For those who are looking for a way to make the accountability argument in congressional campaigns this fall, here’s an example from my congressman, Henry Waxman:
There is a desperate need in Washington for more oversight, transparency and accountability. The checks and balances of our Constitution don’t work when the White House and the Congressional leadership work together to shield government corruption and abuse from scrutiny.
The past five years of one-party rule have produced one of the greatest concentrations of power in America’s history. The Republican-controlled Congress has ceased to function as an independent branch of government. Genuine legislative debate has vanished. Congressional committees rarely exercise their oversight responsibilities.
The consequences have been disastrous. Congress never held hearings that challenged the White House’s distortion of intelligence in its rush to war in Iraq. Congress never questioned the President’s reckless fiscal policies. And Congress never protested when Administration cronies were installed as heads of essential federal agencies like the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Not surprisingly, the disappearance of oversight and accountability has been an invitation to corruption. A growing list of Washington Republicans, from lobbyists to members of Congress to the Vice President’s chief of staff, are either under indictment or under investigation for shakedowns, bribery and other crimes.
Fortunately, there is an agenda that will promote core American values and revive the nation’s faith in government. Democrats on the House Committee on Government Reform have introduced legislation that would restore open government, block political cronies from being appointed to essential public health and safety positions, prohibit government spending on covert propaganda and stop the growing politicization of science.
Our Hurricane Katrina Accountability and Contracting Reform Act would ban “monopoly contracts” used to shield politically well-connected companies from price competition in government contracts, and it would stop the revolving door between government and industry that has created billions in wasteful spending. Our Open Government bill would bring back the old-fashioned idea that government information belongs to the public; it would halt the proliferation of pseudo-classifications like “For Official Use Only” and “Sensitive but Unclassified” that the Bush Administration has used to hide embarrassing facts.
Unfortunately, the public has heard virtually nothing about these proposals. The Republicans running Congress have kept them bottled up so effectively that not one single piece of the Democratic good-government agenda has been brought up for a vote in the House.
While each week brings to light new evidence of corruption, subterfuge and wasteful spending, there are many well-developed proposals for change waiting for a fair chance to be enacted. They will get that fair chance if Americans elect a Democratic Congress in 2006 and send a signal that they want honesty and accountability restored to government.
The Republicans are running against John Conyers and Charlie Rangel to stimulate their racist base. And they have good reason to fear them, they are tough, take no prisoners Democrats.
But Henry Waxman is the guy who made the tobacco executives testify under oath on national TV that they believed smoking was not addictive. He is extremely effective. If he becomes the chairman of the House Committee On government reform, the Republicans know he is going to successfully shine a light on in the dark corners of republican rule for the past five years.
Waxman has shown certain areas worthy of investigation and there are others. The key, as the MYDD campaign memo points out is to “pick a fight, any fight” and use it to illustrate for voters the Democrats’ intention to clean up this mess in Washington. If they believe that Democrats can be effective in changing things they’ll vote for them.
Codpiece quoted General Abazaid (God help us) in his press conference today with what I assume Karl and Karen think is a new twist on their favorite zinger:
“If we leave [Iraq] before the mission is done the terrorists will follow us here.”
Bam! Right between the eyes!
I would normally say we should use logic and reason by pointing out that all the terrorists aren’t in Iraq — as the foiled British plot recently showed — so being in Iraq can’t prevent terrorists who are elsewhere from coming over here.
But that’s too complicated. When a Republican says “if we leave Iraq before the mission is done the terrorists will follow us here” the Democrat should reply, “well, unlike the Republicans, I won’t let em in.”
Democrats get too fine with this stuff. Trash talk is trash talk and they should just throw it back in their faces.
Bob Geiger (posting again at this old digs) wrote about the media obsession with the Jon Benet Ramsey over the week-end:
In their warped news judgment, the media is deciding for all of us that we should be more concerned about the minute-by-minute developments with John Mark Karr than the fact that our brave men and women continue to be lost in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are making a decision every hour that a story of such incredibly specious importance, is more relevant than the deaths of our men and women serving in uniform overseas.
