Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Having Too Much Fun

by digby

Matt Yglesias observes something that I hadn’t seen before. And it’s very disturbing:

What it comes down to is that, somewhat perversely, the “more open” primary system — as opposed to old-school smoke filled rooms — has in many ways made webs of connections more rather than less important. Power has been taken out of the hands of a small group of geographically dispersed elites who, acting out of self-interest, might choose to elevate a relatively obscure figure in the interests of securing victory and placed less in the hands of a broad mass of people than in the hands of a small geographically concentrated elite that controls the channels of mass communications — i.e., the Washington political press. This elite, lacking an actual stake in the outcome, can afford to let self-interest essentially dictate a policy of laziness. Hence, we may be doomed to an endless cycle of Senators (who DC political reporters already cover), governors from Virginia and Maryland (whose exploits are detailed in the Metro section of The Washington Post), and scions of famous families.

This is one of the best explanations for what has seemed to be the very shallow bench of viable potential presidential candidates. The press corps is picking them. Oy vey.

Oh, and here’s a follow-up to my post from last night about all the “fun” reporters are having. From the National Journal:

Media people are feverish. They’ve discovered an exotic new life-form, the missing link, the elusive “walking fish” that just might be the key to existence itself. Known as The Democrat, this fascinating beast has been the subject lately of countless earnest, hopeful news stories.

[…]

The hive is buzzing because a Democratic Congress is better for journalism. What!?? you say. Journalists really prefer Democrats? Yes, but not for the reasons you’ve heard — covert pinkoism and so on.

Obviously, a divided government is full of the tensions that produce headlines. But a Democratic Congress is also anthropologically different from a Republican Congress — messier, louder, looser-lipped, more colorful, newsier, and, for the media class’s purposes, more fun:

1. Running wild. Generally speaking, Republicans have an executive temperament; they like order and control. Democrats, in contrast, are legislative beasts. They thrive in chaotic, do-your-own-thing environments like Congress — except when the other guys are running the place. Under the Republican majority, the Democrats always had a glowering, tamped-down look. The sandbox was being run by hall monitors! Now they can be their wild-child selves again. Running Congress brings out the best (creative chaos) and the worst (destructive chaos) in Democrats. Both are catnip for journalists.

2. Infighting. As National Journal’s Thomas B. Edsall has pointed out, the current generation of Democratic leaders grew up during the middle decades of the 20th century with the assumption that their party would control the Hill forever. To get ahead, they didn’t need to beat the GOP so much as beat one another within the institutions they dominated. Even today, they often seem more interested in warring among themselves than against the other party. It’s happy talk and hugs right now, but just wait a few months. The intrigue and skullduggery of the contest for House majority leader was a taste of the cannibalism to come.

3. Who am I? While Republicans seem to know basically who they are and what their purpose is, modern Democrats are filled with doubt. They are the Hamlets of politics, unsure whether to act — or how. Even what to call themselves is an issue. Where most Republicans seem comfortable with the “conservative” label, many Democrats run from the “L” word. Are they progressives? Populists? Some appear to change identities daily. Remember the Kerry-Edwards campaign? Life under the Democrats is a nonstop identity crisis, and as Shakespeare knew, there is no better story line.

4. Tough love. Journalists are more aggressive under Democratic rule. This doesn’t jibe with the stereotype of reporters as liberals, but it’s the stereotype that winds up undermining itself. When Democrats are in power, there’s a huge incentive for reporters not to appear too sympathetic and thereby confirm the old liberal-bias charge. Thus, despite the friendly coverage we’re seeing in this honeymoon period, the Democratic restoration will eventually produce tougher coverage than we saw of the GOP Congress, as media outlets strive to prove that they aren’t soft on the Democrats.

5. Duck soup. Democrats are always on the edge of comedy. There’s a madcap, Marx Brothers quality to this party. Remember the Dean Scream? Kerry’s goof about education and the war was another classic flub, a pratfall tinged with darkness. Was he trying to destroy himself? You laugh, you cry, and sometimes it feels like you’re staring straight into the abyss.

Just two weeks ago, journalism was looking so sad and dreary. Let the party begin!

What can I say? This is what we are dealing with and there’s no getting around it. These are not serious people, they are immature fools. And apparently, they are proud of it.

