Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

“You’re Doin’ A Heckuva Job Brownie:” One Year Ago Today

by digby

Bush congratulated Brownie even though he had just viewed a DVD with highlights of horrors on the ground on AF One as he made his way to the Gulf for the above photo-op:

The reality, say several aides who did not wish to be quoted because it might displease the president, did not really sink in until Thursday night. Some White House staffers were watching the evening news and thought the president needed to see the horrific reports coming out of New Orleans. Counselor Bartlett made up a DVD of the newscasts so Bush could see them in their entirety as he flew down to the Gulf Coast the next morning on Air Force One.

A group of 1,000 firefighters convened in Atlanta to volunteer with the Katrina relief efforts. Of those, “a team of 50 Monday morning quickly was ushered onto a flight headed for Louisiana. The crew’s first assignment: to stand beside President Bush as he tours devastated areas.”

Rove took over handling the crisis and immediately got to work on the most important priority:

In a reflection of what has long been a hallmark of Mr. Rove’s tough political style, the administration is also working to shift the blame away from the White House and toward officials of New Orleans and Louisiana who, as it happens, are Democrats.

”The way that emergency operations act under the law is the responsibility and the power, the authority, to order an evacuation rests with state and local officials,” Mr. Chertoff said in his television interview. ”The federal government comes in and supports those officials.”

That line of argument was echoed throughout the day, in harsher language, by Republicans reflecting the White House line.

In interviews, these Republicans said that the normally nimble White House political operation had fallen short in part because the president and his aides were scattered outside Washington on vacation, leaving no one obviously in charge at a time of great disruption. Mr. Rove and Mr. Bush were in Texas, while Vice President Dick Cheney was at his Wyoming ranch.

Mr. Bush’s communications director, Nicolle Devenish, was married this weekend in Greece, and a number of Mr. Bush’s political advisers — including Ken Mehlman, the Republican National Committee chairman — attended the wedding.

Ms. Rice did not return to Washington until Thursday, after she was spotted at a Broadway show and shopping for shoes, an image that Republicans said buttressed the notion of a White House unconcerned with tragedy.

These officials said that Mr. Bush and his political aides rapidly changed course in what they acknowledged was a belated realization of the situation’s political ramifications. As is common when this White House confronts a serious problem, management was quickly taken over by Mr. Rove and a group of associates including Mr. Bartlett. Neither man responded to requests for comment.

The first official talking point, however, was to blame the victims. I wrote that morning:

I heard this shocking exchange between Aaron Brown and Jamie MacIntyre last night too, and was stunned. There is clearly a culture of pass-the-buck whining about military failure taking over the Pentagon if their first reaction is to complain about partisanship…this was an official talking point. On Thursday, September 1st, three days after the scope of the disaster was well known, George W. Bush sent his disaster officials out to the media with the instructions that they were to blame the victims — the same day that we were seeing dead bodies and dehydrated children all over our television sets.

Here’s the exchange I was talking about:

MCINTYRE: And as to your question about political, I talked to a lot of people at the Pentagon today who were very frustrated about the fact that the perception was being created that the military didn’t move fast enough. And they did it somewhat as political. They thought that part of the motivation was the critics of the administration to make the president look bad.

And they seemed to question the motives of some of our reporters who were out there and hearing these stories from the victims about why they had so much sympathy for the victims, and not as much sympathy for the challenges that the government met in meeting this challenge.

And I have to say thinking about that, it doesn’t really seem all that unusual that you would tend to understand the plight of the victims a little more than the bureaucrats in Washington.

BROWN: Yes, I mean, I’m glad you told us that. And they have every right to believe they believe and think the way they think. I mean, and I mean that. But you’ve got people who have been living as refugees. It is not hard to understand why our first heart beat goes in their direction. We’ll worry about the bureaucrats later.

That night, I watched in abject horror as Shepard Smith and Geraldo on Fox Newsof all places, reported on conditions so horrible that you could not believe it was America in 2005. I wrote:

Bill O’Reilly is trying with all his might to make this story about “thugs” and bad Democrats but both Fox news reporters on the ground are having none of it. Shepard Smith and Steve Harrigan are both insisting that the story is about people dying and starving on the streets of New Orleans. Smith is particularly upset that the mayor sent buses to the Hyatt today and took tourists over to the Superdome and let them off at the front of the line.

O’Reilly says “you sound so bitter” and said they need a strong leader like Rudy Giuliani. Smith replies that what they needed “on the first day was food and water and what they needed on the second day was food and water and what they needed on the third day was food and water.”

O’Reilly is practically rolling his eyes with impatience at Smith’s pussified outrage about the plight of a bunch of losers who were asking for it. He really, really wants to talk about scary black boogeymen and steppin-fetchit politicans. It doesn’t work out. He looks relieved to move over to the Natalee Holloway story.

