Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

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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Crazed Secular Base

by digby

Democrats are held hostage by their secular base and need to distance themselves from it in order to win over all the religious southerners who left the Democrats when the atheists took over. Happy birthday Karl.

Stung by their loss in the 2004 presidential election, a growing number of prominent Democrats are, well, finding religion in religion. And with polls saying that 70% of Americans want their president to have “strong religious beliefs,” it’s not hard to deduce that they just might be on to something.

[…]

What Democrats won’t say, however, is that the secular posturing Obama is railing against is more a function of the party’s desire to appease a powerful, but relatively small, constituency than it is a deeply held, widely shared ideological stance. Just as the Republican Party pays obeisance to the demands of the 37% of its base that is white evangelical Christian, the Democrats feel they must not offend the 22% of their core voters who claim no religious affiliation. Why not? Because although they make up less than one-quarter of the coalition, these secular Democrats are much more likely than others to be high-level party activists.

Before I delve into the rest of this, here’s a little known fact:

Americans almost all say religion matters, yet more people than ever are opting out. Not just out of the pews. Out from under a theological roof altogether. In 2001, more than 29.4 million Americans said they had no religion — more than double the number in 1990, and more than Methodists, Lutherans and Episcopalians all added up — according to the American Religious Identification Survey 2001 (ARIS).

Here’s another one:

The largest growing religious cohort in the United States is “non-religious”, doubling in the past decade and growing stronger. And it’s particularly true in the western states where there is a growing preference for “spirituality” over formal religion.

Contrast this with the studies that show Protestants losing ground for decades, perhaps stabilizing now, but certainly not growing, while Catholics remain fairly stable, but divided politically. The Barna group, a Christian organization that does the most in-depth polling on religion in America recently wrote:

“There does not seem to be revival taking place in America. Whether that is measured by church attendance, born again status, or theological purity, the statistics simply do not reflect a surge of any noticeable proportions.

If we are to look at the electoral landscape, we will see that the hard core religious cohort is most influential in the south, which is no surprise. But if you take a look at this interesting map, created by USA today, you’ will see that “non-religious” is a rather large minority in the west and midwest swing states

Ok. That’s out of the way. From a purely pragmatic standpoint, it does not make a whole lot of sense to insult a fairly large and growing faction of your own coalition. And if you look at an electoral map, the places where this is most important are the places where the Democrats have the best chance of changing the map from Red to Blue.

It should also go without saying that secularists are decent, hardworking Americans just like the religious folk. If you aren’t careful with this kind of talk you could find yourself making arguments like this:

Right now, there are 50 Democrats in the Senate. How many would be there without African-American voters? … Without the African-American vote, the number of Democrats in the Senate would be reduced from 50 to 37.

As Fred at Slactivist points out:

This is a conversation between Schneider and Woodruff on behalf of people who look like Schneider and Woodruff. The us-and-them subtext is only barely “sub.” Marshall’s description is dead on — they’re not comparing black voters with white voters, they’re comparing black voters with “real” (legitimate, truly American) voters. Separate and unequal.

You will never, ever hear Woodruff and Schneider discussing the hypothetical makeup of the Senate “without the white vote.” You will never hear this from Schneider:

“What would have happened if no whites had voted in 2000? … A Florida recount? Not necessary.”

Underlying all of this is a hugely suggestive, but largely unexplored, fact: Black voters overwhelmingly favor the Democratic Party.

Why this might be so is such a potentially explosive question that it is usually evaded with sleight of hand — “black voters have traditionally voted for Democrats.” That “traditionally” merely puts off the question without answering it (“turtles all the way down”).

The two most obvious possible answers to this question are considered impolite and impolitic — one answer is blatantly racist, the other implies that a major political party is implicitly racist. So don’t expect Judy Woodruff or Bill Schneider to have the courage to ask such a question any time soon.

Perhaps the question should broached in this case too. Why do the vast majority secularists vote for the Democrats? Could it possibly be for the same reason that African Americans do? Could it be that the Republican Party is so implicitly or explicitly religiously intolerant that they have no place in it?

Rodriguez continues:

But the Democratic delegation that nominated South Dakota Sen. George McGovern for president at the ’72 convention represented a profound shift from what had been the cultural consensus in American politics. Whereas only 5% of Americans could be considered secular in 1972, fully 24% of first-time Democratic delegates that year were self-identified agnostics, atheists or people who rarely, if ever, set foot in a house of worship. This new activist base encouraged a growing number of Democratic politicians to tone down their appeal to religious voters and to seek a higher wall separating church and state. With little regard for the traditionalist sensitivities of religious people within or outside of the party, the Democrats also embraced progressive stances on feminism and homosexuality that the public had never openly debated.