We have had a president for the last six years who is so stupid he can barely eat and breathe and who has single handedly destroyed more than 50 years of American leadership in the world. The American people have spoken loudly and clearly and have elected a new congress to provide some checks and balances to his reign of incompetence and executive power-mongering. They did not elect Democrats to provide the puerile putzes of the DC press corps with entertainment.

If these blindered fools can’t see how many real stories are now potentially theirs for the taking, they should get out of the business. This could be the most fertile time for investigative reporting since Watergate — Republicans are talking out of school for the first time in six long years. And the Democrats have the investigative tools to get to information that’s been hidden. It should be great moment for DC journalism if DC journalism actually existed. Instead we are already back in the truthiness and fake news business, which they do very badly (particularly since we now have professional comedians who do truthiness and fake news far more entertainingly than these witless bores could ever hope to.)

The shallow cliches in that article are not just lighthearted good times. They illustrate the narrative that cost Al Gore an election and motivated an eight year media withchunt against President Clinton. But it’s no joke, which events of the last six years should have pounded home to every person who works in the journalism business. This sophomoric approach to covering politics was largely responsible for the empowerment of the most destructive political leadership in American history.

And apparently they haven’t learned a damned thing.

Update: Rick Perlstein wrote about the Pundit Primary sometime back.

It has long been a truism that Democrats pay way too much attention to elite opinion. Gore was criticized heavily for it. I think I always assumed, however, that the pundits and the press corps had a specific agenda for their choices. It never occurred to me before that it was sheer laziness and shallowness that led them to their choices:

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Bush Hires Latest Sacha Baron Cohen Character

by tristero

Y’gotta hand it to Sacha Baron Cohen. He really is as brilliant and daring a comic as everyone says he is. Fresh off the spectacular success of “Borat,” Cohen posed as an utterly deranged abstinence-only rightwinger and managed, apparently, to get himself hired by the Bush administration to oversee the only federal program that oversees family planning!

I haven’t laughed so hard since I saw “Borat” last week. It seems according to “Dr. Eric Keroack,” that when women have sex with too many men, they deplete their oxytocin:

People who have misused their sexual faculty and become bonded to multiple persons will diminish the power of oxytocin to maintain a permanent bond with an individual.

It’s amazing, and extremely funny, that he was able to fool anyone. Look at that moustache! Look at that hairline! It’s so obviously fake. And then the totally bogus name, a blatant homage to a famous Monty Python – who always looked great in a skirt – and the great Beat author, Jack Kerouac. As if all that wasn’t enough of a give-away, oxytocin? Isn’t that something like the stuff Limbaugh abused? That should have set off alarm bells right away.

Kudos, Sacha! You haven’t lost your touch. That such an obvious fake could get himself hired by the Bush administration really goes to show how utterly clueless they are. And how good you, Sacha, are at slipping into these preposterous characters.

Oh. Omigod. Wait a minute…

Clinton Rules Redux

by digby

Man are these catty little MSNBC snots enjoying their full-on Demo bitch fest. They are partying like it’s 1999. Norah O’Donnell, Lawrence O’Donnell, Mary Ann Akers and some other person I don’t know have just spent half an hour discussing the fact that Nancy Pelosi ruined her own honeymoon and now it is really quesionable whether she can lead. Meanwhile, the dirty netroots and Howard Dean must have done something wrong because James Carville is hanging out all the Democratic dirty laundry (while his wife cackles with glee, no doubt) and he wouldn’t do that unless there was something to it.

After a thorough discussion of how hapless the Democratic nerds have already proven to be, Mary Ann Akers whispers that reporters all over town are “loving” this story. It’s so much fun! All the kidz squealed like schoolgirls at prospect of the merciless going-over they are preparing to give these totalbigfatlosers. (“We’re so not being mean or anything cuz they like totally deserve it cuz they just don’t get it, ok?”)

The spite girls are back in town. It isn’t so much a matter of substance. You can argue that talking about the majority leader race is worthwhile and that it says something about Pelosi’s leadership style. The Carville sideswipe at Dean is interesting. That’s not the problem. It’s that the patented 90’s style smug, juvenile, derisive Kewl Kidz tone is once again ooozing through everything they say. (I could have sworn I heard the “Friends” theme song in the backround.)

