Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Remedial Democracy

by digby

Scott Winship has an interesting article in The Democratic Strategist today in which he dissects one of those polls that measures how stupid Americans are about politics. And boy are they stupid about politics — only one in ten knows who Denny Hastert is. But the good news is that they aren’t measurably more stupid than they were in the 40’s and 50’s when there was a lot more illiteracy and many people didn’t graduate from High School. I suppose that’s good news.

Here’s the part I find interesting:

Bennett shows that consistency in positions taken across issue areas increases as political knowledge increases. Those who have little knowledge tend to have unconventional combinations of issue positions. If it is also the case that those with little political knowledge are less consistent in their positions on individual issues over time than other people are, then the result might be a sizeable constituency for demagoguery and misdirection. Bennett’s results imply that that bloc would be as large as one-third of the population. It seems important to separate these people out, to the extent possible, when analyzing characteristics of the electorate by, say, party or ideology. And it would be nice to know more about the positions they take on issues and the candidates they support.

I happen to know an excellent place to start. Chris Hayes wrote an article about exactly this odd phenomenon after the 2004 election and I posted about it here.
Hayes wrote:

Undecided voters aren’t as rational as you think. Members of the political class may disparage undecided voters, but we at least tend to impute to them a basic rationality. We’re giving them too much credit. I met voters who told me they were voting for Bush, but who named their most important issue as the environment. One man told me he voted for Bush in 2000 because he thought that with Cheney, an oilman, on the ticket, the administration would finally be able to make us independent from foreign oil. A colleague spoke to a voter who had been a big Howard Dean fan, but had switched to supporting Bush after Dean lost the nomination. After half an hour in the man’s house, she still couldn’t make sense of his decision.

[…]

A disturbing number of undecided voters are crypto-racist isolationists. In the age of the war on terror and the war in Iraq, pundits agreed that this would be the most foreign policy-oriented election in a generation–and polling throughout the summer seemed to bear that out…But just because voters were unusually concerned about foreign policy didn’t mean they had fundamentally shifted their outlook on world affairs. In fact, among undecided voters, I encountered a consistent and surprising isolationism–an isolationism that September 11 was supposed to have made obsolete everywhere but the left and right fringes of the political spectrum.

[…]

To be sure, maybe they simply thought Kerry’s promise to bring in allies was a lame idea–after all, many well-informed observers did. But I became convinced that there was something else at play here, because undecided voters extended the same logic to other seemingly intractable problems, like the deficit or health care. On these issues, too, undecideds recognized the severity of the situation–but precisely because they understood the severity, they were inclined to be skeptical of Kerry’s ability to fix things. Undecided voters, as everyone knows, have a deep skepticism about the ability of politicians to keep their promises and solve problems. So the staggering incompetence and irresponsibility of the Bush administration and the demonstrably poor state of world affairs seemed to serve not as indictments of Bush in particular, but rather of politicians in general.

[…]

undecideds seemed oddly unwilling to hold the president accountable for his previous actions, focusing instead on the practical issue of who would have a better chance of success in the future. Because undecideds seemed uninterested in assessing responsibility for the past, Bush suffered no penalty for having made things so bad; and because undecideds were focused on, but cynical about, the future, the worse things appeared, the less inclined they were to believe that problems could be fixed–thereby nullifying the backbone of Kerry’s case. Needless to say, I found this logic maddening.

Undecided voters don’t think in terms of issues. Perhaps the greatest myth about undecided voters is that they are undecided because of the “issues.” That is, while they might favor Kerry on the economy, they favor Bush on terrorism; or while they are anti-gay marriage, they also support social welfare programs. Occasionally I did encounter undecided voters who were genuinely cross-pressured–a couple who was fiercely pro-life, antiwar, and pro-environment for example–but such cases were exceedingly rare. More often than not, when I asked undecided voters what issues they would pay attention to as they made up their minds I was met with a blank stare, as if I’d just asked them to name their favorite prime number.

[…]

But the very concept of the issue seemed to be almost completely alien to most of the undecided voters I spoke to… So I tried other ways of asking the same question: “Anything of particular concern to you? Are you anxious or worried about anything? Are you excited about what’s been happening in the country in the last four years?”

