Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

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

Garbage Out, Garbage In

by digby

I’m sure others have noted this already, but Trent Lott’s resurrection among the Republican leadership can’t help but remind all of us of a time when the GOP elites passionately cast aside poor old Trent as nothing more than a piece of garbage. Remember this one, where the crazy dolphin lady held a little dialog with one of the other crazy dolphin ladies inside her head?

Q: Why are you conservative pundit-writer-chatterer types so passionate about this?

A: Lots of reasons. One is that we’re tired of being embarrassed by people who aren’t sensitive to the reality of race in America. We’re tired of being humiliated by politicians who otherwise see many things as we do but who seem to have an inability to be constructive and understanding about race. We’re tired to being associated with hate mongering. We care about our country, and we think patriotism demands a constructive attitude in this big area.

Some of us have put our reputations in jeopardy by supporting programs like the school liberation movement because we want to help people who don’t have much and need a break. Or we’ve put ourselves in jeopardy by opposing racial preferences, or any number of other programs, for the very reason that we believe completely in our hearts and minds that all races are equal and no one should be judged by the color of his skin. And then some guy comes along and speaks the old code of yesteryear and seems to reinforce the idea that those who hold conservative positions are really, at heart, racist. We are indignant, and we have been for a long time.

In the Lott scandal our indignation reached critical mass. A lot of conservatives, many of them 50 and under, decided enough is enough, let’s end this, let a new party be born. And by the way, in the particular case of Trent Lott, it didn’t start yesterday. Stanley Crouch just surprised me by sending me a column he wrote almost four years ago for the New York Daily News. It was about a Lott appearance before the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white-supremacist group. I said it was springtime and it’s time to throw out the garbage, and Mr. Lott should go. Go to the archives of conservative journals and see what they’ve been writing and thinking for a long time about race. This is a good time to get real conservative thinking out there and known for what it is.

So guess it must be liberals who have just elected him again to be the face of a major political party. How embarrassing for us.

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Deep Bench

by digby

Here’s an interesting post-mortem from John Judis on how the parties fared in the state legislatures in which he rightly points out:

Not only do they provide a rough measure of party loyalty, which reflects national politics, but they can also determine the overall success or failure of a party for years to come.

The overall results in this year’s state legislative races show a dramatic swing toward the Democrats. In races for state Senate, which usually undercount urban areas, the Democrats went from a 48 percent minority to a 51 percent majority; in state House races, they went from 49 to 55 percent of all seats. Prior to the election, Republicans controlled 20 state legislatures, the Democrats 19, and ten were split between House and Senate (Nebraska’s legislature is non-partisan). After the election, Democrats controlled 23, Republicans 15, and eleven were split.

Even more striking, however, are the trends in individual states. They show which states and regions are becoming solidly Democratic or solidly Republican, and which have become or remain contestable. Here’s a summary of where the two parties stand around the country:

The Northeast
Republicans not only didn’t make significant gains in any Northeastern state, they suffered significant losses in states where the party still had residual strength. New Hampshire, for example, now appears to be in the Democrats’ corner. Democrats there picked up six seats in the Senate, giving them a 14 to 10 advantage; in the House, where they were down 150 to 242 seats, nearly one hundred seats switched hands, giving Democrats a 239 to 161 majority. Democrats also made very large gains in Connecticut, Maine, and Maryland (which Republicans had hoped to win back after Republican Robert Ehrlich won the governorship in 2002).

Border states and the Upper South
Republicans made no gains in these states and suffered significant losses in West Virginia, Missouri, Kentucky and Arkansas, where Democrats won the governorship and picked up three legislative seats. They have a huge 27 to eight majority in the Arkansas Senate and a 75 to 25 majority in the House. Democrats now enjoy a clear advantage in Arkansas and West Virginia, and Missouri and Virginia are up for grabs. Kentucky still leans Republican, but Democrats picked up five House seats.

The Midwest
Republicans lost legislative seats throughout the Midwest, including Indiana. Iowa and Minnesota, which have teetered between Republican and Democratic control, appear to have become solidly Democratic. In Minnesota, Democrats won six Senate seats and 19 House seats, and in Iowa five Senate and five House seats. Republicans still enjoy majorities in both chambers in Ohio, though Democrats picked up one Senate seat and seven House seats there. But legislative majorities in Ohio depend on redistricting, which a Democratic governor will now control.