It’s as if all these unpleasant events of the last six years never happened and we are back in the days of endless cable bitch-fests filled with snickering about unauthorized blow jobs and earth tones and “grown-ups” who eat PB&J’s and travel with their favorite pillies.

I knew it would happen in one form or another. (We caught a glimpse of it with the John Kerry apology treatment.) The DC press corps hates having to criticize Republicans. Republicans make them feel all icky and call them liberals (which they so, like, aren’t!) I confess, however, that I’m a little bit awed by how smoothly they have transitioned back into their assigned roles. I thought there might be a moment or two of cognitive dissonance as they went from grim and serious reports about terrorism and war to shallow personality politics and tabloid character assassination. I assumed they would at least wait until the presidential campaign took off to contrast the manly Republican Alpha with the loser Omega Dem, but I guess I didn’t realize how much they’ve missed their fast times at DC High.

They were certainly enjoying themselves tonight. Rolling their eyes and laughing and even snorting a time or two at the completely absurd sight of Democrats in power. I expected to see Yoohoo spray out of Norah’s nose at one point. It was just so, like, awesomely super-fun!

It’s worth noting that the last time the House turned over, in 1994, Tom Delay beat Newt Gingrich’s handpicked choice for majority leader and somehow the whole town didn’t interpret that as Newtie’s waterloo. As a matter of fact, the press was giving him such wet slurpy blowjobs they could hardly come up for air.

Bill Clinton, on the other hand, was given five months before TIME put him on the cover as the Incredible Shrinking President saying this:

“While the staff can be blamed for some of the confusion, even his closest advisers insist that Clinton is a big part of the problem. ‘A lot of it can’t be laid at anyone’s doorstep but his own,’ said one last week. Democratic Party elders admit to being stunned by Clinton’s judgment lately. Having his $200 haircut and allowing a Hollywood producer to work out of a White House office and then intervene on behalf of friends to win White House air-charter business have done serious damage to his public standing. ‘The best politician the Democratic Party has turned up in a long time turns out to have a tin ear,’ said a longtime friend. ‘He has squandered his moral authority with a lot of this stuff. It leads people to say, “This man isn’t really a populist; he is a phony, a fraud.” And though this perception is completely wrong in substance, it is enormously damaging and has to be dealt with. He has to regain the moral authority to call people to sacrifice.’…If he fails to adjust quickly, he will confirm the widespread belief that the biggest problem with the Clinton presidency is Clinton himself.”

There are no honeymoons for Democrats. Remember that. And “moral authority” is about haircuts and Hollywood, not torture and illegal wars. It is not merely a fight against the Republicans or a fight over politics and policy. It is a non-stop battle with the press to cover events with seriousness and responsiblity. For some reason, when Democrats are in power the press corps immediately goes from being merely shallow to insufferable, sophomoric assholes.

The 2006 election was nine days ago and this is what CNN had on their screen today:

These are Clinton rules, folks. Get used to it.

H/T to Media Matters for the screen grab.

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Quick On The Taser

by digby

I have written before about the abusive use of tasers by police in this country. (Talk Left has written much more about this, including discussions of the lawsuits filed against the (Bernie Kerick owned)taser company by police officers themselves for maiming them in their training — and more than 70 reports of death.)

Here’s the latest installment in what is becoming a depressingly commonplace occurence in this country. Excruciating pain is now commonly accepted as a proper way for the police to bend people to their will. It’s often used against the mentally ill who populate our streets and is increasingly used in cases of civil disobedience. It’s not even particularly controversial.

Police insist that it is a great tool to keep them from having to use lethal force. As you can see by this horrific film (via Americablog) it is more commonly used to force compliance and exert absolute authority. In this film you see the police first tasering the college student because he’s yelling at them and then tasering him again on the ground because he refuses to properly respond to an order to stand up.

The thought behind this seems to be that because tasing (usually) doesn’t leave any severe marks or lasting damage, it’s alright for the police to use this tool to inflict terrible pain on people who are slow or refuse to cooperate. In this case, you can see that this was purely a matter of swaying this person to their will, not a matter of protecting themselves or others. There were a whole bunch of police present and dozens of witnesses. They could have dragged the suspect out.

Here’s the story of his “crime.”

At around 11:30 p.m., CSOs asked a male student using a computer in the back of the room to leave when he was unable to produce a BruinCard during a random check. The student did not exit the building immediately.

