Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Change Agents

by digby

All this handwringing amongst the cognoscenti about the barbarians at the gates ruining everything for the Democratic party (again) and what do I find in my mailbox but this strategy memo from insider Dem establishment polling outfit, Democracy Corps run by none other than Carville and Stan Greenberg. And lo and behold, here’s what they have to say:

The Democrats need to catch up with the country, which wants to vote for outsiders, is demanding change and ready to respond to the Democrats’ message and definition of the election. All things considered, this is not a bad problem to have, but it requires a new intensity and focus to grab ahold of the forces for change and take the Democrats to a new level.

Change dynamic one: The Iraq war. This is the biggest voting issue for Democrats (and independents and change voters). While voters are divided on policy issues(like timetable for withdrawal), the continuing attention to the war increases dissatisfaction and elevates the change vote.

This means that it is not a loser to run against the war. It has always been self-evident to me, but for some reason the Democratic leadership and the punditocrisy can’t seem to grasp this. Indeed, this Lamont challenge may just help other candidates around the country because it shows that the Democratic party is serious about challenging the Republican “stay the course” policy.

Change dynamic two: Washington is working for big corporations and the privileged, not the people or the country. There is an abiding sense that things are out of balance in Washington, with political leaders working for the big corporate interests and the privileged, rather than trying to have America work for everyone. This is the top reason (along with rising costs) for wanting to change the Republican Congress.

Change dynamic three: They’re not taking care of America. Across a whole range of issues – Iraq, Katrina, the borders and immigration, and trade and manufacturing – voters think the political leaders are failing to step up and take care of America. This is why the House Republicans are trying to keep immigration focused on the borders.

Change dynamic four: This economy brings you high gas and health care costs and financial pressure for the middle class. Because the elites, journalists and the Republicans think this is a strong economy, the campaign thus far has neglected the great frustration with rising costs and financial pressures – for many groups, the top reasons to change the Congress.

Change dynamic five: They’ve bankrupted the country. There is a sense of foreboding in the country that this Republican government has bankrupted the country, run up the deficits and passed on our debts and obligations to future generations. They have made a mess of things financially and hurt the country. This is one of the top worries about any future Congress, and one of the key things voters want to put a halt to.

Now all that’s really funny to me because it is pretty much exactly the constellation of issues the netroots have been plugging for months now. As it turns out we aren’t a bunch of out of touch retreads who have no sense of what the silent majority really wants — it turns out we are the ones in tune with the zeitgeist. All these Lieberman defenders of the status quo are the ones who are failing to make the sale to the American people because they don’t have a fucking clue what the American people are looking for.

The Republicans are trying to deny Democrats the voters they need. Understand that those undecided and dislodged voters do respond to these conservative issues, yet these are the voters Democrats need to raise their vote. They have not closed the deal because the image of the Democrats has not improved over the last year and the number of Democratic identifiers has not risen.

Thus, Democrats must do better in identifying with the forces for change and making them matter in the election. If they do that, they will consolidate their vote, win over the undecided, increase turnout and demoralize the Republicans. But Democrats must also act aggressively to confound and undermine the efficacy of the conservative issues, thus allowing these voters to vote for change. That combination can take the Democrats to a dramatic level.

I would suggest that the whining about the horrible hippie horde that is challenging poor old Joe Lieberman might not be the best way to do this.

There’s a lot in the memo that’s quite interesting, but I’m going to highlight this because it’s an argument I’ve been howling about for months now, and have been increasingly demoralized because it seems Democrats are running as fast as they can from it:

The increased attention to Iraq, even when Republicans control the debate, hurts them when people decide their congressional vote. The country is divided on setting a deadline (50 to 49 percent) and we win an actual exchange on the issue by just 4 points (50 to 46 percent).

However, when we include accountability in the message – “exercise oversight and push for a new direction, not more of the same” rather than a deadline – Democrats’ advantage doubles to 8 points. More importantly, when we promise to send investigative committees to find the missing money, investigate the lack of armor and no-bid contracts, the lead nearly doubles again to 14 points (55 to 41 percent).