These questions, too, more often than not yielded bewilderment. As far as I could tell, the problem wasn’t the word “issue”; it was a fundamental lack of understanding of what constituted the broad category of the “political.” The undecideds I spoke to didn’t seem to have any intuitive grasp of what kinds of grievances qualify as political grievances. Often, once I would engage undecided voters, they would list concerns, such as the rising cost of health care; but when I would tell them that Kerry had a plan to lower health-care premiums, they would respond in disbelief–not in disbelief that he had a plan, but that the cost of health care was a political issue. It was as if you were telling them that Kerry was promising to extend summer into December.

[…]

In this context, Bush’s victory, particularly on the strength of those voters who listed “values” as their number one issue, makes perfect sense. Kerry ran a campaign that was about politics: He parsed the world into political categories and offered political solutions. Bush did this too, but it wasn’t the main thrust of his campaign. Instead, the president ran on broad themes, like “character” and “morals.” Everyone feels an immediate and intuitive expertise on morals and values–we all know what’s right and wrong. But how can undecided voters evaluate a candidate on issues if they don’t even grasp what issues are?

Liberals like to point out that majorities of Americans agree with the Democratic Party on the issues, so Republicans are forced to run on character and values in order to win. (This cuts both ways: I met a large number of Bush/Feingold voters whose politics were more in line with the Republican president, but who admired the backbone and gutsiness of their Democratic senator.) But polls that ask people about issues presuppose a basic familiarity with the concept of issues–a familiarity that may not exist.

As far as I can tell, this leaves Democrats with two options: either abandon “issues” as the lynchpin of political campaigns and adopt the language of values, morals, and character as many have suggested; or begin the long-term and arduous task of rebuilding a popular, accessible political vocabulary–of convincing undecided voters to believe once again in the importance of issues. The former strategy could help the Democrats stop the bleeding in time for 2008. But the latter strategy might be necessary for the Democrats to become a majority party again.

I think Democrats need to do a bit of both. Certainly, the Republicans, for whatever reason, seem to better understand heuristics and are willing to demagogue wherever necessary. These last few years have taught us nothing if they haven’t taught us how far you can go even when you make no sense whatsoever.

But the fact remains that this is not good for the country. We simply cannot adequately govern ourselves if a large number of us are dumb as posts and vote for reasons that make no sense.

The polling data suggests that the best solution is this:

The surest way to enhance political information levels is to convince people to become more interested in politics. In 2004, the mean score on the PI scale for the least interested segment of the public was 1.7. Among the most interested, the mean score was 6.2.

Increasing political interest won’t be easy, however. One suggestion has been for schools to conduct more classes in civics or American history, but the link between the number of such classes taken K-12 and informed citizenship is extremely weak. Get-out-the-vote campaigns in the mass media have also been popular, but the people who most need such encouragement don’t read newspapers or watch the news on TV. “Kids Voting” programs may benefit some, but they tend to be too few in number around the country, and their effects are generally minor.

Tne possible solution is deliberative polls, as suggested by University of Texas professor James Fishkin. The 2004 ANES found, for example, that persons who reported discussing politics with family and friends were significantly better informed than those who eschewed political talk. It is likely that political information and political discussions are mutually reinforcing.

And that, my friends, is our mission, should we decide to accept it. As the trainspotting, vanguard political junkies, our job is to take this conversation offline and spread the good word to our families and friends and co-workers. We can hang out in the blogosphere and hash out the arguments and organize ourselves around issues and candidates and raise money and volunteer. But if we do nothing else, we need to talk about this stuff out in the real world and build this dialog into the body politic.

I don’t know how many people you can inspire or how many in whom you can even tweak an interest. But it doesn’t take very many. Once a poltically informed person is created they tend to create more. I’ve been quite hopeful that this will be a positive benefit of the blogosphere for sometime. And when you read that data you can see just how necessary it is.

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BFF’s

by digby

The RNC has put out an amazing hit piece today on our glorious overlord Kos. Apparently, Democrats who associate themselves with our Dear Leader are to be shunned for such extremist associations.

