John Fund responded to my post of last night by sending an email telling me that he is friends with a black GOP activist named Ted Hayes, who hails from Waters’ district. Good for him.
He also pointed out that Waters was, in fact, one of those who voted on one bill to cut off funds for the war, which means that his taunting had some basis in fact. What he doesn’t explain is why she should be ashamed of it.
This “cutting off funds for the troops” is an old Republican shibboleth going back to Vietnam. They use it very effectively to say that Democrats don’t support the troops, but it’s actually the only method the constitution provides for the congress to force an intransigent president to change course in a war when the people demand it. This is a democracy last I checked and we do have at least a little say in these things.
There are always a few who see the writing on the wall earlier than others. When Johnson wanted to escalate the war in Vietnam some senators famously demured:
Gaylord Nelson … as the junior Senator from Wisconsin in 1965, joined two others in voting against funding to escalate the Vietnam war. At the time Nelson said:
“At a time in history when the Senate should be vindicating its historic reputation as the greatest deliberative body in the world, we are stumbling over each other to see who can say ‘yea’ the quickest and the loudest. I regret it, and I think some day we shall all regret it. . . .
“Reluctantly, I express my opposition . . . here by voting ‘nay.’ The support in the Congress for this measure is clearly overwhelming. Obviously, you need my vote less than I need my conscience.”
As time went on and the war became more and more untenable, more agreed with that argument. And finally, after years of protests and many tens of thousands more dead, a bi-partisan veto-proof majority voted for an amendment which forbade any further U.S. escalation of the war in Vietnam. The next year, after Watergate, a lame duck congress voted to cut off funding.
It’s not as if they were blameless. As Nelson said, in the early days they were “stumbling over each other to see who can say ‘yea’ the quickest and the loudest.” But after years of public debate and outcry, they finally heard what the people were saying and they did what they had to do. Too late, as it turned out, for a lot of people.
Morton Kondracke writes about this topic in this week’s column, bemoaning the fact that a Democratic majority may do the same thing. He believes in the simplistic fairly tale that we would have won Vietnam if it weren’t for the dirty hippies so he finds this a damning propect. But it is only a possibility because of the lies and strategic blunders that got this country into that misbegotten war and the bungling that’s characterized it ever since. At some point you have to do something. And the only thing a congress can do in the face of presidential intransigence and incompetence is deny the president the money to screw things up any further.
President Bush could make it easy on himself and the nation by listening to what the people are telling him, being honest and coming up with the least bad plan out of an array of bad options. But he won’t. He has said that he will not leave Iraq and he’s shown that his administation has no skill to do anything else. Unless he does, there will, by necessity, be more who will be forced to vote against funding, not because they don’t support the troops but because their constituents demand it. It shouldn’t have to come to that.
Florida voters using electronic ballot machines are having persistent problems choosing Democrats in early elections, the Miami Herald reports.
The touch-screen gizmos seem strangely attracted to Republican candidates. One voter needed assistance from an election official, and even then, needed three tries to convince the machine that he wanted to vote for Democrat Jim Davis in the gubernatorial race, not his Republican opponent Charlie Crist.
Another voter who went Democrat across the board kept finding Republicans listed in the summary screen. He made repeated attempts until, finally, the machine registered his votes correctly, and he cast his ballot.
Yet another frustrated voter who complained of difficulties selecting a Democrat was told that the machine she was using had been troublesome. Poll workers fiddled with it for a bit, and then it seemed to work properly.
I know it’s very exciting and enjoyable for the media to incessantly masturbate each other on camera while chattering about whether a candidate who’s not even on the ballot should apologise for some trivial bullshit, but this story getting no play in the days before an election is downright journalistic malfeasance:
Exploiting GOP vulnerability in the Nov. 7 elections, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki flexed his political muscle Tuesday and won U.S. agreement to lift military blockades on Sadr City and another Shiite enclave where an American soldier was abducted.
U.S. forces, who had set up the checkpoints in Baghdad last week as part of an unsuccessful search for the soldier, drove away in Humvees and armored personnel carriers at the 5 p.m. deadline set by al-Maliki. Iraqi troops, who had manned the checkpoints with the Americans, loaded coils of razor wire and red traffic cones onto pickup trucks.