[…]

Sean’s up now and he’s equally uncomfortable with Shep’s story about the thousands still stuck on freeways and bridges with no food and water — who have been ignored for days now. He’s been covering one single bridge for days and nobody knows why they haven’t been helped yet. He’s almost shrill.

Now Geraldo comes on and he freaks out, begging the authorities to let people still stuck at the convention center walk out of town. Shep comes back and he says they have checkpoints set up turning people back to the city if they try. (wtf?) They are both on the verge of tears.

Sean says they need to get some perspective and Shep screams at him “this is the perspective!”

This was some amazing TV. Kudos to Shep Smith and Geraldo for not letting O’Reilly and Hannity spin their GOP “resolve” apologia bullshit. I’m fairly shocked.

Watch it again over at Crooks and Liars. It’s still hard to believe.

Meanwhile, over at The Corner:

NOT A NATIONAL DISGRACE [Rich Lowry]
A dissent from this column I wrote yesterday:

It is not. It is – or ought to be – a disgrace and an embarrassment to Louisiana and New Orleans. I see the way Florida prepares for and responds to hurricanes; I see the way Mississippi and Alabama are dealing with this one; I’ve seen the Carolinas and Virginia deal with hurricanes, too. I’ve been in Miami and Norfolk when hurricanes hit, though not as severe as this one, and seen folks come together to support each other in the crisis. I see the outpouring of support from surrounding states and from the federal government heading to Louisiana as fast as it can.

And then I see citizens of New Orleans shooting, raping, burning, and plundering while their government officials stand by helplessly…

Of course, nobody actually “saw” any of this, because it didn’t happen.

This was the night that they turned people away at gunpoint on the bridge to Gretna.

More on that tomorrow.

It was a heckuva day.

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Southern Liberty – The Ugly Side

by poputonian

Earlier I referenced the book Liberty and Freedom in which the author, David Hackett Fischer, differentiates the meanings of the words liberty and freedom. He first describes a simplistic , libertarian definition wherein each word implies “a power of choice, an ability to exercise one’s will.” This definition, if acted out, lends advantage to people of privilege and means. As I indicated before, however, Fischer goes how to describe other ways in which the original meanings of liberty and freedom were distinct from one another:

“Liberty … meant unbounded, unrestricted, and released from restraint … to loosen a set of bonds … the condition of being independent, separate, and distinct … not ruled by another’s will … some degree of separation and independence.”
…
“Freedom has another origin … which meant dear or beloved … someone who was joined to a tribe of free people by ties of kinship and rights of belonging.”
…
“In that respect, the original meanings of freedom and liberty were not merely different but opposed. Liberty meant separation. Freedom implied connection.”

Fischer goes on to lay down what I think is a very sharp demarkation between responsible Americans on the one hand, and unfeeling libertarians and libertines, the President included, on the other:

“It is interesting (and urgently important for us to understand in the modern world) that these ancient traditions of liberty and freedom both entailed obligations and responsibilities. But they did so differently. The gift of [liberty] brought with it an obligation to act in a wise and responsible way–not as a libertine. A person with liberty was responsible for his own acts.”

“A person who was born to freedom in an ancient tribe had a sacred obligation to serve and support the folk, and to keep the customs of a free people, and to respect the rights of others on pain of banishment. In modern America too many people have forgotten this side of our inheritance. They think of liberty as license without responsibility, and freedom as entitlement without obligation. To think this in the modern world is to remember only half of these ancient traditions.”

All of the above was included in Fischer’s introduction. Six-hundred pages and many essays later he penned the following composition. Long time readers of Hullabaloo will recognize its theme as one contained in more than a few of Digby’s previous posts:

Massive Resistance
White Citizens Councils and Visions of Southern Liberty

States Rights and Southern Liberty
Impeach Earl Warren.
—-Southern Bumper Sticker

In the deep south, many whites turned strongly against civil rights. The result was a fierce collision between two social movements. Once again, as so often before in America, each side passionately believed that it was the true defender of liberty and freedom. The conservative reaction began to grow immediately after the Supreme Court’s desegregation decision in 1954. It kept on growing through the late 1950s and accelerated in the 1960s and 1970s. Moderate politicians fell silent. Even Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy kept very quiet and failed to give the country the leadership it needed in a critical moment. Eisenhower reluctantly enforced integration decisions but told his friends that the appointment of Earl Warren as chief justice was the greatest mistake of his career. Kennedy was appalled by the violence of the white southerners against the first Freedom Riders in 1961 and sent six hundred federal marshals to Alabama after southern leaders refused to restore order. But he also tried to shut down the Freedom Marches and sent a peremptory order to his civil rights advisor, Harris Wofford. “Call it off!” President Kennedy demanded. “Stop them! Get your friends off those buses.” Kennedy felt that the Freedom Rides were “embarrassing” before his Summit meeting with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. In another episode, African diplomats on the road between Washington and New York complained of Jim Crow in restaurants along Maryland highways. President Kennedy replied, “Tell them to fly!”