But, it’s funny, as I was over on the site reading through their various press releases, I saw that they have issued many in support of John Bolton. And yet John Bolton’s most important and passionate online operative is none other than Pamela “Atlas” Oshry, surely one of the most shocking extremists in the right blogosphere. Why he was being “interviewed” one-on-one by the wingnut-gone-wild while he was supposedly right in the middle of brokering a cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon a couple of weeks ago. They are practically joined at the hip … or something.

And needless to say, since Republican politicians routinely go on radio shows like Rush Limbaugh’s and appear at conferences with psychotic hatemongers like Ann Coulter, making the “guilt by association” argument is very, very risky for them.

Are they sure they want to go there?

Update: From Seeing the Forest, I see that the man who said, “I would only add that these liberals want us to lose, not just in some small corner, but with their whole hearts; in fact, our defeat is the only thing they whole-heartedly work for” was invited to the white house this week.

He wasn’t talking about liberals wanting conservatives to lose — he was talking about liberals wanting America to lose to the terrorists, which logically means we desire a fundamentalist Islamic theocracy.

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Massaging Katrina

by digby

I wrote a few days ago about the “Duelling Pageants” of 9/11 and Katrina. It appears that the Bush administration is going to go into the belly of the beast on the day and try to squeeze out some good publicity from the stagnant floodwaters.

As next week’s anniversary of Hurricane Katrina triggers recollections of rooftop refugees and massive devastation along the Gulf Coast, the White House has begun a public relations blitz to counteract Democrats’ plans to use the government’s tardy response and the region’s slow recovery in the coming congressional elections.

President Bush will visit the area Monday and Tuesday, including an overnight stay in New Orleans. He probably will visit the city’s Lower 9th Ward, the heavily black area that remains mired in debris, and is expected to meet with storm victims.

The trip will force Bush to revisit sensitive racial issues that arose with the flooding of New Orleans; at that time, civil rights leaders charged that the White House was slow to respond because so many victims were black. GOP strategists acknowledged that the administration’s failure to act quickly was a significant setback in their efforts to court traditionally Democratic African American voters.

The White House announced Bush’s visit Tuesday as a phalanx of administration officials stood before reporters to argue that billions of dollars had flowed to the region and millions more was on the way. The plans for the trip were disclosed one day after Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales announced that he was sending additional lawyers and resources to the city to fight fraud and abuse.

At Tuesday’s briefing, White House aides passed out folders and fact sheets that painted a picture of aggressive recovery efforts. A packet from the Army Corps of Engineers, responsible for the levees that were breached after the storm, carried the slogan: “One Team: Relevant, Ready, Responsible, Reliable.”

Donald E. Powell, the White House official in charge of recovery plans, declared that Bush was “fulfilling his commitment to rebuild the Gulf Coast better and stronger.”

The administration’s coordinated response is the latest example of White House officials maneuvering to cast a positive light on a campaign issue expected to hurt Republicans. Just this week, Bush acknowledged public anxiety over Katrina, along with concern about the war in Iraq and rising gasoline prices. But he defended his record and accused the Democrats of weakness, particularly on national security issues.

I suppose you could call this progress. The administration has progressed from never acknowledging they made a mistake to “acknowledging public anxiety.”

The tone of the article suggests skepticism on the part of these particular reporters, but there’s no guarantee that the white house won’t be able to pull out that old photo op magic the press won’t be compelled to portray Bush as a benevolent religious figure. They’ve had a lot of time to plan this.

The White House effort comes as the Democrats, who plan to challenge Republicans on national security in this year’s midterm election campaign, are portraying the government’s response to Katrina as evidence that Bush failed to fix inadequacies exposed by the Sept. 11 attacks.

A report being released today by top Democrats, titled “Broken Promises: The Republican Response to Katrina,” features a picture of Bush during his Sept. 15, 2005, speech in New Orleans’ Jackson Square, in which he promised to oversee “one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen.”

The report argues that every aspect of recovery — including housing, business loans, healthcare, education and preparedness — “suffers from a failed Republican response marked by unfulfilled promises, cronyism, waste, fraud, and abuse.”

