Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Depending On The Breaks

by digby

Newtie’s got a stomach churning op-ed today called “The Only Option Is To Win” in the Washington Post. I would suggest that everyone take him quite seriously. There is a lot of pressure on the right to conform with this line of thinking and these ginned up crises tend to force their acceptance for a long enough time that there’s no turning back. Lest we forget their boy still has his finger on the button:

Holbrooke has set the stage for an important national debate that goes well beyond such awful possibilities as Sept. 11-style airliner plots. It’s a debate about whether we are in danger of losing one or more U.S. cities, whether the world faces the possibility of a second Holocaust should Iran use nuclear or biological weapons against Israel, and whether a nuclear Iran would dominate the Persian Gulf and the world’s energy supplies. This is the most important debate of our time. It rivals both Winston Churchill’s argument in the 1930s over the nature of Hitler and the Nazis and Harry Truman’s argument in the 1940s about the emerging Soviet empire.

Holbrooke indicates that he would take the wrong path on American national security. He asserts that “containing the violence must be Washington’s first priority.”

As a goal this is precisely wrong. Defeating the terrorists and thwarting efforts by Iran and North Korea to gain nuclear and biological weapons must be the first goal of American policy. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, if violence is necessary to defeat the terrorists, the Iranians and the North Koreans, then it is regrettably necessary. If they can be disarmed with less violence, then that is desirable. But a nonviolent solution that allows the terrorists to become better trained, better organized, more numerous and better armed is a defeat. A nonviolent solution that leads to North Korean and Iranian nuclear weapons threatening us across the planet is a defeat.

This piece is explicitly coming out against any kind of containment. (Naturally, since containment worked in the cold war and is thus discredited as are all things that turn out in retrospect to have been right.) Note also how he says “if they can be disarmed with less violence that would be desirable.” You can almost see the pinched, sour expression on his face. He is subtly backing up his silly WWIII rhetoric by saying we are simultaneously fighting “the terrorists,” Iran and North Korea and there is no way to deal with them but “defeat” them militarily. (I particularly like his cynical use of the term holocaust in this discussion.)

This essay echoes his colleague at the new Committee on a Present Danger, Joe Lieberman who said yesterday:

“I’m worried that too many people, both in politics and out, don’t appreciate the seriousness of the threat to American security and the evil of the enemy that faces us — more evil, or as evil, as Nazism and probably more dangerous than the Soviet Communists we fought during the long Cold War,” Mr. Lieberman said.

I can hardly believe he would say this. Aside from the fact that it is deeply offensive to anyone with intellectual integrity it is cheap demagoguery at its most obvious. Let’s get one thing straight. Nazism was a evil as it gets. And there was no more mortal human threat to the planet in world history than the threat of accidental or purposful nuclear war during the cold war. MAD was the ultimate threat — real Armageddon. We have many challenges and threats facing us, not the the least of which is nuclear prolifieration. Yet both Newtie and Joe find it completely acceptable that the military dictatorship and home of hotbed of islamic fundamentalism, Pakistan, and its arch rival India among a host of other countries have such weapons.

I’m sure all this macho talk is emotionally satisfying to some people but there is no reason that Democrats should allow themselves to be trash-talked into another Iraq style debate where the only parameters that can even be discussed are the how not the why. That’s what they are trying to do — get us into a position where we will start saying “ok, yes, this is WWIII, but I don’t think we are at war with Iran and North Korea — just Iran.” Or “of course this is an existential threat and we are in a global war against islamic fascism, but we should get the UN involved, don’t you think?”

I remember that feeling of being bulldozed on Iraq like it was yesterday. Many of us knew the war was ill timed and unnecessary (not to mention illegal and immoral) but it was clear from the beginning that there was nothing we could do. It was like watching a car accident in slow motion. We are in the midst of another attempt to create a crisis for which the only answer is more war and once again I get the sense that the entire system is paralyzed by it.

I don’t think the American people are on board at the moment, but if the Democrats don’t supply an alternative narrative — and do it with strength and conviction — many people will think that the decison has already been made and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. That’s where the Republicans want the country be in November — scared Republicans streaming to the polls to support their government and disillusioned Democrats staying home.

But there is something much bigger at stake than domestic politics and much more dangerous, I think. Newtie and his friends are using the specter of this WWIII and a nuclear armed Iran to begin the process of removing the taboo against a US first strike.

The great big neoelephant in the middle of the room is tactical nukes. We have proved with Iraq that we can’t back up our big threats with conventional warfare. So what we are left with is “shock and awe” and there is only one thing left in our arsenal that can carry that mail:

To those who have been paying attention to the Bush administration’s pronouncements on nuclear policy since 2001, Hersh’s revelations come as little surprise. During its first term, the Bush administration codified a new nuclear doctrine that identified several specific scenarios in which the United States would consciously choose to initiate nuclear war. The 2002 “Nuclear Posture Review,” almost wholly unnoticed by the peace and progressive communities, put forth explicit plans for launching nuclear attacks against nonnuclear nations. It even named seven states—including Iran—as possible targets of a U.S. nuclear first strike.