With those attitudes in the Oval Office during the presidencies of Eisenhower and Kennedy, and with open encouragement for massive resistance from southern governors such as Orval Faubus in Arkansas, Ross Barnett in Mississippi, and George Wallace in Alabama, smoldering pockets of southern racism suddenly burst into flame. White supremacy organizations multiplied below the Mason-Dixon line. The Ku Klux Klan became active again. These groups turned to terror and violence as a tool for crippling the civil rights movement. Arsonists burned black churches and Jewish synagogues. Assassins murdered civil rights leaders. Bombs killed and maimed black children in schools and homes. This violence was done with strong support from some wealthy and powerful people throughout the southern states.

The ideology of the southern conservative movement was cast in libertarian terms: liberty from the hated federal government and especially the Supreme Court; liberty from “outside agitators and “ni**er equality”; liberty for “states’ rights” and “southern rights.” Its rhetoric reached back to the iconography of southern independence in the Civil War. So also did its symbols. A modern revision of the old Confederate battle flag became the leading emblem of white supremacy and massive resistance. It claimed a kinship with Robert E. Lee, but this was not the old four-square “stainless banner” that had been carried with honor by the Army of Northern Virginia in the Civil War. This was something different, a twentieth-century polyester Jim Crow flag with rectangular proportions that were ironically closer to the Stars and Stripes than to the old Confederate battle flags. The southern flag of massive resistance was a new image, invented for a second civil war and quickly adopted by racist movements in many parts of the world.

The iconography of massive resistance was complex. An example appeared in a photograph by Cecil Williams of a run-down rural gas station at Sandy Run in Calhoun County, South Carolina. It served whites only; in some parts of the Deep South even gas pumps were segregated by race. The windows of the battered building bore many images: a devotional portrait of Jesus, a modern Jim Crow flag of massive resistance, angry bumper stickers for white supremacist candidates, and defiant racist slogans.

In the twentieth century, these symbols inspired a new civil war within the South. On one side were very angry southern whites who used extreme violence as an instrument of repression. The beatings and bombings and murders were mostly the work of downtrodden poor whites whose only claim to distinction was that they were not black. They were funded and protected by southern leaders of wealth and power.

On the other side were southern blacks and white liberals who chose the weapons of nonviolence during the 1950s and early 1960s, at a heavy cost but with ultimate success. These contending groups were very different in many ways, but the two warring southern movements for civil rights and white supremacy shared a common heritage. Both were were strongly Christian and evangelical and quoted the same Bible. Both had deep roots in American history and shared a strong sense of rights and entitlements. Both were very southern in speech and manner. But in other ways, the contrast could not have been more complete. Here was a collision of rage against reason, hatred against love, brutality against humanity, force against nonviolence. It was also a conflict of separation against integration, hierarchy against equality, and liberty against freedom.

Katrina’s roots.

One Year Ago Today

by digby

I am officially an idiot. (Not news to many of you, I’m sure.) I really believed that the duelling pageants would benefit the Democrats. I felt that the newer Katrina story, replete with horror stories of people still unable to go home, piles of rubble remaining on the streets, and journalists who saw themselves as the heroic center of the story last year would lead to a surfeit of Katrina stories that would rend the heart and remind everyone that Bush failed in his most basic mission — stepping in to help its citizens in a time of such great crisis that the normal functions of everyday life are disrupted. I was wrong.

After a series of perfunctory stories and a couple of plodding Bush speeches, the official anniversary is over.

Yet, it was exactly one year ago today that this was unfolding:

“Just moments ago at the Ferragamo on 5th Avenue, Condoleeza Rice was seen spending several thousands of dollars on some nice, new shoes (we’ve confirmed this, so her new heels will surely get coverage from the WaPo’s Robin Givhan). A fellow shopper, unable to fathom the absurdity of Rice’s timing, went up to the Secretary and reportedly shouted, ‘How dare you shop for shoes while thousands are dying and homeless!’”

While Condi was shoe shopping, we were all seeing this on our television screens:

President Bush appeared on Good Morning America that morning and made his famous statement “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.” The Washington Post also reported Bush’s stern warning:

He also warned Gulf Coast residents, including those searching for water and food, not to break into businesses or commit other crimes during the crisis.

“There ought to be zero tolerance of people breaking the law during an emergency such as this,” Bush said in an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

“If people need water and food, we’re going to do everything we can to get them water and food,” Bush added. “It’s very important for the citizens in all affected areas to take personal responsibility and assume a kind of a civic sense of responsibility so that the situation doesn’t get out of hand, so people don’t exploit the vulnerable.”

The president of the United States “warned” people not to break into businesses for food and water. Can you imagine such a thing?