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada is scheduled to spend Thursday in New Orleans with fellow Democratic Sen. Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana to kick off what they call the “Hope and Recovery Tour.” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco plans to arrive this weekend with about 20 other Democrats for additional events.

That’s good. But, thank goodness the visual images of the crisis speak for themselves. The ninth ward still looks like it was hit with a bunker buster.

I would really like to see Bill Clinton down there next week. This is the type of thing at which he excells:

Leaders of the recovery effort said Tuesday that although progress had been slow in some areas, Bush would be able to point to successes in some New Orleans neighborhoods, including the famed French Quarter and the Garden District. However, neither area was damaged as severely as the Lower 9th Ward. The question for White House schedulers is how much to accentuate the positives while acknowledging the negatives.

“If you go to most of the city you see enormous progress,” said Walter Isaacson, president of the Aspen Institute and vice chairman of the Louisiana Recovery Authority. “They are probably going to go to the Lower 9th Ward, which is very honest of them, because that’s the place you see the least progress.”

Isaacson, a New Orleans native, said he considered many of the Democrats’ critiques to be unfair. He credited the White House with safeguarding millions of dollars in grants for housing and levee reconstruction, some of which was only approved this summer amid a contentious budget debate.

“They protected that housing money and the levee money in the appropriation process when every congressman was looking at it greedily,” he said.

Good old former editor of TIME magazine Walter Isaacson, still shilling for his GOP buddies. He neglects to mention that if this is true, the whitehouse was “protecting” the housing money from its own Republicans — and they did it for purely partisan political reasons.

On Monday, Bush offered a preview of his anniversary message, contending at a news conference that despite frustrations about the slow arrival of housing funds and delays in debris removal, “the money has been appropriated, the formula is in place, and now it’s time to move forward.”

He suggested that $110 billion in federal funds had been “committed” to help the region rebuild, but confusion persisted Tuesday over what portion of that money had actually been spent.

During the White House briefing, Powell said that about $44 billion, about 40% of the total, had been distributed to hurricane victims, but suggested that state and local governments were mostly to blame for the gap.

Obviously Iraq is the primary political issue in the coming election. But the real issue, cutting across all the others, is the fact that the Republicans simply cannot handle the responsibility of government whether it’s terrorism, gas prices or a crisis in a major American city. Katrina is the most vivid image of their incompetence and lack of accountability right here in the US.

The country is going to be reminded of this lowest moment of Republican rule next week. Let’s hope the Republicans aren’t able to turn that soggy lemon into lemonade. They are absolutely terrible at governing and with Bush they have a guy who they can’t count on to react well during the crisis. But nobody manufactures a campaign photo-op better than they do.

Case in point:

Remarks by President Bush After Meeting With Rockey Vaccarella
Wednesday August 23, 11:39 am ET

WASHINGTON, Aug. 23 /PRNewswire/ — The following are remarks by President Bush:

THE PRESIDENT: I just had coffee with Rockey Vaccarella, St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana. He caught my attention because he decided to come up to Washington, D.C. and make it clear to me and others here in the government that there’s people down there still hurting in south Louisiana, and along the Gulf Coast.

And Rock is a plain-spoken guy. He’s the kind of fellow I feel comfortable talking to. I told him that I understand that there’s people down there that still need help. And I told him the federal government will work with the state and local authorities to get the help to them as quickly as possible.

MR. VACCARELLA: That’s right.

THE PRESIDENT: He met with my friend, Don Powell. Don’s job is to cut through bureaucracy. I told Rocky the first obligation of the federal government is to write a check big enough to help the people down there. And I want to thank the members of Congress of both political parties that helped us pass over $110 billion of appropriations. And that’s going to help the folks. And I told him that to the extent that there’s still bureaucratic hurdles, and the need for the federal government to help eradicate those hurdles, we want to do that.

Now, I know we’re coming up on the first-year anniversary of Katrina, and it’s a time to remember, a time to particularly remember the suffering that people went through. Rocky lost everything. He lost — he and his family had every possession they had wiped out. And it’s a time to remember that people suffer, and it’s a time to recommit ourselves to helping them. But I also want people to remember that a one-year anniversary is just that, because it’s going to require a long time to help these people rebuild.