[…]

If the U.S. actually does roll out a few atomic bombs in the skies over Iran, there will be no turning back for any of us. The taboo that has prevailed since Hiroshima and Nagasaki will prevail no more. The distinction between conventional and nuclear war will forever be lost. The inhibition that has kept everyone from stepping over the nuclear precipice will disappear in a single flash. Once someone throws open the nuclear Pandora’s box that has been so precariously held shut since Aug. 9, 1945, it will never be shut again.

Busting taboos is a specialty of the Bush administration. The taboo against torture is now pretty much fully inoperative. The taboo against genocide is being currently tested. Nukes are the most efficient way to get there so that taboo is being discarded too.

Of course, the neocons and other hawks have always been big believers in nuclear weapons and thought the taboo against a first strike was “tying our hands.” Part of their original raison d’etre was their antipathy toward detente back in the 70’s which led them form Team B and Committee on the Present Danger to hype the Soviet threat. They were hysterical then and they are hysterical now. But we are in a different world. The WWII veterans and foreign policy establishment types who knew to keep these crazies at bay are long gone. The crazies are in charge.

If we let Gingrich and Lieberman get away with this insane, reckless rhetoric comparing some would-be bombers with Hitler and Stalin and characterizing the GWOT as an existential threat requiring extreme violence, within a very short time period the slow motion car wreck will have begun and we will wake up one morning to find Cheney and his pals have exercized their “only option to win.”

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Republicans Are The Same Everywhere

by poputonian

August 7, 2006 from Morning Edition (JOHN HENDREN reporting)

This is how staggeringly pointless the killing in Iraq is getting: shepherds in the rural western Baghdad neighborhood of Gazalea have recently been murdered, according to locals, for failing to diaper their goats. Apparently the sexual tension is so high in regions where Sheikhs take a draconian view of Shariah law, that they feel the sight of naked goats poses an unacceptable temptation. They blame the goats.

I’ve spent nearly a year here, on more than a dozen visits since the early days of the war, and that seemed about as preposterous as Iraq could get until I heard about the grocery store in east Baghdad. The grocer and three others were shot to death and the store was firebombed because he suggestively arranged his vegetables.

I didn’t believe it at first. Firebombings of liquor stores are common, and I figured there must’ve been one next door. But an Iraqi colleague explained matter-of-factly that Shiite clerics had recently distributed a flyer directing groceries how to display their food.

Standing up a celery stalk near a couple of tomatoes in a way that might – to the profoundly repressed – suggest an aroused male, is now a capital offense.

Sexually repressed and free to kill.

“Help me Out, Sama”

by digby

I know it’s absurd to think that the Bush administration cynically uses the threat of terrorism for political gain and that by being suspicious of such a thing I’m unserious about national security. But this is getting ridiculous …

Weighed down by the unpopular war in Iraq, Bush and his aides have tried to shift the national political debate from that conflict to the broader and more popular global war on terrorism ahead of November 7 congressional elections.

The London conspiracy is “a stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation,” the president said on a day trip to Wisconsin.

“It is a mistake to believe there is no threat to the United States of America,” he said. “We’ve taken a lot of measures to protect the American people. But obviously we still aren’t completely safe.”

His remarks came a day after the White House orchestrated an exceptionally aggressive campaign to tar opposition Democrats as weak on terrorism, knowing what Democrats didn’t: News of the plot could soon break.

Vice President Dick Cheney and White House spokesman Tony Snow had argued that Democrats wanted to raise what Snow called “a white flag in the war on terror,” citing as evidence the defeat of a three-term Democratic senator who backed the Iraq war in his effort to win renomination.

But Bush aides on Thursday fought the notion that they had exploited their knowledge of the coming British raid to hit Democrats, saying the trigger had been the defeat of Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut by an anti-war political novice.

“The comments were purely and simply a reaction” to Democratic voters who “removed a pro-defense Senator and sent the message that the party would not tolerate candidates with such views,” said Snow.

The public relations offensive “was not done in anticipation. It was not said with the knowledge that this was coming,” the spokesman said.

Snow said Bush first learned in detail about the plot on Friday, and received two detailed briefings on it on Saturday and Sunday, as well as had two conversations about it with British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

But a senior White House official said that the British government had not launched its raid until well after Cheney held a highly unusual conference call with reporters to attack the Democrats as weak against terrorism.

[…]

But Bush’s Republicans hoped the raid would yield political gains.

“I’d rather be talking about this than all of the other things that Congress hasn’t done well,” one Republican congressional aide told AFP on condition of anonymity because of possible reprisals.

“Weeks before September 11th, this is going to play big,” said another White House official, who also spoke on condition of not being named, adding that some Democratic candidates won’t “look as appealing” under the circumstances.