This kind of talk was rampant that day, and it resulted in delaying aid as relief workers and rescuers refused to enter the allegedly lawless city. It was later verified that this was almost all nonsense, which anyone could have guessed considering that there were cameras all over New Orleans and none of them were capturing any of this alleged violence. The only thing we saw was some casual looting in tennis shoe stores and Wal-Mart. But that didn’t stop the media from breathlessly reporting it as if it were true. And the rightwing ate it up.

Here was what Peggy Noonan was vomiting up that day:

As for the tragic piggism that is taking place on the streets of New Orleans, it is not unbelievable but it is unforgivable, and I hope the looters are shot. A hurricane cannot rob a great city of its spirit, but a vicious citizenry can. A bad time with Mother Nature can leave you digging out for a long time, but a bad turn in human behavior frays and tears all the ties that truly bind human being–trust, confidence, mutual regard, belief in the essential goodness of one’s fellow citizens.

[…]

We had a bad time in the 1960s, and in the New York blackout in the ’70s, and in the Los Angeles riots in the ’90s. But the whole story of our last national crisis, 9/11, was courage–among the passersby, among the firemen, among those who walked down there stairs slowly to help a less able colleague, among those who fought their way past the flames in the Pentagon to get people out. And it gave us quite a sense of who we are as a people. It gave us a lot of renewed pride.

If New Orleans damages that sense, it’s going to be painful to face. It’s going to be damaging to the national spirit. More damaging even than a hurricane, even than the worst in decades

I was getting a little bit crispy by the time I read that and so I replied:

Yes, nothing must be allowed to blemish the steely-eyed rocket man’s moment of pulsating, wet-making glory.

Here are a couple of people you won’t have to waste a bullet on, you fucking privileged asshole:

Mu first post that morning, was this:

I don’t know if all of you have seen the footage today from the convention center in New Orleans, but it is shocking. There are dead bodies lying all over the place. People are waiting for help and the only people who’ve come in there are news crews and Harry Connick Jr. (And fuck you Michele Malkin.) It’s a living hell.

The MSNNC reporter just said that he counted 82 buses lined up outside the city waiting to go in to evacuate people from the convention center but they won’t go because they’ve been told it isn’t safe.

On 9/11 we had cops and firefighters running into collapsing buildings to rescue people. Today, days after the crisis hit, I’m watching people with little babies desperate for food and water and nobody is coming in to help them.

What in the hell is going on?

Perhaps this comment by Homeland Security chief Chertoff explains the Bush administration’s slow motion response:

“The critical thing was to get people out of there before the disaster,” he said on NBC’s Today program. “Some people chose not to obey that order. That was a mistake on their part.”

For Christ’s sake the tourists couldn’t get out either. All the rental cars were booked and the airport was closed. Lucky for them, most of them were staying in high rise hotels and they rode out the storm. And now they have someplace to go — home. The locals who didn’t have cars aren’t quite so lucky, are they?

I think Chertoff’s comment says everything we need to know about how this government viewed this catastrophe. “We told ’em to get out; if they refused (or couldn’t) they brought this on themselves.” That’s the Republican philosophy in a nutshell. “You’re on your own, losers.”

I think Americans expect more of their government than that. That comment should be hung around the necks of these poor planning, corruption spreading, deficit spending, budget slashing, warwmongering, tax cutting assholes like a dead Louisiana pelican.

I’m even more angry about this than I was a year ago. Let’s hope most Americans are too and we tell these fearmongering bastards just what we think of them this November. This can’t ever be allowed to happen again.

* The second picture above is different from the one I originally posted of a man holding a baby standing next to the body of a dead man. I had linked to the yahoo site and I can’t locate it now.

Rising Above The Fray

by tristero

The other day, in flacking his upcoming addresses on the importance of sending more of America’s children home to their moms in body ba- sorry – transfer tubes for no reason whatsoever, Crawford’s Own Churchill said:

These are important times, and I seriously hope people wouldn’t politicize these issues I’m going to talk about…

The only sensible response is to repeat Dick Cheney’s immortal words:

Go fuck yourself.

The Faiths Of The Founding Fathers

by tristero

Most readers of blogs like this one know that the question “Was the US founded as a Christian nation?” is a joke. Not so many a newspaper editor or tv producer, who regularly permit the likes of James Dobson or Tim LaHaye to get away with asserting without contradiction that the founders were devout Christians. David L. Holmes’s happily concise new book, The Faiths of the Founding Fathers should serve as a useful corrective. He doesn’t exactly come out and say that the christianists are lying about the religious beliefs of the Founders, but that’s only because he doesn’t have to. The facts he amasses speak for themselves. However, given the nearly telegraphic, dispassionate style of the book (it contains neither an introduction nor a final chapter to summarize and assess what’s discussed), some reading-betwixt-the-lines and deduction is called for, on occasion. The book is packed with information, but I’ll discuss only one part of it here, which I think is the core of the book.