The withdrawal was greeted with jubilation in the streets of Sadr City, the densely populated Shiite enclave where the Americans have focused their manhunt and where anti-American sentiment runs high. The initial American reaction to the order, which was released by Mr. Maliki’s press office, strongly suggested that the statement had not been issued in concert with the American authorities.
“Our commanders have his press release and are reviewing how best to address these concerns,” Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a military spokesman in Baghdad, said early Tuesday afternoon, about an hour after the order was issued.
Late Tuesday night, after hours of silence, a senior American Embassy official who had been delegated to return reporters’ phone calls said the prime minister’s order was “the result of a meeting” between Mr. Maliki, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top American commander in Iraq. “It was essentially something that Maliki wanted to do and Casey agreed to it,” the official said.
[…]
Al-Maliki’s move Tuesday came three days after his closest aide, Hassan al-Suneid, said unabashedly that the prime minister was trying to capitalize on American voter discontent with the war and White House reluctance to open a public fight with the Iraqi leader just before the midterm election. Much of the discontent is fueled by soaring death tolls among U.S. troops and their inability to contain raging sectarian violence 3 1/2 years after the ouster of Saddam Hussein.
How very convenient for the administration that the press is concentrating on irrelevancies when a story like this breaks, eh?
The Maliki government is playing Bush for the cowardly loser he is, apparently threatening him with more bad headlines, so the Americans backed off and left a soldier behind.
But look no further, citizens. John Kerry blew a punchline and that requires a full-on media frenzy. Nothing is more fun and exciting to the kewl kidz than going after a simple meaningless anti-Democrat story that pleases the GOP establishment. Everybody wins. Except the American people, of course. Or that abandoned soldier in Iraq.
I would love to see the Democrats blow this up. It’s the hardest of hardball, but I am finding it difficult to think of a good reason why these people should be immune from the kind of treatment they dished out to Clinton over Somalia and would dish out again no matter who we were fighting. I realize that they have retired the concept of hypocrisy, but this is beyond anything we’ve seen. The Bush administration is so weak and so useless that they are allowing Maliki and the Sadr militia to dictate terms to the US military because of the US elections.
Try to imagine what would happen in a Democrat did such a thing.
If you are watching the wall-to-wall Kerry-hates-the-troops coverage today on the cablers you can see perfectly how the patented GOP sanctimonious “demand for an apology” works.
First, you have to be a phony hypocritical Republican. Democrats can never pull this off.
Second, you have to choose a comment that isn’t particularly heinous or is vaguely worded. You want the comment to not be particularly bad, for reasons that become obvious when you get to the endgame.
Third, being desperate to do your bidding because they’ve been a little bit harsh and are eager to get back in your good graces, you give the media tons of footage and sound-bites to work with.
Fourth you pump the story as hard as you can by demanding that other Democrats distance themselves from the remarks, which they begin to do slowly at first then pile on like a litter of puppies.
Fifth, you wear down the perpetrator (who has, remember, done nothing really wrong) until you get him to apologise.
And then after all this is said and done, you call all Democrats pussies because they aren’t stand-up guys. After all, they just bowed and scraped and apologised for a trivial comment they had no need to apologise for. Who can trust such weaklings to run the government?
Pay no attention to the death, destruction, incompetence and horror that lies at the center of this coming election. The narrative says Republicans are brave and strong and Democrats are weak and cowardly and that is how it must be. Even if they have to make up a story to illustrate that, the press will do its duty.
Update: If we played this game with equal fervor we’d be demanding that Bush ask for an apology from Rush Limbaugh for what he said about Michael J. Fox, since he’s his new BFF and all. But we don’t.
The author tried to compare the tactics of the South Dakota pro-coathangers to the pro-choicers, trying to make them out as equally guilty of extreme rhetoric. So I thought I’d propose a little guessing game this morning.
Now don’t cheat and click on the link before you’ve taken the time to guess how to finish the second sentence. You want to illustrate that both sides are equally inflammatory:
For that, the most extreme arguments are nowhere to be found. No bloody fetuses fill billboards…[INSERT HERE EXAMPLE BY PRO-CHOICERS OF EQUALLY EXTREME AND SICK TACTICS]
So how does this sentence finish up? What tactics can “the other side” deploy that are as extreme an argument as filling billboards with bloody fetuses? Lesseee:
For that, the most extreme arguments are nowhere to be found. No bloody fetuses fill billboards, no posters of hemorraghing 14 year-old girls passed out in a filthy alley.