And thank you for your spirit.

MR. VACCARELLA: Thank you, Mr. President.

THE PRESIDENT: It’s an amazing country, isn’t it, where —

MR. VACCARELLA: It is. You know, it’s really amazing when a small man like me from St. Bernard Parish can meet the President of the United States. The President is a people person. I knew that from the beginning. I was confident that I could meet President Bush.

And my mission was very simple. I wanted to thank President Bush for the millions of FEMA trailers that were brought down there. They gave roofs over people’s head. People had the chance to have baths, air condition. We have TV, we have toiletry, we have things that are necessities that we can live upon.

But now, I wanted to remind the President that the job’s not done, and he knows that. And I just don’t want the government and President Bush to forget about us. And I just wish the President could have another term in Washington.

So it begins.

CNN is, predictably, having an orgasm. They are down with Rocky’s lovely family in their FEMA trailer right now.

Rocky, by the way, is a very nice local Republican politician and he’s very grateful for everything the president has done — unlike some of those other “ungrateful” macaca types.

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White Underbelly

by digby

I was reading about the latest outrage from Felix “Macaca” Allen’s campaign over at Gilliard’s place and something about his comment tickled my memory. Steve wrote:

They’re clearly worried about the impact of the racist words coming from Allen’s mouth. And even if he didn’t say Macaca/Sand Ni**er/Dune C**n/Haji what came after is worse. “Welcome to America”.

Excuse me. America is no longer just white people. That’s the real insult there. Especially when the kid was born in Virginia, unlike Allen.

I recalled that the empty Codpiece had said something along the same lines a couple of years ago:

There’s a lot of people in the world who don’t believe that people whose skin color may not be the same as ours can be free and self-govern. I reject that. I reject that strongly. I believe that people who practice the Muslim faith can self-govern. I believe that people whose skins aren’t necessarily — are a different color than white can self-govern.

Felix and Dubya default to the same patronizing, bigoted assumptions. Bush may be less hostile than Felix, but he’s no less racist. “America” to both of these rich, privileged Republican creeps, is white.

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Bring It

by digby

Our man Hackett debating a robot:

“Where’s the six-foot-two, left-handed guy with the flowing white robe and the kidney problem? (Taylor) doesn’t understand the war on terror.”

Crooks and Liars has the vid.

Am I right, or am I right?

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Conservative Crack-Up Watch

by digby

So we know that king neocon Norman Podhoretz is sticking with Bush to the bitter end, which is kind of sweet when you think about it. But the movement conservatives are bailing. Here’s a blurb from Richard Viguerie’s new book:

This is the first book that deals with the disappointment and even anger that most conservatives have with President Bush and the GOP-led Congress on major public policy issues. In this conservative manifesto, Viguerie applies conservative principles to 21st Century problems and issues. He also presents a detailed strategy for conservatives to take back control of the Republican Party and govern America.

With President Bush’s low approval numbers, the unrest among grassroots conservatives, and the potential for GOP losses in the 2006 and 2008 elections, this book is a roadmap for conservatives as they begin to rebuild the conservative movement, recapture the Republican Party, and move even the Democrats to the right. In Conservatives Betrayed, Mr. Viguerie proposes bold action for conservatives to take back the Republican Party from Big Government Republicans, including:

Withhold financial support from Republican committees and most Republican incumbents.

Withhold support from all 2008 presidential candidates.

No longer call yourself a “Republican” but rather a Reagan conservative or Reagan Republican.

Work for wholesale change in Republican leadership at all levels of government.

And think and act as a third force (not third party) independent of the Republican Party. While not advocating GOP defeat, Mr. Viguerie says conservatives should not fear the loss of Congress in 2006, since our best gains usually come after a defeat:

— 1976: Gerald Ford’s loss made possible Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980.

— 1992: George H.W. Bush’s loss made possible the Republican congressional victories in 1994.

Losing is always a good tonic for the New Right, who always get a little disoriented when they hold power for too long. It messes with their sense of victimization. And, of course, they have to do this to save conservatism from the taint of Bushism.