What were the Founders’ faith? In a chapter amusingly entitled “A Layperson’s Guide to Distinguishing a Deist From an Orthodox Christian,” Holmes, a professor of Religious Studies at William and Mary, writes

The religious beliefs of the founders seem to have fallen into three categories: Non-Christian Deism, Christian Deism, and orthodox Christianity.

What’s Deism? Holmes quotes the immortal Tom Paine:

Its creed is pure and sublimely simple. It believes in God and there it rests. It honours Reason [and] it avoids all presumptuous beliefs and rejects, as the fabulous inventions of men, all books pretending to revelation.

In his comments elsewhere, Holmes explicitly states that Deism cannot be considered a Christian religion as it rejects too much that is explicitly Christian, including the divine authority of the Bible. In other words, Deism’s pretty close to the bare minimum one can believe if one claims to be at all religious.

“Orthodox Christianity” is kind of a vague, catch-all term that includes both Roman Catholic and Protestant beliefs (it has nothing to do with Eastern Orthodox Christianity; it refers to how closely a belief system cleaves to western Christian orthodoxy). Unlike, perhaps, “Orthodox Judaism,” a follower of orthodox Christianity in Holmes’s sense need not be especially devout or observant, but rather must simply accept as true at least some aspects of the New Testament or traditional Christian belief. For instance, if you accept Jesus’s divinity but not the doctrine of transubstantiation, you could be thought an orthodox Christian, according to the way Holmes uses it, as opposed to a radical Deist.

Occasionally, I’ve seen the term used by christianists to confuse people, but Holmes, who is no christianist, uses “orthodox Christian” in a very specfic way, essentially to differentiate styles (or depths) of Deistic belief. In other words, when it comes to the Founders, Deism is the normative religious belief system, not Christianity. Therefore, the concept of some kind of generalized “orthodox Christianity” is helpful, not in uniting Christians politically as the christianists desire, but solely in demonstrating how the Founders’ beliefs deviate from strictly defined Deism. The term simply serves Holmes’ purpose in pointing to ways that the Founders privileged the New Testament and the Hebrew Bible in various subtle, perhaps even unconscious, ways. As his book makes abundantly clear, nearly all of the major male figures involved in the Revolution were Deists.* However, it wasn’t a consistent or organized theology; almost by definition, it couldn’t be. Many of them went to at least some church services (even if they didn’t take Communion) or maintained ties to the church of their youth. Many, including Franklin, held to beliefs that, strictly speaking, weren’t reasonable but supernatural. These are, according to Holmes, intimations of Orthodox Christianity within their Deism. They modulate their Deism and give some of the Founder’s beliefs a “Christian Deist” bent. But that does not make them pious, devout, or practicing Christians. Holmes goes to considerable lengths to demonstrate that assertions of specifically Christian piety for many of the Founders are baseless.

The religious beliefs of the Founders were highly individualized, and often a contradictory muddle, like the beliefs of most Americans today, and quite unlike the sclerotic and highly politicized irrationalism of modern christianists. Indeed, after finishing Holmes’ book, one can’t escape the conclusion that the decision to omit explicitly Christian references from the Declaration of Independence (and insert explicitly Deistic ones) was deliberate and supported even by those Founders with radically different beliefs, such as Jefferson and Adams. Furthermore, the fact that God is not mentioned in the Constitution was also deliberate. “We forgot,” Hamilton once quipped. Well, perhaps they did, but certainly on purpose.

But as I read him, Holmes goes even further. It is abundantly clear from the structure of the book, only in the most general sense are the three categories Holmes proposes (Deist, Deist Christian, orthodox Christian) equally populated by influential Founders. In fact, most of the “orthodox Christians” were women who, like it or not, had no direct power.** In short, regarding religion, Christianity per se was important to the mindset of the most influential founders, but more important still was the non-Christian religion of Deism, which most believed to a greater or lesser extent.***

And so, once again, when one examines the hysterical debates perpetrated on the country by the extreme Right, there is no there there. Yes, of course, it is a mistake to equate the non-rigorous religious thinking of the Founders with atheism or “secularism.” But here’s the point: Holmes can’t find anyone important to quote who makes such a basic error, not even the “secular humanist” journal Free Inquiry. Yes, as quoted in Holmes’ book, Gordon C. Wood, in The Radicalism of the American Revolution, appears to overstate the case for the Founders’ disinterest in organized religion and belief. However, Holmes cites numerous cases of important figures in the Revolution who avoided religous confirmation or failed to mention the consolations of religion at moments of personal crisis. Conclusion: Wood certainly did not exaggerate by much.

