Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Irate Moderates

by digby

The day after the Connecticut primary the NY Times published an editorial that I have been thinking about in the days since. It was called “Revenge of the Irate Moderates” and I think it was more insightful than I recognized at the time:

The rebellion against Mr. Lieberman was actually an uprising by that rare phenomenon, irate moderates. They are the voters who have been unnerved over the last few years as the country has seemed to be galloping in a deeply unmoderate direction. A war that began at the president’s choosing has degenerated into a desperate, bloody mess that has turned much of the world against the United States. The administration’s contempt for international agreements, Congressional prerogatives and the authority of the courts has undermined the rule of law abroad and at home.

Yet while all this has been happening, the political discussion in Washington has become a captive of the Bush agenda. Traditional beliefs like every person’s right to a day in court, or the conviction that America should not start wars it does not know how to win, wind up being portrayed as extreme. The middle becomes a place where senators struggle to get the president to volunteer to obey the law when the mood strikes him. Attempting to regain the real center becomes a radical alternative.

When Mr. Lieberman told The Washington Post, “I haven’t changed. Events around me have changed,” he actually put his finger on his political problem. His constituents felt that when the White House led the country into a disastrous international crisis and started subverting the nation’s basic traditions, Joe Lieberman should have changed enough to take a lead in fighting back.

It seems this race in Connecticut has become a clarifying moment for many people and in the long run Lieberman may have done his the party a favor. Josh Marshall and Kevin Drum each have interesting posts up today discussing their personal odysseys. I urge you to read them both because it’s important for those of us who are temperamentally fiery partisans to understand how this unfolded for those who are more temperamentally moderate. To be clear, I’m not suggesting that either Drum or Marshall needed any kind of political educating or conversion experience to understand modern politics — they are smarter than virtually anyone I know. It was, I think, a psychological reckoning rather than a political one and I believe that’s key.

Those of moderate political temperament are naturally resistent to the rather radical belief that politics have become an ugly, bare knuckle battle in which winning is defined as stopping the other side cold — or winning elections and passing legislation through brute partisan force if necessary. I suspect that many people are resistent to this idea and for good reason. While there are some on the right who enjoy getting in others’ faces, most people prefer a peaceful existence and avoid confrontation until they are absolutely forced to do it.

It took me a little while to recognize what was happening too. I was a Clintonite who was willing to see if the third way could work. But I’ve got a strong streak of anti-authoritarianism in me that viscerally recoiled at the conservative movement’s partisan misuse of the congress and the legal system during that era. Perhaps because I grew up in a rightwing household I understood that the bipartisan rules we had all assumed were a permanent fixture in American politics were no longer operative. By 2000, I was thoroughly radicalized and believed that Democrats had to play a different, more disciplined, brand of politics even if it meant losing in the short term (which, after 9/11, I figured would happen anyway.)It was clear to me that third way politics had no future once the Republicans had a taste of power and revealed themselves.

But that’s me. I’m naturally partisan anyway. I grew up in a rightwing family and I’ve had emotional, take-no-prisoners political arguments my whole life — I get how these macho wingnuts love the fight and will do anything to win. Most of us have been lucky to avoid such highly charged confrontations (at least since the Vietnam era) and quite naturally assume that the opposition is reasonable. (Most people you meet in real life are.) Modern rightwingers, however, are a different animal.

Atrios touches on how this led to Democratic paralysis in a post today in which he discusses the policy implications of all this. In his own pithy style he puts it this way:

The politics side has to do with a Democratic party in which all the leading Democrats are forever running against their own party. Triangulation can work for one man, but when every leading Democrat is constantly falling all over themselves (yes, this is exaggeration) to distance themselves from Those Damn Dirty Democrats, you have a party which is without foundation and where capitulation is confused with bipartisanship.

The Lieberman race seems to have finally resolved the Democratic party’s confusion on this. When even Joe Klein is correctly characterizing the Republicans as using the war for partisan gain, the zeitgeist has clearly shifted. All factions of the Democratic party, with the exception of the actual DLC membership, seem to be coming to this realization which is absolutely key to making a case for the Democrats in November and beyond.

