Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Democrats Then and Now

by poputonian

So Ralph turns to clay in Georgia.

Meanwhile up in Ohio (from Reuters):

Megachurches build a Republican base

It’s not Sunday but Fairfield Christian Church is packed. Hundreds of kids are making their way to vacation Bible school, parents are dropping in at the day-care center and yellow-shirted volunteers are everywhere, directing traffic. In one wing of the sprawling church, a coffee barista whips up a mango smoothie while workers bustle around the cafeteria. “There are people here from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. every day — sometimes later,” senior pastor Russell Johnson says as he surveys the activity. The 4,000 members of Fairfield Christian are part of the growing evangelical Christian movement in middle America. In a March survey, a quarter of Ohio residents said they were evangelicals — believing that a strict adherence to the Bible and personal commitment to the teachings of Jesus Christ will bring salvation. The fastest-growing faith group in America, evangelical Christians have had a growing impact on the nation’s political landscape, in part because adherents believe conservative Christian values should have a place in politics — and they support politicians who agree with them. In that March survey, more than 82 percent of the Ohio evangelicals who attend church at least once a week said they approve of bringing more religion into politics. “Christians stepped back too far. I prayed in school but my kids can’t pray in school,” said volunteer Lisa Sexton, 42, a Bible school volunteer. “I should have spoken up earlier.” Political analyst John Green said evangelical growth has had a major political impact in Ohio, a key swing state that narrowly decided President George W. Bush’s election victory in 2004. “Evangelical Protestants have become much more Republican in recent times, although 40 or 50 years ago more of them were Democrats,” said Green, director of the University of Akron’s Bliss Institute of Applied Politics. …
“I appreciate the fact that the church is politically involved,” said Kyle Hatfield, a 30-year-old father of two who believes the separation of church and state has gone too far. “It was not our forefathers’ intention to prevent churches from being involved,” he said. “Our forefathers did not want to force people to belong to a church, but that has been tweaked to mean churches cannot be involved.”

So let’s go back forty or fifty years. Here’s Susan Jacoby quoting JFK in her book Freethinkers:

In his celebrated speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association on September 12, 1960, Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy declared unequivocally that he believed …

“… in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute–where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote–where no church or church school is granted any public funds for policy preference–and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.”

Kennedy went on to make it clear that he regarded the Jeffersonian wall of separation not as a flexible metaphor but as the foundation of the American system of government. He reminded his audience, composed heavily of evangelical Protestants, that Jefferson’s relgious freedom act in Virginia was strongly supported by Baptists who had endured persecution both in England and in America. With a nod to the non-religious, the candidate also expounded his vision of America as a nation “where every man had the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice.”

My how the landscape has changed.

Hovering And Wheedling

by digby

Modo has an entertaining column on Georgie’s Big G8 Adventure. I thought this was particularly good:

He treated Tony “As It Were” Blair like the servant in “The Remains of the Day,’’ blowing off his offer to help with the Israel-Lebanon crisis, and changing the subject from substance to fluff at one point, noting about his 60th-birthday Burberry gift: “Thanks for the sweater. Awfully thoughtful of you.’’ Then he razzed the British prime minister, who was hovering and wheedling like an abused wife: “I know you picked it out yourself.”

(I’m pretty sure the servant to whom she’s referring was the one played by Emma Thompson, not Anthony Hopkins. Like her, Blair has such expressive hands.)

She didn’t mention Bush’s obsession with pig meat. I think it was a matter of space. There were just so many outrageous behaviors on this trip that it takes more than one column to cover them all.

Update: I had vaguely remembered this and finally tracked it down. Bush has always had such bad manners that he couldn’t be trusted to behave properly in the White House when his father was president.

Even as an adult, George was so out of control that his mother, then the president’s wife, removed her eldest son to the opposite end of the table at a state dinner for the Queen of England. Although sober by then, the First Son had introduced himself to the Queen as “the black sheep of the family.”

George W. Bush was then 44 years old.

He’s almost 60 now.