The South
The deep South remains Republican, as the party won two Senate seats and a House seat in Alabama, gained a House seat in South Carolina, and maintained its huge advantage in Georgia, which it won in 2004 when Republicans went from a six-to-five disadvantage to a seven-to-five advantage in the state legislature. Democrats made significant gains, however, in North Carolina and Florida, which are now contestable.

The Great Plains
Republican subordination to the religious right cost the party in the Dakotas and Kansas. In Kansas, with the wounds from a controversy over evolution still fresh, the Democrats picked up six House seats; in South Dakota (where a draconian anti-abortion initiative failed) five Senate seats and one House seat; and in North Dakota six Senate seats and six House seats. A Democratic presidential candidate may not carry these states, but it is now imaginable that a Democrat could be elected senator from Kansas.

Rocky Mountain states
Utah remains solidly Republican. Montana has a Democratic governor and two Democratic senators in Congress, but by losing two Senate seats, Democrats lost control of the Senate. Democrats picked up three Senate seats in Wyoming. These states have become competitive, but no means Democratic. But the big change is in Colorado, where Democrats solidified their victories in 2004, winning two more Senate seats and four more House seats. Colorado, like New Hampshire, may have turned blue this year.

The Southwest
Despite Republican Representative Heather Wilson’s re-election in Albuquerque (due to a disastrous debate performance by her opponent at the campaign’s end), New Mexico remains Democratic, as Democrats maintained their almost three-to-two margin in the state legislature. In Arizona, Republicans still control the legislature, but Democrats picked up seven seats in the House, narrowing the Republican margin to only 32 to 28. In Oklahoma and Texas, Republicans remain in command, although Democrats picked up five House seats in Texas despite Tom DeLay’s rigging of district lines.

The Pacific Coast
Democrats held their own in California, as expected. Yes, Arnold Schwarzenegger is governor, but he won re-election by firing the Pete Wilson protégés who initially ran the House and replacing them with Democrats. The Democrats picked up four seats in Oregon and 13 seats in Washington. After a gubernatorial cliff-hanger in 2004, Washington has become dependably Democratic.

Unlike the congressional or presidential elections, state races are not tied directly to national political issues. A candidate for the California Assembly, for example, doesn’t run on a platform of withdrawing from Iraq. But, while they don’t show whether a particular state will support a Democrat or Republican for president in 2008– presidential contests are still shaped too much by the candidates’ political skills–they do provide a good indication of which party a state or region will favor, on average, over the next four or five elections.

By this measure, Democrats should dominate the Northeast, Upper Midwest, and Far West; make serious inroads in the Rockies, Plains states, and Southwest; and win a good share of seats in the border states and Upper South. The Republicans will maintain their hold over the Deep South, Utah, and, perhaps, Idaho. But they will have to work to win elections everywhere else. In short, if these trends hold up, the Republicans are in trouble. So much for Karl Rove’s math.

So much for Karl Rove.

One other thing that’s not mentioned very often, but which I find astonishing. I think we all sort of saw this as a “throw the bums out” election. The public might hate all incumbents, but the majority is likely to lose more so it’s bad news for them and good news for the minority party. What’s significant in this election is that the Democrats didn’t lose any seats at all. It wasn’t just disgust with “Washington” as Karl Rove wants people to believe. It was a very specific national rebuke of the Republican Party in all but its most solid strongholds in the deep South and a few western states.

Update: Bowers crunched these numbers too and makes this great point:

We have now almost entirely restocked our bench following the 1994 elections. Our list of potential candidates for higher office at every level is now much longer than it was only six years ago. We also are in a position to favorably remake electoral maps in than we were six years ago. Also, by taking a substantial lead in trifectas, now we can govern for the first time in a long time, shifting the national policy debate decidedly in our favor. The trend for us at the state level has been pretty much straight upward from 2004-2006. As the backbone of our national coalition, this makes our majorities and influence in Washington, D.C. all the greater.

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The Conservative Consensus

by digby

As I read about all the intermural jockeying for power and the discussions of a progressive agenda for the next congress, I can’t help but feel a little bit overwhelmed by the challenge we are going to face in the next few years.

Jonathan Cohn spells it out:

No, Bush hasn’t enacted a conservative version of the New Deal. But, even though some of his most grandiose proposals failed, he has still managed to leave a lasting mark on economic policy–and, through it, the economy. His tax cuts have shifted wealth in this country from the poor and middle-class to the rich. At the same time, they have destroyed the balanced budgets of the Clinton era, creating large liabilities that future governments will have to pay off. If you don’t think that’s a large impact, ask Bill Clinton himself: The large deficits he inherited forced him to shelve many of his early economic plans in 1993. Even if a Democrat is elected president in 2008, he will similarly spend much of his early time in office cleaning up this fiscal mess.