I think we are now seeing more political analysts recognizing this than not and that’s a huge step. I cannot predict how a message of contrast and confrontation will affect the unaffiliated moderates in the electorate but I think the Democrats must at least try it. The strategy of blurring differences has not worked for us in this partisan era and we need to try something new.

But because of this recent shift among Dem moderates, I think there’s some hope that the Independents and moderate Republicans who are appalled at the results of total Republican rule may also see that the Democrats are getting their act together and are willing and able to confront the Republicans and change course. I believe our biggest problem among those people has not been the hippie boogeyman (which nobody under 50 really gets anyway) but rather the idea that Democrats don’t stand for anything and are ineffectual against the Republicans. People won’t vote for you if they feel that it’s pointless. Going with the confident winners and hoping they will learn from experience is a better bet.

No matter how upsetting the current political situation may seem or how unpopular the Republicans are, if people feel that it will make no difference they won’t bother to vote. A strong, united Democratic party can change that. I think we might be getting there.

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Chutzpah

by digby

How does he get away with this?

Lieberman aides said that Mr. Lamont’s association with Mr. Sharpton and Mr. Jackson — both of whom campaigned vigorously for Mr. Lamont — was a political albatross that helped explain why Mr. Lieberman believed he could win over a majority of voters.

“Primary night was the first time that many Connecticut voters saw Lamont on TV, and he’s surrounding himself with two of the more divisive and problematic figures in the Democratic Party,” said Dan Gerstein, a veteran Lieberman aide who was appointed communications director for the campaign last week.

Here you have a Democrat who has rejected the result of a Democratic primary, is now running as an independent calling members of his own party soft on terrorism and out of the mainstream and he has the balls to call other people “divisive and problematic in the Democratic party?” Wow.

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French Code Words

by digby

There is some debate as to whether George Felix Allen was making a deliberate slur or whether he was just repeating his French mother’s phrase for “dirty arab” without fully realizing what he was saying (or thinking nobody would know what he was saying.)

I don’t think so. I think this is racist code of the worst sort. Allen isn’t just another southern good old boy who can’t tell the difference between his family heritage and racism. He chose to become a neoconfederate long after it was out of fashion, in defiance of accepted norms of his time and he has built his good old boy reputation partially because of it. He didn’t inherit his brand of racism — he chose it.

The evidence suggests that “macaca” is a slur that American white supremecists have adopted from European white supremecists to apply to dark skinned people. And what this means is that George Allen is conversant in the language of white supremecists and he uses that language in his conversation. And while it’s impossible to prove, I believe he used that word deliberately because it is a word that a racist like him would know that “certain” people would correctly identify.

It’s right out of the Lee Atwater playbook, at whose knee Mary Matalin, Allen’s biggest supporter, studied. Bob Herbert reported in the October 6, 2005 edition of the New York Times of a 1981 interview with Lee Atwater in which he explains the GOP’s Southern Strategy:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Ni**er, ni**er, ni**er.” By 1968 you can’t say “ni**er” – that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.
And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me – because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Ni**er, ni**er.”

That was Atwater, even as he was trying to say that racism was dying, helpfully explaining that the GOP mantra of “tax cuts” was another way for a candidate to say that you didn’t believe in government hand outs to black people. (Too bad nobody listened to him at the time and figured out a way to fight that, but it’s too late now.) But what he really revealed was that racism had just gone underground. “Macaca” is as abstract as it gets — to anybody but a white supremecist who knows exactly what it means. It’s just one of the newer code words for “ni**er, ni**er, ni**er” and Allen, who kept a noose in his office for years, is the type of guy who would know it.

George Felix Allen is the most disgusting serious candidate for president this country has produced in many decades. The fact that he’s backed by a large number of powerful mainstream Republicans for the nomination shows what that party really is, even now, after all this time.

Update: Allen has apologized again, sort of:

“I also made up a nickname for the cameraman, which was in no way intended to be racially derogatory. Any insinuations to the contrary are completely false.”

“I never want to embarrass or demean anyone and I apologize if my comments offended this young man

bullshit.