For some reason the Democratic leadership is convinced that if they run explicitly on accountability — on any subject — they will be seen as sourpusses and nobody wants to vote for a downer who will spend a bunch of time and money trying to sort out the atrocities of the last few years. This is clearly not the case. People are frustrated but they have no reason to believe that the Democrats will do anything about this situation in Washington. Why should they?

Up to now, I’ve only been going on instinct, but I have always felt that they will not get the turnout they need unless they make an explict case for why the Democrats will be able to make a difference if they win this election. I simply can’t see how they can do that without running on accountability. People know that Bush will be in for two more years, so any hope of enacting a positive agenda is impossible. He’d love to use that rusty veto pen of his. This is a referendum on the Republicans and we should run against them, hard.

I think war profiteering is a surefire winner. People know this has been a windfall for corporations and this is an excellent way to consolidate the Republican culture of corruption and the dissatisfaction with the war(the two most important issues according to this poll) under one umbrella. I think people are becoming outraged — they just don’t see that the Democrats will do anything about it. (I would also like to see a Democratic majority judiciary committee look into the abuse of presidential powers — hold some hearings, air this thing out in public. For the good of the country…)

In fairness, there is a bunch of stuff in the strategy memo about “reasurring” voters that we are against gay marriage, raising taxes on the middle class, sex and violence on TV and precipitously withdrawing from Iraq. The usual boilerplate defensive moves. They claim that these issues are salient with seniors and blue collar workers and must be finessed. I would think that these are the kinds of issues that each candiate needs to take into consideration depending on the make up of his or her constituency. The national party line should be 100% offense.

The good news is that we aren’t nuts. The people really are looking for change. We in the netroots and the grassroots are agitating for that change — and change is painful for entrenched interests so they are fighting us all the way. That’s ok. It’s the way it works. We will just keep hammering this and hope that candidates are listening to their potential constituents and that the establishment is reading the polls.

Last night on CBS the analysis was that “the left” is pulling the Democrats away from the mainstream and the Republicans would win going away because the “moderates” would be scared off. That analysis is wrong. These numbers quite clearly show that the grassroots of the Democratic party are not pulling the party away from the mainstream, they are pulling it toward it. This isn’t about left vs right. It’s about change vs. status quo.

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Pulitzer Prize Winning Senators

by digby

Everybody’s talking about the fact that Jon “Box Turtle” Kyl and Huckleberry Graham wrote a little play and tried to insert it into the congressional record as a transcript in the Hamdan case. I mentioned this in passing last week in my post about Bush’s “unusual” interpretation of the decision (which when you consider his interpretive signing statements, may be less of a joke than that I originally made it.)

Christy at FDL writes:

Knowingly filing false information with a court is grounds for disbarment in my state, and I would be very surprised if Arizona and South Carolina didn’t have the same standards — this sort of behavior skews the entire legal process and it cannot be tolerated. Period.

I cannot emphasize enough how much this is NOT done as an attorney, and how it clouds every single thing you ever do from that point forward. No judge, anywhere, is going to believe anything either man ever does or files after this without triple checking it. And when you don’t have your integrity and your honesty as an attorney, you are useless to your clients over the long run.

Actually that’s already happened. At the end of this informative John Dean article, he writes:

Out of an apparent concern for interbranch comity, the High Court has chosen to ignore the bogus brief filed by Senators Graham and Kyl, rather than reprimanding the Senators. Nevertheless, when Graham and Kyl sought to file the very same brief, a month later, with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columba, Slate’s Emily Bazelon reports that court “issued an unusual order rejecting” their amicus brief alone, although they accepted five others.

No one familiar with this remarkable behavior by Graham and Kyl can doubt why the court did not want to hear from these senators.

Does anyone remember the entire alumni association of the Barbizon school of blond former prosecutors hissing and shrieking in unison over the threat to the legal system posed by Monica Lewinsky filing a false deposition in the dismissed Paula Jones case? I do. You see, it was an assault on the rule of law to file false documents in a court proceeding. Nothing was more of a slap in the face to our constitution and our American system of justice than to try to defraud the court.