They can’t get enough of it. And either there is serendipitious synchronicity in the air, or the NY Times pushed up its feature series on child porn to take advantage of the situation. I just watched CNN’s Kiera host the reporter who did the investigation, Kurt Eichenwald, and spend at least 10 minutes discussing the various disgusting things these child predators do. Yesterday the story was about fake child actor sites that featured clothes or covered children in sexy poses in order to circumvent the child porn laws.
Here’s my question. Considering this new awareness of the use of overly sexualized visual images of children by pedophiles, why has nobody taken the networks to task for repeatedly showing those Jon Benet beauty pageant videos ten years after the fact? They had them on a loop the first time around and ten years later they are showing them again. Over and over and over. It’s always made me uncomfortable. It seems to me that the news networks are feeding pedophiles’ sick urges the same way these online sites are by repeatedly showing these creepy vids. Are they actually getting big ratings by tittilating the audience with thinly veiled child pornography? Ewww.
This seems like a story some enterprising Real Journalist would want to pursue. It seems that there have been a bunch of party switchers in the red states this year. These are at the local and state level where politics is immediate and personal, so it takes some real chutzpah to do it. There have been more switchers than at any time since 1994 when the red states went completely red in the first place.
There’s only one little difference. They are all Republicans switching to Democrat.
Michael Barone has long decried the unfair, hyper-partisanship of the Democratic Party. Back in 2000, during the recount, he characterized it this way:
By all accounts, including those of the Democratic legislators who campaigned for him around the country, Bush is a good listener, responds candidly and with respect to others’ arguments, is willing to compromise, and keeps his word–qualities useful in building legislative majorities. In contrast, Al Gore seldom worked closely with his former colleagues on Capitol Hill and is widely disliked by many, even in his own party. His strong partisanship, evident now in the way his campaign is challenging the Florida results, means that he would have to go against the grain to seek bipartisan action on the Hill.
Love is stronger than hate. That is the lesson of the 2004 election results. Millions of Democrats and leftists have been seething with hatred for George W. Bush for years, and many of them lined up before the polls opened to cast their votes against him — one reason, apparently, that the exit poll results turned out to favor Democrats more than did the actual results.
But Republicans full of love, or at least affection, for George W. Bush turned out steadily later in the day or sent in their ballots days before. They have watched “old media” — The New York Times, the broadcast networks CBS, ABC and NBC — beat up on Bush for the past year, and they have listened to the sneers and slurs directed at him by coastal elites for a long time. Now they had their chance to speak. They did so loudly and clearly, giving Bush the first popular-vote majority for president in 16 years.
This summer, one big story is replaced by another — the London bombings July 7, the speculation that Karl Rove illegally named a covert CIA agent, the nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court, more London bombings last week. But beneath the hubbub, we can see the playing out of another, less reported story: the collapse of the attempts by liberal Democrats and their sympathizers in the mainstream media — The New York Times, etc., etc. — to delegitimize yet another Republican administration.
This project has been ongoing for more than 30 years. Richard Nixon, by obstructing investigation of the Watergate burglary, unwittingly colluded in the successful attempt to besmirch his administration. Less than two years after carrying 49 states, he was compelled to resign. The attempt to delegitimize the Reagan administration seemed at the time reasonably successful. Reagan was widely dismissed as a lightweight ideologue, and the rejection of his nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987 contributed to the impression that his years in office were, to take the title of a book by a first-rate journalist, “the Reagan detour.” As time went on, as the Berlin Wall fell and Bill Clinton proclaimed that the era of big government was over, it became clear that Reagan was a successful transformational president — something the mainstream media grudgingly admitted when he died in 2004 after a decade out of public view.
You think they’d learn. But for the past five years, the same folks have been trying to undermine the presidency of George W. Bush.
I guess Barone was in a coma during the 90’s.
But you can see that throughout Bush’s presidency he has been very upset at Democratic partisanship. In fact, he thinks the Democrats have been trying to delegitimize Republicans for decades.
