And that every member of the government didn’t immediately read up on bin Laden and his movement after 9/11 is simply irresponsible.

But then, look at the president, who didn’t know the difference between the Shia and the Sunni on the eve of the invasion. Or former CIA director George Tenent who was quoted in Woodward’s book “Bush At War” saying “The Iranians may have switched sides and gone to side with the Taliban.” (It’s not impossible,of course, but under current conditions it would be shockingly unexpected. It would be on the par of the Palestinians and the Israelis suddenly deciding to ally themselves.)And then there’s this guy who shows what appears to be a pretty common understanding of the complexities of the situation:

“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.

It’s hard to understand why so many members of the government haven’t bothered to educate themselves on this important topic, but it seems that they haven’t.

Well, in many cases, it’s hard. For some, it’s perfectly obvious:

Trent Lott, the veteran Republican senator from Mississippi, said only last September that “It’s hard for Americans, all of us, including me, to understand what’s wrong with these people.”

“Why do they kill people of other religions because of religion?” wondered Lott, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, after a meeting with Bush.

“Why do they hate the Israelis and despise their right to exist? Why do they hate each other? Why do Sunnis kill Shiites? How do they tell the difference?

“They all look the same to me,” Lott said.

Update: Emptywheel at The Next Hurrah has a great idea: A pop quiz for lawmakers. I also think the Democratic leadership would do well to organize some tutorials and lectures on the middle east and require the elected officials and their staffs to attend. I’m not kidding. This is a grave problem and since the administration is led by an idiot and run by a bunch of faith based magical thinkers, it behooves the Democrats to do better.

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Justice and Humanity

by poputonian

During the American Revolution, George Washington wrote several letters to British General William Howe about the mistreatment of American prisoners of war. In each letter, Washington used the phrase “justice and humanity demands … ” as a way to appeal to Howe. Justice and humanity are universal qualities that align with most everyone’s sense of right and wrong.

The number of people who have died as a result of the Iraq debacle is approaching 700,000; if the number of injured could be added to the count, the total must approach one million. The United States — because of the recklessness, negligence, and fraud of its elected leaders, and because of a flawed system that fails to keep the corrupt influence of money from those who hold political power — is directly responsible for the injured and the dead.

In the eyes of justice and humanity, how do we — you and me — as part of a representative democracy, escape an equal share of responsibility for the carnage? As part of a country where coercive trade and rampant self-enrichment has historically led to the systematic decimation of opposing cultures, including the decimation of the politically weak, why should we also not be held to account? In the eyes of justice and humanity, how does America atone for this mistake in Iraq, reconcile and correct its flawed system of politics, and prevent future debacles of this magnitude? How does America ensure that despots and tyrants don’t again so easily gain the highest office in the land?

The only way I can think of is to (not necessarily in sequential order): 1. Undergo Congressional investigation of Bush administration conduct. 2. Appoint a special prosecutor. 3. Actuate a popular movement insisting on impeachment. 4. Remove the guilty from office. 5. Enact legislation to deal with a flawed system of mass media. 6. Enact legislation to fix the electoral process. 7. Pay reparations to Iraq or some international institution.

What else?Shouldn’t the question of impeachment not be one of partisan political strategy, but instead be about justice and humanity as seen through the eyes of the entire world?