Now Huck and the Turtle were only dealing with a case of the most serious magnitude imaginable, a direct constitutional question of the separation of pwoers that was headed all the way to the Supreme Court to decide. There were, to my knowledge, no blow jobs involved. (There have been allegations of sexual humiliation and torture. But only the good kind.) And Huck and the Turtle are, after all, Republicans, which means that when they defraud the court it is for the country’s own good.

Still, I will never get over the rank hypocrisy of Huckelberry Graham, the unctuous House Manager, who droned on day after day in the impeachment hearings pretending to care deeply about the rule ‘o law. One hopes that Christy is right and that any time the government tries to cite a Huckleberry colloquy going forward that the opposing counsel brings this up and requests that it be checked for veracity. Huck and his partner The Box Turtle have shown they have a remarkable talent for writing fictional dialog.

Update: I was remiss in not mentioning that this issue was discussed a couple of months ago on other blogs such as Slate and Unclaimed Territory. I was aware of it and I just assumed that everyone else was as well.

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Moderation In The Pursuit Of Ego Is No Virtue

by digby

Neil the Ethical Werewolf, subbing over a Ezra’s place yesterday, made some excellent points about the Lieberman challenge:

Criticizing “extremists” in your party and making opponents of the war look like unpatriotic radicals does nothing to help Claire McCaskill and Harold Ford win their Senate races. By painting a picture of unpatriotic extreme antiwar Democrats, Lieberman damages the party’s brand and hurts Democrats everywhere.

Triangulation makes sense as a strategy for individual candidates, but it’s not a strategy that an entire party can engage in. In a country with an established two-party system, the media will define the space of moderate opinion relative to the parties themselves. No party will be able to gain a lasting reputation for moderation by compromising and moving towards its opponents. All that’ll happen is that the space of moderation will be narrowed, and opinions that previously were considered moderate will be regarded as extreme.

[…]

I don’t want my safe-seat Democrats triangulating into moderate positions. I want them to explore new territory on the left, so that when our Arkansas and Nebraska Senators triangulate off of them, they end up in positions that are fairly good, or at least non-destructive. And that’s why I have no use for Joe Lieberman. Where Lamont would stretch the field leftward as a moderate personality with progressive views, Lieberman compresses it and perpetuates negative stereotypes of Democrats. It’s time to remove him from politics, and threaten anyone who follows his path with a similar fate. There’s more.

One of the things I think has not been discussed is the value of Joe not being elected as a Democrat if he wins the general election as an independent. Him not being allowed to speak for the party is a positive, he only hurts the ballclub. He’ll have to join the GOP team and just be one of a large crowd of rabid liberal haters. I’m sure it will not be nearly as ego gratifying. That’s a shame.

I realize that these Lieberman posts may be somewhat boring to some of you. But it’s important to me that grassroots Dems arm themselves with the cogent argument for why we are supporting this primary challenge. There is a willful misunderstanding on the part of the MSM and the establishment as to our motives, which does not surprise me, and I think it’s important to use the platforms we have as bloggers to make our case. Sometimes that requires redundancy. I hope you will bear with me, and consider the arguments I make and to which I link. I think we can change this silly out-moded narrative the establishment has concocted if we work at it. At least, I think it’s worth a try.

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Lalalalalala

by digby

…The situation in Iraq is a lot better, different than it was a year ago. The Iraqis held three elections. They formed a unity government. They are on the way to building a free and independent Iraq. Their military — two-thirds of their military is now ready, on their own, to lead the fight with some logistical backing from the U.S. or stand up on their own totally. That’s progress. Joe Lieberman, July 6, 2006

Brutality and corruption are rampant in Iraq’s police force, with abuses including the rape of female prisoners, the release of terrorism suspects in exchange for bribes, assassinations of police officers and participation in insurgent bombings, according to confidential Iraqi government documents detailing more than 400 police corruption investigations.

A recent assessment by State Department police training contractors echoes the investigative documents, concluding that strong paramilitary and insurgent influences within the force and endemic corruption have undermined public confidence in the government.

Officers also have beaten prisoners to death, been involved in kidnapping rings, sold thousands of stolen and forged Iraqi passports and passed along vital information to insurgents, the Iraqi documents allege.

The documents, which cover part of 2005 and 2006, were obtained by The Times and authenticated by current and former police officials.

