Paul Krugman’s column today lists the names and statements of people who were right about Iraq. He says, “We should honor these people for their wisdom and courage.” Indeed we should.
The recording industry is doing just that by honoring the Dixie Chicks with five grammy nominations today:
The trio started in Texas and soared to fame in Nashville but, after their well-documented odyssey through partisan politics, they were frozen out of the country music establishment, which denied them radio airplay and awards. The Grammys stepped in Thursday to embrace the genre refugees in dramatic fashion, giving them five nominations, including for album, record and song of the year for the music of “Taking the Long Way,” a CD recorded in Los Angeles with rock musicians and a rock sensibility.
[…]
The Chicks, of course, have been in the center of one of pop’s strangest soap operas. On the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, lead singer Natalie Maines was on stage in England and made an off-the-cuff remark that would rival John Lennon’s 1966 quote about the Beatles being “more popular than Jesus” as a cultural flashpoint. Maines told the crowd: “Just so you know, we’re ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.”
The Chicks became the target of CD burnings, radio bans and peer criticism that changed the course of their career and even led to this year’s acclaimed documentary film, “Shut Up & Sing.” Maines and her partners, sisters Emily Robison and Martie Maguire, responded this year with an album that, musically, is their least beholden to traditional country or bluegrass.
The group has a long history of Grammy attention — it has five trophies already and this is its third nomination for best album — but this year the accolades stand in stark contrast to the Country Music Assn. awards in November, which ignored the Chicks despite the album’s sales, which now stand at 1.7 million copies in the U.S., according to Nielsen SoundScan.
The Dixie Chicks took the slings and arrows that were meant for all of us who were speaking out against Bush in that dark time four years ago when he was considered by many people in this country to be more of a religious figure than a politician. It was an ugly period and the Chicks were a profile in courage for refusing to back down. In fact they got their backs up when people started writing them death threats for daring to speak their minds and stood even taller. That’s patriotism.
Good for the grammys for embracing them. And as a resident of Los Angeles, I couldn’t be more proud to call them an LA band.
Firedoglake, Pandagon and manyothers have been writing about NARAL’s inexplicable decision to take a “neutral stance” on one of those move-the-goalpost pieces of legislation which are designed to normalize anti-choice talking points for future consideration:
“…the awkward phrasing of “20 weeks past fertilization” classifies a woman as pregnant even before implantation of the egg in the uterus. That’s the type of legalese that could redefine certain types of birth control, like Plan B, as abortifacients.”
I do not think NARAL understands its function anymore. It is not a politician from a conservative district who won with only a few percentage points and needs to pander. It is not a political party that needs to gloss over differences to come to consensus. It is an advocacy organization. Its job is to hold the line and then move the debate their way.
Ezra explains it so that even the comatose Washington establishment can understand it:
One thing groups like NARAL have a tendency to do is accept vaguely acceptable-sounding or politically popular bills in an effort to remain in the center, believing their group’s moderate credentials — see also their early endorsement of Lincoln Chafee — somehow important.The alternative strategy — practiced by the NRA, among others — would be to wage all-out war on even these minor encroachments, thus fighting to shift the center left.
This strategy of trying to join the center rather than move it is a damaging one. If NARAL were totally dogmatic and absolutist, that would make life much easier on Democrats who could occasionally show their “centrism” by voting against NARAL-opposed legislation that actually doesn’t much matter. Instead, however, to demonstrate independence on choice, Democrats end up supporting much more onerous and repulsive legislation, because just aping NARAL’s priorities line doesn’t win them any points in the media. Elected politicians, after all, often have to remain “in the center.” Independent interest groups, on the other hand, can spend their time trying to redefine what “the center” is.
That’s exactly right and NARAL’s decision illustrates something very important about a new and disturbing dynamic on capital hill.
Democratic leaders cited NARAL’s position when they decided against trying to influence the vote. Democratic leadership aides said yesterday that they are leery of Republicans charging that they are already out of touch with mainstream values, even before they assume power.
That means NARAL is now in the business of giving cover to Democratic Leaders who are trying to bullshit pro-choice liberals into thinking they aren’t selling them out. (We saw this same ploy in Connecticut earlier this year.) Apparently, it sees itself as an inside player helping the Democrats keep from having to go out on a limb on the abortion issue. They are allowing themselves to be used as a shield against their most ardent supporters.