Not bad. That would show that “both sides” – hereafter abbreviated to BS – are prone to equally revolting demagoguery. But the problem is the pro-choice movement never has done anything remotely like that.
So let’s try again:
“For that, the most extreme arguments are nowhere to be found. No bloody fetuses fill billboards, no graphic tv commercials showing a 50-year old degenerate raping a 13-year old at knife point.
Hmm…Well, again, it does meet the BS criteria, but come to think of it, there isn’t a tv station in the country that would ever show such a commercial.
Wow! I guess it’s harder than you might think to find equally extreme tactics when you’re trying to use BS in an article on abortion. Can we come up with anything the pro-choice crowd has used that’s as dramatically disgusting as billboards filled with bloody fetuses?
One more try:
For that, the most extreme arguments are nowhere to be found. No bloody fetuses fill billboards, no trucks with billboard-sized pictures showing deformed progeny of third generation incest, either.
Nah. no pro-choice group has ever done anything like that.
Okay, give up? How does the NY Times balance the extremism of the pro-coathanger crowd by showing “the other side” can get equally inflammatory and out-there on the cultural margins? Here’s what the reporter actually wrote:
For that, the most extreme arguments are nowhere to be found. No bloody fetuses fill billboards, no absolute claims are being offered about women’s rights.
And that’s the reason, ladies, gentlemen, and Republicans, why I say that the culture war in this country isn’t between the left and the right, or the religious and the secular.
The culture war is really between extreme rightwing fanatics and the rest of us.
Special note: Some of you might point out that my use of the phrase “pro-coathanger” to describe the anti-choice gang is just as extreme as calling pro-choice people “baby-killers.” Well, yes, of course it is. And that is the point. I’m using the term deliberately here to shock you into realizing that that is how perverse our rhetoric has to get even to begin to come close to matching the revolting rhetoric of the far-right that we take for granted as normal discourse.
For example, to counter the inaccurate term “pro-life” with the accurate “pro-choice” is to cede the rhetorical advantage to the extreme right by permitting them to lie about their position. There is nothing even remotely pro-life about insisting that poor girls who get pregnant without wanting to must suffer the horrors of an incompetent medical procedure. And yet, every day, this is how the mainstream discussion of abortion is conducted, even by liberals who really ought to know better.
Well…what about using “anti-abortion” and “pro-abortion” to label the “two sides?” That seems fair, right?
It does not. There are very few people, even those of us who insist that the state has no right to tell a woman what to do with her body, who go around saying, “I’m pro-abortion. Every woman should have one. Men should try them, too!” The pro/anti-abortion construction grossly distorts the complex positions that nearly everyone has.
So…what is the best way to characterize the “two sides?” Well, the advantage of “pro-choice” is, as mentioned above, that it is accurate. I suppose you could characterize the nutjobs as “anti-choice” and be technically correct. But that doesn’t capture either the Puritanism or the explicitly punitive element of their opposition to decent healthcare for poor women. They want raped teenagers to suffer unspeakable additional shame should they choose to terminate a pregnancy. And they certainly want all women who fuck for pleasure – ie, all women except for Phyllis Schafly wannabes – to be ashamed of themselves, and if they get pregnant, to “suffer the full consequences of their sin.”
So, while I admit it’s nauseating and extreme, “pro-coathanger” has the distinct virtue of being a 100 percent accurate description of the far-right’s position on whether women have the right to choose. And I will persist in labelling them as such for as long as they feel they can get away with labelling those of us who want poor women to have equal access to competent healthcare “baby killers” or even “pro-abortion.”
Oh, and one final thing. Perhaps you think that the far-right hasn’t done anything so sick as to promote billboards of bloody fetuses. You would be wrong:
Two 8-by-22-foot rolling billboards displaying extremely graphic photos of aborted fetuses are expected to travel state Route 8 and interstates 76 and 77 in and around Akron this morning and afternoon. The trucks, which critics are calling “deplorable,” will cruise through downtown Akron during the rush hour today and head to Canton on Thursday
And if you click, you’ll be taken to a site that collects articles from many states where this tactic was used. That’s right, folks. The use of trucks with billboard-sized pictures of fetuses was part of a well-funded national campaign.
