Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Slacker In Chief

by digby

Ok, so I’m reading a story in the Washington Post about George W. Bush’s annual August vacation and the fact that he’s only taking ten days (like most American working stiffs) instead of the usual month or more:

Bush’s scheduled week and a half in Texas is a far cry from last year’s working vacation, which was shaping up as the longest presidential retreat in more than three decades before it was rudely cut short by Hurricane Katrina after nearly a month.

The image of Bush on an extended stay away from the White House while Katrina flattened much of the Gulf Coast and left New Orleans engulfed by floodwater proved to be a defining moment of his presidency.

The image of a president who critics say is aloof from details and too eager to delegate was only driven home when he ordered Air Force One to fly low over the stricken region so he could get a bird’s-eye view of the destruction as he returned to Washington.

[…]

Bush is not the first president to be criticized for spending time away from Washington. More than a century ago, Ulysses S. Grant was pilloried for his retreats to the Jersey Shore. President Bill Clinton often spent vacations at friends’ homes in places such as Martha’s Vineyard and twice vacationed in Jackson Hole, Wyo., a locale his political handlers said would play well among swing voters.

President Lyndon B. Johnson spent 474 days at his Texas spread during his five-plus years as president, far surpassing the 370 days that Bush has spent in Texas since his election, according to U.S. News & World Report. White House aides are quick to point out that Bush remains in command even when he is far from the Oval Office. He continues to receive his normal security briefings and holds meeting with top aides and foreign leaders during his working vacations. The president also likes to use his down time to mountain-bike around his 1,500-acre ranch and to do chores such as clearing brush.

“We’ve reached a point in the modern presidency where any vacation the president takes hurts in some way, because the world and the media move so fast,” Fleischer said. ” . . . The normal things that everyone else does, if the president does it he gets criticized.”

While Bush plans to curtail his long stretches away from Washington this year, he still plans to spend most of the coming month out of town. He has planned long weekends at Camp David and the Bush family compound in Kennebunkport, Maine, for August, before returning to Texas before the Labor Day weekend.

So, Grant, Johnson, Bush and Clinton all spent lots of time away from Washington and got criticized for it. Isn’t that what you just read?

Unfortunately, it is really a game of “what’s wrong with this picture?” Bill Clinton took fewer vacations than any other president. I know it doesn’t specifically say he took long vacations or many vacations like all the other presidents mentioned in the article, but the context certainly suggests that he, like Grant, Johnson and Bush was criticized for doing so. That is incorrect.

(He was criticized for choosing his vacation locale for political reasons, it’s true. But I’ve always wondered why nobody ever thought that the Disney McRanch movie set that Bush bought in 1999 might have been chosen for political reasons too. Nope, not a word.)

Anyway, for the record, Clinton may have been a lot of things, but a lazy shirker like Bush he certainly wasn’t:

As of December 1999, President Bill Clinton had spent only 152 days on holiday during his two terms, according to CBS News. A former staffer noted Clinton was such a workaholic that “it almost killed Clinton to take one-week vacations during August.” In 2000, Clinton cut his summer vacation short to just three days, so he and his wife could concentrate on her Senate race and fundraising for Democrats. While we couldn’t find the exact tally for Clinton’s last year in office, it’s reasonable to expect he didn’t increase his vacation rate. And in barely three years in office, George W. Bush has already taken more vacation than Clinton did in seven years.

As of now, Bush has already spent more than a whole year (370 days) of his first six years as president on vacation.

This is another example of the false equivalence that’s making a mockery of modern journalism. They could have stuck with Lyndon Johnson as the example of a lazy Democratic president who couldn’t stand being in Washington. Hell, he was even a Texan. But they had to stick Clinton in there, out of context and without offering the similar criticism that should have been leveled at Bush since 2000 and wasn’t. I guess it’s a law or something.

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Who’s The Boss?

by digby

Roy at Alicublog made me depressed. I guess we citizen journalists aren’t taking over the planet next February as planned. Damn. There was supposed to be money in it.