But there’s more to it than that and it has to do with old Norman. Even before the last election, Viguerie was seeing the writing on the wall:

… for Viguerie and other conservative leaders, maintaining that discipline this year is harder than usual. The Republicans’ united front masks a growing struggle sparked by the president’s hawkish and ambitious foreign policy–one that may burst into the open soon after the polls close, whoever wins. “Most conservatives are not comfortable with the neocons,” Viguerie says. He decries the neocons as “overbearing” and “immensely influential. . . . They want to be the world’s policeman. We don’t feel our role is to be Don Quixote, righting all the wrongs in the world.”

Viguerie’s disquiet is widely shared by veteran conservative activists, who are increasingly blaming neoconservatives for placing Iraq at the center of the war on terrorism.

Viguerie is one of the great old men of the modern conservative movement. He’s a keeper of the flame. The GOP is just the political arm, not the center of the movement itself. Bush and his friends the neocons have failed conservatism, big time:

…the neocons now find themselves in a fight for their place in the Republican Party–and in a second term, should Bush win. Former Reagan administration official Stefan Halper and former British diplomat Jonathan Clarke, in a widely discussed book called America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order, charge that Bush’s foreign policy was hijacked after 9/11, leading to a “betrayal of both Republican and conservative principles.” Francis Fukuyama, a former State Department official in the administration of Bush’s father, assailed some fellow neocons and Bush’s Iraq policy in a National Interest article. He argued that Bush overlooked the need for international support to build a sense of “legitimacy” for the Iraq invasion, antagonized many by announcing a pre-emption strategy, and “went into Iraq with enormous illusions about how easy the postwar situation would be.” Conservative columnists like George Will, Robert Novak, and William F. Buckley Jr. are stoking the fire. Will recently complained that ideology is crowding out facts in Bush’s Iraq nation building. “This administration needs a dose of conservatism without the [neo] prefix,” he wrote.

Behind the scenes, movement conservatives are disputing neocon ideas as well. Says Alfred Regnery, publisher of the American Spectator and numerous conservative books, “The administration got sold a little bit by the neocons. . . . We should return to a traditional, strong Republican foreign policy: We go to war only as a last resort, and we’re not in the business of building nations.” Phyllis Schlafly, president of the Eagle Forum, says the administration needs to “finish up the job in Iraq.” However, Schlafly says, “we don’t think we can be the policeman of the world.” She describes herself as “not a fan” of Wilsonian policies: “All this talk of democracy in Iraq is kind of ridiculous,” she argues. “What’s really important is that they have governments that are friendly to the United States.”

Meanwhile:

Under fire, neoconservatives out of government are regrouping. This summer saw the rebirth of the Committee on the Present Danger–the third incarnation of a group first launched in the 1950s and restarted in the 1970s to promote a hard line against Soviet communism. Norman Podhoretz, one of the movement’s leading thinkers, laments the darkening mood of “gloom and doom,” in particular the “newborn pessimism among supporters” of the Iraq war. “Things have gone not badly, not disastrously, but triumphantly,” he declared at the group’s inaugural conference last month. The group posits that the United States now faces another existential threat and has dubbed the struggle “World War IV,” the Cold War being World War III. The group’s chairman, former CIA Director James Woolsey, says its rebirth recognizes that “people are to some extent choosing up sides. . . . Get the job done or go back to the ’90s” –before 9/11 and Bush’s pre-emption doctrine. “A number of critics have a nostalgia for an earlier era,” he warns. But with a toxic mix of Arab and Islamist totalitarianism, weapons of mass destruction, and terrorists, he says, “those days are gone with the wind.”

Woolsey predicts “the long war of the 21st century” will last decades. The fight between neocons and other cons might last just as long.

If the Dems pull off a win this fall, it’s well worth thinking about how to stoke these divisions over the next few years as the Republicans re-group. This fault in their coalition is a big one and its worth driving a wedge in as deeply as possible.

HT to Pastor Dan
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Oversold

by digby

So Holy Joe agrees with the far right neocon nutballs that the real reason we went into Iraq was to “pop the head of the snake in Iran” and himself says, “if I fault the administration for anything before the war — ’cause I think we did the right thing in going in to overthrow Saddam — it’s that they oversold the WMD part of the argument….”