The CSOs left, returning minutes later, and police officers arrived to escort the student out. By this time the student had begun to walk toward the door with his backpack when an officer approached him and grabbed his arm, at which point the student told the officer to let him go. A second officer then approached the student as well.

The student began to yell “get off me,” repeating himself several times.

It was at this point that the officers shot the student with a Taser for the first time, causing him to fall to the floor and cry out in pain. The student also told the officers he had a medical condition.

UCPD officers confirmed that the man involved in the incident was a student, but did not give a name or any additional information about his identity.

Video shot from a student’s camera phone captured the student yelling, “Here’s your Patriot Act, here’s your fucking abuse of power,” while he struggled with the officers.

As the student was screaming, UCPD officers repeatedly told him to stand up and said “stop fighting us.” The student did not stand up as the officers requested and they shot him with the Taser at least once more.

Taser abuse is out of control. Cops are using it to “subdue” people who are not carrying weapons and present no threat. While I understand it is a useful tool in the law enforcement arsenal, police are not supposed to be in the business of meting out punishment nor are they supposed to use excruciating (even if shortlived) pain to make suspects comply with their orders unless they have absolutely no other choice.

I’ve seen dozens of these videos and it makes me feel nauseated each time I see someone lying on the ground after being tasered while police threaten them with further pain if they refuse to comply. Inevitably these people are disoriented and confused and angry and shocked yet when they fail to properly respond, the police calmly taser them until they do. It’s the coldest application of pain I’ve ever seen.

Update: More here from In These Times.

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Adding to Spencer’s Questions

by tristero

Indeed, Spencer Ackerman is quite right:

“Faced with a disastrous war, the most important consideration is not ‘Were we wrong?’ but ‘Why were we wrong?’ and ‘How can we avoid being so wrong in the future?”

In fact, I said the same thing on October 18, 2003:

Bush’s foreign policy, the too-late-to-save-us release of “America Unbound” and the bamboozling of Joshua Micah Marshall just before the war point to a very serious crisis. It is an intellectual crisis that gives credence to obviously terrible and self-destructive ideas. It makes them seem fit not only for academic debate, and not only for public discussion, but – incredibly -also fit for adoption as policy by the most militarily powerful country the world has ever known. It is an intellectual crisis that permits such long-discredited siren calls as America’s “manifest destiny” to sing out once again and seduce nearly every class in this country into believing the clearly delusional notion that by prosecuting a clearly unnecessary war we could ensure peace.

How could this crisis have happened? I don’t have a clue. I don’t know how anyone could have heard what Josh heard and not think that the person who said them was a candidate for involuntary psychiatric hospitalization. I don’t know how anyone as smart and eloquent as Nicholas Lemann could understand the neo-con fairy tale so well and claim it was “breathtakingly ambitious” instead of screaming yellow bonkers.

But we are going to have to find out how it happened. Not to punish Wolfowitz, Perle and the rest of the self-described Cabal (although what they did was surely criminal) and certainly not to punish the media which, to be kind, fucked up royally for two years. No, we must figure out how this crisis happened so that we can prevent it ever happening again.

And now I’d like to add some questions to that list Spencer Ackerman has for The New Republic to address:

1. How come I, along with most of the world I might add, got it so right? Not only, “What did we see that that the official grand poohbahs missed” but also, “How did we know enough, and what did we know, to judge that Bush/Iraq would without doubt be a total disaster so clearly in the spring of ’02?*

2. How can we hear from more people who got it right in the mainstream media? I don’t mean me, duh, I mean the Jessica Tuchman Mathews of the world.

I think the second question really requires not only an immediate answer, but immediate action. The very same clowns are still in place for the most part, making a total hash of our national discourse. I’m not saying merely that we need knowledgeable liberals appearing regularly on tv, although heaven knows we need them. We also need real moderates, real conservatives, and real leftists – we got plenty already of real rightwingers, thank you very much.

Furthermore, we need the ignorant lunatics – I’m talking Bill o’Reilly and Robert Novak and Sean Hannity here, among others – marginalized. It is inexcusable that a president of the United States would give interviews to such people. It is outrageous that a man as morally bankrupt as William Bennett can still appear as a responsible spokesman on a so-called mainstream network like CNN. Etc. Etc.