In the course of bursting my little bubble, he mentions a New Yorker profile(pdf) of Hugh Hewitt written by Nicholas Lemann, well known journalist and current Dean of the Columbia School of Journalism. I missed this article when it came out and couldn’t quite believe what I was reading.

Hugh Hewitt is a hardworking, intelligent entrepreneur and a fine cigar smoking gentleman and scholar to boot. Not that he’ll get any credit for it:

I can competetently predict is that after this article appears activists on the left will put Hugh Hewitt forward as an example of the well-oiled quality of the Republican media operation, because of the efficiency and prolixity of his efforts to disseminate the party’s message. If bloggers can respond to political developments within seconds, it must be OK for me to speen up the cycle of discourse just one more click and defend Hewitt in advance against this as yet unmade charge. Hewitt is definitely a Republican, but he is no mere mouthpiece. He says that he has spent a total of five minutes off the air with Karl Rove(to disagree with a possible change in the tax treatment for clerics), that he never reads the e-mails that endlessly flow from the Republican National Committee, and that he is now involved, through an outfit called Not One Dime More, in a campaign to dissuade people from contributing to the National Republican Senatorial Committee (because some of its candidates supported the filibuster compromise.) What Hewitt demonstrates about journalism is that journalism-as-politics is rapidly expanding its size and reach, especially on the conservative side. What he demonstrates about politics is not that the Republicans have a wonderously efficient message machine but that there are a lot of smart and very determined conservatives who are starting up new organizations and signing up more converts. And the Democrats aren’t going to beat them by streamlining the delivery of their message.

Ok, I don’t even know what “streamlining the delivery of their message” would entail and Lemann doesn’t explain anywhere in the article so I have no idea what he’s talking about. But his misunderstanding of the way the Right Wing Noise Machine really works is astonishing.

Guys like Hewitt don’t dance to the Ken Mehlman’s tune; if anything, it’s the other way around. The RWNM is a subsidiary of the big money conservative movement not the Republican party. In fact, the Republican party itself is just the political arm of the big money conservative movement.

All those “smart, determined conservatives” who are starting new organizations and making more converts are funded by a network of wealthy benefactors. They are not required to make money (I guess they are considered the loss leaders of the oligarchy) and their function is to simultaneously write the word and spread it. They’ve been fairly successful recently at making a market for their work, but it’s still not big enough to sustain it. With the exception of actual political campaigns (at which point they actively coordinate with whichever strategic electoral wizard they’ve anointed), after 30 years of listening only to each other there is no need to explicitly inform anyone of the company line. They know it without having to be told.

I suppose you could call that “journalism.” I call it “propaganda” and I’m stunned that Nicholas Lemann, of all people, hasn’t figured out how this thing works by now. But when you hear some of Hewitt’s interviews with DC journalists it’s clear they haven’t figured it out either.

Update: Andrew Sullivan has been having an ongoing feud with Hewitt. As it happens, as part of an argument about Mel Gibson, of all things, Hewitt makes my point for me today:

I am a defender of the president, though not when I think he or his Adminstration makes an error like the ports deal or the briefs in the Michigan affirmative action cases. Sullivan’s frenzied, sometimes even hysterical attacks on pundits and analysts who admire the president and his team are the means to understanding Sullivan. He is consumed by Bush hatred. So much so, in fact, that he has branched out into hating those who not only don’t hate Bush, but admire him.

I do believe that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell, Gonzales and Ashcroft have run the global war on terror about as well as it could have been run, and their commitment to its prosecution has been unyielding. I admire their courage and their consistency. This presidency is already among the most significant of our nation’s history, and like Reagan’s, will be admired for generations long after the Bush haters have been forgotten.

It stands to reason that he’s going to be the keeper of the Bush flame. Somebody has to do it and he is, after all, the man who made his bones working as Nixon’s assistant after his disgrace. I guess he got the short straw at the Wednesday meeting.