Less high-profile, but no less important, have been the administration’s actions on regulation. Substantially more skeptical of regulation–and regulators–than the Clinton administration, the Bush administration has gutted agencies like the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, rejecting proposed new rules on everything from ergonomics standards to tuberculosis protections that were already in the pipeline, while failing to propose new ones. This, too, is the kind of shift that a new president, let alone a new Congress, will find difficult to undo quickly. The regulatory process takes time. And seeing proposed changes through to completion requires sustained political will, particularly when the changes rankle well-connected business groups (as they so often do).

The Bush administration’s impact on the judiciary could be even longer-lasting. The conservatives Bush has appointed to the Supreme Court–where they enjoy lifetime tenure–could easily tip the balance on issues like abortion, privacy, and the limits of executive authority, the latter two being of particular concern given the war on terror. And, speaking of war, look at what the administration has done on foreign policy: It has toppled regimes in two countries, set off a civil war in one of them, committed a large chunk of our Armed Forces to action, and basically redefined the premises of U.S. foreign policy.

These and other such changes will affect Americans–and, in some respects, the entire world–for years to come. And while the voters rejected Bush’s divisive political strategy, it was exactly that strategy–much like FDR’s–that likely made these changes feasible. Imagine that Bush had governed as an accommodator rather than an agitator, as he promised to do as a candidate in 2000. Would he be more popular now? Probably. But would the rich still have their fabulous tax breaks? Would former industry lobbyists be running around the bureaucracy, destroying regulatory agencies from the inside out? Would U.S. troops still be in Baghdad? Probably not.

As Cohn says elsewhere in the piece, “[f]or the last few years, we’ve been in a conservative political period that arguably extended all the way back to the late 1960s, when Kevin Phillips wrote of an “emerging Republican majority.”

This is the fundamental problem we face and I don’t think we have all quite grasped the enormity of that because the Republicans ran and governed during the last 40 years as if the liberals were in control and they were the angry insurgents trying to knock them off. Everyone during this period, including the Democrats, fell for it and believed that underneath it all a liberal consensus existed. But to a remarkable extent, we have had a conservative consensus for some time.

Let’s look at economics. A reader sent me this excerpt from The Economist View‘s Tim Duy, talking about Hayek, in which he excerpts some choice quotes from The Road to Serfdom and explains that even the free market God of the right understood that government was necessary to mitigate at least some of the risk of a dynamic capitalist society. Here’s what I found most interesting about this post, however:

Speaking of Keynes, Robert Skidelsky’s masterful biography includes Keynes’s thoughts on Hayek:

Keynes’s response was unexpected. Hayek’s was a “grand book,” he wrote, and “we all have the greatest reason to be grateful to you for saying so well what needs so much to be said.Morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it; and not only in agreement, but in deeply moved agreement.”

Keynes did note, however, that Hayek, by admitting to the need for government to serve a social function, recognized that there was in fact need for a middle ground, but could not determine where to draw it.

The difference between the intellectuals, you see, isn’t really so stark. But for the last 40 years that line has been drawn far over to the right as a function of politics rather than real economic philosophy. The public economic debate has been turned into a simplistic argument over who can provide the best tax cuts and the least regulation because that’s the candy the southern strategy Republicans sold to their conservative base as the best way to defund a government which they claim always spent hard-earned tax dollars on the “wrong” people. (You know what I’m talking about…)

But it didn’t stop with them. I think I wrote before about an earnest young woman I worked with a few years back who was a compassionate liberal, voted for Democrats and even contributed time and money to the cause. One day she came into my office and breathlessly told me, “Finally, I saw someone last night on TV who knows what he’s talking about. Maybe you’ve heard of him. He’s an economist and his name is Milton Friedman.” To her, Friedman “made sense” because he reaffirmed what she’d been hearing since she was old enough to vaguely pay attention, not because she agreed with his laissez-faire theories. She didn’t even know that’s what they were. It just sounded so reasonable to her (and as Dr. Atrios pointed out here, that little bit of freshman economics can be a dangerous thing.)

The Republicans may have finally jumped the shark, after failing so dramatically at governance, but they have inculcated their thinking so thoroughly into people’s minds that many people don’t even know it. The way most people think about government, and the vocabulary they all use, comes from the Republican playbook. It’s going to take a huge effort to get people thinking about it in new ways. (There are a lot of smart people working on that, thank goodness.)