So they launched their Lieberman offensive yesterday with the full knowledge that this raid was coming. What a fine bunch of patriots. Lieberman must be so proud to be associated with them

Of course, we already knew they have good reason to believe they’ll benefit from terrorist attacks — threated or thwarted. After all, according to the CIA, terrorists like to help the Bush administration any way they can:

On Oct. 29, 2004, just four days before the U.S. presidential election, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin-Laden released a videotape denouncing George W. Bush. Some Bush supporters quickly spun the diatribe as “Osama’s endorsement of John Kerry.” But behind the walls of the CIA, analysts had concluded the opposite: that bin-Laden was trying to help Bush gain a second term.

This stunning CIA disclosure is tucked away in a brief passage near the end of Ron Suskind’s The One Percent Doctrine, which draws heavily from CIA insiders. Suskind wrote that the CIA analysts based their troubling assessment on classified information, but the analysts still puzzled over exactly why bin-Laden wanted Bush to stay in office.

According to Suskind’s book, CIA analysts had spent years “parsing each expressed word of the al-Qaeda leader and his deputy, [Ayman] Zawahiri. What they’d learned over nearly a decade is that bin-Laden speaks only for strategic reasons. …

“Their [the CIA’s] assessments, at day’s end, are a distillate of the kind of secret, internal conversations that the American public [was] not sanctioned to hear: strategic analysis. Today’s conclusion: bin-Laden’s message was clearly designed to assist the President’s reelection.

“At the five o’clock meeting, [deputy CIA director] John McLaughlin opened the issue with the consensus view: ‘Bin-Laden certainly did a nice favor today for the President.’”

McLaughlin’s comment drew nods from CIA officers at the table. Jami Miscik, CIA deputy associate director for intelligence, suggested that the al-Qaeda founder may have come to Bush’s aid because bin-Laden felt threatened by the rise in Iraq of Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi; bin-Laden might have thought his leadership would be diminished if Bush lost the White House and their “eye-to-eye struggle” ended.

The Stakeholder has a nice timeline of the blatant exploitation here.

ht to Americablog

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Acid, Amnesty, Abortion and Amnesia

by digby

Maha discusses “The Story of 1972” today and does something quite innovative. She pulls up Richard Nixon’s acceptance speech and reminds everyone what he was really running against that year: acid, amnesty and abortion — as well as “law and order” which was George Wallace’s racist war cry in 1968 and stood the Republicans in good stead for a generation of race baiting.

The first issue Nixon launched into was not Vietnam, but quotas. He was speaking out against Affirmative Action. He spoke of “millions who have been driven out of their home in the Democratic Party” — this was a nod to the old white supremacist Dixiecrats who were leaving the Democratic Party because of its stand in favor of civil rights (the famous Southern Strategy). McGovern had proposed a guaranteed minimum income for the nation’s poor that was widely regarded as radical and flaky and (in popular lore) amounted to taking tax money away from white people and giving it to blacks. Nixon warned that McGovern’s policies would raise taxes and also add millions of people to welfare roles — another racially charged issue. Then Nixon took on one of his favorite issues, crime. If you remember those years you’ll remember that Nixon was always going on about “lawnorder.” This was another issue with racial overtones, but it was also a swipe at the “permissiveness” of the counterculture and the more violent segments of the antiwar and Black Power movements.

Finally, toward the end, he addressed Vietnam:

Peace is too important for partisanship. There have been five Presidents in my political lifetime–Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson.

They had differences on some issues, but they were united in their belief that where the security of America or the peace of the world is involved we are not Republicans, we are not Democrats. We are Americans, first, last, and always.

These five Presidents were united in their total opposition to isolation for America and in their belief that the interests of the United States and the interests of world peace require that America be strong enough and intelligent enough to assume the responsibilities of leadership in the world.

They were united in the conviction that the United States should have a defense second to none in the world.

They were all men who hated war and were dedicated to peace.

But not one of these five men, and no President in our history, believed that America should ask an enemy for peace on terms that would betray our allies and destroy respect for the United States all over the world.

As your President, I pledge that I shall always uphold that proud bipartisan tradition. Standing in this Convention Hall 4 years ago, I pledged to seek an honorable end to the war in Vietnam. We have made great progress toward that end. We have brought over half a million men home, and more will be coming home. We have ended America’s ground combat role. No draftees are being sent to Vietnam. We have reduced our casualties by 98 percent. We have gone the extra mile, in fact we have gone tens of thousands of miles trying to seek a negotiated settlement of the war. We have offered a cease-fire, a total withdrawal of all American forces, an exchange of all prisoners of war, internationally supervised free elections with the Communists participating in the elections and in the supervision.