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Ralphie, We Hardly Knew Ye

by digby

So Ralph Reed, the darling prince of the Christian Right, top Bush administration advisor,ratfucker extraordinaire, coveted election night analyst and infamous college Republican couldn’t win the Republican primary for Lt Governor of Georgia. Wow. How the mighty have fallen. This was supposed to be his first step toward the presidency.

Reed has always been a phony and his criminal association with Abramoff finally brought him low. His Christian Right fans weren’t impressed with the fact that he was making millions promoting gambling and forced abortions. And they particularly didn’t like the fact that he refused to repent. (There’s a lesson in that, strategists, if you care to look.)

I think the thing I’ve always found most interesting about Ralph is the fact that he’s seen as a real evangelical when it’s quite clear that he became one purely for political reasons.

[In 1981]At the College Republican Natipnal Committee, Abramoff, Norquist and Reed formed what was known as the “Abramoff-Norquist-Reed triumvirate.” Upon Abramoff’s election, the trio purged “dissidents” and re-wrote the CRNC’s bylaws to consolidate their control over the organization. Reed was the “hatchet man” and “carried out Abramoff-Norquist orders with ruthless efficiency, not bothering to hide his fingerprints.” Abramoff promoted Reed in 1983, appointing him to succeed Norquist as Executive Director of the CRNC. (Nina J. Easton, Gang of Five: Leaders at the Center of the Conservative Crusade, page 143)

In the spring of 1983, Reed was accused of rigging the election of ally Sam Harbren as his successor as president of the College Republicans at the University of Georgia. Promising a keg party, Reed recruited a number of new “members” to vote in the election, submitting their membership paperwork on the last night before the deadline for the election. The defeated presidential candidate, Lee Culpepper, wrote to the College Republican National Committee calling the election a sham. The CRNC investigated the matter, reprimanded Reed and ordered a new election. However, in the meantime, Culpepper “led an angry exodus” out of the UGA College Republicans and into a newly formed Young Republicans of Clarke County club. Harben admitted later, “We ran a dirty election.” (Nina J. Easton, Gang of Five, page 129–130)

Reed has said that, on a Saturday evening in September of 1983, he had a religious experience while at Bullfeathers, a upscale pub in Capitol Hill that is popular with staffers (and, to a lesser extent, members) of the House of Representatives. Regarding the experience, Reed said “the Holy Spirit simply demanded me to come to Jesus”. He walked outside the pub to a phone booth, thumbed through the yellow pages under “Churches,” and found the Evangel Assembly of God in Camp Springs, Maryland. He visited the next morning and became a born-again Christian. (Nina J. Easton, Gang of Five, pages 201–202)

In March 1985, Reed organized members of Students for America and College Republicans to picket the Fleming Center in Raleigh, North Carolina, and the nearby home of its founder, a Dutch-born doctor. Clinic staff reported that protestors “screamed epithets and intimidated patients with mock baby funerals.” Reed was arrested after bursting into the waiting room of the abortion clinic. He signed an agreement promising to stay away from the clinic and was not prosecuted. (Nina J. Easton, Gang of Five, page 205)

In 1989, Reed and Pat Robertson formed the Christian Coalition out of the ashes of Robertson’s failed presidential campaign.

Ralph has always been a sleazy Republican operative who pretended to be a Christian. The party’s full of people like him (Ann Coulter says she goes to church!) but he was the face of the Christian Coalition for many years so the revelation of his worldly corruption was particularly ruinous.

Oh, and by the way, Ralph has always had a lot of friends in high places. one of them is Joe Lieberman:

July 12, 2002

Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein and Republican strategist Ralph Reed were talking on the phone, shortly after announcing the launch of Stand for Israel, a campaign to mobilize Evangelical Christian political support for Israel.

Few political operatives have as much access to the White House these days as Reed, chairman of the Georgia Republican Party and former executive director of the Christian Coalition. But when Senator Joseph Lieberman phoned on the other line, Eckstein, 51, was happy to take the call from an old friend.