But right now, we are stuck in the same old groove:

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid said reviving several popular business and middle-class tax breaks that expired at the end of 2005 will be at the top of his party’s agenda when Congress returns next week for a postelection session.

It’s not that I don’t want to see middle class families and small businesses have some more money in their pockets. I do. I haven’t looked at the economic implication of these tax reductions and maybe they even make sense. But I’m pretty sure this is simple politics (and undoubtedly good politics) in which the Democrats prove their tax-cutting bonafides to the constituency both parties need — the middle class. In today’s political climate, you aren’t delivering, if you aren’t delivering “tax relief.”

That’s as true blue Republican as you can get. And at some point Democrats are going to have to start rolling this back and making the case that delivering for the middle class means providing the safety net and provision for the less fortunate that allows average Americans the freedom to take risks and fuel our dynamic economy — like taking new jobs or starting a new business. Tax cuts are like candy — they taste good, but the individual middle class worker and her family doesn’t get nearly the nutritious bang for the buck that the safety net and government programs do. Liberals and progressives need to start changing the political dialog in ways that talk about risk management and security and fair trade and wage growth — things we really believe in and which can make an affirmative, lasting difference in people’s lives.

There are so many great economists in the blogosphere who are much smarter than I am about these things and who can speak in great detail about policy, so I will leave them to it. But before we get to that I think we are going to have to start thinking about how to make our argument in new terms and talk to people about their relationship to their government in new ways.

My first suggestion for this new vocabulary isn’t really mine, but a reader’s from some time back who pointed out my use of the term “tax burden” was an example of unthinking adoption of conservative rhetoric. He was right. He suggested that we start talking about it as “paying the bills” something that everyone understands. I think that makes sense. You can’t blow smoke in people’s faces by trying to tell them that taxes are “good.” That’s dreaming. But everyone knows that we have to pay the bills and our bill for the services we get — national defense, social security for the disabled and elderly, medical research, roads and bridges,air traffic control, clean air and water, veterans benefits and on and on and on aren’t free. It’s a bill that has to be paid for both the individual and common good. We need the insurance it provides, the pension, the health care (universal someday, old age right now) the health and safety, the security. And there is no free lunch on that stuff, it’s the price we pay to live in a first world, thriving democracy in the 21st century. If you don’t want to pay those bills, move to a third world country and see what not having to pay them gets an average person.

Right now, we are going to have to deal with some rich kids who stole the car, blew the inheritance and ran up a bunch of debt and we are going to have to make them pay it back. Their bills are going to be high for a while. They have plenty of money. They won’t suffer much, even though they should.

The conservative consensus says that low taxes, limited government, individual rights, strong national defense and family values equals a better life. Many people, including many liberals, have absorbed that message into their worldview and it’s going to take some work to unravel it. It won’t happen through issue advocacy. People already favor all the government programs they depend on (and some they that don’t even exist, yet.) But they have been disconnected from government itself — their ownership of it and their obligation to keep it working. Until we successfully challenge the conservative consensus with new language and new ways of thinking about government and politics, it’s going to remain in place. And it’s going to be very difficult to successfully advance the progressive agenda until that changes.

Update: As DB reminds me in the comments, here’s the post I wrote about Bill Sher’s book on this very topic.

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Quiverfull of Kooks

by digby

Following up tristero’s post below, I think the single most disturbing part of the article he discusses, is this:

Meanwhile, Phillip Longman hardly offers a left-wing counterpoint. Instead, he’s searching–at the request of the Democratic Leadership Council, which published his policy proposals in its Blueprint magazine–for a way to appeal to the same voters Carlson is organizing: a typically “radical middle” quest to figure out how Democrats can make nice with Kansas.

“Who are these evangelicals?” asks Longman. “Is there anything about them that makes them inherently prowar and for tax cuts for the rich?” No, he concludes. “What’s irreducible about these religious voters is that they’re for the family.” Asked whether the absolutist position Quiverfull takes on birth control, let alone abortion, might interfere with his strategy, Longman admits that abortion rights would have to take a back seat but that, in politics, “nobody ever gets everything they need.”