On the other hand, the quotes Holmes provides from the christianist LaHaye’s writings – “even secular humanists would have to admit to the religious (particularly Christian) origins of this nation” – stands exposed as just so much wildly inaccurate blather. Far more important to the origins of “this nation” is the liberal project of the Enlightenment, particularly Deism and perhaps most importantly, the consummately Enlightenment values of religious freedom and toleration (not the same thing). These values, clearly at the core of nearly every Founders’ political credo, are nowhere close to being a central part of orthodox Christianity, where the divinity of Christ, belief in the Bible’s authority, and belief in the moral truth of Christ’s and Paul’s teachings hold sway.

Holmes’s book also has a notable Epilogue in which he briefly describes the religious life of every president from Ford to the present one. Most readers of this blog will probably find that he is grossly unfair to the Democrats.**** But what I also noticed was a much stronger level of criticism of Republicans (even of Reagan!) than is common in many books that examine religion and politics from a religious/evangelical perspective. And so, whatever reservations I might have about certain details, I couldn’t help concluding that the entire book was a stinging critique of the religous right, written in a non-polemical style to attract those people – such as network tv producers, Fox News types, and the more gullible segments of their audience – who may have been bamboozled into taking scoundrels like LaHaye, Dobson, Falwell, and Robertson as serious theologians or social commentators.

If you have any interest in the religious beliefs of the Founders or any doubt as to how idiotic the notion that the US was founded as a Christian nation really is, you really should pick up this short, and intelligently written, book.

*The three most notable exceptions in Holmes’ book were Samuel Adams, John Jay, and Patrick Henry. As was Elias Boudinot, the president of the Continental Congress and a foe of Paine’s. The presidents were all Deists of one stripe or another.

**Holmes provides several good reasons why a disparity of belief along gender lines occurred. What were they? Read the book (grin).

***Was the US founded as a Deist nation? That’s a slightly more interesting question, perhaps, than whether it was founded as Christian nation, but the answer is emphatically “no.” Holmes’s book makes clear that the Founders had as little interest in foisting Deism on Americans as they did Christianity. The US was established as a civil government that deliberately separated church from state. Duh.

**** He makes a minor error, neglecting to mention that William Sloane Coffin had no recollection of a conversation in which Bush claims that Reverend Coffin insulted his father. As discussed elsewhere, I go further that that and strongly suspect Bush was lying.

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A Wedge Issue To Exploit

by poputonian

DemFromCT at The Next Hurrah picks up on what might be the season’s most critical election issue:

Is the Iraq civil war a “good” war?

The point being made is that how the Iraq war is characterized can help determine the likelihood of Congress to continue its support for the war, and also, and perhaps more significantly, help determine the likelihood of American voters to continue sacrificing their children in someone else’s war.

Basically, DfCT’s post deconstructs how the Republicans got to their desired new framing, the one being promulgated by GWB’s current speech campaign, where the Chief Executive offers perfumed pink clouds as an antidote for administration-induced fear. DfCT then goes on to suggest the alternative frame by quoting from a News and Observer op-ed:

Facts have also accumulated to conspire against the administration’s preferred frame. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi of al-Qaeda in Iraq is dead, Iraqis are killing each other at a much greater rate (approximately 3,400 per month) than they are killing U.S. troops, and American generals have admitted the possibility of a “civil war” fought along sectarian lines.

The generals’ frank admission has created a temporally limited opportunity for critics of the war to reframe the conflict and begin to credibly discuss disengagement alternatives.

Republican Sen. John Warner of Virginia apparently seized upon this potential when he recently speculated that the president might need a new statutory authorization from Congress legitimizing American involvement in a nascent Iraqi civil war. Acknowledgment of a civil war would truncate the U.S. intervention into three phases: a major combat operations victory, a counterinsurgency campaign draw, and a civil war of which many Americans want no part and legislators did not approve.

This recognition offers an opportunity (for either side of the aisle) to reframe the war as a humanitarian intervention with questionable prospects for success. Ample research has shown that Americans are less tolerant of casualties in this type of war — suggesting that they might be persuaded the time has come to begin the process of disengaging from Iraq.

Isn’t using the term “civil war” a wedge tactic that could gain bipartisan support, and one which the Dems should fully exploit? DemFromCt says yes, and says it much better than I can. Inquisitive political minds should read the full post in order to capture its saliency.

By the way, who said this: ” … the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people … is a reason to help the Iraqis but it’s not a reason to put American kids’ lives at risk, certainly not on the scale we did it.”

Springsteen Sings Big Easy Pain

by digby

How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?

Well, the doctor comes ’round here with his face all bright
And he says “in a little while you’ll be alright”
All he gives is a humbug pill, a dose of dope and a great big bill
Tell me, how can a poor man stand such times and live?

He says “me and my old school pals had some mighty high times down here
And what happened to you poor black folks, well it just ain’t fair”
He took a look around gave a little pep talk, said “I’m with you” then he took a little walk
Tell me, how can a poor man stand such times and live?