Old allies and pioneers in the push to build bridges with conservative Christians, Eckstein and Lieberman had not spoken since the senator’s ascension to the Democratic presidential ticket in August 2000.

“He said that he had just seen The New York Times piece about Stand for Israel, wanted to tell me how proud he was, and encouraged me to do more,” Eckstein told the Forward, recounting his conversation with Lieberman. “He also told me that, finally, after 25 years, my work has been vindicated.”

Joe and Ralph and the Rabbi had worked together in the past on a project called the Center for Christian and Jewish Values:

In 1994, when the ADL issued a scathing report blasting fundamentalist evangelicals, and Robertson’s Christian Coalition in particular, as a grave threat to Jewish life, Eckstein leaped to defend his allies. He convened a meeting in Washington between evangelical and Jewish leaders, and convinced the ADL’s director, Abe Foxman, to invite Robertson’s master tactician, Reed, to issue a call for reconciliation at ADL’s annual conference….According to Eckstein, “Reed made a wonderful impression.”

Eckstein capitalized on his successes by forming the Center for Christian and Jewish Values in Washington. Co-chaired by Orthodox Jewish Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., and evangelical Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., the now-defunct center, according to Eckstein, “brought together disparate groups to find common ground on issues of shared concern.” While Eckstein did bring people of different faiths under one roof, their ideological leanings were mostly uniform. The center was made up almost entirely of right-wing evangelicals like then Family Research Council director Bauer, Southern Baptist Convention executive director Richard Land and the dean of Robertson’s Regent University’s school of government, Kay James. (James is now director of the Office of Personnel Management under Bush.) Also involved were neoconservatives such as Abrams, William Kristol and William Bennett. The center was essentially a command post for the culture war.

I would imagine Joe felt a little frisson of fear tonight when he heard his old ally in the culture war went down in a primary. Ralph was a superstar of the conservative movement and plenty of people believed that he was headed for the white house.

Something’s in the air.

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It Could be Worse

by digby

Tristero calls the bonafides of this foreign affairs roundtable into question in the post below. I’m not sure I can wholly endorse his criticisms as long as great thinkers like Newt Gingrich and Jonah Goldberg are out there pontificating to larger audiences and with much greater influence. Gingrich, you’ll recall, is a great intimate of Donald Rumsfeld and worked hand in glove with him on the military strategy for Iraq. He is considered a leading conservative intellectual:

James Wolcott leads us through Newties latest foreign policy advice:

‘This is World War III,’ Gingrich said. And once that’s accepted, he said calls for restraint would fall away:

“‘Israel wouldn’t leave southern Lebanon as long as there was a single missile there. I would go in and clean them all out and I would announce that any Iranian airplane trying to bring missiles to re-supply them would be shot down. This idea that we have this one-sided war where the other team gets to plan how to kill us and we get to talk, is nuts.’

“There is a public relations value, too. Gingrich said that public opinion can change “the minute you use the language of World War III. The message then, he said, is ‘OK, if we’re in the third world war, which side do you think should win?'”

So Gingrich wants to roll out World War III as a bugle call to give Republicans a Viagra injection and force Democrats to slink behind the cavalry in mealy-mouthed agreement, for fear of being called appeasers and peaceniks by useful fools like Michael Goodwin.

But I don’t know about this. It might have worked as a portentous sales device in the immediate aftershock of 9/11, but we’re nearly five years on and the US stature has shrunk. If a majority of Americans want us to withdraw from Iraq, how eager are they going to be to sign on to a declaration of world war against a stateless enemy?

They’ll only do it notionally, as long as nothing is actually required of them.

President Bush speaks to the camera: “We’re going to call it World War III, but there’ll be no draft of your precious darling geniuses, no tax increases, no sacrifice demanded, and I promise not to preempt your favorite programs, such as American Idol.”

Fred and Wilma Flintstone, feet propped up on baby dinosaur: “Er, okay; fine; whatever.”