Man oh man, the guy has brass ones.

MR. RUSSERT: And we’re back with Senator Joe Lieberman. Can the president commence military action against Iraq without a smoking gun?

SEN. LIEBERMAN: There are smoking guns, and that’s the important point to make. Look, I think that the president has to do a better job of explaining what we mean by a smoking gun. There’s a way in which people are now looking at the U.N. inspectors in Iraq as if some local prosecutor has sent people in to investigate an innocent man for a suspected crime and find the evidence. Saddam Hussein is not an innocent man. He made clear he wants to dominate the Arab world, which would be terrible for the Arab world and the rest of the world. He invaded his neighbors. He’s killed hundreds of thousands of people. We know that he had weapons of mass destruction.

You want to find the smoking guns? There are thousands of them in the report issued by the United Nations inspectors after they were kicked out of Iraq in 1998. Thousands of tons of chemical agents, thousands of liters of biological agents, and the aim of the United Nations resolution, in my opinion, was to send those inspectors in and to force Saddam Hussein to say, “I’ve destroyed the smoking guns that you knew I had in 1999.” He hasn’t done that, and unless he does, we’re going to have to take action to disarm him. Nobody wants to go to war, but sometimes you have to go to war to protect the lives of the American people. This may be one of those cases.

MR. RUSSERT: In your guess, it probably will be necessary?

SEN. LIEBERMAN: Well, so far, he’s done nothing but continue to deny and deceive and cheat. And I don’t want to look
back one day after he uses those chemical and biological weapons against Americans and ask ourselves: “Why didn’t we act to protect our security?”

Yeah, no overselling there. He’s a foreign policy genius.

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Cooties

by digby

Everybody’s talking about this blurb today, and it is kind of amazing. The president who claimed he would bring honor and dignity to the white house is apparently known for puerile fart jokes — and even emits them in the office to play jokes on his aides. Me, I much prefer a grown up president who privately has sex in the oval office than one who farts publicly. But that’s just me.

But this is the part I find interesting and the little blurb doesn’t elaborate at all:

A top insider let that slip when explaining why President Bush is paranoid around women, always worried about his behavior.

Forget the farting. What’s with the paranoia around women? (There is apparently a clinical term for it called “gynophobia” which I’ve never heard of until today.) It’s quite clear that he doesn’t know how to behave around powerful women he doesn’t control, judging from his inappropriate groping of the prime minister of Germany. And I’ve often wondered about his relationship to Rice, Hughes and Mieres — the office wives. Is he afraid that he’s going to accidentally pass gas or use a bad word in front of these women or does he let fly with women he knows and is just paranoid around strange women? I’m genuinely curious. This is very wierd for any 60 year old man much less a highly succesful politician.

He is such an immature person that I think it’s entirely possible that he’s still stuck in that pre-pubescent little boy state where girls are just “yucky.” That’s how his behavior comes off anyway. There’s some frat boy stuff, to be sure, especially in his behavior with other men. But I’m thinking that when it comes to women, he’s stuck even further back than that — cub scouts, maybe. Did mommy lock him in the closet or something?

Update: Coincidentally, Echidne has already inaugurated the Cootie Awards. You know who the first winner just has to be…

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Wingnut Fun House Mirror

by digby

Sen. James Inhofe” U.S. involvement in Iraq has been incredibly successful and developments there have been “nothing short of a miracle,”

LIEBERMAN: The situation in Iraq is a lot better, different than it was a year ago. The Iraqis held three elections. They formed a unity government. They are on the way to building a free and independent Iraq. Their military — two-thirds of their military is now ready, on their own, to lead the fight with some logistical backing from the U.S. or stand up on their own totally. That’s progress.

Norman Podhoretz: I must confess to being puzzled by the amazing spread of the idea that the Bush Doctrine has indeed failed the test of Iraq. After all, Iraq has been liberated from one of the worst tyrants in the Middle East; three elections have been held; a decent constitution has been written; a government is in place; and previously unimaginable liberties are being enjoyed. By what bizarre calculus does all this add up to failure? And by what even stranger logic is failure to be read into the fact that the forces opposed to democratization are fighting back with all their might?