Not exactly “stay the course,” is it? And Nixon doesn’t argue that McGovern’s withdrawal proposal amounted to being weak on national security. Instead, he argued that it would be ignoble and a betrayal of our allies: “[I]t will discourage our friends abroad and it will encourage our enemies to engage in aggression.”

I actually think that the most apropos quote comes from Nixon’s acceptance speech in 1968, (courtesy commenter km):

And this great group of Americans – the forgotten Americans and others – know that the great question Americans must answer by their votes in November is this: Whether we will continue for four more years the policies of the last five years.

And this is their answer, and this is my answer to that question: When the strongest nation in the world can be tied up for four years in a war in Vietnam with no end in sight, when the richest nation in the world can’t manage its own economy, when the nation with the greatest tradition of the rule of law is plagued by unprecedented lawlessness, when a nation that has been known for a century for equality of opportunity is torn by unprecedented racial violence, and when the President of the United States cannot travel abroad or to any major city at home without fear of a hostile demonstration – then it’s time for new leadership for the United States of America.

Ned Lamont could substitute Iraq for Vietnam and give that quote almost verbatim. If there’s any 60’s era analogy to be seen in this election (and it’s really a stretch) it’s with the Republicans who split that year between the George Wallace racists in the south and Nixon who ran on a peace platform. Joe Lieberman is angling to be this year’s George Wallace (in more ways than one.) Lucky for us the party is very united. The only people who seem to be ready to follow him are hysterical beltway wags.

I will repeat this, even though it’s boring. Aside from the realighnment of the southern states that began in 1964, the world underwent a huge social cataclysm that included a sexual revolution, equal rights for despised minorities and women and a new form of popular culture that spoke in codes and underground language that those not in know couldn’t understand. It wasn’t just in America. It happened all over the world to one degree or another. The basic fabric of society was being challenged and turned upside down in every way from technology to family. That kind of major change is shocking and frightening at first and many people naturally look for ways to try to slow it down. One of those ways in a democratic society is to elect a conservative government.

It didn’t actually work very well on that count. The culture continued to change quickly and with a surprisingly small amount of lasting discombobulation. Our society is a very different place than it was in 1960 and is a much better place for more than half the population, at least. Humans are surprisingly adaptable and perhaps America, with its immigrant history of personal reinvention is more adaptable than most. But it came at a big political price for the Democratic Party.

That bill has now been paid in full. The conservatives have successfully exploited racial and sexual fears and resentment for more than a generation in order to gain power. They got it, they blew it and this country can no longer afford to wallow in the battles of 40 years ago. It’s a new day and a new set of challenges. The Republicans have shown they are incompetent to deal with those challenges. It’s time for both sides to get over the “acid amnesty and abortion” nonsense and look to the future.

Right now the extremist radical position is to stay the course in Iraq and just keep blindly flailing at terrorism with no real idea of how to tackle it on a long term basis. Consider this: George W. Bush turned the office of State Department undersecretary for public diplomacy into a patronage job and appointed one of his second rate office wives at a time when this country’s greatest challenge is to win a war of ideas. He’s kept Don Rumsfeld in charge of the war effort even as we have been watching him slowly unravel before our very eyes. Americans are hated by a majority of the world’s inhabitants now. There is no Democrat in the country who would have done that.

Phantom hippies are the least of our problems. Is it too much to ask that the media not fall for Karl Rove’s manufactured spin for just one minute and recognize that this nation’s foreign policy is being run by incompetent political hacks and neocon fanatics at a time of maximum danger? It’s fun to take these little trips down memory lane and all, but really, we have serious issues to deal with and the current government is doing a terrible job of it. Perhaps we could take our eyes off the rear view mirror for a minute or two and deal with the fleet of mack trucks that are coming right at us.

Update: Here’s a wonderful essay on this topic from a diarist on DKOS (who also happens to be a historian):

This is where McGovern comes in. By 1972 Democratic Party rules had greatly changed (a legacy of the 1964 fiasco involving the MDFP) opening up the party to many new entrants: Blacks, women, the young, etc. Many of these people had been involved in the anti-war, civil rights, and feminist movements. There had been a reproachment between the left and the Democratic Party since 1968. The Democrats had already embraced the Civil Rights movement by 1964. Now they were associated, unjustifiably, with Black Panthers, Feminazis (an anachronism I know), tree huggers and hippies. It was not McGovern’s anti-war stance, per se, that alienated Americans so much as the association of dovishness with the counter culture and anti-Americanism.