That is, to say the least, a very unusual strategy. They have to know they have dramatically lost credibility with those of us who consider the right to choose a fundamental matter of personal liberty. And if NARAL doesn’t represent us, it represents nobody.
On a purely political level I’m sympathetic to the Democrats’ desire to finesse the issue of abortion. It would be just terrific if everyone would just leave it alone so we could deal with issues that don’t make people feel all icky. If the right would respect the status quo, that might even be possible. But anyone who thinks that they can quiet them with a few compromises like this hasn’t been paying attention. They will not rest until they have given the fetus full citizenship, repealed Roe vs Wade and outlawed abortion. It’s not like they are hiding their agenda.
This vote didn’t matter all that much except to the extent it showed how this is going to play out in the future. If the Democrats need to sacrifice something on the alter of “bipartisanshipandcentrism” it’s looking like they are prepared to negotiate away ever more pieces of the right to choose.They have decided that being pro-choice, despite being a majority position and one based on fundamental principles, is not “mainstream.” It’s now a bipartisan poker chip and NARAL is apparently willing to ante up.
The problem is that tucked in the details of their compromise plan that features all kinds of neat stuff about providing contraception for poor women and better sex education, there are a bunch of pernicious anti-choice and anti-science elements like federal money for ultrasounds in clinics and (incorrect) information about fetal pain among other things. (And you certainly see nothing about expanding beyond the 14% of American counties that now provide abortion services.)
There’s no free lunch, right? Acces to birth control and sex ed comes at a price and that price is the idea that women can make this decision without first being forced to sit through a bunch of propaganda designed to make her feel ashamed and then being “offered” an ultrasound that shows the adorabletinybaby inside her tummy begging for its little life, after which they will also “offer” her some anesthetic for the poor little tyke before they go ahead and kill it. (If she’s still selfish and cruel enough to go through with it, that is.)
What we are seeing is a new pincer strategy, with a slow, relentless mainstreaming of the liberal pro-life(and cowardly politicians’) rhetoric which is intended to make abortion a source of shame and guilt so they can tut-tut about it in church — and the ongoing onslaught of the conservative anti-choice agenda which is intended to enshrine the fetus as a full human with rights that trump the irrelevant vessel it lives inside of. The woman with an unwanted pregnancy is getting squeezed by everybody now.
“NARAL” kind of sounds like “NRA” but they aren’t even in the same league:
In May 1977, the NRA began a rightward shift after controversy erupted within the organization over the possibility of banning “Saturday night specials.” In the so-called “Cincinnati Revolt”, more than 2,000 NRA members met in the Cincinnati Convention-Exposition Center until nearly 4 AM. Harlon Carter, a member of the NRA’s Executive Council who had been fired as political action director, was elected the new leader of the NRA.
Since this change, the NRA has consistently opposed any proposed legislation that purports to limit access to guns by law-abiding citizens.
In the late 70’s it was a matter faith among liberals that handguns would be outlawed and other guns would be strictly regulated. It was just a matter of time. Within 20 years the NRA had killed the issue. Gun control is no longer even on the menu outside the biggest cities and even then it’s dicey.
The NRA said that Americans had a right to bear arms. Period. They didn’t bargain or negotiate. And they were successful because when your raison d’etre is protecting a fundamental right, you have to be absolutist or you lose the moral authority of your argument.
Abortion is a messy fight, nobody disputes that. I’m all for contraception and sex education and all the other things that these abortion “reducers” are pushing. But it appears to me as if that’s mainly a political ploy to appease the pro-choice crowd into believing that if they just give up a little here and there, the basic right will be preserved. It will not happen that way. With all this talk of “reducing,” and “rare” and fetal pain and snowflake babies and all the rest, they are helping the right prepare the ground for a full outlawing of abortion if Roe is overturned. They aren’t even trying to make the fundamental argument anymore.
I’m a good Democrat and I’m also someone who likes to think strategically. As I argued above, I think it’s a huge mistake for advocacy groups that represent fundamental rights to ever negotiate (leave that to the politicians.) But I could theoretically support any strategy that would ensure a woman’s right to choose. On the substance, however, this is no more subject to compromise to me than habeas corpus or torture or slavery. It defines what it is to be an autonomous human being. If every woman in this country doesn’t own her own body then she is not free.
I’ve never trusted politicians on this issue and now it looks like we can’t trust one of the premier pro-choice advocacy groups either. They are no longer effective. But there are plenty of others that can use my money and I’ll be sending it to them rather than NARAL from now on. We need savvy people doing this right now.