There’s bodies floatin’ on Canal and the levees gone to Hell
Martha, get me my sixteen gauge and some dry shells
Them who’s got got out of town
And them who ain’t got left to drown
Tell me, how can a poor man stand such times and live?

I got family scattered from Texas all the way to Baltimore
And I ain’t got no home in this world no more
Gonna be a judgment that’s a fact, a righteous train rollin’ down this track
Tell me, how can a poor man stand such times and live?

.

Consequences

by digby

If Dan Bartlett is any indication, the administration is going completely over the bend and are going to try to convince the American people that “Islamic fascism” is literally equivalent to WWII.

Here’s what he just said on Hardball:

Nora O’Donnell: Dan do you agree that making an analogy to Hitler can be disproportionate with the current battles — while it’s extremely important, the war on terror — comparing it to WWII is overstepping

Dan Bartlett: Absolutely not. The fascist movement from that era is very similar to the totalitarian ideology that al-Qaeda and other extremists, those who are wanting to pervert a very rich tradition of peaceful religion – Islam – to accomplish a certain set of objectives.

They have taken 3,000 American lives on one single morning, they’ve attacked country after country after country throughout the world with a very determined idoelogy, they’re trying to overturn governments. They took control of Afghanistan, they’re trying to take control of Iraq, they’re trying to take control of Lebanon and they’re doing it for a very specific reason — they have territorial ambition, they want the resources, they want the nuclear weapons, they want to destroy the west.

Very similar in proportion I would argue, and many other people would argue as well. So it is a very important historical lesson for to understand today because the fight we’re in today is as consequential as the fight we fought in the last century.

Let’s think for a moment about what he’s saying. If it is true that they have suddenly discovered that this threat is equal to the threat posed by the axis powers in WWII, then they have clearly failed miserably to meet such an existential threat. These monsters are allegedly attacking “country after country after country” trying to seize territory so they can take the resources and get nuclear weapons and we are sending national guard troops over to Iraq for their fourth or fifth tours instead of mobilizing the entire nation? The only sacrifice Bush has asked of the Amrican people is to pay their taxes and spend money.

But there’s more to the story. Nora then commented on Bush’s insistence yesterday that this wasn’t “political” and admonishing others not to politicize it. Bartlett was having none of it.

He continued:

Dan Bartlett: It’s important that certain aspects or certain reflection points in this war that the president of the United States speak directly to the public about the conduct of this war, developments in this war and the consequences of this war. He is not partisan in the sense that he’s going out and attacking individual members of the other party or the like…

Nora O’Donnell: No, because you are going to leave this for Rumsfeld to do.

Dan Bartlett: Rumsfeld talked about [inaudible]who as you have pointed out are many times on this program go off and say the president lied and people died, that the president, the administration is incompetent, the administration is this, the administration is that, and it’s important that the administration clearly articulate and set the recod straight on many of these outrageous comments that people are making.

And some of the outrageous comments are coming from people who want to take control of the congress. Now there are consequences for the rhetoric they are employing at this time and at this juncture in the war on terror and it is incumbent upon officials in this administration to clearly explain to the American people what those consequences are, so…

It’s a two way street Nora and as long as our critics are out there, saying what they’re saying, often times not based on fact, it’s important for the administration to very very aggressively articulate what the facts are and why we believe it. There are two sides to this debate.

Well now. That certainly clears up what the real motivation for this PR offensive is, doesn’t it? Bartlett lost his shit and pretty much admitted that this is a simple political ploy — a gambit to draw attention away from Bush’s failures. (Shrum just called it a “Katrina foreign policy.”)

But if this takes hold and people really begin to accept this WWII analogy, the logical extension of the argument is that the US needs to do everything it possibly can to defeat this existential threat and that can only mean we must be willing to use nuclear weapons. They keep using the word “consequences” and I’m getting a rather ugly picture in my head of just what they might be.

Update: Glenn Greenwald notes the similarities between Bush’s Iraq speech in Cincinnatti and his speech yesterday. I don’t know if they’ve decided on war with Iran and/or Syria, but they most certainly are preparing the ground.

Greenwald advises the Democrats to go on the offensive and hit Bush hard. I agree, of course. I was a little bit depressed to hear Nora O’Donnell tell Jack Reed today that they’ve tried to get a Democrat to come on for days to rebut the Republican attack and couldn’t get any calls returned. I guess people are on vacation… All Reed could say is “I’m here now.”

Update II:

And a Freeper has an aneurysm:

To: governsleastgovernsbest

I wonder if oberman has children;or nephews/nieces etc. All of these idiots that refuse to allow the front loading of a looming confrontation will be directly responsible for the fact that in all likelihood OUR children will absolutely be involved in a life or death struggle to preserve OUR nation. The very same elitist , do nothing but babble , morons that decry every use of force , every vengeful indiscretion, every PERCIEVED slight, of a murdering Islamofacists rights, will be the very same people that squall like stuck pigs , when all of our children are fighting and dying because of the aformentioned idiocy.