In our war against Islamo-fascist terrorism, we face enemies both overt and covert. The overt enemies are, of course, the terrorists themselves. Their motives are clear: They hate our society because of its freedoms and liberties, and want to make us all submit to their totalitarian form of Islam. They are busy trying to wreak harm on us in any way they can. Against them we can fight back, as we did when British authorities arrested the men and women who were plotting to blow up a dozen airliners over the Atlantic.
Our covert enemies are harder to identify, for they live in large numbers within our midst. And in terms of intentions, they are not enemies in the sense that they consciously wish to destroy our society. On the contrary, they enjoy our freedoms and often call for their expansion. But they have also been working, over many years, to undermine faith in our society and confidence in its goodness. These covert enemies are those among our elites who have promoted the ideas labeled as multiculturalism, moral relativism and (the term is Professor Samuel Huntington’s) transnationalism.
[…]
We have always had our covert enemies, but their numbers were few until the 1960s. But then the elite young men who declined to serve in the military during the Vietnam War set out to write a narrative in which they, rather than those who obeyed the call to duty, were the heroes. They have propagated their ideas through the universities, the schools and mainstream media to the point that they are the default assumptions of millions. Our covert enemies don’t want the Islamo-fascists to win. But in some corner of their hearts, they would like us to lose.
The poor conservatives are always on the run from the liberal enemy. And recently we have learned that the hippies are even worse than the commies were— or at least there are more of them. It’s a wonder they have managed to survive this onslaught of treasonous liberalism as long as they have.
In all seriousness, I shudder at the implications of Barone’s beliefs should things get really out of hand in this country and people like him feel compelled to use the vast police powers they covet. It’s a very dangerous way of thinking among some people who have huge chips on their shoulders.
But I also admit that this up-is-down-ism simply drives me up a wall. A reader sent me the link to Barone’s column this morning with the header, “this will make smoke come out of your ears” and he was right. I read this and it made me feel as if I’m living in an alternate universe.
But I have to remember that Barone is exhibiting the most fundamental characteristic of conservative culture and recognize that the smoke coming out of my ears is what keeps the conservative movement together.
Purple Hearts are constitutive of conservative culture. So are Purple Heart Band-Aids. Both (conservatives feel) bug liberals. So is the simple pre-adolescent pleasure of blowing things up. That really bugs the liberals. The tone of conservative culture shades easily into a righteous lust for pissing people off. A billboard off the Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago for a talk-radio station reads, “Liberals Hate It!” For, if you piss people off, that proves you are beleaguered.
Over the last few years, as their own success challenged conservatives’ feelings of marginalization, they just started working harder to sustain it. Fox News helps; that is why the vice president of the United States insists that any television in any hotel room he uses already be tuned to it before he’ll deign cross the threshold. For conservatives, moving right will always be a losing career move, a sacrifice: “Veteran ABC newsman John Stossel … abandoned his liberal perspective, became a libertarian — and paid a heavy price, he recently told NewsMax in an exclusive interview…”
And don’t expect any of this to change much if Republicans lose the House in 2006 and the White House in 2008 — or if Stossel somehow ends up in the gutter. A true conservative loves a test of faith: It only proves him stronger in his convictions. I often exchange e-mails with two favorite conservative activists. I started out with a plan: One of them posts frequently on FreeRepublic; another writes on his blog of FreeRepublic’s “shrieking lunacy.” I’ve tried to get them to fight each another. It never works. They’ve got me, a liberal, to bug. That is how conservative culture works so well: the joy of feeling as one in their beleaguered conservatism. I’ve found, paradoxically, that, for this determined remnant, conservative identity becomes stronger the more discredited conservative governance becomes. They seem to take their lumps in stride and emerge all the more confident in their ideology from the challenge.
As we contemplate a possible take-over of the congress this fall, I think we have to keep this in mind. It is ingrained in conservative culture to “bug the liberals.” In fact, at this point it’s the only thing holding them together and we are going to have to gird ourselves for the fact that being in the minority will only make it worse.