But of course, calling for women to have an absolute right to do what they want with their body is an equally extreme tactic.
George W. Bush is so desperate to get his embarrassed base out to vote that he’s appearing with extremist talk show pig Rush Limbaugh tomorrow.
That honor and dignity schtick is now so dead it stinks — they aren’t even pretending anymore. He is sullying the presidency worse than a million adulterous blojobs could ever do. Just days ago that gelatinous blowhard cruelly derided a man with Parkinson’s Disease for lowlife political purposes. And now the President of the United States is going to validate his malevolent cultural poison by appearing on his show.
Say your final good-byes to that silly Hughesian alliterative construct, “compassionate conservatism.” George W. Bush and his porcine hatchet-man are going to be smothering the last remaining vestige of it tomorrow as they wallow around together in the fetid shit pile known as the Rush Limbaugh Show.
It sure makes you proud to be an American, doesn’t it?
According to the NY Times some Republicans have a whole new approach to Iraq:
President Bush isn’t getting our frustrations — it’s time to be decisive, beat the terrorists,” Mike McGavick, the Republican candidate for Senate in Washington, said in an advertisement that began running this week. “Partition the country if we have to and get our troops home in victory.”
Good thinking. We need to beat those damned terrorists, partition the country whether the Iraqis like it or not, win and come on home. Why hasn’t anyone thought of this before? Let’s roll!
Update: I’m reminded by commenter Straight Talk express that there is another even more sophisticated GOP plan out there, proposed by presumptive GOP presidential candidate St. John McCain:
“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.'”
I just saw John Fund insist to Maxine Waters that he had a lot of friends in her Compton and Inglewood district. I think she almost burst out laughing.
She smacked the smug little bastard down good. If you want to see what a real fighting liberal looks like, she’s it.
FUND: John Kerry is the titular head of the Democratic Party. And, clearly, in 2004, his position on Iraq was completely muddled.
And I think the problem is, this distracts from the Democratic message, and it makes people ask: All right, the Republicans are leading an unpopular war. But what is the Democratic plan to get the troops home?
And it is unclear. Nancy Pelosi wants to end the war. The only way to end the war, realistically, if the president doesn’t want to, is to cut funding. This leaves this ambiguous.
WATERS: That’s — that’s absolutely ridiculous.
As a matter of fact, the Out of Iraq Caucus that I have to organize have been working for over a year to try and get all of the members of Congress to have enough courage to pressure the president into correcting his wrong. He started this war.
FUND: Congresswoman, you…
WATERS: And those of you who — those of you who protect him are simply…
FUND: No.
WATERS: … trying to say, yes, he started it.
FUND: Congresswoman…
WATERS: … but, somehow we must come up with the answer about how to get our troops back out.
FUND: … I’m not protecting President Bush. But I am from California.
WATERS: Yes, you are.
FUND: And I know lots of people in your district. And you have told people in your district you want to end funding for the war.
WATERS: No, I have not. And you don’t know lots of people in my district.
FUND: Yes, I…
WATERS: I’m sure…
FUND: I know lots of people in Compton.
WATERS: … you would like people to believe that.
FUND: I know lots of people in Inglewood, absolutely.
WATERS: I do not represent anybody in Compton. So, let’s get it straight.
You have been protecting the president. You have been trying to make sense out of this war that he got us involved in. We have almost 3,000 soldiers that have been killed, almost $400 billion of taxpayers’ money that’s been spent, between Iraq and Afghanistan. There’s no end in sight.
So a bunch of George Allen’s banjo-boys roughed up blogger Mike Stark today saying “you got personal” when he asked Allen if it was true that he had spit on his first wife. He’s lucky. Allen usually spits on people who annoy him.