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Take It To The Wingnuts

by digby

Most of you have probably already read the fascinating polling data from MYDD that challenges the conventional wisdom about the Busby race in CA-50 (if you haven’t, be sure to do it.) If you don’t want to slog through all the numbers, here’s an interesting article from the LA CityBeat that gives the basic overview.

Busby’s campaign turns out to have been far less effective than the media suggested. While she certainly galvanized Democrats in the 50th Congressional District, and while Republican turnout was markedly lower than usual because of disenchantment with the status quo, she failed to capture the one constituency she desperately needed to put her over the top, which was independent voters. Her promise to push for better ethics in Washington fell utterly flat with them, because they were almost as suspicious about the integrity of the Democratic Party as they were of the Republicans. Things might have been differenBt if Busby had been running against Duke Cunningham himself, but the man was in prison, not on the ballot. Independents, according to the survey, either stayed home or voted for a third-party candidate.

What might have induced those independents to vote for Busby? According to Rick Jacobs, the Courage Campaign’s chair, all it would have taken was a simple promise to hold the administration’s feet to the fire. “Voters want a candidate to say, ‘I will hold George Bush accountable,’” Jacobs told me. “They think the country’s heading in the wrong direction, they disapprove of George Bush, and therefore they want to know: who is going to be most likely to call him to account and put the country on a better path? I don’t think Busby did any of that.”

[…]

Busby herself appears to have taken some of these lessons on board as she gears up for a rematch against Bilbray in November. Curiously, it might actually be easier for her to win this time – if she can use Bilbray’s few months’ tenure on Capitol Hill as ammunition to suggest that a Republican representative will do nothing to force the Bush administration to change course. According to Rick Jacobs, the party as a whole would do well to approach the midterms in a similar spirit. “This is how the party can define itself, nationally,” he said. “Bush is taking the country in the wrong direction, and Iraq is exhibit number one. Vote for us, and we are going to force the president to come up with a plan to get us out of the there. A Republican congress won’t do anything. That’s the message.”

That was certainly Ned Lamont’s message, and it worked. Now the Democrats need to stop fighting among themselves, and take the message to a broader national audience. They might not have had the courage to stand up against a popular Republican administration. Now all they need is the courage to oppose an unpopular Republican administration. Really, how hard can that be?

Democrats have been demonized as being weak and ineffectual for so long that Independent voters naturally figure that they can’t or won’t do anything to stop the Republicans. Democratic partisans may believe, but in order to get a robust turnout throughout the country, even many of them still need to be convinced that their party leadership will follow through. Democrats must make the case in no uncertain terms that they are prepared to hold Republicans accountable — which means that they must be willing to talk about the lack of oversight and they must promise to hold hearings into specific issues.

The Republicans will scream like banshees, but that actually plays into the Democrats’ hands if they have the nerve to just stare them down and tell them to bring it. Rove’s tried to innoculate against this with his little “omg! they’re going to act just like we did and impeach the president!” message but its primary purpose was to get Democrats to back off. He knew that if Democrats ran on holding his boy accountable they would win. Now we have the data to back that up.

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Send Her Back To Normal

by digby

The President of the most powerful nation on why Hezbollah isn’t the real winner in this war:

The world got to see — got to see what it means to confront terrorism. I mean, it’s a — it’s the challenge of the 21st century, the fight against terror.

A group of ideologues, by the way, who use terror to achieve an objective — this is the challenge.

And that’s why in my remarks I spoke about the need for those of us who understand the blessings of liberty to help liberty prevail in the Middle East.

And the fundamental question is: Can it? And my answer is: Absolutely, it can. I believe that freedom is a universal value. And by that, I mean I believe people want to be free.

People want to be free. One way to put it is I believe mothers around the world want to raise their children in a peaceful world. That’s what I believe…

Could somebody please keep him away from Karen? This is just embarrassing.