I am going to do some study to figure out how I can resist being “bugged.” You cannot ignore them. They simply won’t let you and society demands that you interact. (And anyway, we tried that and wound up with Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh being considered “mainstream.”) You can’t try to become more like them. They will only try harder. You can’t lock them all up and you can’t kill them. They never grow out of it. It’s a dilemma.
What would the psychologists say about how to deal with people who embrace victimization as their organizing principle, no matter what the circumstances, and whose tribal identity is dependent upon annoying and demeaning the other tribe? I think it’s a good idea to think about this because if it’s true that conservatism as we know it is only held together by its shared sophomoric need to bug the liberals, then it is key that we find a way to deny them what they need. (Clearly, the reality of holding all political power in the most powerful nation on earth didn’t do it. Barone is on the verge of calling for an new HUAC.)
The alliance between George Bush and Tony Blair is in danger after it was revealed that the Prime Minister believes the President has ‘let him down badly’ over the Middle East crisis.
A senior Downing Street source said that, privately, Mr Blair broadly agrees with John Prescott, who said Mr Bush’s record on the issue was ‘crap’.
The source said: “We all feel badly let down by Bush. We thought we had persuaded him to take the Israel-Palestine situation seriously, but we were wrong. How can anyone have faith in a man of such low intellect?”
I was just watching MSNBC do an in-depth report on the controversy surrounding Madonna’s depiction of a crucifixion in her concert. (Here’s a video of one of the discussions.)
Madonna faces arrest over her controversial mock crucifixion.
The ‘Hung Up’ singer could be arrested when she performs in Germany on Sunday (20.08.06) if she goes ahead with the much-criticized routine.
Dusseldorf police have warned the singer that she could be in breach of their “insulting religious beliefs” law and they will be in the crowd ready to act if she attempts the stunt.
Singer Madonna is reportedly being threathened by Russian mobsters who are plotting to kidnap her and her two kids. The threat came as the pop icon prepared for her upcoming tour stop in Moscow next month.
[…]
The alleged kidnap plot is expected to have stemmed from Madonna’s controversial mock crucifixion, in which she wears a crown of fake thorns while performing on a mirrored cross, that has sparked outrage among religious leaders across the globe.
I immedately did a little check around the right blogosphere to see what the right was doing to defend Madonna’s right to mock religion. After all, the entire rightwing blogosphere wrote stirring defenses of those Danish cartoons didn’t they? They all agreed that free speech and a free press were fundamental western values and that simply because certain religious people somewhere might be offended by certain images, it was no reason to withhold them. Indeed, it was reason to publish them, which many of these right wing bloggers did, with no compunction about offending the muslims in their own communities or around the world.
But strangely, I saw nothing about this Madonna thing. Perhaps they just haven’t heard about this affront to liberal western values yet. But then, they have some rather strange ideas about what political speech should be defended and what should be condemned, don’t they? They went crazy when Jane Hamsher posted a satirical image of Joe Lieberman in blackface and didn’t even blink an eye at their own intellectual inconsistency. At the time I looked around for some of their stirring defenses of the Danish cartoons and found many. It was a certifiable cause in the right blogosphere, all done in the name of western liberal values.
This battle over the Danish cartoons highlights all of these philosophical dilemmas (which I have argued previously are the result of certain linguistic misunderstandings that are either cynically or idealistically perpetuated); and so we are brought to the point where this clash of civilizations—which in one important sense is a clash between theocratic Islamism and the west, but in another, more crucial sense, is a clash between the west and its own structural thinking, brought on by years of insinuation into our philosophy of what is, at root, collectivist thought that privileges the interpreter of an action over the necessary primacy of intent and agency and personal responsibility to the communicative chain—could conceivably become manifest over something so seemingly trivial as the right to satirize.
Whew! Only it seems it isn’t really a clash of civilizations at all, is it? Nor can it be attributed to mush-headed leftists and their relativistic po-mo collectivism. It turns out there are western nations that actually have laws against “insulting religious beliefs.” And in the case of Jane’s satirical blackface graphic the “collectivist thought that privileges the interpreter of an action over the necessary primacy of intent” was used as a bludgeon against her by “individualist” conservatives even though her intent was obviously not racist.