Surely what makes more sense is the opposite interpretation of the terrible violence being perpetrated by the terrorists of the so-called “insurgency”: that it is in itself a tribute to the enormous strides that have been made in democratizing the country. If this murderous collection of diehard Sunni Baathists and vengeful Shiite militias, together with their allies inside the government, agreed that democratization had already failed, would they be waging so desperate a campaign to defeat it? And if democratization in Iraq posed no threat to the other despotisms in the region, would those regimes be sending jihadists and material support to the “insurgency” there?

The new Podhoretz article (via Henry Farrell) is fascinating stuff. Farrell entitles his post “Dead Enders” and I think that pretty well covers it. But Podhoretz has nailed himself to Bush’s cross so completely, I honestly don’t see how he can ever crawl down. In his view every Bush misstep is actually prudent or canny, every criticism of him is petty and wrong. Bush has played every hand brilliantly — even more brilliantly than Ronald Reagan played his hand (which Podhoretz only sees in retrospect having criticised the Gipper at the time much as the youngsters are criticizing the Codpiece.)

Keep in mind that Norman is responding to the criticisms of his fellow neoconservatives in this piece, not the crazed hippy left. Indeed, he ruefully admits that he actually agrees with the crazed hippy left in its assessment that Bush has not given up on the Bush Doctrine — needless to say, he’s quite happy about that while the CHL is not.

In Norm’s view, the Bush Doctrine has not only been validated by the great success of the Iraq and Israeli military actions, it will stand us through the next several decades of WWIV (I wish they’d decide on a number and stick to it) and will eventually save the world:

It is my contention that the Bush Doctrine is no more dead today than the Truman Doctrine was cowardly in its own early career. Bolstered by that analogy, I feel safe in predicting that, like the Truman Doctrine in 1952, the Bush Doctrine will prove irreversible by the time its author leaves the White House in 2008. And encouraged by the precedent of Ronald Reagan, I feel almost as confident in predicting that, three or four decades into the future, and after the inevitable missteps and reversals, there will come a President who, like Reagan in relation to Truman in World War III, will bring World War IV to a victorious end by building on the noble doctrine that George W. Bush promulgated when that war first began.

How nice for him to live in a time of epistemic relativism where he can look back on his life and claim vindication despite the fact that everything he ever said was demonstrably wrong. How sad for the rest of us that his fetid philosophy has come to full flower just as he’s shuffling off his moral coil and won’t be around to share the “victorious end” when it finally comes, decades from now. I don’t think J-Pod has his father’s gift for delivering elegant, self-serving absolution for decades of misguided bloodlust.

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Gene Cesspool
by poputonianDoes anyone know what channel this comedy is on? I’ve read about the episode where the dude got the death penalty for putting the celery by the tomatoes, but this one about a Republican with contaminated genes should also be good for a laugh or two.

“My church has long ago given up that practice in the 1800s, but putting that aside for a moment, it’s real clear that Americans, myself included, believe that marriage is a relationship between a man and a woman and not more than that, and also not same sex couples,” Romney told MSNBC’s “Hardball” host Chris Matthews.

Romney, of course, didn’t mention that about the time The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints renounced polygamy in 1890, his great-grandfather was among those Mormons who fled to Mexico to start their own community where plural marriage continued to be practiced.
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Romney’s family tree is rife with polygamists on the paternal side. Two great-great grandfathers, for example, had more than 10 wives each.
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His great-great grandfather, Miles Romney, eventually took on 13 wives, including the niece with the same name of his first wife, Elizabeth Gaskell. In all, Romney’s family tree harbors six polygamous men with 41 wives, according to research by The Salt Lake Tribune.
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“Within the Republican primary, when you get into South Carolina, God knows if polygamist roots will hurt him,” Ballenger says. “Maybe something like that would cost him enough votes.”

UPDATED to include last snippet. Most people quoted in the article don’t think this will matter in Romney’s political success or failure. I have no idea and was just making fun of the fact that Romney is having to defend himself about that marriage definition thing. I think Chrissy Matthews, on the other hand, is just plain fascinated that some men once had multiple wives.