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Craven Hawk

by digby

Atrios flags this piece by Spencer Ackerman which I also thinks is worth reading. Ackerman points out that Lieberman’s reputation for sophisticated foreign policy smarts is nothing more than knee jerk me-too-ism:

Lieberman’s judgment on defense questions is like that of a stopped clock: the hawkish position, applied consistently, has to be right sooner or later. What Lieberman is asking Connecticut — and the Democratic Party, and the country — to accept is that the only secure America is a bellicose America. And that position is a guarantee of future Iraqs.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Lieberman’s defense record is the difficulty of defining Liebermanism. On the central question of why a nation should or shouldn’t go to war, Lieberman’s answer is simply, “yes!” His Senate-floor explanation of his 1991 vote for the Gulf War wasn’t a ringing endorsement of the need to confront Saddam Hussein, or a defense of Kuwaiti sovereignty, or even a simple explanation of how the war served American interests – none of which were difficult cases to make. Rather, Lieberman contended that the war was necessary “because our president has asked us to vote to support him in this hour of challenge.”

This is not a matter of philosophy. It’s a lazy and craven purely political stance that was perfectly illustrated by Jacob Weisberg’s Slate piece the other day:

The Lamont-Lieberman battle was filled with echoes and parallels from the Vietnam era. Democratic reformers and anti-establishment insurgents weren’t wrong about that conflict, either. Vietnam was a terrible mistake for the United States. But like Iraq, Vietnam was a badly chosen battlefield in a larger conflict with totalitarianism that America had no choice but to pursue. In turning viciously on stalwarts of the Cold War era like Lyndon B. Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, and Scoop Jackson, anti-war insurgents called into question the Democratic Party’s underlying commitment to challenging Communist expansion. The party’s Vietnam-era drift away from issues of security and defense—and its association with a radical left hostile to the military and neutral in the fight between liberalism and communism—helped push a lot of Americans who didn’t much like the Vietnam War into the arms of Richard Nixon.

Lieberman, a charter member of the DLC, learned the lesson so well that he does not discriminate at all when it comes to military action. If a war is on the table, he’s for it. And that’s pretty much what Weisberg prescribes as the proper Democratic position if they want to be taken seriously on foreign policy and national security.

You can be craven about a lot of things, but war is one issue you really should think twice about. Not only is it a moral question it is a most serious question of national security. Once you unleash the dogs of war, all kinds of unintended, catastrophic things can happen as we are now witnessing in Iraq. It should never be just a matter of politics.

I think that it’s quite clear from Holy Joe’s record that, in his case, it is. He’s voted enthusiatically for every military action that’s been proposed since he took office. I doubt there are many Republicans out there with that kind of record (although their reasons for voting against military action in the 90’s were completely partisan.) He clearly doesn’t even think about it.

What Weisberg and Lieberman and other DLC types have done is back Democrats into the corner by agreeing with the GOP that they must always follow the Republicans over the cliff or risk being called weak on security. This is political blackmail and it’s exactly what led us into Iraq. The Democratic caucus was terrified of the repurcussions (especially post 9/11) of their votes against the first Gulf War and I have no doubt that guys like Lieberman were fingerwagging in the cloakroom every chance they got.

Joe Lieberman has taken the easy route on national security time after time and it’s led to this horrible mess we’re in. The sooner he’s out of the Democratic party the better for everyone. This lazy, rubber stamping of GOP warmongering for political purposes has paralyzed the Democratic party on national security and it’s time the party rids itself of it.

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Unity ’06

by digby

George W. Bush is not committing to support the Republican nominee for Senate in Connecticut:

Q Does the President support the Republican candidate for Senate in Connecticut?

MR. SNOW: The President supports the democratic process in the state of Connecticut, and wishes them a successful election in November.

Greg Sargent asked the Lieberman campaign over the week-end if they would demand that the GOP stop using their candidate as a talking point. This is their reply:

“Joe Lieberman has no interest in being Dick Cheney or Karl Rove’s political football, just as he has no interest in being a political football for Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid. In fact, he’s fed up with this kind of petty partisan game playing which is stalemating Washington and blocking progress on the problems people care about. That is exactly why he is campaigning for a new politics of unity and purpose that will deliver results for the people of Connecticut. The Republicans and Democrats in Washington can spin the results any way they want, but Joe Lieberman is focused on bringing meaningful change for his constituents.”

So we have Joe Lieberman claiming to be above partisan politics and George W. Bush claiming to be above partisan politics. Look for more of that rhetorical synergy going into the fall.