Gilliard has posted a rundown of the recent Fall of the House of Bush. You can certainly understand why the patriarch might cry in public. But what’s most fascinating is this amazing picture.
It reminded me of this article by Phil Agre from a few years back that I’ve been meaning to discuss as we watch the edifice of modern conservatism start to crumble. It’s an interesting piece, but what’s really important is something that is so obvious that we sometimes forget about it with all the Neo-con and Theo-con intellectual babble of recent years:
From the pharaohs of ancient Egypt to the self-regarding thugs of ancient Rome to the glorified warlords of medieval and absolutist Europe, in nearly every urbanized society throughout human history, there have been people who have tried to constitute themselves as an aristocracy. These people and their allies are the conservatives.
The tactics of conservatism vary widely by place and time. But the most central feature of conservatism is deference: a psychologically internalized attitude on the part of the common people that the aristocracy are better people than they are. Modern-day liberals often theorize that conservatives use “social issues” as a way to mask economic objectives, but this is almost backward: the true goal of conservatism is to establish an aristocracy, which is a social and psychological condition of inequality. Economic inequality and regressive taxation, while certainly welcomed by the aristocracy, are best understood as a means to their actual goal, which is simply to be aristocrats. More generally, it is crucial to conservatism that the people must literally love the order that dominates them. Of course this notion sounds bizarre to modern ears, but it is perfectly overt in the writings of leading conservative theorists such as Burke. Democracy, for them, is not about the mechanisms of voting and office-holding. In fact conservatives hold a wide variety of opinions about such secondary formal matters. For conservatives, rather, democracy is a psychological condition. People who believe that the aristocracy rightfully dominates society because of its intrinsic superiority are conservatives; democrats, by contrast, believe that they are of equal social worth. Conservatism is the antithesis of democracy. This has been true for thousands of years.
There’s been a lot of rightwing populist talk in recent years and plenty of econobabble about “the ownership society” and the rest. Modern conservatism’s most successful strategy was to merge public relations and politics into a seamless operation in which it could use modern marketing methods to convince people to vote against their own interests. (Perhaps we are seeing the first signs of how that can blow back on them. We’ll see.)
But looking at that amazing picture of the Bush clan in the White house — the former president, the current president, the Governor of one of the largest states — all together in the White House says everything you need to know about what true conservatism is really all about.
We allowed them to impeach the duly elected president who beat the father, for trivial reasons. We allowed the father’s appointees to settle a dubious election result in the son’s favor. We have watched them as they created a presidency insulated from popular or congressional oversight in which they have gone so far as to set forth the idea that the president has no obligation to follow the law. They lowered taxes on the very rich to a level not seen in many decades and created an income disparity between the very, very rich and everyone else that is unprecedented in the modern era. They eliminated the single best means of ensuring that an aristocracy will not truly form — the estate inheritance tax. The ten year campaign to repeal it was bankrolled by 18 of the richest families in America.
Who says Bush isn’t a real conservative? Why he’s the most purely conservative president in American history.
Tom Schaller over at TAPPED notes something I’ve been observing for a while as well: the precipitous loss of Tony Blair’s rhetorical skills:
MARKETERS-IN-CHIEF. Regarding the Blair-Bush press conference this morning, is it just me or is Tony Blair becoming less eloquent and coherent the more he stands side-by-side with Bush?
I thought it was just me. It’s rubbing off, and not just in Bush’s presence. Here’s an excerpt from his Labour Party speech in September:
And of course, the new anxiety is the global struggle against terrorism without mercy or limit.
This is a struggle that will last a generation and more. But this I believe passionately: we will not win until we shake ourselves free of the wretched capitulation to the propaganda of the enemy, that somehow we are the ones responsible.
This terrorism isn’t our fault. We didn’t cause it.
It’s not the consequence of foreign policy.
It’s an attack on our way of life.
It’s global.
It has an ideology.
It killed nearly 3,000 people including over 60 British on the streets of New York before war in Afghanistan or Iraq was even thought of.
It has been decades growing.
Its victims are in Egypt, Algeria, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Turkey.
Over 30 nations in the world.
It preys on every conflict.
It exploits every grievance.
And its victims are mainly Muslim.
This is not our war against Islam.
[…]
If we retreat now, hand Iraq over to Al Qaida and sectarian death squads and Afghanistan back to Al Qaida and the Taleban, we won’t be safer; we will be committing a craven act of surrender that will put our future security in the deepest peril.