Again, compare this with today. Where, for instance, are we to find the counter-culture? Are the Dixie Chicks the newest incarnation of Joan Baez? Puhlease. Can there even be a counter culture in this day and age when American culture has become so diverse? (A positive legacy of the 1960’s.) The closest thing we have to a “counter culture” are goths whose defining attribute seems to be nihilism, not activism. Even the self-identified anarchists seem more interested in street theater than genuine political involvement. And whatever colorful diversity may be on display at anti-war protests – hardly a prominent feature – is invisible to most Americans since the main stream media doesn’t even bother to report on such protests. Protest itself has been mainstreamed as a legacy of the 1960’s. (Doonesbury ran a hilarious cartoon during the 1980’s showing anti-apartheid protesters coordinating with the police, providing them a list of the people that wanted to be arrested in front of the South African embassy for that day’s activities.) The social and cultural revolution of the 1960’s is no longer new and has been accepted by a majority of Americans as a fact of life. (Except, of course, by the Rush Limbaughs and Anne Coulters of the right.) In short, the association between the “counter culture” and the anti-war movement has been broken. And since Americans were most upset about the counter culture, their ability to sympathize with anti-war sentiment is no longer a source of cognitive dissonance.

Overall, the punditocracy’s understanding of history is shallow at best, mendacious at worst. As much as Vietnam and Iraq may resemble each other militarily, the domestic situations are not at all comparable. Fears that Democrats are going to repeat the “mistakes of 68” are totally ludicrous. If anything, it is the right’s current embrace of warmongering and class warfare that threatens to do to them what happened to the Democrats over the last 30 years: discredit Republicans for the next generation.

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Don’t Make Trouble Part XXIV

by digby

Jacob Weisberg was only four years old in 1968 and yet he is manifesting a severe case of hippieitis. Apparently the trauma runs deep even for those who were little children at the time.

I wonder if it has occurred to any of these people that their obsession with events of 38 years ago logically requires that Democrats go along with any war the Republicans ever propose? I had assumed the party would be bleached of the horrible stain of New Left counterculture when we boomers shuffled off our mortal coil but I fear there is no statute of limitations on this. If people who were practically still in diapers at the time can’t let go of it, we’re in for at least a few decades of craven warmongering.

Weisberg admits that Iraq is a terrible mistake just as Vietnam was, but opposing both of those wars makes Democrats look like wimps who don’t understand islamofascismtotalitarianwhatever and that spells doom for the Party. Again, what this means is that if somebody wants to wage a cynical, immoral, useless war for no good reason, Democrats simply have to go along with it if they want to be taken seriously. Why that should be, I don’t know. It seems to me that people who recognize when something is immoral, useless and stupid should be the ones taken seriously. But apparently that’s not how this works.

It’s true the Democrats split back in the day. It’s also true that there were many factors including race and the counter-culture. But when it came to the war there is one blindingly obvious fact that nobody seems to think is significant: the Vietnam War split the Democrats because it was run by Democrats. The Pentagon papers didn’t indict a bunch of Republicans, after all. It was lieberman-Lamont writ very, very large and with much bigger consequences.

The fact is that most Democrats, not being natural authoritarians, don’t put up with this crap from their leaders, of either party. They hold them accountable. Now I realize that for some twisted illogical reason that means they are seen as unserious and irresponsible in American politics, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s the right thing to do. When your country is engaged in dangerous wars based on lies and obscure reasoning, it is immoral to say nothing simply because you are afraid it will make you look bad. I’m proud of the history of Democrats standing up and opposing these two wars.

In 2006, despite all the hyperventilating in the press, the party is not split at all, and it’s easy to see why. This is a war that was relentlessly hyped by the Republicans who ruthlessly bullied anybody who even thought about opposing it. That war is now a proven disaster. Today’s polling shows that nearly 90% of the Democratic party want the US to withdraw from Iraq and believe it was a mistake. Sixty percent of the nation as a whole feels the same way with a fair number of Republicans in that group. This is not a fringe position and there is no reason to fear that the Democratic Party will be seen as unrepentant hippies unless the press insists on repeating this narrative ad nauseum.

But it isn’t just Iraq, of course. It’s what people like Weisberg assume opposition to Iraq “really means.” He beats the hell out of a leftwing strawman who thinks that terrorists are no threat:

The problem for the Democrats is that the anti-Lieberman insurgents go far beyond simply opposing Bush’s faulty rationale for the war, his dishonest argumentation for it, and his incompetent execution of it. Many of them appear not to take the wider, global battle against Islamic fanaticism seriously. They see Iraq purely as a symptom of a cynical and politicized right-wing response to Sept. 11, as opposed to a tragic misstep in a bigger conflict. Substantively, this view indicates a fundamental misapprehension of the problem of terrorism. Politically, it points the way to perpetual Democratic defeat.

I’m getting really tired of this. I would really like to see some evidence. This assertion misrepresents the far more complex view that many of us have that challenges the the GOP’s silly neocon manicheanism. If Weisberg wants to endorse Bush’s absurd formulation that’s his privilege. But it is not the only valid way to look at it.

First of all, there can be no debate that there was a “cynical and politicized right-wing response to Sept. 11.” We’ve seen Karl Rove’s power point presentation and we’ve been through two elections. The result of that is that we now have a government suffering from “cry wolf” syndrome in which nobody knows whether you can believe what they say. That is a very dangerous and stupid thing to do.