But let’s not forget that just because Hewitt says he’s a free thinker, it means he is. He has been in the tank so long he doesn’t even know how much internalized rightwing propaganda is splashing around in his brain.

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Small-d Fever

by digby

Harold Meyerson writes:

Many of my fellow pundits read all kinds of sinister meanings into Lieberman’s pending defeat, including a purge of moderates from Democratic ranks. But, as Michael Tomasky demonstrated a couple of days ago, the moderate forces within the Democrats’ Senate delegation are still very much alive and well. Next Tuesday, in fact, Connecticut Democrats will be doing exactly what small-d democratic theorists would have them do: decide an election by opting for one clear policy alternative, as personified by one candidate, over another personified by the incumbent.

From a big-D Democratic perspective, Connecticut’s Democrats are doing what Democrats are hoping a clear majority of voters everywhere will do this November: reject incumbents who have supported the failed policies of this administration, the war most particularly. Far from being some kind of martyr to the fickleness of Democratic voters, Joe Lieberman has actually turned himself into one of the first victims of the popular groundswell against Bush and his war.

The question is, why would any influential Democrat choose to support Lieberman’s independent bid to maintain his seat, which the senator has said he’ll wage if loses the primary? By late Tuesday night, Lieberman will not only be the party’s foremost outlier on the question of the war. He will also likely be the rejected incumbent of an overwhelming majority of his state’s Democrats. For any prominent Democrat to continue to support Lieberman under those conditions is to tell the party rank-and-file that its votes don’t matter when they dethrone the longtime friends or associates of Democratic higher-ups.

That’s right. And conversely, if Lamont wins and the Party does the right thing and supports him, it will galvanize the base going into the fall. This is a catalyzing event in an election that could be a tsunami or just a little lapping wave over the feet of the body politic. I would hope the party pooh-bahs recognize this for the opportunity it is.

Update: The scuttlebut is that all this talk of Lieberman abandoning his ground game is bs. The Lamont people still need people on the ground for the canvas so if you are in the area and can make it, head up there this week-end.

For those outside the region, Move-on is sponsoring a phone bank. You can use those free week-end minutes for a good cause.

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Hecklers

by digby

Clinton gets angry. I don’t know why this made me nostalgic for the old rogue, but it did. Andrew Sullivan

Me too.

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Penance

by digby

The ex-future-ex-Mrs Rush Limbaugh wants people to believe she’s leaving CNN to start a blog:

Kagan, a 12-year CNN veteran who anchors two hours of news coverage from Atlanta each weekday morning, is leaving Sept. 1 to set up a Web site devoted to telling inspirational stories.

“I think there is a void in the straight news business now, (which is) lacking a certain spirituality,” Kagan told The Associated Press on Thursday. “I think most people live in a space where they are looking for meaning in life and good in the world and that is not necessarily reflected in straight news coverage right now.”

Kagan said the site is not affiliated with any religious group, although she certainly welcomes people who are religious to visit. She expects to include audio, video and print reports.

[…]

She’s not turning her back on news, Kagan said.

“It’s important to be informed but I also think it’s important to be inspired,” said Kagan, a former love interest of radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh. “I’m creating a space where people can be inspired.”

She said she had no financial backer for her Web endeavor other than herself.

The site, darynkagan.com, will launch on Nov. 13, she said.

After spending time in bed with that fatuous gasbag, it’s obvious why she’d need some spiritual cleansing. But she probably should have stuck with the conventional “wants to spend more time with her family” excuse. Everyubody knows you don’t have to quit your job to be a fulltime blogger…

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Between Two Friends

by digby

From Haaretz

During the past 39 years since the Six-Day War, the United States did not force Israel to pull out of the West Bank, but more than once acted to block Israeli military actions. Over time, we have grown accustomed to the Americans saving us, not only from the Arabs, but from ourselves too. Not in this war. It is still unclear whether this war was coordinated with the United States; only the release of government records of the past three weeks will shed light on this. Whatever the case may be, the impression is that the Americans are linking the events in Lebanon to their failing adventure in Iraq.