Of course it’s tough.
Not a day goes by or an hour in the day when I don’t reflect on our troops with admiration and thanks – the finest, the best, the bravest, any nation could hope for.
They are not fighting in vain. But for this nation’s future.
I’m sure it sounds better in a british accent but it’s still Bush boilerplate. I’m surprised he didn’t say that that until 9/11, England had always thought the oceans would protect her.
I have concluded that while we have all been trying for years to figure out just what in the hell Blair thought he was doing, the simplest answer is probably the right one. He’s just as dumb as Bush on this matter. He believes this crap. Now that all the early rationales that made his rhetoric sensible lie moldering in the historical compost heap, he’s left with nothing but the puerile ad copy that Junior’s team concocted to make these people believe they had been anointed by God to fight a grand struggle between good and evil. Sad.
Update: “I know it’s tough”
In case anyone missed Bush’s little tantrum this morning, here it is:
Q Mr. President, the Iraq Study Group described the situation in Iraq as grave and deteriorating. You said that the increase in attacks is unsettling. That won’t convince many people that you’re [not] still in denial about how bad things are in Iraq, and question your sincerity about changing course.
PRESIDENT BUSH: It’s bad in Iraq. Does that help? (Laughter.)
Q Why did it take others to say it before you’ve been willing to acknowledge for the world —
PRESIDENT BUSH: In all due respect, I’ve been saying it a lot. I understand how tough it is. And I’ve been telling the American people how tough it is. And they know how tough it is. And the fundamental question is, do we have a plan to achieve our objective. Are we willing to change as the enemy has changed? And what the Baker-Hamilton study has done is it shows good ideas as to how to go forward. What our Pentagon is doing is figuring out ways to go forward, all aiming to achieve our objective.
Make no mistake about it, I understand how tough it is, sir. I talk to families who die. I understand there’s sectarian violence. I also understand that we’re hunting down al Qaeda on a regular basis and we’re bringing them to justice. I understand how hard our troops are working. I know how brave the men and women who wear the uniform are, and therefore, they’ll have the full support of this government. I understand what long deployments mean to wives and husbands, and mothers and fathers, particularly as we come into a holiday season. I understand. And I have made it abundantly clear how tough it is.
I also believe we’re going to succeed. I believe we’ll prevail. Not only do I know how important it is to prevail, I believe we will prevail. I understand how hard it is to prevail. But I also want the American people to understand that if we were to fail — and one way to assure failure is just to quit, is not to adjust, and say it’s just not worth it — if we were to fail, that failed policy will come to hurt generations of Americans in the future.
And as I said in my opening statement, I believe we’re in an ideological struggle between forces that are reasonable and want to live in peace, and radicals and extremists. And when you throw into the mix radical Shia and radical Sunni trying to gain power and topple moderate governments, with energy which they could use to blackmail Great Britain or America, or anybody else who doesn’t kowtow to them, and a nuclear weapon in the hands of a government that is — would be using that nuclear weapon to blackmail to achieve political objectives — historians will look back and say, how come Bush and Blair couldn’t see the threat? That’s what they’ll be asking. And I want to tell you, I see the threat and I believe it is up to our governments to help lead the forces of moderation to prevail. It’s in our interests.
And one of the things that has changed for American foreign policy is a threat overseas can now come home to hurt us, and September the 11th should be a wake-up call for the American people to understand what happens if there is violence and safe havens in a part of the world. And what happens is people can die here at home.
So, no, I appreciate your question. As you can tell, I feel strongly about making sure you understand that I understand it’s tough. But I want you to know, sir, that I believe we’ll prevail. I know we have to adjust to prevail, but I wouldn’t have our troops in harm’s way if I didn’t believe that, one, it was important, and, two, we’ll succeed. Thank you.
I was reading Christy Hardin Smith’s piece this morning about my congressman Henry Waxman and how the republicans changed the rules back in the 90’s to give the the chairman of the house Government reform Committee unilateral subpoena power. As ye sow, so shall ye reap, my friends.
In her post she points out something that I think everyone should memorize and be prepared to quote every time these Republicans start to whine a cry about the Democratic witchhunt:
The House took 140 hours of sworn testimony to get to the bottom of whether Clinton had misused the White House Christmas-card list for political purposes, but only 12 hours on prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib.
It would probably be very helpful to have at the ready a handy list comparing all the subpoenas and investigations during the Clinton administration as compared to Bush. The Republicans are going to portray the Democratic congress as an out of control lynch mob. It’s important that we remind everyone of what a bunch of slackers they have been under a Republican president and what a non-stop slavering freakshow they ran the last time government was divided.