Update: Armando has more.

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White Man’s Overbite

by digby

OMFG

Tucker Carlson set for ‘Dancing with the Stars’

pic via Mediabistro.com

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Blowing Off Steam

by digby

It’s probably overkill for me to post about this hour long Pamela Atlas Shrugs “interview” with John Bolton since so many others have already commented. But I thought it was worthwhile to emphasize something about it that Glenn Greenwald mentioned in passing. This interview was done last Saturday. Does everyone remember what was going on last Saturday?

Masood Haider from UN adds: Kofi Annan announced on Saturday night that he had been in touch with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel and Prime Minister Fouad Siniora of Lebanon and that both had agreed that the end of fighting would take effect at 8 am Monday in Lebanon and Israel.

“I am happy to announce that the two leaders have agreed that the cessation of hostilities and the end of the fighting will enter into force on Aug 14, at 0500 hours GMT,” Mr Annan said in a statement released here.

It wasn’t just an ordinary day. It was the day when the ceasefire was being finalized. And while I understand that he was probably still stinging from having had his ass handed to him by the French, it was still inappropriate to give an hour long interview with a psychotic fawning righwing blogger who asked him questions like this:

Pamela: So much faith in the Lebanese government I do not understand. A puppet of Syria, who is a puppet of Iran. Iran is Barzini here. You see the Godfather? Okay? So a question about it. Who props up that government? I mean if the Israeli, if the IDF, which is, although when I was in Israel, I gotta tell you, a bunch of baby-faced kids. I know they’re always portrayed in the media with Darth Vader helmets and the Israeli war machine. I’m telling you, the cutest kids ever. But if they couldn’t contain, and I think there’s an element of that that no one really wants to talk about. I wonder how much the US government was surprised that Israel didn’t go in, bing-bang-boom, and knock these suckers out. Forget about Israel for a second, even though it’s difficult for me, right and wrong, good and evil, and all that. Let’s discuss real politics, shall we? It’s in America’s best interest that Hezbollah be eliminated. I mean this is not just Israel’s problem. You know who Hezbollah is. You know where they are. So I think there was an element of surprise. Do I think it’s Olmert’s weakness? I do. Did I campaign wildly for Bibi? I did. Do I have a vote? I don’t. So I think Israel also, you know it’s interesting, when I was in Israel, you could see the country was in short of like a shock, like a 9/11 shock. Here they had banked so much on land for peace and peace, even this sh–, even a bad peace, sorry about that, John, is better than a good war, so to speak, although I don’t subscribe to that. I understand that the current, modern civilization does, to which they’re going to pay dearly, but that’s besides the point. Such stock we’re putting in the Lebanese government, who is totally kowtowing to Hezbollah. You put every remark by the crying Siniora, I mean, another Godfather moment. You remember Godfather, Frank Sinatra, it was supposed to be Frank Sinatra, he’s crying, you’re godfather. Same thing happens, somebody slap him. So how could you have so much faith in the Lebanon government? I mean, I want to believe, John. I believe in you. I want to believe.

It might be worthwhile to see if Chris Matthews or CNN are interested in this story. Pamela would be more than happy to go on television, I’m sure, and explain how she got an exclusive interview with the US Ambassador to the UN right in the middle of the biggest crisis of his tenure. It would be a fascinating story.

The last I heard, we were shy one vote for a filibuster. I think we all have noticed that appointments cannot be derailed on substance. A nominee can be a raving lunatic with a Nazi paper trail a mile long and they will still get through. A person will only be defeated or withdraw if the charge is trivial and easy to understand.

This could be it. Pamela is beyond crazy and this is actually the second interview, I believe, with her idol John Bolton (with whom she seems to have a rather odd familiarity.) I think she would look very fetching in a blue dress.

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One Toe In The Water

by digby

A lot of people are going to take issue with Joe Klein for this week’s column about the Connecticut race, and with good reason. (Armando does so, here.)

But I am not going to join that party. I have been very hard on Klein for years for his anachronistic political analysis, but I am sensing that something has changed and I think it’s worth recognizing.