After all, we had Darkblack’s, the artist’s, intent right out there in black and white explaining his “intent” so Malkin and her followers should have had no problem understanding what it was:
As the composer of the work in question, allow me to make some broader points clearer. This will be my last word on the subject, but all are free to debate further, of course. Lieberman has attempted to activate a voting demographic that his strategists believe will aid him in his quest.
To this end, he has imported a figure, Bill Clinton, who has standing with the American black community, and has repeatedly asserted his personal credentials as one who has worked on behalf of that community.Yet Lieberman has engaged in race baiting (with the Lamont flyer) as a cynical attempt to game this demographic, and he has engaged in other activities which cast doubtful shadows upon this allegiance.
Thus, in my opinion, Lieberman is pretending to be something that he is not for personal gain, exactly like the vile caucasian minstrel show performers of Vaudeville. And so my artist’s impression stands. If we as a people run from controversial imagery, we will never stop running. Better to unearth and deal with the unpleasant than to live in fear.
I am not vouching for the political effectiveness of the graphic or the wisdom of using it. American political campaigns are inherently and literally conservative (even for liberals) in that they always try to avoid unnecessary controversy. Blackface is a loaded image in American culture and causes an emotional reaction that is more appropriate to political art than to elective politics. I myself balked at showing the graphic on this site during the last days of the campaign when Michael Shaw of Bagnewsnotes featured it in his ad. Normally, I would have been happy to have it there as a point of discussion, but I didn’t want to add fuel to the fire. Political activism requires such considerations and it’s not always an easy call. (But then neither was the cartoons although to hear the right tell it, only a terrorist or traitor would have thought so.)
The hysterical rightwing response to the graphic, however, was a laughable exercise in rank hypocrisy. The same people who ranted for weeks about the Danish cartoons and the principle of free speech even when it is offensive were the first ones to wring their lacy designer dew rags about leftist racism and bad taste when the opportunity came along.
I actually partially agree with Goldstein (hey, even a stopped clock is right twice a day, ba dum pum) when he says some of this intolerance of controversial speech comes from the mistaken notion that the feelings of an interpreter of an action take primacy over the intent. (Hate crimes, for instance, are all about intent, although I doubt seriously that Goldstein agrees with me on that.) But the idea that it is the sole province of “collectivist” or liberal philosophy is ludicrous. It’s the province of dogmatic thinkers everywhere, but it occurs far more often on the right, I’m afraid, and particularly among religious fanatics of all stripes who seek to silence anyone who doesn’t adhere to their beliefs.
When I see the right wing blogosphere showing pictures of Madge on the cross and Jane’s Lieberman satire on all their blogs as a sign of solidarity with the western value of free speech as they did with the Danish cartoons, maybe I’ll take them seriously on that issue. Until then, they are just political cartoons themselves whose braying about western values are as meaningful as Mallard Fillmore.
And btw, in case anyone’s wondering what Goldstein had to say about the blackface incident, here’s a little taste:
Lamont’s victory speech video
If you look over his shoulder to the left and squint a bit, you’ll see Jane Hamsher in blackface sucking down a beer bong filled with Dos Equis. Or maybe that’s just the shadow of doom beginning its inexorable creep across a once proud nation.
He was just “kidding,” of course. He’s a very funny guy. Still, those lefty racists are uncivil and deserve everything they get.
Roy Edroso looks at the Ole Perfesser’s idea ‘o earthly heaven. All I can say is “Ah, damn you! God… damn you all to hell!”
Unfortunately, I linked to the wrong Roy masterpiece, which made my comment incomprehensible, (not an unusual event in any case.) I fixed the link but you should read all of his posts anyway.
Back in 2000, I had a standard argument for Naderites who claimed “there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between them” because they both are beholden to big business. I always said that you had to look at the coalitions that formed both parties and as long as Democrats had unions and women’s groups and environmentalists etc in their coalition, their big business ties would be mitigated and there would be better legislation produced. I was wrong.