Aside from the centrist tax policies Longman is crafting to rival Carlson’s, he urges a return to patriarchy–properly understood, he is careful to note, as not just male domination but also increased male responsibility as husbands and fathers–on more universal grounds. Taking a long view as unsettling in its way as Pastor Bartly Heneghan’s rapture talk, Longman says that no society can survive to reproduce itself without following patriarchy. “As secular and libertarian elements in society fail to reproduce, people adhering to more traditional, patriarchal values inherit society by default,” Longman argues, pointing to cyclical demographic upheavals from ancient Greece and Rome to the present day, when falling birthrates have consistently augured conservative, even reactionary comebacks, marked by increased nationalism, religious fundamentalism and deep societal conservatism. Presenting a thinly veiled ultimatum to moderates and liberals, Longman cites the political sea change in the Netherlands in recent years, where, he charges, a population decline led to a vacuum that “Muslim extremists came in to fill.” Though individual, nonpatriarchal elements of society may die out, he says, societies as a whole will survive and, “through a process of cultural evolution, a set of values and norms that can roughly be described as patriarchy reemerge.”

Longman’s answer to this threat is for progressives to beat conservatives by joining them, emulating the large patriarchal families that conservatives promote in order not to be overrun by a reactionary baby boom. Any mention of social good occurring in regions with low birthrates is swept away by the escalating rhetoric of a “birth dearth,” a “baby bust,” a dying hemisphere undone by its own progressive politics.

Holy fuck, indeed. This kind of thinking has finally gone mainstream and is fully integrated into the debate among influential Democrats. Granted, Longman’s advice to the DLC was to embrace “family friendly” policy but as you can see from his comments, in order to truly embrace these undereducated “Quiverfull” nuts whom everyone thinks need to be part of the Big Tent (birthing and cleaning after everyone apparently)the agenda is going to have to expand significantly. We are already seeing the argument going beyond abortion and extending into the birth control realm.

Let me put it this way: if the Democrats insist on racing the Republicans into the dark ages with this kind of racist, misogynist, anti-intellectual, enlightenment destroying bullshit, we won’t have to worry about “staying on top.” Americans will be soon be living atop a gigantic garbage dump picking through the remnants of their former civilization for enough to eat. It isn’t 1956 anymore and it sure as hell isn’t 1856 anymore. If the US wants to take a trip back to the 18th century that’s fine. I’m sure Europe, China and India would be more than happy to pick up the slack.

This stuff is very thinly veiled Bell Curve nonsense re-packaged to appeal to sexists and homophobes as well as racists. After all, folks, if it was just the aging population everyone was so worried about, there would be no immigration debate, would there?

Here’s David Brooks on the subject a few months back:

I suspect that if more people had the chance to focus exclusively on child-rearing before training for and launching a career, fertility rates would rise. That would be good for the country, for as Phillip Longman, author of “The Empty Cradle,” has argued, we are consuming more human capital than we are producing – or to put it another way, we don’t have enough young people to support our old people.

Plenty of young people want to come to America and would be more than happy to pay into social security to support all of us old codgers. They just aren’t the “right kind” of people, if you know what I mean. So get to breeding, white bitches. You’ve got work to do.

I am all for having a big tent. But there is no political party on earth that is big enough for me and people who believe that liberalism’s great hope is to create policies that encourage women to have 14 children so we can “outbreed” the competition and make sure the wrong people don’t come in and ruin the place. That’s where I head for the exit.

Update:
Here’s an interesting article by Michele Goldberg, of “The Rise Of Christian Nationalism” fame on the subject of childlessness and happiness (as in “the pursuit of” — another one of those bedrock American values people seem to think are fungible these days.) For a great many of us, the pursuit of happiness is not possible unless life offers freedom to choose how we will live our lives.

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The Quiverfulls

by tristero

I can’t improve on what Justin exclaimed about The Quiverfulls (also see here): Holy Fuck!

I’ll add only two things. First of all, note the language they use, how by having lotsa kids they are helping to take the country back from the commie-feminist-homosexual-al Qaeda lovers.

This isn’t the language of religion. This is the language of far right political operatives. And sure enough, if you read The Nation, you learn that one of the scumbags that inspired the Quiverfulls was a Holocaust “revisionist,” to use Kathryn Joyce’s disgusting euphemism for Holocaust denier.

As for those who think that the Quiverfulls somehow contradict the notion that christianists are engaged in a war on fucking, well… with all due respect to Justin’s great quip, I suggest you read very carefully what they are saying. If that’s fucking, God help us all.

Secondly, since someone is bound to mention it in comments, yes, I do recall very well that Bach had 20 children (21, if you count PDQ). And for a very good reason.

Someone had to copy all that music he was writing every week and hiring copyists then as now could get really pricey.