Setting aside his weak defense of triangulation as a governing strategy and his misplaced hope that after all the excitement of these last few years the political system will settle down into a nice bipartisan era of good feelings if the Democrats don’t go off the deep end (tell it to Dobson, Limbaugh and Kristol, Joe), I think his piece is actually amazingly right-on in some important respects. He seems to have had an epiphany recently and finally figured out how we got to where we are, if not how to get out of it. Since Klein is a major voice of the insider conventional wisdom, I think we are making progress.

Forget all the silliness he writes about “blognuts” and and his predictable he said/she said rendition of the post Lamont challenges to both parties and get a load of this:

Much was made of Cheney’s venting, and it is a bit too easy, after six years of this bilge, to dwell on the Vice President’s aura and miss the essential felony of the Bush White House—that it has tried to run a war without bipartisan support. Indeed, it has often attempted to use the war for partisan gain. To be sure, there is some grist to the Republican portrayal of Democrats as a bunch of wimpy peaceniks. All too often in the post-Vietnam past—the first Gulf War, for example—the default position of the Democratic Party has been to assume that any prospective use of U.S. military power would be immoral. But Bush’s initial post-9/11 response was not one of those times. The invasion of Afghanistan and an aggressive effort to destroy al-Qaeda were supported by just about every Democratic politician. Many leading Democrats even gave Bush the authority to invade Iraq, although most did so, I suspect, for reasons of political expediency. One of the most convincing arguments offered by the bloggers is that the Democratic establishment should have been far more skeptical than it was about a pre-emptive, nearly unilateral assault on an Islamic country.

In 2004 Bush and Karl Rove managed to flummox the Democrats by conflating the war in Iraq with the war against al-Qaeda and insisting that any Democratic reservations about Iraq were a sign of weakness. This was infuriating. It was Bush’s disastrous decision to go to war—and worse, to go to war with insufficient resources—that transformed Iraq into a terrorist Valhalla. It is Bush’s feckless prosecution of the war that has created the current morass, in which a U.S. military withdrawal could lead to a regional conflagration. Rove may avert another electoral embarrassment this November with the same old demagoguery, but his strategy has betrayed the nation’s best interests. It has destroyed any chance of a unified U.S. response to a crisis overseas. Even the Wall Street Journal’s quasi-wingnut [quasi???? — ed] editorial page cautioned, in the midst of a typical anti-Democratic harrumph, “[No] President can maintain a war for long without any support from the opposition party; sooner or later his own party will begin to crack as well.”

That’s about as harsh an assessment of Bush’s failures as I’ve read anywhere. He has absorbed the message that supporting Iraq was a bad move from the get. He has absorbed the message that the bipartisanship he loves and values was destroyed by the Republicans, not the Democrats. And while he still bemoans the fact that Dems are weak on security, he does so with much less energy than he has in the past and lays the current disaster directly at the feet of the Republicans and their hyper partisan governing style. This is a good sign.

It’s true that he fails to note his own (and others in the political establishment’s) complicity in the terrible decision to back Bush’s Iraq policy. And he blandly repeats the trope about the Democrats going back to the 70’s (but notably fails to conjure the magic “McGovern” word even once.) However, it’s far more important that he has come to recognize, somehow, that the Republicans “wave the bloody shirt of Islamist terrorism as a partisan bludgeon.”

This is a big deal as we go into the 06 and 08 elections. If the punditocrisy and the media chatterers can be encouraged to see this clearly, as Klein has done, we might finally be able to change this national security narrative and take these GOP thugs down.

Furthermore, despite Klein’s desperate attempt to find equivalence, anybody can see that compared to “waving the bloody shirt of Islamist terrorism as a partisan bludgeon,” the “blognuts” rejecting Clintonian triagulation isn’t even in the same league when it comes to extremism. After all, one is exploiting global death and destruction for political gain while the other (even if you think it’s a political mistake) is just routine internecine politics. There simply isn’t any equivalence and it’s quite clear that Joe Klein knows it, even if he isn’t ready to abandon his irrelevant position as a “raging moderate.”

So, I say welcome to the reality based pool, Joe. Go ahead, you can jump all the way in. The water’s fine.

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