As I wrote last week, it’s true that it’s a fallacy that the US has ever really been an honest broker — but there was utility in the fiction for just such times as these. The over-the-top GWOT rhetoric (and policy) has perverted our role in the world. It’s true that the UN, for instance, was often a shallow debating society, but it provided a very useful way to allow parties to back down without losing face. It didn’t solve every problem, but it could solve some. But that wasn’t good enough for these guys who believe that getting their opponents to say “uncle” is the only way to manage world events.

Bush and his neocon megalomaniacs really are arguing that they can eradicate evil if we just kill enough people to show evil who’s boss. And then we will give birth to utopia. (Don’t ever let another conservative accuse you of being naive again…)

I suspect the truth at this point is that they have no idea what to do about the hell they’ve unleashed so this is the best they can do — the old Strangelovian “I’m not saying we won’t get our hair mussed…10-20 million tops.”

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2+2=Dittohead

by digby

Greg Sargent takes Rush to task:

Rush’s website links to this story about an Ohio University poll which found that over a third of Americans suspect that the Feds helped the 9/11 terrorist attacks or didn’t act to stop them. Rush’s site then blares:

[T]he Hearts & Minds Crowd Can’t Bring Themselves to Confront Enemy Hate…Poll: 1/3 of Americans Say 9/11 Was Inside Job, 1/3 of Americans are Democrats — Do the Math

Sargent looks at the poll in question and concludes:

…the poll also asked whether respondents approve or disapprove of President Bush. The answer? Thirty-five percent approve, 59 percent disapprove — almost exactly what polls of the national electorate show. So there you have it — it’s very clear that the respondents of the poll almost perfectly reflect the makeup of America in general. Yep, Rush lied again.

I dunno. It looks to me as if the third of the country who believe the US was involved in 9/11 must be Bush supporters. After all, they represent a third of the electorate. Can’t Rush do simple arithmetic?

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Making The Case

by digby

Scott Winship has written a much discussed article about the netroots which I will let you all read for yourself rather than expound on it at length tonight. I would just say that I think the central problem with this entire conversation about whether the netroots are too liberal or whether the country will recoil in horror at the sight of impassioned progressive activists is that there is an assumption that the body politic holds a rigid set of beliefs to which the parties must adapt. I think that is a wrong assumption — or incomplete anyway.

Winship believes the netroots are more liberal than the party as a whole. Setting aside all the reasons why this may or may not be true (and there are plenty of reasons to believe it’s not) let’s assume for the sake of argument that he’s right. But let’s also agree for the sake of argument to take bloggers at their word that they want to unseat the Republicans and win elections. If both those assumptions are correct, how would one reconcile them?

How about if the plan is to pragmatically adapt as necessary in the short term to realities that require compromise, while at the same time embarking on a long term project to persuade the country through argument, ideas and political rhetoric that liberalism is in their best interest? And let’s suppose that we try to increase the number of liberals and partisans in the congress wherever possible, in order to balance out those moderates Michael Tomasky talks about here whom we know are going to necessarily be required to gain a majority? Let’s call it pragmatic liberalism.

While I believe that liberalism is the best way to govern in a free society, that doesn’t mean I’m unaware of what’s currently politically achievable. Like most bloggers I understand that there are regional, tribal and structural factors that play into our politics as much as ideology. But perhaps some of us see our keyboards as a way, over time, to persuade people to come over to our side. There is a lot of preaching to the choir, to be sure. But the idea is to get liberal ideas back into circulation — at dinner tables, water coolers, church picnics and, of course, the media. If the country is politically conservative I have to believe that it’s at least partially because conservatism or psuedo-conservatism is the only ideology that’s being discussed. It certainly is the only ideology that’s considered respectable.