I just hope the marksmanship I taught my children can keep them alive when it becomes the difference between those that make out alive and those that don’t .

The really terrifying aspect of all this is the open borders issue and how it darn near grandee’s that 5th columnist are or will be in place to harm us in a much more personal way than Hitler ever did. 56 posted on 08/30/2006 8:16:31 PM PDT by ping jockey (radical islam; the great evil of all times.)

Stateless Fascists

by digby

I find it fascinating that the administration has taken on the shibboleth of the nuttiest far right wingnuts and is calling Islamic radicals, fascists. Clearly, they are just throwing it around as some sort of boogeyman word because Islamic extremists are like fascists only to the extent that they are dangerous creeps. But then you could say that about a lot of people, couldn’t you?

They are all blathering stuff like this to explain it:

Charles Black, a longtime GOP consultant with close ties to both the first Bush administration and the current White House, said branding Islamic extremists as fascists is apt.

“It helps dramatize what we’re up against. They are not just some ragtag terrorists. They are people with a plan to take over the world and eliminate everybody except them,” Black said.

Run for your lives!!!

I know I don’t have to spell out all he ways in which Islamic radicalism is unlike fascism. But it is worth taking a look at the writings of the guy who pretty much invented fascism, good old Benito Mussolini. He wrote a little treatise back in 1932 that spelled it all out. It’s true that fascism considered itself an enemy of democracy (and Marxism) and it fetishized war and violence. And yes, one of its primary tenets was imperialism.

We can argue about whether any or all of those components are part of the “Islamo-fascist ideology,” but for the sake of argument, let’s agree that on some level they are. But there are a few defining characteristic of fascism — as defined by the man who made fascism a household name — that surely make Islamic radicalism something else entirely.

For instance:

…The Fascist accepts life and loves it, knowing nothing of and despising suicide: he rather conceives of life as duty and struggle and conquest, but above all for others — those who are at hand and those who are far distant, contemporaries, and those who will come after…

[…]

The foundation of Fascism is the conception of the State, its character, its duty, and its aim. Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived of in their relation to the State. The conception of the Liberal State is not that of a directing force, guiding the play and development, both material and spiritual, of a collective body, but merely a force limited to the function of recording results: on the other hand, the Fascist State is itself conscious and has itself a will and a personality — thus it may be called the “ethic” State…….The Fascist State organizes the nation, but leaves a sufficient margin of liberty to the individual; the latter is deprived of all useless and possibly harmful freedom, but retains what is essential; the deciding power in this question cannot be the individual, but the State alone….

Those two things, it seems to me, make any comparison between fascism and a loose confederation (if that) of suicidal religious fanatics spread all over the world, ridiculous. They might just as well have appropriated the phrase Mongol Hordes for all the sense it made. (Actually, Osama bin Laden has made that comparison — with the US.) Not that it will stop the wingnuts from pimping it like it’s the latest teen-age fad — making sense has never been a hallmark of these people.

The funny thing is that if you look at Mussolini’s definition it does fit some modern western political factions much better than Islamic radicalism. I leave it to you to figure out who they might be.

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Freedom

by digby

Hawlati: Couple were killed in Arbil for 6 minute sex video

8/3/2006 KurdishMedia.com

London (KurdishMedia.com) 03 August 2006: In Arbil, southern Kurdistan’s capital, a couple were killed after their pornographic video CD was distributed in the city’s market, according to news published in the Kurdish weekly Hawlati on Thursday.

The couple were killed within one week. The woman’s body was found on Tuesday. The video is only 6 minutes and 10 seconds and it is taken on a mobile telephone, Hawlati stated.

The event has been the topic of discussion all over Arbil and the religious community in the mosques issued decrees for clamping down on the couple, Hawlati added.

They have good reason to nip this in the bud. Just ask this mullah:

As the 21st century progresses, it seems that every day brings new extremes of sexual debauchery and degradation. Simply put, our society has become obsessed by perversity. The term “pornography” itself no longer carries much of a stigma culturally, because what was once taboo is now the norm. Obscene material that was confined to seedy bookstores on the wrong side of town is now aired on network or cable television during the “family hour.”

[…]

At the outset, let me be perfectly clear — especially to those who may shrug off or slyly wink at the cultural acceptance of pornography. Much like a mistress, the philosophical acceptance of this salacious material in everyday life is a wickedly insidious thing that, over time, will devastate individuals and families. We must assume a zero tolerance policy toward obscenity … With every new assault made on God’s sacred and holy gift of sex, the appetite for lascivious images grows more insatiable.

As far as he’s concerned, Iraqi society has the kind of morality we should aspire to. One wonders if he agrees with the sanctions. Let’s say I’m more than a little bit curious about what he means by “zero tolerance.”

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