Saturday Night At The Movies

I’m With the Banned: Two new docs for free speech groupies

By Dennis Hartley

If blowing the lid off the f-bomb doesn’t sound like fodder for a revelatory documentary in 2006, you’re probably right. “Fuck” (in theaters now) makes an admirable attempt to examine the impact of its namesake in the context of history, politics, religion, the media, popular culture and everyday life. Myriad talking heads are employed-vox populi, actors, musicians, writers, comics, media pundits, linguists, psychologists, etc. Conservative Citizens of Puritan Nation (Pat Boone, Michael Medved, Miss Manners, etc.) and the NPR Lovin’ Civil Libertarians (Bill Maher, Hunter Thompson, Janeane Garofalo, etc.) play predictable point/counterpoint via dueling sound bites, interspersed with archival footage from films, TV and newsreels. The overall effect is akin to one of those VH-1/E! Network pop culture countdowns-“The 50 Most Outrageous F-Bomb Moments!” There are a few well-focused segments-a tribute to Lenny Bruce, a brief examination of the FCC’s Orwellian Michel Powell era (Janet Jackson’s nipple, Howard Stern’s fines and Bono’s “fookin’ brilliant” award acceptance speech), and a review of George Carlin’s “7 words you can’t say on TV” (which you wish they would play in its entirety, because that one bit delivers a more profound denouement regarding censorship than the documentary itself!). The film is a great tease, but there’s not enough of a payoff to make you crave a cigarette afterwards.(Note: “Fuck” only ran for a week here in good ‘ol liberal Seattle, so I suspect it may not be on a lot of screens-you may have to wait for the DVD!).

Billed as a “feel good flick with fun, filth and felonious assault”, filmmaker James Guardino’s “Porn King” (Blue Underground DVD) is a peephole-eyed profile of notorious “Screw Magazine” publisher Al Goldstein. After a perfunctory review of Goldstein’s early years and subsequent rise to riches and infamy, the film directs its focus to the story of a three-year court battle kindled by a relatively minor verbal harassment charge brought against him by his ex-secretary in 2001. Goldstein’s “glory days” of first amendment battles were ancient history by the time Guardino started filming, and it becomes obvious that this final skirmish is less about freedom of speech and more about media attention (in this jaded age of mainstream post-Madonna porn chic, old-school “smut peddlers” like Goldstein appear to have lost their cachet). The film bears unblinking witness to the dethroning, as his riches turn quite literally into rags (at one point, a humbled Goldstein is actually begging the cameraman for a few bucks because he doesn’t want to spend another night in a homeless shelter). It’s still tough to feel sorry for him, because up to this point in the story he is shown to be so unrelentingly self-destructive and compulsively abrasive toward everyone he comes in contact with. Still, there is a morbid fascination factor here that makes “Porn King” an interesting watch.

Still not feeling persecuted enough? Here are some more free-speech flicks I recommend:

Lenny, Lenny Bruce: Swear To Tell The Truth, The Aristocrats, The People vs. Larry Flynt, Inside Deep Throat, Talk Radio, 1776 (no, I am not being facetious).

Let me also take this opportunity to gush shamelessly and thank you for making me feel so welcome to the Hullabaloo family, and for your enlightening comments-keep ‘em coming!

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Doomed To Repeat It

by digby

Kevin Drum links to an embarrassing interview with Silvestre Reyes and wonders:

On the other hand, if you were to ask a bunch of congress critters whether, say, Italy was fascist or communist during World War II, I wonder how many would beg off with jokes about not paying attention during high school history?

I can’t comment on congress critters, but I heard a real shocker from a Supreme Court Justice the other night:

SANDRA DAY O’CONNOR: It was suggested by the study group that we at least talk to those two countries, with whom we’ve had great difficulty and which are creating difficulty for Iraq, and that is Iran and Syria.

And they’re both neighboring countries. It’s important that they understand the concerns and to inquire whether they can try to help preserve the country of Iraq as it is, to stabilize it.

VERNON JORDAN: You know, Margaret, on this issue of Iran and Syria, in the early part of my career, I spent an awful lot of time talking to the enemy. They were police chiefs in the South and sheriffs in the South who were not our friends. But negotiation was required. And we did it because it was necessary, and I think the same thing about Iran and Syria.

SANDRA DAY O’CONNOR: We might go all the way back to World War II, where the United States continued to have discussions with Stalin. He was the enemy, not our friend, but we continued to have discussions. And I think we pretty much have to do the same here.

This country is in such trouble.