* It’s worth repeating again, as the “good idea to invade Iraq, too bad Bush was the one who did it” line has become the CW:

In 2002, when I first started to hear about the planned invasion, I was convinced that only a damn fool would take anything like that seriously. There was no chance in hell that good would come out of it. And let me be clear. It was not because the Bush administration was incompetent at implementing an invasion and conquest of Iraq that could have worked, although there was their incompetence to deal with, of course. It never could have worked. (And in fact, one would expect an incompetent government to take just such an incompetent idea seriously.) And of course, most importantly it was immoral and completely illegal.

The Pence of Darkness And God’s Mighty Government

by poputonian

Today’s Indy Star puffs up Mike — I’m “a Christian, a conservative and a Republican, in that order” — Pence, but acknowledges he is an underdog in the race for House minority leader. The article also notes Laura Ingraham on Tuesday saying of Pence: “If there is a God in heaven, he will be the next House minority leader.”

Laura longs for someone to lead her from darkness, that place in the wilderness as can only be understood by “church-people,” as Chris Matthews has been calling them lately .

The article also provides this quote from Pence: “We didn’t just lose our majority. We lost our way.”

As any good conservative will tell you — and as Pence explained in his vision statement to House Republicans — ‘losing your way’ means you end up in that “otherplace.” You know where I mean:

We are in the wilderness because we walked away from the principles that brought us our governing Majority.

Yes, it’s that place again … the wilderness.

As interpreted by the minister’s sermon, even the natural world – the storms, the wolves in the wilderness, and the catastrophes at sea – spoke of the war of good and evil and of God’s mighty government. Social institutions, conscience, and the forces of nature meshed in the communal experience to restrain rebellious dispositions.
…
The combined force of so many institutions invested law and authority with immense power. In nearly every dimension of life – family, church, the social hierarchy, and religion – a [citizen] encountered unanimous reinforcement of governing authority. The total impact was immense, because each institution was an integral part of a monolithic whole. In each community the agencies of law and authority merged so that the individual felt himself confined within a unified governing structure. The preacher’s exhortation to submit to domestic government reinforced the father’s dominion in his family. Church discipline carried added terrors because censures were delivered before the neighbors and the town’s most prominent families, and the assignment of pews in the meetinghouse according to social rank reminded everyone of the distinctions among individuals and of the deference due superiors. The total environment enjoined obedience: the stately figure of minister or commissioner as he rode through town, the leading inhabitants’ imposing two-storied houses standing near the meetinghouse at its center, the austere graves of the dead in its shadow.

Only Mike Pence can restore fear of wilderness to puritan governance.

Bushman again:

Election of these officials, even the highest, did not diminish their authority or make them responsible to the people. Democracy, in the Puritan view, was nongovernment, or anarchy, and rulers had to constrain [themselves] not to obey a corrupt popular will. Election was a device for implementing divine intentions rather than for transmitting power from the people to their rulers.

And a contemporaneous quote from the day of Puritan rule:

“In elective states, where persons are advanced by the suffrage of others to places of rule, and vested with Civil Power, the persons choosing give not the power, but GOD. They are but the instruments of conveyance.”

I hope Mike hangs in there. Someday he’ll convince enough people of the invisible darkness that enfolds them, the one they can’t see but which he knows is there. Eventually, the incredible lightness of movement conservatism will save them from it.

The Voice Of Unreason

by tristero

Blogger ate an earlier post I did on David Klinghoffer’s Jerusalem Post article in which he attempts to align “intelligent design” creationism with Orthodox Judaism.* So, I will just quickly note that among other “goodies,” David’s article features a tactic common to the right when they lie or argue for a particularly awful idea, namely the adoption of a facade of sober-minded, above-the-fray thoughtfulness. In this case, David Klingoffer does both. He lies about a particularly awful idea:

Yet more than a few people on the traditional side of the religious divide are vocal critics of intelligent design (ID), the scientific framework in which doubts about Darwinism are currently being expressed and worked out.

The lie, of course, is that David knows that in Kitzmiller v. Dover, Judge Jones ruled that “intelligent design” is nothing more than the religious doctrinee of creationism and that there is nothing scientific about “intelligent design” creationism in the slightest. And David well knows that the vast majority of mainstream scientists concur.