Gingrich of course is thinking tactically–he probably flosses tactically, imagining the most ingenious angle a vanguard thinker like himself should employ in a flossing opportunity–but there’s also a strong component of nostalgia in this world war talk. You see in the writings of Victor Davis Hanson, the constant references to Neville Chamberlain and Patton, the primping of Blair and Bush for the role of Churchillian stalwart. It’s as if Gingrich, Bill Kristol, Max Boot, and the whole gang have fallen for their own romantic bluster and fantasize that the Winds of War are going to sweep them through History like Robert Mitchum in Herman Wouk’s epic, where they will feel the spray of the North Atlantic, the stinging sands of North Africa, and enjoy the passionate embrace of a USO entertainer after a heavy night in the canteen. They want to believe that inspired and educated with the right words–their words–Americans will once again rise and meet the mortal challenge.

This has been the case from the beginning and it infects not only the crazed neocon right, but liberal hawks and certainly the media, who all don their fabulous Prada safari jackets and head out on the first plane to whatever desert is exploding to do their bad Walter Cronkite impressions. (I blame Tom Brokaw and Stephen Spielberg for all this, btw.)

When you have this level of “intellectual” discourse being taken very seriously in newspapers and on television, I look at this foreign affairs panel and just breathe a sign of relief that Newt Gingrich wasn’t on it. This is, of course, the problem. The spectrum of opinion is always restricted by the fact that the right blasts the atmosphere with gaseous rhetoric so inane and outrageous that they define the perimeter of the debate.

Seriously, when Jonah Goldberg is actually paid to pontificate on serious topics, you know that something has gone terribly awry. Here’s Wolcott again:

Let the learning curve begin, advises Jonah Goldberg, taking a break from playing with his action figures: “…the advantage of calling all this World War Three is that it’s easier to understand and takes less explanation. Most people don’t think of the Cold War as a war so much as an effort to avoid one.”

The post also provides a helpful glimpse of Goldberg’s thought processes at work, which resemble Horton trying to hatch an egg:

“Domino theory and public diplomacy had fairly minor roles in World War II. But such considerations are central to our understanding of today’s challenges. Of course, tthe Cold War analogy fails in some important respects as it was mostly a contest between states. But all analogies fail in important respects, that’s why they’re analogies.”

He sure makes that Foreign Affairs panel look better, doesn’t he?

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Questions For Foreign Affairs’ “What to Do in Iraq” Panel

by tristero

Hi, boys:

Got a few questions for you:

1. Are you Muslim? It doesn’t appear that any of you are.

2. If you’re not, do any of you speak fluent Arabic, ie, well enough to hold a conversation, listen to al Jazeera, and read the newspapers?

3. If not, how many of you have read the entire Qu’ran and most of the Hadith in translation? If not, how many of you have participated more than once in worship at a mosque? Sh’ia or Sunni – and can you quickly define the difference?

4. If not, how many of you have travelled to Iraq since the occupation, how long did you stay, and where did you go?

5. How many of you publicly opposed the invasion prior to the launch of the New Product – as the Bush administration termed the invasion and occupation – long before it was politically safe to do so, say, prior to the passage of the Senate resolution in fall of 2002? Before January, 2003?

6. If you are not Muslim, don’t speak Arabic well, haven’t read the basic texts of Islam or participated in services, haven’t been to Iraq, and/or believed – for whatever reason – prior to the invasion that it was a smart, or at least reasonable, idea to invade Iraq – that is, if you can’t answer “yes” to a decent number of my first five questions – then why should I bother to take seriously anything you might think to say?

I’m not saying you’re stupid or uninformed, I know you’re not. I’m asking: upon what is your expertise based, besides attending conferences, reading a lot of thick books by non-Islamic Americans, reading American newspapers and official government reports?

Just asking.

Love,

Tristero

Answering Digby’s Question

by tristero

After Bush gave the Chancellor of Germany an unasked-for quickie of a a massage, Digby asked, “What do you suppose you need to do to get treated with respect by this asshole?”