Over the next generation, the shift in the Democratic Party pushed many religious voters, including the traditionally Democratic bloc of Southern evangelicals, into the arms of the Republican Party.

But I thought it was the “strident secular rhetoric,” rather than the actual stands on civil rights that resulted in the departure of the Southern evangelicals. (And by all means, let’s not talk about the black elephant sitting in the middle of the room.)

But does Obama’s appeal to religious voters mean that if Democrats want to win they have to adopt the positions of the religious right? Absolutely not.[thank God! — d] The good news is that the vast majority of Americans are sitting out the culture wars. The real combatants are actually minority constituencies within each respective political party — the secularists among the Democrats and the evangelicals in the GOP. Look closely at surveys on religiously charged issues and you’ll find that all religious voters don’t think alike.

No kidding. But this person believes that there is a significant sub-set of religious voters who are pro-choice, pro-gay rights and pro-civil rights who are voting Republican because of these crazed atheists who are holding the Democrats hostage. Except I’ve never seen any evidence that such people exist.

Now, are there pro-choice, pro-gay rights Republicans who vote for the Republicans because of taxes? Sure. National security? Absolutely. You can easily split the baby that way. Some of these voters no doubt consider themselves religious too, and maybe they think the Democrats are hostile to religion as well. But that’s not the reason they are voting Republican. It’s these people who are sitting out the culture wars, not this fantasy faction of pro-choice, gay religious voters who would happily vote for Democrats if it only it weren’t for the atheist extremists in their midst.

If you are voting on the basis of somebody else’s religious belief, you are neck deep in the culture war, by definition. And Republicans who are neck deep in the culture war are social conservatives.

But hey, Greg, thanks for giving Karl the nice present. I’m sure the wingnuts will put this new “crazed secularist base” meme to good use. The media will latch on to it as a way to point out that both parties are equally to blame for the polarized atmosphere.

And choice will go on the chopping block. Anybody who thinks that they can woo Republicans by publicly slapping down this atheist straw man is a fool. If the party insists on going in this direction the social conservatives will insist they show their good intentions with something real. They always do. The death penalty is off the table. So are guns. The uterus is next on the list.

Update: Via Atrios I see that Elton has already trod this ground:

So what’s going on here? Rodriguez makes his real problem clear enough: he is not happy that “Democrats feel they must not offend the 22% of their core voters who claim no religious affiliation.” Go ahead, offend them, he recommends. Tear down this wall separating church and state that only the activist base cares about. Piss on your secular supporters – where else can they go, anyway? – and in return you’ll gain a whole bunch of shiny new religious voters like me, says Mr. Rodriguez.

Stark, but there you have it. Although there was no obvious good reason for stirring this particular pot at this particular time, the Democratic Party is now confronted with a choice. It can change course and become more theocracy-friendly on the advice of people who hear voices in their heads that others cannot discern – I refer, of course, to the “stridently secular rhetoric” – or it can continue to best respect all its diverse supporters by, as a party, neither endorsing nor rejecting any particular belief system or lack thereof.

In other words – walk away from your core voters, or not. Take your pick, Democratic Party.

updateII: Jim Snowden writes a nice short historical summary of the real American political history since 1972. I think you’ll find it a bit more recognizabe than the Martian version of Gregory Rodriguez.

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In Plain Sight

by digby

When are Americans going to take the neocons seriously?

I’m not talking about the Republican party here or the movement conservatives. I’m speaking specifically of the group that can be called the true neocons of the era: The PNAC signatories and their supporters throughout the rightwing think tank intelligensia.

I’ve been writing about these guys online from practically the first moment I went online back in the 90’s. My friends thought I was a tin-foil nutter and at times, I thought I was too. The sheer grandiosity of their scheme was awesome.

Despite a reputation for Straussian opacity, the truth is that they have always made their plans known. There is no mystery about what they are about. To a shocking degree they have successfully promoted their agenda within the Republican establishment for the last two decades. And in the last six years we have seen them act without hesitation to opportunistically advance their strategic goals, regardless of the price.

These guys have been around for a long time, but I honestly never thought they would ever be granted the kind of power they would need to do what they sought to do.

How foolish of me.

Today, Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, one of the many scholars and experts whe were consistently right about Iraq (and ignored by the media and the punditocisy even today) writes:

Neocons Resurrect Plans For Regional War In The Middle East

In 1996, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser (all later senior officials in the Bush administration) had a plan for how to destroy Hezbollah: Invade Iraq. They wrote a report to the newly elected Likud government in Israel calling for “a clean break” with the policies of negotiating with the Palestinians and trading land for peace.