And the bad idea here? Why, evangelizing to Israel for “intelligent design” creationism, of course. Doesn’t Israel have enough troubles as it is?

I’ll leave it to you to marvel at the incredible density of deceit packed into David’s column, not to mention his sheer ignorance of science. My favorite: ID belief is an “increasingly confident minority view among scientists.” Not that “a vanishingly small minority of scientists” have anything good to say about ID, but that it is a minority view. Not that the small minority (out of which David can muster up not a single scientist trained in the specialized areas of evolution, genetics and species formation) is increasing, but rather that their confidence is.

My interest in David Klinghoffer is not because I think he is a particularly influential or effective writer. Rather, it is because his efforts to disguise his far-right political agenda as religion are so crude as to make it obvious what he is really up to. By the time you’re slick enough to lead a mega-church, as Ted Haggard did, you’ve managed to bury the political implications underneath all the hosannas and praise the Lords so that casual outside observers who don’t know where the action lies will mistake it for non-political and therefore harmless religious observance.

With David, it’s always about far-right politics. The lengths he will go to to advance extremist memes are genuinely astonishing, if not downright revolting. Here, for instance:

It would be a presumption to assert that God caused the Holocaust, or allowed it to happen, in order to punish European Jewry for their increasingly widespread devotion to secularism. In any given historical event, we can never know God’s true intention. But it would also be a presumption, and a worse one, to assert that such a punishment was not what He had in mind. It is that latter presumption of which most Jews, including many religiously observant ones, are guilty today. Anyway, if He did intend that event as a punishment, a warning, or a lesson, it would fit the Bible’s pattern neatly. The Jews liquidated by Nazi Germany were not only, or even mostly, Reformers and secularists. Many deeply pious Jews perished as well, for they were often the last to seek escape from rising Nazi power.

You read that correctly. David here is arguing that maybe the Holocaust happened because God was punishing the Jews, all Jews, because some Jews were too “secular.” And he skirts quite close to saying that the Jews he thinks are too “secular” deserved the gas camps. His message is unmistakeable: if Jews want to be absolutely certain to avoid another Holocaust, they better do something about the deadly “secularists.”

To say the least, a few people begged to differ. Klinghoffer’s reply to them is also worth a read; just be sure that you haven’t eaten anything for at least two hours before you try.

Again, the issue is not so much David himself as it is how his blatantly obvious attempts to disguise his loopy politics as religion provide us with insight into how the slicker boys and girls go about it. Still, that Klinghoffer would try to export “intelligent design” creationism to Israel is truly unforgivable.

*Klinghoffer is employed by the Discovery Institute which should surprise no one. Where else could he work, after all?

Right On Time

by digby

November 26, 2005:

Movement conservatives are getting ready to write the history of this era as liberalism once again failing the people. Typically, the conservatives were screwed, as they always are. They must regroup and fight for conservatism, real conservatism, once again. Viva la revolucion!

There is no such thing as a bad conservative. “Conservative” is a magic word that applies to those who are in other conservatives’ good graces. Until they aren’t. At which point they are liberals.

Today:

Reluctantly, we may finally have to admit that President George W. Bush has governed more like a liberal Democrat than the true moral conservative we all wanted to believe he was. If Richard Viguerie is right, more bad things will continue to happen to the Republican Party as long as conservatives remain unhappy.

They are so utterly predictable it’s as if we are living in some sort of conservative Zombie Day from which we cannot escape.

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The Oracle Speaks

by digby

With his trademark prescience, the man who wrote “The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq” is now advising us not to withdraw from Iraq because to do so would lead to civil war:

Kenneth M. Pollack, an expert at the Brookings Institution who served on the staff of the National Security Council during the Clinton administration, also argued that a push for troop reductions would backfire by contributing to the disorder in Iraq.

“If we start pulling out troops and the violence gets worse and the control of the militias increases and people become confirmed in their suspicion that the United States is not going to be there to prevent civil war, they are to going to start making decisions today to prepare for the eventuality of civil war tomorrow,” he said. “That is how civil wars start.”

I guess Pollack’s been busy analyzing the gathering threat of the Mayan Empire or something because he seems to have missed the latest:

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Suckers

by digby

I just saw this on a conservative site and I couldn’t help but be arrested by the, shall-we-say unrealistic little fantasy this ad represents.

Right