Well one thing’s for sure:

You want more than backrubs from Bush, it sure helps to fill your country with a zillion barrels of that there Texas Tea.

Sharpening The Pitchforks

by digby

Somebody bring Lanny Davis some smelling salts. Big media Atrios lays out the blogofascist case against Lieberman in the LA Times.

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Oh Those Guys

by digby

If you’re in the mood for dark speculation there’s nobody better or smarter than Billmon. Tonight’s post on the mid-east will keep me awake for awhile.

He asks an obvious question: What about al Qaeda?

However senior Al Qaeda leaders feel about Hezbollah and the emerging Shi’a crescent, they can’t be too happy about seeing their status in the terrorist celebrity pantheon overshadowed by Hezbollah’s starring role in the Lebanon extravaganza — particularly at a time when Al Qaeda is already under considerable pressure to prove it still has political and operational relevance. But there’s really only way to show the world who the real scourge of the Jews and Crusaders is: By executing a major terrorist attack, either in Israel (hard) America (less hard) or Britain (even less hard — although something bigger than a couple of pipe bombs in the Tube would probably be necessary to make the point.)

The bottom line is that like any fading rock group, Al Qaeda badly needs a hit to avoid being permanently supplanted in the public eye by its Shi’a rival, which is setting the charts ablaze, so to speak. If the original band or its various spin offs have any ambitious projects on the drawing boards, now might be the opportune time to put them into production. Which means it’s at least possible that the silent party won’t remain silent much longer.

One thing our neocon overlords have never really given a damn about it’s al Qaeda. I doubt any of them are giving it a second thought right now either.

Sweet dreams.

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Frat Boy Prick

I guess he thought she was just another one of his office wives.

Check out the look on his face. Does he look like he’s “just having fun” or does he look like he’s putting the uppity bitch in her place?

This woman is the Chancellor of Germany. What do you suppose you need to do to get treated with respect by this asshole?

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Personal Conviction

by digby

Adding to my post below about Joe Lieberman’s views of “life” issues, reader Dover Bitch sent this for us to think about:

I must pass this one along to you because I think it really shows what’s in Lieberman’s mind and why Alito got a free pass from the Gang of 14. It also shows why Planned Parenthood and NARAL are clueless.

Here’s what Lieberman said on the Senate floor back on Oct. 20, 1999:

“I remember I first dealt with these issues when I was a State senator in Connecticut in the 1970s, after the Roe v. Wade decision was first passed down by the Supreme Court, and the swelter of conflicting questions: What is the appropriate place for my convictions about abortion, my personal conviction that potential life begins at conception and, therefore, my personal conviction that all abortions are unacceptable? How do I relate that to my role as a lawmaker, to the limits of the law, to the right of privacy that the Supreme Court found in Roe v. Wade?”

Lieberman has voted in line with Roe as a matter of constitutionality, but not as a matter of respect for a woman’s right to control her own body. And the way to satisfy both his own convictions and his respect for the rule of constitutional law is to allow justices like Alito end up on the Supreme Court and overturn Roe.

This explains why he was able to say he was “reassured” by Alito’s vague statements prior to the hearings:

Alito met privately with the senators, both supporters of abortion rights. Afterward Lieberman quoted Alito as having told him that Roe v. Wade ”was a precedent on which people, a lot of people, relied . . . for decades and therefore deserved great respect.”

Other politicians have said they don’t personally believe in abortion but they support a woman’s right to choose based on the principle of personal autonomy or an inherent right to privacy. Lieberman’s rationale (like other Blue State Republicans) is based on a “respect for precedent” and the rule of law, not the principle underlying it.

When the forced pregnancy forces finally get a majority (with Lieberman’s help) and Alito votes to overturn Roe, Joe will appear before the cameras and dolefully endorse the decision saying that as much as he has supported abortion rights in the past and is disappointed the court chose to reverse, he’s always said that the court’s decisions must be respected.

If you don’t believe in the underlying principle, then it’s all just a matter of paperwork, isn’t it?

Lieberman always gets to have it both ways, doesn’t he?

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