Most of us take the threat of Islamic fundamentalism — indeed fundamentalism of all kinds — far more seriously than the Republicans with their comic book and paint ball approach to complex problems. I think most of us feel that Bush has exacerbated the threat to such a degree that we are in vastly more danger today than we were before he undertook his absurd neo-congame. Again when you are actually right about something for some reason these elites consider you a fool and therefore you can’t be taken seriously on national security matters. With that kind of thinking we’ll be lucky to avoid blowing up the planet.

If Weisberg and the rest of Karl Rove’s bitches would like to know what a typical “Lieberman insurgent” thinks of Bush’s performance in dealing with Islamic fundamentalism, maybe this from Wes Clark today will suffice:

You see, despite what Joe Lieberman believes, invading Iraq and diverting our attention away from Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden is not being strong on national security. Blind allegiance to George W. Bush and his failed “stay the course” strategy is not being strong on national security. And no, Senator Lieberman, no matter how you demonize your opponents, there is no “antisecurity wing” of the Democratic Party.

One of the hallmarks of liberalism is its belief in empiricism. When things aren’t working we try to figure out why and solve the problem. Despite our unfounded reputation for starry-eyed naive belief in human perfectability, we are the practical thinkers who are looking to the future and trying to figure out a way to make things better. It is a grave misreading of the current sentiment to assume that we don’t care about national security. The reason we are trying so hard to change things is because we do care about it. I don’t think I’m the only who feels much less secure than I once did knowing that we have alienated half the world out of some misplaced faith in machismo as a diplomatic strategy. The world stage isn’t high school and I’d like to see something a little more sophisticated than locker room psychology brought to bear to solve these problems. In case nobody’s noticed, the middle east isn’t looking so good right now and the Republicans are shrieking like banshees in ever more hysterical terms. Far be it for me to object, what with the need to live down the summer of love and all, but that just doesn’t seem like a good situation to me.

Perhaps it’s fashionable to adopt Weisberg’s disdainful pose, but it’s completely worthless on both a political and policy level. It’s as if they are living in an endless feed-back loop and haven’t thought a new thought in decades. I doubt that even winning a majority will convince these timorous chatterers that objecting to Republican national security policy isn’t a death wish, but it won’t matter. The only thing that matters is that the Democratic party stops listening to them.

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A Learning Opportunity

by poputonian

After reading today that Lieberman becomes only the fourth incumbent senator to lose a primary since 1980, I jumped on Google to find out a little more about this. The results led to a timely post written Monday that not only describes the three who have been processed out since ’80, but also goes back to 1960 and covers nineteen such cases. Better yet, it provides the meaningful after-analysis of what happened to each candidate and perhaps offers parallels today for those more closely involved in Democratic party politics. The post author draws some comparisons to Lieberman, and, interestingly, notes the one senator (John Warner in 1978) who successfully captured a senate seat after losing in his own party’s primary.

It is very rare for incumbent senators to lose in their party’s primary: since 1960, only 19 have so fallen. Five of these were special cases: Sheila Frahm (R-Kansas), Donald Stewart (D-Alabama), David Gambrell (D-Georgia), Howard Metzenbaum (D-Ohio, in 1974), and Ross Bass (D-Tennessee) were either interim appointments or had won special elections, and then failed to secure the nomination for a full term in the Senate. Advanced age (J. William Fulbright, D-Arkansas; B. Everett Jordan, D-North Carolina) or scandal (Edward Long, D-Missouri; A. Willis Robertson, D-Virginia) explained the defeats of four others.

A pattern of political weakness explained the primary defeats of three other senators. In 2002, New Hampshire Republicans ousted Robert Smith in large part because they believed, probably correctly, that he couldn’t win in November; he had barely won re-election in 1996, in a race that TV networks prematurely called for his opponent, former congressman Dick Swett. Two other spurned incumbents, Democrats Mike Gravel of Alaska and Richard (Dick) Stone of Florida, had initially captured very tight primaries and never established firm party bases. Stone lost to the man who he had defeated in 1974, former congressman Bill Gunter; Gravel fell to Clark Gruening, the grandson of the senator he had ousted in 1968. Both Gunter and Gruening then lost the fall election to Republicans.