Today, I have no doubt that Bach would do as all the rest of us do. He’d get a Mac (or PC) and a copy of Finale and have a lot less kids.

Did You Know That San Francisco Is 28 Feet From New York City?

by tristero

It’s true!

(If you’re a christianist, that is.)

Faith Based Boy Genius

by digby

This is a perfect illustration of everything that is wrong with the Bush administration. They are magical thinkers:

Rove’s miscalculations began well before election night. The polls and pundits pointed to a Democratic sweep, but Rove dismissed them all. In public, he predicted outright victory, flashing the V sign to reporters flying on Air Force One. He wasn’t just trying to psych out the media and the opposition. He believed his “metrics” were far superior to plain old polls. Two weeks before the elections, Rove showed NEWSWEEK his magic numbers: a series of graphs and bar charts that tallied early voting and voter outreach. Both were running far higher than in 2004. In fact, Rove thought the polls were obsolete because they relied on home telephones in an age of do-not-call lists and cell phones. Based on his models, he forecast a loss of 12 to 14 seats in the House—enough to hang on to the majority. Rove placed so much faith in his figures that, after the elections, he planned to convene a panel of Republican political scientists—to study just how wrong the polls were.

His confidence buoyed everyone inside the West Wing, especially the president. Ten days before the elections, House Majority Leader John Boehner visited Bush in the Oval Office with bad news. He told Bush that the party would lose Tom DeLay’s old seat in Texas, where Bush was set to campaign. Bush brushed him off, Boehner recalls. “Get me Karl,” the president told an aide. “Karl has the numbers.”

I think what shocks me the most about this article is that it reveals that Rove actually believed they would definitely win based on his magic numbers. I assumed he was “projecting” confidence as any political strategist would do. I honestly didn’t know he was delusional.

And this delusional man’s power was unprecedented for a political advisior. In many ways he has been running the country for the last six years:

In his acceptance speech, Bush thanks Rove, calling him simply “the architect.”

“Everyone in the room knew what that meant,” says Washington Post reporter Mike Allen. “He was the architect of the public policies that got them there, he was the architect of the campaign platform, he was the architect of the fundraising strategy, he was the architect of the state-by-state strategy, he was the architect of the travel itinerary. His hand was in all of it.”

February 2005

Rove is promoted. President Bush announces that he will now be assistant to the president, deputy chief of staff and a senior adviser, the title reflecting influence over both politics and policy. Rove also gets a new office, just steps away from the Oval Office.

With Bush re-elected, Rove is thinking long-term. He intends to use both politics and policy to create a permanent Republican majority. He designs a legislative agenda that he hopes will lead to future Republican gains. High on the list: an overhaul and partial privatization of Social Security, and the appointment of “strict constructionist” judges who will reverse what many Republicans see as judicial activism. “I think what they are trying to do is bigger than the Great Society, and approaches the New Deal,” says Washington Post reporter Thomas Edsall. “They aren’t kidding around.”

They weren’t serious people though and Tom Edsall and the rest of the Washington press corps should have known very well by then. Ron Suskind had chronicled the dysfunction inside the Bush administration as early as January 2003:

DiIulio defines the Mayberry Machiavellis as political staff, Karl Rove and his people, “who consistently talked and acted as if the height of political sophistication consisted in reducing every issue to its simplest black-and-white terms for public consumption, then steering legislative initiatives or policy proposals as far right as possible. These folks have their predecessors in previous administrations (left and right, Democrat and Republican), but in the Bush administration, they were particularly unfettered.”

“Remember ‘No child left behind’? That was a Bush campaign slogan. I believe it was his heart, too. But translating good impulses into good policy proposals requires more than whatever somebody thinks up in the eleventh hour before a speech is to be delivered.”

Weekly meetings of the Domestic Policy Council “were breathtaking,” DiIulio told me. As for the head of the DPC, Margaret La Montagne, a longtime friend of Karl Rove who guided education policy in Texas, DiIulio is blunt: “What she knows about domestic policy could fit in a thimble.”

When DiIulio would raise objections to killing programs—like the Earned Income Tax Credit, a tax credit for the poorest Americans, hailed by policy analysts on both sides of the aisle, that contributed to the success of welfare reform—he found he was often arguing with libertarians who didn’t know the basic functions of major federal programs. As a senior White House adviser and admirer of DiIulio’s recently said to me, “You have to understand, this administration is further to the right than much of the public understands. The view of many people [in the White House] is that the best government can do is simply do no harm, that it never is an agent for positive change. If that’s your position, why bother to understand what programs actually do?”