The facts are that Allen refuses to release his divorce records or his arrest records. I have no idea what’s it them, of course. But I don’t think anyone would be particularly surprised to find out that the rumors about him spitting on his ex-wife are true. He often spits to make a statement. And he always has:
“One thing that always disgusted me about George was that he chewed tobacco in college and often carried no cup to spit into and he would walk down the halls at Newcomb Hall,” Shelton said. “He would spit tobacco juice on the floors and on the wall with total disrespect, in my opinion, for the University, the students and the janitors, and at that time most of them were black.”
And just a week or so ago Ryan Lizza, writing in TNR about Mark Warner, said:
One night in New Hampshire, after a few drinks at a pool hall in a college town, the conversation turned to the political troubles of another potential ’08 contender. I told a story that had been making the rounds about how this politician once spit on his wife.
Gosh, I wonder who that could be? The ’08 contender who is a known spitter? Hmmmm.
Maybe it’s personal but that’s not Stark’s problem. Allen even made it his signature:
Allen’s personal style is similarly distinctive. He drinks beer mixed with orange juice and signs personal notes with the salutation, “Spit, George.”Washington Post, Dec. 31, 1995
I don’t know why it’s so wrong for his constituents to ask him about these rumors. He’s a spitter and proud of it. If he doesn’t want people gossiping about him spitting on his ex-wife, maybe he shouldn’t spit at people all the time. It tends to make those rumors awfully believable.
Sam Rosenfeld and Matt Yglesias are wrong. The movement to establish an American theocracy is serious, relentless, and very, very dangerous.
Need proof? Start by picking up a copy of With Liberty & Justice for All: Christian Politics Made Simple by the Reverend [sic] Joe Morecraft III. You will find there a succinct discussion of the rationales and reasoning behind the modern christianist movement. You will also encounter, in stark language, many ideas, such as “America is a Christian nation” that are currently being mainstreamed.
Then learn something about “intelligent design” creationism. I don’t mean the doctrine, which is simply worthless both as science or theology. I’m talking about the history, rationale, and culture (I use the term loosely) behind the movement. Read the Wedge strategy. Then, to get a sense of who is funding this, read Creationism’s Trojan Horse by Barbara Forrest and Paul Gross. If you think alarm bells about the theocracy movement are just hype, you will be shocked to discover that the alarm bells aren’t ringing loud enough.
ID creationism may be the wedge that theocrats are using, but it is hardly the only strategy. Go to Colorado Springs or Springfield, MO and attend some megachurch ceremonies. I’m talking about places where christianism is a lifestyle, 24/7, where the churches have elaborate multi-media services and a Starbucks on the premises:
The megachurches thus become part church, part shopping mall and part country club. One in Tacoma, Washington, even has its own Starbucks. Brentwood Baptist Church in Houston has a McDonald’s on its 111 acres. The Prestonwood Baptist Church, near Dallas, boasts 15 baseball fields, a Fifties-style diner and a food court. New Birth Baptist Church, also in Texas, offers web links to “antiques”, “dining” and “health and fitness”.
In addition to the megachurches, there are 31 “gigachurches” in the US, which are defined as those that at least 10,000 people attend every Sunday; 73 per cent of all these are in Bush-Cheney territory in the South or West. Some offer bookstores and health clubs on their premises. The Lakewood Church, yet another in Houston, describes itself as a “non-denominational charismatic church” and has a congregation of 25,000 every Sunday. It says it will soon have more than 30,000 people attending the remodelled, $73m former “Compaq Centre” that was previously home to the Houston Rockets, a basketball team.*
Sam Rosenfeld sets up an utterly false dichotomy between the notion that christianists are rubes who have been suckered and christianists as malevolent force. Merely because there are some high-level Bush officials, like Rove, who think Robertson is nuts, doesn’t show that the “religious” right has been suckered. Look at the faith-based programs. Look at the infiltration of science/health programs with christianist propaganda. After all, this is a country which, until Bush, wouldn’t have dreamed of selling in a national park bookstore, a history of the Grand Canyon that claimed it was only 6,000 years old.
True, christianists have not gotten from Bush everything they’ve wanted. So they’ve been screaming bloody murder at their “betrayal.” That hardly means they are in retreat. They have advanced far in the past 6 years. Now, they are simply honing their strategy for the next step.