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Particles Of Impeachment

by poputonian

In my earlier post, I referenced an article that appeared in the mainstream populist publication In These Times. It was authored by John Nichols and carries the title “In Praise of Impeachment.” The article compels me to change my original passive position of letting the Congressional investigations run their course, and to instead insist on impeachment. It’s a duty to do so. Nichols begins, appropriately, with Richard Nixon and Watergate:

Grassroots Democrats and a few bold members of Congress began suggesting that issues raised by the Watergate burglaries and related matters were serious enough to merit discussion of impeachment. House Speaker Carl Albert, House Minority Leader Tip O’Neill and most of their compatriots in the Democratic Party knew at the time that, despite the president’s protestations, Nixon was indeed a crook — and by extension, that he and his nefarious inner circle had committed acts that gave definition to the deliberately amorphous term “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Yet, they took impeachment off the table — and kept it off — until the evolution of the scandal and the popular outcry it inspired forced them to put the most powerful tool in the arsenal of the republic back where it belonged.

The article goes on to describe Pelosi as a bit player (at present), and that her pronouncement that “impeachment is off the table” should not be taken seriously.

Why should we dismiss the Speaker-to-be’s adamant dismissal of impeachment as mere wordplay? Not because Pelosi is secretly plotting impeachment. Rather, because any meaningful movement to impeach a president — and, in the case of the Bush-Cheney administration, a vice president — does not come from the Speaker of the House. The Speaker is, in fact, often the last to know when the constitutional moment has arrived.

Impeachment is an organic process, imagined as such by the founders. Its seed is not naturally planted in Washington, nor nurtured there. When an impeachment initiative is little more than a manifestation of inside-the-Beltway partisanship, as was the case with the Clinton impeachment of the late 90s, its proponents invite an appropriate rebuke from the citizenry. But when proposals for impeachment are grounded in popular concern for the republic in general, and the application of the rule of law in particular — as are moves to sanction Bush and Cheney for illegal war-making and wiretapping — the process will begin at the grassroots and grow until it cannot be denied in Washington.
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So the question is not: Where does Pelosi stand at the opening of this session of Congress? Rather, it is: Where do the American people stand?

Polling tells us that Americans are a good deal more enthusiastic about holding this president to account than are the leaders of what is sometimes euphemistically referred to as an opposition party. A majority of Americans surveyed last fall in a national poll by the respected firm Ipsos Public Affairs, which measures public opinion on behalf of the Associated Press, agreed with the statement: “If President Bush did not tell the truth about his reasons for going to war with Iraq, Congress should consider holding him accountable by impeaching him.”

It was not entirely surprising that 72 percent of the Democrats were inclined toward impeachment. What was more interesting was that 56 percent of Independents were ready to hold the president to account, as were 20 percent of Republicans.

(Think what those poll numbers must be today after the Junior’s own surrogate-uncle Baker led the parade that trashed the boy-President’s self-ingratiating foreign adventure.)

But polls are easily dismissed, even by the politicians who live by them. Harder to neglect are the signals from around the country, where citizens have been asked to vote on the question of whether impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney is needed. Pelosi might want to take note of the message her own constituents sent on the same day that the Democrats’ victory reversed a dozen years of Republican control of the House.

San Franciscans were asked on Nov. 7 to vote “yes” or “no” on Proposition J, a measure calling on the city’s elected representatives to “use every available legal mechanism to effect the impeachment and removal from office of President Bush and Vice President Cheney for committing high crimes and misdemeanors in violation of the United States Constitution.” The measure won with more than 58 percent of the vote. Pelosi’s hometown wasn’t the only city to vote for impeachment on November 7. Calls for impeachment won voter approval from Cunningham Township, Illinois to Berkeley, California, adding the names of those communities to the list of two-dozen municipalities nationwide that have now officially adopted impeachment resolutions.

Another measure of popular sentiment regarding impeachment — -one that Pelosi should understand — came in the congressional elections of Nov. 7. More than three-dozen Democratic members of the House faced voters as explicit advocates for keeping the impeachment option on the table. Thirty-eight members of the House signed on over the past year to H. Res. 635, a measure sponsored by Michigan Rep. John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. It proposed to investigate whether members of the Bush administration made moves to invade Iraq before receiving congressional authorization, manipulating pre-war intelligence, encouraged the use of torture in Iraq and elsewhere, and used their positions to retaliate against critics of the war.

H. Res. 635 explicitly states that the select committee would be charged with making recommendations regarding grounds for the possible impeachment of Bush and Cheney.