The problem could be solved “if Israel seized the strategic initiative along it northern borders by engaging Hizballah (sic), Syria, and Iran, as the principal agents of aggression in Lebanon.” The key, they said, was to “focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right — as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions.” They called for “reestablishing the principle of preemption.” They promised that the successes of these wars could be used to launch campaigns against Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, reshaping “the strategic balance in the Middle East profoundly.”

Now, with the U.S. bogged down in Iraq, with Bush losing control of world events, and with the threats to national security growing worse, no one could possibly still believe this plan, could they? Think again.

William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, is still pushing this radical vision. He now uses the excuse of Hezbollah terrorist attacks — what he calls “Iran’s Proxy War” — to push the United States deeper into a regional war against Iran and Syria:

We might consider countering this act of Iranian aggression with a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. Why wait? Does anyone think a nuclear Iran can be contained? That the current regime will negotiate in good faith? It would be easier to act sooner rather than later. Yes, there would be repercussions — and they would be healthy ones, showing a strong America that has rejected further appeasement.

Perle has already weighed in in a June 25 Washington Post editorial decrying Bush’s “ignominious retreat” on Iran. He, too, wants war. Newt Gingrich on Meet the Press this Sunday said we were already in World War III and that the US needed to take direct action against North Korea and Iran. Less well known pundits have flooded cable news and talk radio this weekend beating the war drums. Meanwhile, David Wurmser is ensconced in Vice-President Cheney’s office, and his neoconservative colleague Elliot Abrams (the convicted Iran-Contra felon who urged war with Iraq in a 1998 letter to President Bill Clinton) directs Middle East policy on the National Security Council staff.

The neoconservatives are now hoping to use the Israeli-Lebanon conflict as the trigger to launch a U.S. war against Syria, Iran or both. These profoundly dangerous policies have to be exposed and stopped before they do even more harm to U.S. national security then they already have.

We will never know for sure all the reasons we found ourselves in this mess. There are many moving parts in the Bush administration. But you have to admit, if you step back and look, the neocon faction, of all the others, have had their way almost unimpeded. And no amount of failure in real terms has slowed their pace.

They are very adept at taking advantage of circumstances to advance their goals. prior to 9/11 Islamic fundamentalism was a footnote in their plans. They had arranged their “threat matrix” around China and “Rogue States” (hence the fully formed plan for Iraq before the smoke had even cleared.) But they had always known that they needed a galvanizing crisis to put the nation on the war footing needed to carry out their vision. They were agile enough to adopt the GWOT when it presented itself and they have been agile enough to take advantage of new circumstances to advance their goals ever since.

Meanwhile, the titular president of the United States says something so stupid, even for him, that it’s crystal clear that the administration cannot effectively stop these people. From Ezra:

A live mic at the G8 Summit caught Tony Blair and George Bush talking privately about the conflict in Lebanon. Given the relative opacity of Bush’s thoughts on the situation, the frank discussion offered a fair amount of insight and a couple nuggets of news, including that he was going to send Condi to the region (or possibly the UN — but she’s going somewhere to deal with this), that he blamed neither Israel nor Lebanon for the violence, and that “the irony is what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it’s over.”

That’s a big deal: Bush believes it within the Syrian government’s power to calm the conflict. Theoretically, that should have major implications for American diplomacy and, possibly, policy.

(Ezra says “theoretically” because the focus of the event has been on the fact that Bush said “shit.”) But think about this. Bush is at a meeting of the world’s most powerful leaders and he says, off the cuff, something that betrays such a misunderstanding of the situation that it’s clear he hasn’t even been properly briefed. Condi, too, has been incoherent. So who’s really running the show?

I think we all know his name is Dick Cheney, original signatory of the PNAC and the man who stated baldly that he came into office with ideas about executive power and America’s place as a sole superpower that he’s been percolating since the late 70’s. Cheney has been playing a long game, much longer than anyone else in the administration. Like a shark, he is single minded, focused and relentless. By his standards, and the standards of his multi-national corporate and neocon theorist patrons, he has been tremendously successful so far. They do not see the dangers staring them in the face, or if they do they truly believe the risk (and the blood and money) are worth it. They have no doubts.

It’s tempting to write them off as a bunch of kooks, but it is their kooky vision that is right now playing out in the mid-east. It’s not that they are necessarily directing it, to be sure. But they are always prepared to take advantage of circumstances that advance it. And like all historical leaders of aMarch of Folly they believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that everything will turn out ok in the end.

Update: Via John Amato and Arthur Silber, I see that Rush Limbaugh is priming the base for the rapture. He’s gotcher Strauss for ya, right here.

This plays perfectly into Karl’s plan as well, by the way. Beating the war drum is the only card he’s really got to play — national security and foreign policy are the only issues in which the Republicans are even pulling close to the Dems in the polls. How serendipitous death and destruction always are for Republicans.

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