[…]

Five days later, on July 9, at the administration’s six-month senior-staff retreat, DiIulio writes that “an explicit discussion ensued concerning how to emulate more strongly the Clinton White House’s press, communications, and rapid-response media relations—how better to wage, if you will, the permanent campaign that so defines the modern presidency regardless of who or which party occupies the Oval Office. I listened and was amazed. It wasn’t more press, communications, media, legislative strategizing, and such that they needed. Maybe the Clinton people did that better, though surely they were less disciplined about it and leaked more to the media and so on. No, what they needed, I thought then and still do now, was more policy-relevant information, discussion, and deliberation.”

Part of the problem, DiIulio now understood, was that the paucity of serious policy discussion combined with a leakproof command-and-control operation was altering traditional laws of White House physics. That is: Know what’s political, know what’s policy. They are different. That distinction drives the structure of most administrations. The policy experts, on both domestic and foreign policy, order up “white papers” and hash out the most prudent use of executive power. Political advisers, who often deepen their knowledge by listening carefully as these deliberations unfold, are then called in to decide how, when, and with whom in support policies should be presented, enacted, and executed.

The dilemma presented by Karl Rove, DiIulio realized, was that in such a policy vacuum, his jack-of-all-trades appreciation of an enormous array of policy debates was being mistaken for genuine expertise. It takes a true policy wonk to recognize the difference, and, beyond the realm of foreign affairs, DiIulio was almost alone in the White House.

“When policy analysis is just backfill to support a political maneuver, you’ll get a lot of oops,” he says.

A lot of oops.

Karl Rove never got Bush a mandate and yet advised him to govern as if he’d won in a landslide. (Maybe he showed Junior some “metrics” that proved that even though he had a tiny majority, it meant his wingnut policies were hugely popular.) And he’s been as responsible for the awful state of American politics and malfeasance in office as anyone in the White House. He barely escaped indictment earlier this year.

Can somebody explain to me why the taxpayers are still paying his salary?

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Freeper Geeks With Problems

by digby

So this nutball who’s been sending white powder to liberals and media celebs turns out to be a freeper. Imagine my surprise.

But it turns out that he’s an odd wingnut sci-fi freak too — and he’s been on a rampage to purge the canon of all those dastardly sci-fi lib-symps.

From Dover Bitch:

Beam them all up, already

A quick Google search for the utter prick who sent white powder to Nancy Pelosi, Keith Olbermann and others yields this dilithium crystal, apparently sent by him to SciFi Channel:

With the passing away of Lexx ends an intriguing albeit smarmy experiment in sci-fantasy. One that breaks with conventions, or should I say, cliches of TV sci-fi of the ’90s. The politically correct pabulum, the multicultural indoctrination, the Bladerunner motifs, and not the least—the steroid mutated superbabes that can punch the lights out of men, but never get punched back in return!?

How about creating a new sci-fi anthology with none of the puerile baggage of Rod Serling, Gene Roddenberry, Rockne O’ Bannon, etc., etc. It is time to end their reign of Left-wing innuendo, their anti-American, anti-mankind cynicism and fatalism

.(more here…)

“…steroid mutated superbabes that can punch the lights out of men, but never get punched back in return?”

Issues?

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Poppy’s Last Rescue

by digby

It seems to me that with the new narrative of Junior having to put his codpiece between his legs and beg for daddy and daddy’s old family retainers to once again bail him out it’s a good time to reprise a little vintage Molly Ivans:

Bush likes to claim the difference between him and his father is that, “He went to Greenwich Country Day and I went to San Jacinto Junior High.” He did. For one year. Then his family moved to a posh neighborhood in Houston, and he went to the second-best prep school in town (couldn’t get into the best one) before going off to Andover as a legacy.

Jim Hightower’s great line about Bush, “Born on third and thinks he hit a triple,” is still painfully true. Bush has simply never acknowledged that not only was he born with a silver spoon in his mouth — he’s been eating off it ever since. The reason there is no noblesse oblige about Dubya is because he doesn’t admit to himself or anyone else that he owes his entire life to being named George W. Bush. He didn’t just get a head start by being his father’s son — it remained the single most salient fact about him for most of his life. He got into Andover as a legacy. He got into Yale as a legacy. He got into Harvard Business School as a courtesy (he was turned down by the University of Texas Law School).