So how did supporters of the “dangerous” principle that impeachment should be kept “on the table” fare at the polls?

One co-ponsor of the resolution, Rep. Bernie Sanders, (I-VT), was elected to the Senate. Every other member of the House who signed on for an impeachment inquiry and faced voters on Nov. 7 was reelected, in many cases with an increased percentage of the vote.

Here’s the stake we need to drive through this administration’s immoral, paranoid heart:

It should come as no surprise that, when offered the option of impeaching, voters will opt for it. Outside of Washington, there are still a lot of Americans who recognize impeachment not as the “Constitutional crisis” that so much of the political class and the media fear, but as the cure for the crisis. This was as the founders intended when they inserted all those references to impeachment [it appears six times] into a Constitution that does not mention God, corporations, or the two-party system. They wanted Americans to know that they had a tool for challenging the tyranny of an “elected despot.” [Nichols use of the term “elected despot” was quoting a Jefferson letter to Madison.]

So, it falls to the people to restore a proper understanding of the necessity of impeachment: by voting for local resolutions, passing petitions, and protesting. That process will be helped along by the investigation of Bush administration misdeeds that will, as did the initial investigations of Watergate-related wrongs, provide a steady reconfirmation of the crisis.

Before the House Judiciary Committee weighed the articles of impeachment against Nixon, a congressional break sent federal legislators back to their home districts. Many, including Tip O’Neill, went with some trepidation. They feared that the people would tell them that Congress had gone too far in questioning the authority and actions of the president. Instead, as O’Neill told a reporter for Time magazine, they found the people were asking: “What are you waiting for?” As Time noted in that Watergate summer of 1974, members of the House learned from their constituents that “impeachment is good politics.” Indeed, it became increasingly clear to Democrats, as well as smart Republicans, that it was riskier to refuse to impeach than it was to embrace the Constitutional imperative.

So what are we waiting for? George W. Bush had better strap on his Codpiece, and Dick Cheney had better grab his cholestrol-infested ass. I think the rank and file are coming after them.NOTE: John Nichols is the author a book called The Genius of Impeachment: The Founders’ Cure for Royalism (The New Press).

Wisdom

by digby

The incomparable Meteor Blades has a post up over a Kos that will make you cry. Here is just a small piece:

Three thousand dead Americans from the Navy, the Army, the Marines, the Air Force and the National Guard will soon be in the count. Dead, in many cases, as we have seen, because of the incompetent know-it-allness of an Administration still swarming with chickenhawks. But dead, fundamentally, because of lies. Killed, like McMahon and Judge, heroically trying to save the lives of others. Or killed like my friend, Manny, just for being in the wrong place when the shrapnel came tumbling out of the night.

Whether shattered by an IED at some crossroads in al-Anbar province, Xed out by a sniper round to the throat deep inside Baghdad or crushed in a Humvee rollover in Mosul makes no difference. Heroic or not, no difference. They are dead for lies. Futilely dead. Dead because war criminals sent them abroad fraudulently in the name of liberation, security and prevention.

Dead because of people who waved the bloody shirt of Nine-Eleven in one hand, Old Glory in the other, and simultaneously managed to shred our Constitution and decades of international law. People whose closest brush with battle was reading the Cliff’s Notes version of Sun Tzu, which they promptly forgot. People who, if this were a just world, would soon be making journeys in shackles to The Hague.

In 1967 I lived in Bangkok Thailand, my Dad being a member of the military industrial complex that was part and parcel of the Vietnam enterprise just as Halliburton is today in Iraq. I was just a kid. We welcomed young soldiers into our home, friends of friends’ families or long distance relatives who had a few days of R&R in Bangkok. My mother would make home cooked meals and encourage them to hang out with the family for some all-American comfort. As you can imagine, most of them had much more exotic pastimes in mind, so they rarely took her up on it. I never saw any of them again, but thought of them often because they were interesting creatures to me, sitting at the dinner table sometimes talking animatedly about the war or home, but often somnambulent as if they were in another world.