But when I read that thing about the Christmas card list it also reminded me of something else I recently became aware of. If you’ll recall, during the Clinton administration there was a big scandal over the selling of the Lincoln Bedroom. Everyone agreed that campaign donors had been invited to spend the night in the White House since the time it was built, but what bothered everyone was how mercenary the whole thing seemed, how the hippie hicks from Arkansas were disrespectful toward the nation’s great heritage.
Here’s a pretty decent example of the tone of the complaints:
LEE CULLUM, Dallas Morning News: Yes, it is crass. It’s vulgar. It’s terrible taste. The Dallas Morning News had two editorials this week, not one but two, calling for a special prosecutor in this matter. You know, the White House has simply gone too far. I’m not naive…this has been a systematic selling of the White House in bits and pieces. It’s gone too far, and it’s way out of hand. It is crass.
When Bush ran on “restoring honor and integrity” to the White House, he wasn’t just saying he would avoid interns; the tabloid political press and the GOP congressional committees had been portraying Clinton as a cheap used car salesman, selling out the People’s House, for years. They even accused him of stealing the hand-towels on AirForce One.
So imagine my surprise when I see this on CNN the other day:
When the Secret Service phoned Lesa Glucroft, they were calling about hand lotion. Officials wanted to know if the Calabasas businesswoman was interested in sticking the U.S. presidential seal on her lotions and powders and selling them as “America’s Legacy” at the White House gift shop. At first she thought it was a hoax. “I certainly didn’t think it was a serious call,” said Glucroft, a registered Democrat. But the inquiry, from a licensing agent for the U.S. Secret Service Uniformed Division Benefit Fund, was genuine. And now a line of toiletries bearing the presidential insignia is about to hit the gift shop’s shelves. The antibacterial hand wash, glycerin soap, after-shave and other products come in bottles embossed with the distinctive presidential seal: a vigilant eagle holding an olive branch and arrows in its talons and encircled by stars and the words “The President of the United States.”
You know, I don’t deny the Secret Service a right to have a Benefit Fund. More power to them, they do a fine job. They’ve run a little gift shop in the basement of the White House for years where they sell little tchotckes and they have a little fundraising program to sell ChristmasOrnaments door to door. (Who knew?)
But where did they get the right to exclusively license the sacred People’s House for toiletry items — which they are selling to the public all over the internet? I can’t help but wonder what other intimate products are adorned with the presidential seal these days.
It seems to me that the bluenose society mavens might find all this “crass,” “vulgar” and “in terrible taste,” if not entirely inappropriate. I guess not. In fact, I’m girding myself for the soon-to-begin paeans to the “graciousness” and “class” that the Bush’s brought to the social scene in Washington. They might have been the most destructive presidency in history but at least they weren’t a bunch of no-class hick liberal elites who didn’t know their place.
Update: Dave Niewert says:
I don’t know about you, but the symbology of the Bush White House marketing official presidential hand cleaner strikes me as a flagrant bit of unintentional self-revelation.
The following is an excerpt from Rick Perlstein‘s upcoming book Nixonland: The Politics and Culture of the American Berserk, 1965-1972
The President began to look almost demented. At a March 25th speech to AFL-CIO Building Trades Department, as North Vietnamese troops made their deepest penetration into the South so far, he cried:
“Now, the America we are building”–he paused, and hit the words deliberately for emphasis–“would–be–a–threatened–nation if we let freedom and liberty die in Vietnam…
“I sometimes wonder why we Americans enjoy punishing ourselves so much with our own criticism.
“This is a pretty good land. I am not saying you never had it so good. But that is a fact, isn’t it?”
He pulled himself close to the podium, and stared into the audience, his eyes as wide as saucers.
That night, the bipartisan mandarinate known formally as the Senior Advisory Group began preparing at the Pentagon for a meeting with the President. Among them were advisors who’d steered the course of the Cold War before the Cold War had even been named. The last time the “Wise Men” had met, on November 2, they told the President to stay the course. Now, the head of counterinsurgency briefed them that because Americans had killed 80,000 enemy soldiers, Tet was a famous U.S. victory. UN Ambassador and former Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg questioned his figures. Wasn’t the usual ratio that you could count on four times as many soldiers getting wounded than had died in a battle?
The briefer acknowledged that was so.