He got into the Texas Air National Guard — and sat out Vietnam — through Daddy’s influence. (I would like to point out that that particular unit of FANGers, as regular Air Force referred to the “Fucking Air National Guard,” included not only the sons of Governor John Connally and Senator Lloyd Bentsen, but some actual black members as well — they just happened to play football for the Dallas Cowboys.) Bush was set up in the oil business by friends of his father.

He went broke and was bailed out by friends of his father. He went broke again and was bailed out again by friends of his father; he went broke yet again and was bailed out by some fellow Yalies.

Everybody knew this before they voted for him. But they thought they were voting for backyard bar-b-que pal not president. They also assumed that he listened to his father. Not so:

Did Mr. Bush ask his father for any advice? “I asked the president about this. And President Bush said, ‘Well, no,’ and then he got defensive about it,” says Woodward. “Then he said something that really struck me. He said of his father, ‘He is the wrong father to appeal to for advice. The wrong father to go to, to appeal to in terms of strength.’ And then he said, ‘There’s a higher Father that I appeal to.'”

Just two months ago, Junior told Brian Williams:

WILLIAMS: Is there a palpable tension when you get together with the former president, who happens to be your father? A lot of the guys who worked for him are not happy with the direction of things.

BUSH: Oh no. My relationship is adoring son.

WILLIAMS: You talk shop?

BUSH: Sometimes, yeah, of course we do. But it’s a really interesting question, it’s kind of conspiracy theory at its most rampant. My dad means the world to me, as a loving dad. He gave me the greatest gift a father can give a child, which is unconditional love. And yeah, we go out and can float around there trying to catch some fish, and chat and talk, but he understands what it means to be president. He understands that often times I have information that he doesn’t have. And he understands how difficult the world is today. And I explain my strategy to him, I explain exactly what I just explained to you back there how I view the current tensions, and he takes it on board, and leaves me with this thought, “I love you son.”

(He left out the fact that Senior muttered under his breath afterward “… but you are an idiot.”)

Now, he’s widely seen as having to call in his daddy’s consigliere and top spook. He can’t be happy about that.

But the truth is that even daddy’s rich, loyal pals can’t bail him out of this one.(Read this if you want to see just how hopeless the situation seems at this moment. It’s a nightmare.) I suspect that the best they can hope for this time is to stanch the bleeding until they can safely whisk him back to Crawford, dump the mess on the next guy and try to blame the Democrats for the failure.

I hope people understand that James Baker and Robert Gates are in the Bush family business not the “wise old sage who will do what’s right for the country” business. Indeed, their entire lives have been devoted to bailing out Bushes.(And they haven’t always been successful. Jimmy may have pulled one out for Junior in Florida, but he was called back, much against his will, to get Poppy re-elected and failed.) Their job is simply to try to save Junior from ignominy and that is not necessarily what is in the best interest of the US or Iraq.

It is clear that no matter what this country does now in Iraq, it is impossible to
“fix” in any substantial way. We didn’t just break the pot at the Pottery Barn, we blew up the whole neighborhood. Going in was, as James Webb wrote back in 2003, “the greatest strategic blunder in modern memor” the war’s execution has been the greatest series of tactical mistakes in modern memory — so much now that it’s impossible to see a way out that even leads to some kind of authoritarian stability, much less democracy. And it’s very, very easy to see how it can lurch out of control in a dozen different ways.

James Baker and Robert Gates and Joe Lieberman aren’t magicians. And they are not going to let anybody say they and Junior “lost Iraq.” Don’t get your hopes up about these “grown-ups.” They are just looking for a way to keep Bush (and in joe’s case, himself) from looking like a loser — and real withdrawal (as opposed to cosmetic) is not going to accomplish that. Everything they do for the next two years will be to save Bush’s face and the Republican party, period.

I’m sorry to be so cynical, but I lost any hope that the Bush administration was capable of doing the right thing a long time ago.

BTW: George W. Bush has engendered more nicknames than any other president, I think. I have certainly used my share and even coined a fairly popular one. But I have used “Junior” more often than any other, mainly because I know it’s the one that probably bothers him the most. Back in the 2000 campaign Bush made a famous stop on Oprah and gave himself away:

OPRAH WINFREY: Here’s another viewer who e-mailed us with a question for you. Here it is.

MAN: Governor Bush, what is the public’s largest misconception of you?

GOV. GEORGE W. BUSH: Probably that I’m running on my daddy’s name; that, you know, if my name were George Jones, I’d be a country and western singer.

He’s got to be loving this:

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