Years later, my Dad and I were talking and he told me that of the half dozen who came to visit us, four of them had been killed. They were all my brother’s age — the draft dodging globetrotter who refused to go, and who my father had almost disowned over the issue one Thanksgiving. On this occasion, I asked my Dad whether he still thought it was wrong for his son not to have “fulfilled his obligation” and he simply said, “no.”

I think one of the things that truly distinguishes this god-forsaken war is the utter lack of seriousness and gravitas among those who insisted that we do it. My father fought in WWII and Korea and spent time as a civilian in Vietnam as the war was raging. He was the epitome of the WWII generation of hawks who believed that America was a righteous defender of freedom and that we were obligated to help the world fight back the totalitarians. He had basically spent his life in that pursuit and he couldn’t imagine his government being so perfidious or incompetent as to sacrifice Americans for anything that wasn’t a good cause. His gradual disillusionment during Vietnam and after was an uncomfortable thing to see; the cognitive dissonance and the emotional discord never really resolved themselves. He remained an unreconstructed rightwinger, but his worldview shrank from its earlier big-picture pride to a series of petty complaints about his fellow Americans.

The people who supported this war, on the other hand, had the benefit of hindsight that the WWII generation didn’t have when they committed the folly of Vietnam. They, at least, could be excused for thinking that the US could single handedly change the world. But it was only 30 years ago that American military might was tested in the post atomic world and every single pitfall of idealistic global adventure was experienced and later examined in great detail. These flagwaving, wingnut cheerleaders did not base their faux patriotism on any real knowledge of war or an investment of their own youths in a difficult but successful military victory. They based it on movies and television versions of WWII, in which gritty, American heroes won the war and then appeared later on awards shows and made speeches about the greatest generation while they accepted their Oscars.

Perhaps this shallowness is best illustrated by an exchange I saw on MSNBC on the anniversary of Pearl Harbor this week between two middle aged men who sound like something out of a ladies magazine circa 1962:

BARNICLE: Well, you know, Tim, it—it—it is sad to hear you say that, because—and this is not a shameless plug for your book, “Wisdom of Our Fathers,” but, reading the book, there is a lot of wisdom in it, because it is the wisdom given to us by the men and—and the women, actually, of the World War II generation.

Today is December 7. It is the 65th anniversary of Pearl Harbor. On the morning of December 8 — you have heard the stories—I have heard the stories—long lines of people standing outside recruiting offices joined together as a nation to fight a war on two fronts.

Today, 65 years later, we have this commission report. What is your sense, not only of what—what—what the concept of history is in the Congress of the United States, but the sense of bipartisanship, the spirit that provided us strength through World War II? Can it ever exist again in this type of a culture?

RUSSERT: I see so much of this through the eyes of my dad, Big Russ, Mike.

He told me about Pearl Harbor, what he watched, what he witnessed, what he felt, what he experienced that day. And he was one of those young boys in that line in that recruiting office, and then went down with his B-24 Liberator, and spent six months in a military hospital.

But he told me, first and foremost, about the sacrifice, about Rosie the Riveter, and Jimmy Doolittle, and women giving up nylons, and people giving up condiments on their dinner table, because they had to help feed and support the soldiers.

This is what Barnicle and Russert call wisdom — Thomas Kincaide kitch in which sacrifice is not having any nylons or condiments on the dinner table. I think they are fairly typical of the ruling class in this country who really believed that this could be their WWII. There would be no messy counter culture this time, no rebellion, no complaints. Their biggest disappointment isn’t that it’s become a bloody meatgrinder and a foreign policy disaster. It’s that people aren’t coming together to sing “Hut Sut Ralston On The Rillaragh” and painting lines down the back of their legs so people would think they are wearing seamed stockings. It just seems like that was such good fun. The more than 60 million dead were a small price to pay for such togetherness. And maybe, when the new war is over, everyone will get oscars instead of medals.

This is why tens of thousands of people are dying in Iraq. In that sense Vietnam, for all its mistakes, was a far more noble undertaking.

For an excellent, in depth look at this phenomenon, check out Chris Hayes’ piece in In These Times called “The Good War On Terror.”

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