Matt Stoller has been doing a series of posts over the last few months about how Washington really works and it sobered me up quite a bit. He has a new installment, here. It’s not that there’s not a dimes worth of difference between them, it’s that they are corruptly symbiotic and that symbiosis is mostly enabled by “bipartisan” players like Lieberman and the revolving door of lobbyists.
Stoller describes the way the right works in the post, but I think we are all at least fairly familiar with their style. It’s how the left works that is mind-blowing:
When a bill is introduced, a network of consultants, most of whom have corporate clients, begin to chatter about how taking a liberal position could weaken the Democratic Party. This is supplemented with a strong PR strategy by right-wing temporary coalition groups who put out networks of surrogates and ads to create a powerfully framed environment. Then business lobbyists come and visit Congressional offices, and make threats, attempt legislative bribes, or put out false but extremely persuasive pieces of information. There is often little real counterpressure, because liberal single issue groups have decided not to hold politicians accountable and do not cooperate with each other on issues not directly related to their vertical.
Within the Democratic party, resisting a bill is an exercise in holding the caucus together. The long minority status of the Democratic Party has allowed the development of bad faith actors within the caucus, who cut deals with right-wing groups and sabotage any possibility of resistance. Al Wynn is one such actor; Joe Lieberman is another. On key vote after key vote, these actors have sabotaged the progressive position through fake bipartisanship. It’s no surprise that Lieberman’s former chief of staff was a lobbyist for Enron; Lieberman himself is responsible for many of the corporate accounting scandals over the years because of his embrace of various financial lobbies.
One irony of the Lieberman race is that all the single-issue groups have endorsed Lieberman, and if you look at donations, so have the lobbyists. Indeed, this isn’t a fight between ‘the left’ and ‘the right’ as it is traditionally defined, since no one would put NARAL on the right or even in the center. This is about creating a disincentive towards bad faith actors and corrupt lobbyists on the left.
Stoller has had a very important insight in this series that I don’t think anyone has fully realized. The consultants who work for Democrats also work for coporations and they consistently pitch progressive ideas as being “too liberal” not necessarily because they are, but because these consultants have a conflict of interest that either makes them unable to see things clearly — or that makes them corrupt. In any case, they are giving bad advice to the Democratic party and it’s resulted in nice fat paychecks for them. Serving the public, not so much.
This brings me to the special interests in whom I had placed so much faith to counter such corruption. I had resisted joining in the critique of these groups because I thought they had some basis for playing both sides over the long term. But I thought they knew which side their bread was really buttered on, even so. Apparently not. Stoller describes them as having been co-opted by the corrupt system and lazily enjoying the fruits of the spoils like everyone else. I have to admit that even the most generous view shows they have lost sight of their own goals.
NARAL’s continued endorsement of Lieberman is a case in point. I will bet money that if Lieberman wins the race as an independent with a majority of Republican votes, within his term he is going to change his stance on abortion. It’s obvious that he is uncomfortable with the dissonance between being a social conservative and pro-choice politician, and he’s been feeling around for an argument to justify it for years. He’s the most likely pro-choice Senator in the country to switch. If NARAL thinks they can keep him on the reservation because they’ve been loyal to him, they obviously don’t know who they’re dealing with — or no longer care.
So, what to do? I quoted this comment by Matt Yglesias before about the role of the progressive blogosphere and the more I think about it the more interesting I find it:
The great benefit of the blogosphere is that it isn’t really an “interest group”; it’s more like an old-style membership organization (or a series of such organizations) whose existence used to do something to check what’s now become the out-of-control influence of business groups over the policy process.
I think the netroots and the blogosphere will end up performing many functions and I don’t know exactly where its influence will be most effective. But stepping into the breach and going after the system itself, from the outside, and functioning as the democratic check on the power of big money is one obvious area where we might be effective. It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it.
Stoller and Chris Bowers, Rick Jacobs and Joel Wright wrote a campaign memo based upon their extensive polling after the Busby loss in CA-50. I looked closely at the polling data and it’s fascinating stuff. They went very deep and came up with some results that are quite surprising. But its conclusions feel, at a gut level, like common sense to me, uncomplicated and obvious — and you hear nothing like it from the Democratic consultants.