Ideology and changing party politics played a decisive role in the failed renomination bids of five senators. Three defeated Republican moderates (Jacob Javits, R-New York; Clifford Case, R-New Jersey; Thomas Kuchel, R-California) were victims of the GOP’s shift to the right: the party that ousted them was very different ideologically than the party that initially nominated them. The conservatives who prevailed, however, were all flawed candidates. In 1968, Max Rafferty lost to Democrat Alan Cranston—and Kuchel’s seat has remained in Democratic hands ever since. In 1978, Jeffrey Bell lost to Bill Bradley—and Case’s seat has remained under Democratic control ever since. In 1980, Jacob Javits lost to Al D’Amato—who surely would have been defeated in November but for Javits’ continued presence on the ballot, as the Liberal Party nominee. The incumbent senator siphoned a critical 11 percent of the vote away from Democrat Liz Holtzman, allowing D’Amato to prevail by one percentage point, 44-43. On the Democratic side, the effects of the Vietnam War and their states’ more general shift to the right contributed to the primary defeats of Ernest Gruening (D-Alaska) in 1968 and Ralph Yarborough (D-Texas) in 1970. Gruening, seeking a third term at age 81, came under attack for his increasingly extreme antiwar position (Gruening had voted against all defense appropriations after 1965) and his disinterest in bringing home federal projects to Alaska. Gruening’s foreign policy radicalism and New Deal liberalism was out of place in a state transforming from a Democratic bastion (at time of statehood, 90 percent of Alaska’s state legislature were Democrats) to the libertarian frontier it is today. Age and ideology also hurt the last of the Texas liberals, Ralph Yarborough, who was out-spent by conservative Lloyd Bentsen in the 1970 Democratic primary. Bentsen enjoyed covert support from LBJ, who remembered Yarborough’s opposition to his administration’s policy in Vietnam; the challenger also put together a devastating ad linking Yarborough to the riots at the 1968 Democratic convention.

The closest parallels to the situation Lieberman has faced this year came in Illinois in 1992 and Ohio in 1968. In Illinois, incumbent Alan Dixon had a profile remarkably similar to Lieberman’s. He was a genial, two-term incumbent, with a moderate voting record, someone known for his ability to work with senators across the aisle. Like Lieberman, he had enjoyed smashing electoral success (taking an open-seat race in the bad Democratic year of 1980, securing two-thirds of the vote in 1986) but was sometimes overshadowed by his in-state colleague—Dodd in the case of Lieberman; for Dixon, Democrat Paul Simon. Also like Lieberman, Dixon departed from his Democratic colleagues on an emotionally charged issue: he was the only northern Democrat to support Clarence Thomas’s confirmation to the Supreme Court in 1991.

Can you guess who defeated Dixon? Finish article here.

Like Clockwork

by digby

And so the borg begins the eradication of the disease in its ranks:

RedState Radio: A Conversation with Rush Limbaugh

“The Republican Congress has a problem. It is working without the presence of an elected conservative leader. George W. Bush is conservative but he is not a conservative. He’s Republican, but he’s not a conservative. He is not leading the conservative movement.” — Rush Limbaugh

Yes, if only George W. Bush had been a real conservative none of this would have happened. All hail the conservative movement which never, ever fails.

I’m telling you, if the GOP loses in November you are going to see a bloodbath that makes that little race in Connecticut look like a tea party.

Update: John Amato catches Limbaugh with another of his classy lines:

“One of the factors in his defeat was the fact that he’s just Jewish…”

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“Licking Their Chops”

by digby

I think it might be time to really hit journalists with some poll numbers. they clearly do not have a clue where the American people really stand and are reflexively reporting the tired, outmoded (and increasingly absurd) GOP narrative about the election.

Media matters caught CNN’s Dana Bash at it this morning, a segment that made my eyes roll when I saw it. It’s not just the words she mindlessly repeats, it’s an attitude and a tone. (You can see the video at the link too.)

Republicans, I can tell you, they’re already licking their chops. They are sending around this talking points memo to their supporters, to talk radio hosts. We’re going to hear from the Republican National Committee chairman later on. Essentially the headline of this is: “Defining the defeat-ocrats.” They think this plays right into their storyline this election year, that Democrats are being taken over by the left wing of their party. And from their perspective, that’s not good for the country.

Please. Every bit of that statement is GOP hype. They may be pretending to lick their chops but they are really dreading the coming election due to the fact that their president and their policies are extremely unpopular. They are way down in the generic polls, the country has lost faith in their leaders and the biggest issue in the election — the war — is an issue on which the Republicans are desperately out of sync with the country. They know very well the Democratic party is not being “taken over” by its left wing and that a large and growing majority in the country agree with the Democrats. Clearly, the events in Connecticut last night were not an endorsement of their policies. They don’t give a damn about what’s “good for the country” at this point because contrary to Bash’s very upbeat report, the GOP is focused solely on hanging on to its majority in an increasingly hostile environment. Jayzuz.

Update: It isn’t just Iraq. Again from Media Matters:

Greg Sargent first noted the Post’s omission in a post on TPM Café:

Deep in the guts of that big Washington Post poll today is a startling number that didn’t make it into the Post’s accompanying article. It reads: Which political party, the (Democrats) or the (Republicans), do you trust to do a better job handling the U.S. campaign against terrorism?

The answer: Democrats 46%, Republicans 38% That’s right: this poll’s respondents preferred Dems not just on Iraq, but on the broader war on terror. If this number accurately reflects the electorate’s mood, this may represent a watershed moment at which Americans have stopped reflexively believing the GOP is better on terrorism in general. Two questions: Will future polls show the same? And how much longer will media commentators keep saying that the GOP automatically has the advangage on national security issues?