Then, Goldberg replied, that meant some 320,000 Communists had been removed from the field of battle. But the general had also told them that the Communists had only 240,000 soldiers. So we’d wounded 133 percent of the enemy.
Another briefer was more forthright. He said progress on the ground in Vietnam would take five to seven years. Clark Clifford asked him if the war could ever be won: “Not under present circumstances.” Clifford asked him what he would do if he were president: “Stop the bombing and negotiate.”
Which was exactly what President Johnson had been going around telling audiences he’d never do.
They met with Johnson the next morning. “Mr. President, there has been a very significant shift in most of our positions since we last met,” McGeorge Bundy began. He raised the name of Truman’s legendary secretary of state, a man to make any Democratic president quiver: “Dean Acheson summed up the majority feeling when he said that we can no longer do the job we set out to do in the time we have left, and we must begin to take steps to disengage.”
Lyndon left, then raged to wise man George Ball: “Your whole group must have been brainwashed!” It was a kind of last gasp. He was finally beginning to get the picture: he had to prepare the American people for the reality of eventual disengagement from Vietnam.
David Sirota writing in the December issue of In These Times:
Candidates all over the country talked about how corporate lobbyists have manipulated our trade policy to crush workers, our energy policy to harm consumers and our health care policy to hurt families. Polls show populism (a.k.a., challenging corporate economic power) is the “center” position for the voting public, even though it may not be the “center” position in a K-Street-owned Washington, D.C.
Since the election, Washington’s elite have tried to deny progressives credit and to downplay a mandate that threatens their agenda. These revisionists say the election was about Democrats pretending to be Republicans, billing people like Virginia Senator-elect Jim Webb as a “conservative.” Yet here is what this “conservative” wrote in a Nov. 15 Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “Class Struggle”:
The most important—and unfortunately the least debated—issue in politics today is our society’s steady drift toward a class-based system, the likes of which we have not seen since the 19th century. America’s top tier has grown infinitely richer and more removed over the past 25 years. … The top 1 percent now takes in an astounding 16 percent of national income, up from 8 percent in 1980. The tax codes protect them, just as they protect corporate America, through a vast system of loopholes.
If that is the new “conservative,” progressives won an even bigger victory than we thought.
Yupperz. He goes on:
This is a difficult time for Beltway lobbyists and corporate front-groups like the Democratic Leadership Council. It hurts them to see how populism was the Democrats’ ticket. But the elite are not contrite, rather they babble—”Vital dynamic center! Vital dynamic center!” We can understand their outbursts—it hurts to be rejected—but they are just going to have to deal. As winning candidates from Virginia to Kansas to Montana proved, the strategy of repeating lobbyist-written talking points to win red states belongs in the historical scrap heap. It’s the Era of Populism now.
Read his brief article at the link. (Sorry for the typo in the post title.)
I can’t remember if it was Stewart or Olbermann who spot-lighted Bush’s recent speech where he repeated the slogan “sectarian violence” about a hundred times. The boy-President was repudiating his own responsibility for said violence (by blaming it on Al-Qaeda) but was also refusing to acknowledge what others were calling a civil war. On this latter point, I think he might be on to something. From Christy quoting Joe Wilson:
The problem is we are so far down the road on the way to chaos that there may not be any way to stop this until all sides are exhausted. The question is not whether the situation has become a civil war but rather whether it has degenerated from a civil war to out and out anarchy and a failed state.
It may be, but I think it also might be a more general (and savvy) move to curry favor with liberal Christians. They are starting to organize themselves in a more explicitly political way — partially to save themselves from a rightwing onslaught, but also because the left in general is simply organizing itself in a whole lot of new ways. If Edwards is smart enough to be looking for these organizing mechanisms and making a direct appeal, good for him. I believe that Democratic candidates who are looking beyond the usual suspects are going to be better positioned for 2008. The action is outside the beltway.
In a surprise twist in the debate over Iraq, Rep. Silvestre Reyes, the soon-to-be chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said he wants to see an increase of 20,000 to 30,000 U.S. troops as part of a stepped up effort to ‘dismantle the militias.’
McCain’s the big tough guy who’s been saying 20,000 more troops is the answer. What happens if he gets them? Does he flip flop and say it was too late after all when things don’t go well? Does he blame the troops for not being able to get the job done? It’s quite the dilemma for the man who thought he had a fool proof way to run as the only one in Washington who knew how to fight and win the war like a man.
are now officially an L.A. band.