So for both ideological and practical reasons I believe that somebody has to make a case that it’s good for individuals and the country as a whole to be liberal. The Party gave up on that a while back so activists and writers and others are stepping into the breach. Is that really such a bad thing?

I suppose it might seem so to people who don’t believe in liberalism which is what I suspect is really at the core of this dispute. One of the reasons that pragmatic liberals like me no longer trust the DLC (which I did for many years) is that it no longer seems to be a tactical and strategic organization that tries to find new ways to accomplish liberal goals, which is what I originally understood it to be. The DLC now seems to be actively hostile to liberalism itself. That’s a very big difference and deeply concerning to me.

It’s one thing for the Democratic establishment to adopt their process argument that the “Real Americans” hate liberalism and so liberals should be quiet. It’s quite another if they don’t like liberalism themselves. Which is it, do you suppose?

If it’s the first then they need to consider that it’s important for Democrats to try to persuade some of those people rather than continue the failed triangulation experiment forever. It’s not working. If it’s the latter then we should ask what their vision really is for the Democratic party because if it isn’t at least based on liberal ideology then I honestly don’t know what it is.

Update: For a more pungent view of the DLC, check out this column by Matt Taibbi. It’s quite uncivil — and he’s not even a blogger.

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Official Tin Foil

by digby

Atrios points out that this “Qana was staged” conspiracy theory is not just a blog phenomenon. Indeed it isn’t. Rush is touting it daily on his show, as I mentioned here. This is a Republican Noise Machine Special. They don’t do this stuff on their own.

The WaPo article to which Atrios links effectively debunks the theory and then asks this question:

Who killed the Hashems and Shalhoubs, if it wasn’t an Israel bomb? Korvet and the other bloggers don’t offer any theories.

Rush certainly has one:

You know who really killed those people are the Hezbos. Hezbollah killed those people. Hezbollah put those people in that building and brought the rocket launchers in close by, knowing full well that the launcher would be targeted. That building didn’t fall for eight hours after it was hit. What do you bet that the Hezbos finished the job that the Israeli bomb did not actually complete? What do you bet they killed their own people for the PR aspect? These people cannot compete militarily with any industrialized nation, so they have to fight the PR and the spin war. And it is amazing to me to see how easily the duped US and world media is.

It’s quite clever really because it comports quite nicely with the official line that Hezbollah is not only the cause of Lebanese suffering but that they are doing everything for PR effect:

PRIME MINISTER BLAIR: It’s very obvious what the strategy of terrorism is, and of the actions that Hezbollah took. Their strategy is to commit an outrage that provokes a reaction, and then on the back of the reaction, to mobilize extreme elements, and then try and create a situation which even moderate people feel drawn to their case. That’s the strategy

There are plenty of dittoheads out there who are more than ready to take the next leap and believe that Hezbollah is actually staging the atrocities.

This is not a blog phenomenon and it’s not even a talk radio phenomenon. This is a RWNM phenomenon and that means it’s sanctioned by the Party.

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The Onion

by tristero

The Onion

In a decisive 1–0 decision Monday, President Bush voted to grant the president the constitutional power to grant himself additional powers.

“As president, I strongly believe that my first duty as president is to support and serve the president,” Bush said during a televised address from the East Room of the White House shortly after signing his executive order. “I promise the American people that I will not abuse this new power, unless it becomes necessary to grant myself the power to do so at a later time.”

The Presidential Empowerment Act, which the president hand-drafted on his own Oval Office stationery and promptly signed into law, provides Bush with full authority to permit himself to authorize increased jurisdiction over the three branches of the federal government, provided that the president considers it in his best interest to do so.

“In a time of war, the president must have the power he needs to make the tough decisions, including, if need be, the decision to grant himself even more power,” Bush said. “To do otherwise would be playing into the hands of our enemies.”

The problems is, this ain’t no joke. In case you haven’t had the dubious pleasure, meet David Addington.