Three of the last four Washington Post polls have found that a plurality of Americans trust Democrats rather than Republicans to handle the “campaign against terrorism.” Four consecutive Post polls — and seven of the last eight — have found that a plurality trust Democrats more when it comes to handling “the situation in Iraq.” The lone exception found the parties tied.

Yet the Post, like other news organizations, has routinely touted terrorism and other national security issues as political advantages for the GOP, both through its own assertions and through casual acceptance of Republican claims.

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Purging The Moderates

by digby

There they go again:

DETROIT (AP) — Republican Rep. Joe Schwarz lost his party’s nomination Tuesday, falling to a staunchly conservative challenger in a primary race dominated by a struggle over GOP principles that attracted more than $1 million in spending by outside groups.

Schwarz, a moderate who supported abortion rights, was defeated by former state lawmaker Tim Walberg. With 92 percent of precincts reporting, Walberg had 53 percent, or 31,869 votes, to 47 percent for Schwarz, or 28,168 votes.

Walberg, a former pastor, contended Schwarz’s views did not represent those of constituents in the rural southern Michigan district. He vowed to vote against pork-laden spending plans, tax increases and the expansion of abortion and gay marriage.

”We have to believe that we won because the mission was clear, the message was clear and the agenda was clear,” Walberg said.

Schwarz, who was backed by President Bush and Arizona Sen. John McCain, was forced to defend his views on social issues along with taxes, immigration and spending.

The first-term congressman accused outside groups of trying to buy a seat in Congress by helping Walberg pay for TV ads. He said the primary was ”probably a victory for right to life, anti-abortion, anti-embryonic stem cell groups but it’s a net loss for the Republican party because it just pushes the party farther to the right.”

Well, that’s just fine because it’s what Real Americans want. Everybody knows that.

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The Decider vs The Extreme Left

by digby

Tony Snow just said:

This is a defining moment in some ways for the Democratic Party. I know a lot of people have tried to make it a referendum on the president. I would flip it. Indeed it is a defining moment for the Democratic party whose national leaders have made it clear that if you disagree with the extreme left in their party they’re going to come after you.

I think it’s worthwhile to trace through the implications of that position because it is clearly going to be one of the central issues…One of the positions is that we leave Iraq on a timetable and we need to do it soon…

[blah, blah, blah, democracy, terrorists, blah blah, Taliban, war on terror, blah blah, Iran, North Korea, democracy…]

Some of the leadership of the Democratic Party believe that the proper way to address this is to point a finger at the United States and counsel walking away. The view of the president is that this is a challenge but it is also an opportunity and let me outline that part.

Democracies operate on different principles than totalitarian states. In a Democracy you have to respond to the will of the people. In a democracy within the United States whether it be Joe Lieberman and Ned Lamont competing for votes in Connecticut or on the local level dealing with the needs for people to have safe streets, good schools and services they can depend upon. Those are the things you respond to — the stated desires of the people.

That’s was a nice little lesson, Tony. Thank you very much.

Poll: 60 percent of Americans oppose Iraq war

Wednesday, August 9, 2006; Posted: 6:00 a.m. EDT (10:00 GMT)

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Sixty percent of Americans oppose the U.S. war in Iraq, the highest number since polling on the subject began with the commencement of the war in March 2003, according to poll results and trends released Wednesday.

And a majority of poll respondents said they would support the withdrawal of at least some U.S. troops by the end of the year, according to results from the Opinion Research Corporation poll conducted last week on behalf of CNN. The corporation polled 1,047 adult Americans by telephone.

According to trends, the number of poll respondents who said they did not support the Iraq war has steadily risen as the war stretched into a second and then a third year. In the most recent poll, 36 percent said they were in favor of the war — half of the peak of 72 percent who said they were in favor of the war as it began.

Sixty-one percent, however, said they believed at least some U.S. troops should be withdrawn from Iraq by the end of the year. Of those, 26 percent said they would favor the withdrawal of all troops, while 35 percent said not all troops should be withdrawn. Another 34 percent said they believed the current level of troops in Iraq should be maintained.

It would appear that the people stated their desires quite clearly — both in polls and in elections. I suppose they can keep claiming that 60% of the country is “extreme left” but I don’t think anyone will believe them.

Snow was virtually incoherent this morning. If I didn’t know better, I’d say the white house is rattled. As well they should be.

Here’s my favorite Snow line:

In the totalitarian states the despot alone has the opportunity to declare what he or she wants to do. And frankly, they are much more warlike.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

“I hear the voices, and I read the front page, and I know the speculation. But I’m the decider, and I decide what is best.”

Here’s some video of Snow today. And Think Progress has more on Snow’s bizarre performance, here.

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