Christianists, however, have succeeeded in mainstreaming the notion that religion belongs in politics. It doesn’t, not in America, so it’s quite a step to have the churches in this country so well organized to push a christianist agenda and even endorse (wink, wink, illegal tho it may be) candidates. It’s quite a step to have mainstream national politicians trumpet their piety – as if that is some kind of qualification for running a country – with an intensity that I can’t recall in the races of the past thirty or forty years.
To pooh-pooh the influence of christianism on American politics, as Rosenfeld does, requires ignoring the plain and simple fact that General Jerry Boykin, a man suffering from paranoid delusions that Satan is hovering over battlefields and who is clearly in need of psychiatric help, still has a job. And not just any job; he is one of the pointsmen in the hunt for al Qaeda and bin Laden.
Sigh. Once again, intelligent liberals are making the dangerous mistake of attributing their own intellectual acumen and worldview to other Americans, who think and live very differently than themselves. I share with Yglesias and Rosenfeld a thorough disgust with both the ideas and the lifestyle of the christianists. I find it hard to believe they take their theology seriously as a religion: as Yglesias points out, it’s nuts to believe in an absurd religion that consigns Gandhi to hell. And like them, I find the unique cultural trappings of christianism – the crass materialism and cynical marketing of religious belief – repulsive. How can anyone be suckered into this bullshit?
But the fact that I find christianism utterly repulsive when it’s not just silly doesn’t take away from the fact that many, many Americans are deeply attracted to it. Many more Americans have trouble distinguishing between the more diluted versions of christianism and their own desire to have a meaningful place for religion and national pride in their lives.
It is a serious mistake to underestimate these people. They have more cash, and more followers than we do. More importantly, they know, as we yet don’t, that they are in a culture war. And they know, as incredible as it surely sounds to Rosenfeld and Yglesias, that the culture war is a continuation of the ancient struggle between the priests and the philosophes and ideals of the Enlightenment. Go ahead, Matt and Sam, read what they actually say. Listen to their speeches. That’s what this is about.
In 2002/2003, some liberals – but not this one – were bamboozled by the so-called “seriousness” of respected, brilliant minds like those of Wolfowitz and Perle. The notion that they were dangerous extremists who would lead the country into a catastrophe was extremely hard for some intelligent people to accept. It is dismaying to see that happening again with christianism. Yglesias and Rosenfeld fail to understand, as many liberals have over the past 25 years, that these people are serious and their influence over American life has grown exponentially over the past 6 years. Santorum may no longer have a Senate seat come November 7, but don’t kid yourself. To christianists, that simply means that Santorum will be moved to a different battlefied.
One final thing. Dobson, et al, have been whining non-stop that they are not being taken seriously by the Bush administration, (a perception that, amusingly, both Yglesias and Rosenfeld seem to agree with, albeit with a different sense of whether that’s a good thing). LIke everything else Dobson utters, it is utter crap. It’s all of a piece with the kind of wingnut bitching that always casts the right as the beleagured good guys against the evil liberals. It’s the “mainstream liberal media” myth all over again.
Don’t you believe it. The “religious” right is on a major roll.
The notion that America was founded by christianists is now so widespread that scholars have been working overtime churning out books to remind this country that there is absolutely no truth to the meme. The war against fucking continues unabated, with serious people actually debating the utility of abstinence-only sex education and the “ineffectiveness” of condoms. The assault on embryonic stem-cell research is a national disgrace. And most important of all, the meta-myth of christianism – that a good leader should not listen to reason but to his heart – is so much the norm in America’s concept of politics that very few dare question it in public. Indeed, Bush may not be a perfect christianist, but he embodies their ideal of leading from the depths of a soul at one with God.*
Sam and Matt, the religious right has declared war on you and me, a war they are preparing to win. And they can. They are armed and very dangerous. And they will surely succeed if you, and others with more influence, continue to underestimate their power and fail to grasp their alarming growth and their intentions. They cannot be dismissed as mere kooks. They cannot be ignored. They must be confronted and loudly denounced whenever they rear their ugly heads in national discourse. I don’t have words strong enough to say how urgent I think it is for you to educate yourself on exactly who these people are and what they want. Don’t wait until they are even stronger. We need your voices in strong opposition. Hell, guys, you need your voices, even if you don’t know that yet.
*And that is why I think of christianism as a particularly obscene form of blasphemy.