I would recommend that everyone read this memo to get a sense of just how different these ideas are from what you hear coming from the campaign shops out of Washington. And if you agree that it is on the money then perhaps we can think of some ways to get this in the hands of candidates and their advisors. They should, at the very least, be exposed to these ideas.
I’ve long wondered why the insiders not only come to incorrect conclusions based on the data but how their political instincts became completely ossified. Stoller’s posts on this subject have finally offered an explanation.
In all the hoopla last week about TNR writer Elspeth Reeve’s tribute to Ann Coulter, I missed this very interesting debate among Ezra,Shakespeare’s Sister and Echidne about why there aren’t any firebreathing liberal female hacks. It’s an interesting topic and I urge you to check out all the arguments. (Echidne’s title alone is worth it.)
I’m not going to delve into all the socio-political implications of the Coulter argument. These fine writers cover the topic better than I can. I will just say that my view is that the right chooses certain figures for two very particular reasons — the first is camera friendliness and the second is counter-intuitiveness.
They promote good looking women because sex sells, the networks prefer it, the world is run by horny men, blah, blah blah. Whatever the reasons, that’s a fact. In the media, (except for the pooh-bahs of the male DC punditocrisy) looks matter.
It’s the second that’s interesting and both Shakes and Echidne hit upon it in their posts. The right puts forth attractive female snakes like Coulter and Malkin because they can carry the white, male conservative message without the baggage of being a white male. They know their repulsive rhetoric just doesn’t sound as objectionable coming from the mouth of a nice looking young woman. If you can mix in race too, as Malkin does, you’ve got a winner.
It worked very well during the Clinton years when you’d be blinded by the reflections off the platinum locks of the Barbizon School of former Prosecutors alumni who populated every shout fest. These rightwing women would go on the cable shows and wave their painted talons in front of their faces like lace fans decrying the president for sexualizing the culture with his allegedly crooked genitalia. The whole country sat riveted in a way they never would have if it had been nothing but hairy middle aged men talking about sex on television every night. These ladies could both moralize and sizzle and poor Lanny Davis just sat there like a bowl of overcooked macaroni while they ran circles around him.
The right understands what media wants and they give it to them. And while they are giving it to them, they go against type to innoculate themselves against attacks and soften the message by having it delivered by an unexpected source.
I think the Democrats should do the same thing in reverse. They need to toughen their message and innoculate themselves against attacks that they are too soft. They should find and train attractive males (preferably with military or sports experience) to make the case for liberal politics. Go against type and you flummox the other side.
This should not be taken as a slam on any liberal female spokespeople. I think there should be many more of them out there arguing politics with passion and fire. But since the Democratic party is already considered women friendly — and because strong liberal rhetoric coming from a female’s mouth is not counterintuitive — I think the Ann Coulter positions on the left are better filled by handsome, big-mouthed, funny liberal guys to be effective.
Think Paul Hackett.
Update: Speaking of Hackett, here’s some lefty firebreathing for yah:
Along with similarly concerned friends, neighbors and colleagues, I am starting a new project called Operation Ohio to sound the alarm to the threat of the theocratic political movement here in Ohio.
This concerns all Americans not only because this movement has roots in all states across America, but because Ohio will determine the direction of our country in 2008.
I need your help to get the project started.
Here is the problem as I see it.
In Ohio and across the country, leaders of a political movement opposed to basic principles of American democracy seek to create a “Christian nation.” While claiming up and down they do not want a theocracy, their acts, associations and the words used among themselves prove otherwise. They have spent the past thirty years developing an elaborate grassroots infrastructure while the rest of us moderate Ohioans and Americans have functioned in a “business as usual” manner. Some call those who propel the movement “religious extremists”, or “religious radicals”, others call them the “Religious Right”, “theocrats” or “Christian supremacists” but whatever we call them, we must in the end agree on the threat they pose to our constitutional republic as we know it. We know, for example, that they oppose the constitutional separation of church and state and support religiously-motivated government intervention into our private lives — think Terri Schiavo — while championing the diversion of taxpayer funds to advance their theocratic goals.