The alleged offenses span dozens of police units and hundreds of officers, including beat cops, generals and police chiefs. Officers were punished in some instances, but the vast majority of cases are either under investigation or were dropped because of lack of evidence or witness testimony.

The investigative documents are the latest in a string of disturbing revelations of abuse and corruption by Iraq’s Interior Ministry, a Cabinet-level agency that employs 268,610 police, immigration, facilities security and dignitary protection officers.

Oh, and there’s even more progress! McJoan at Kos notes this good news:

A mob of gunmen went on a brazen daytime rampage through a predominantly Sunni Arab district of western Baghdad on Sunday, pulling people from their cars and homes and killing them in what officials and residents called a spasm of revenge by Shiite militias for the bombing of a Shiite mosque on Saturday. Hours later, two car bombs exploded beside a Shiite mosque in another Baghdad neighborhood in a deadly act of what appeared to be retaliation.

While Baghdad has been ravaged by Sunni-Shiite bloodletting in recent months, even by recent standards the violence here on Sunday was frightening, delivered with impunity by gun-wielding vigilantes on the street. In the culture of revenge that has seized Iraq, residents all over the city braced for an escalation in the cycle of retributive mayhem between the Shiites and Sunnis that has threatened to expand into civil war….

Far be it from me to question Senator Lieberman’s analysis, but you’d think he’d at least acknowledge that things are just a tad dicey in Iraq right now as he’s smugly scolding his fellow Democrats for undermining the president at the nation’s peril. Optimism is a character trait. Delusion is a diagnosis.

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What Else Are They Up To?

by digby

TPM Muckraker connects the dots and comes up with who might have blown the whistle to Peter Hoekstra — and what it probably was about:

I’m not the only person to note that five days before Hoekstra wrote his now-famous letter, NSA whistleblower Russ Tice — James “State of War” Risen’s source for his NYT domestic wiretapping story — told inside-the-beltway pub Congress Daily he was planning to tell congressional staffers “unlawful activity occurred at the agency under the supervision of Gen. Michael Hayden beyond what has been publicly reported, while hinting that it might have involved the illegal use of space-based satellites and systems to spy on U.S. citizens.”

Space based satellites and systems to spy on U.S. citizens. I’m sure these satellites are only tracking terrorists.

Clearly, this isn’t warrantless listening on phone conversations or reading emails. That’s covered by the other secret, illegal NSA spying program. So what the hell else are they doing? Is this some sort of tracking system?

Keep in mind that they are funnelling huge wads of cash to local and state police agencies for “homeland security” as well. How many of these domestic spy programs do you suppose they need?

I’m beginning to think the only way we’ll ever get to the bottom of this is if we start a rumor that they are tracking gun owners. That’s the only thing that worries Republicans enough that the congress will do something about it. If spy satellites are illegally monitoring people’s homes or offices in some way, they believe Americans should be happy to comply. You have to be willing to give up some of your civil liberties so that the government can keep you safe — except from gunfire, for which you should take personal responsibility by being heavily armed and prepared to kill in self-defense. The government has no business messing with the second amendment. The rest, however, are up for grabs.

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Yes, It’s Relevant

by digby

I am undoubtedly much more liberal than Jim Webb. But we are in agreement (and have been for years) about the ramifications of this war and the need for some accountability:

GS: Senator Allen seemed to say that you were part of the ‘I told you so’ caucus on Iraq.

JW: Well, I think there are a lot of people who don’t want to be reminded that they were warned. I think it’s relevant, when you talk about how you build national strategy, and how you use the military — to talk about how these decisions should be made. There should be some sort of accountability.

Is that so hard?

I would really like to see Democrats everywhere making that argument. If people see that Democrats are going to take over and examine where this country went wrong and that they are prepared to work to develop a real national security strategy, for the first time in many years I think people are ready to listen.

George Allen’s “I told you so caucus” line is whiny and weak. Dems have a good chance to challenge Rove’s persistant, schoolyard nonsense this time. I would love to see them do it.

Jim Webb is the perfect example of a Democrat who is taking it to the Republicans — and in the process proves that there is no ideological litmus test other than a fierce desire on the part of the rank and file to stop taking crap from the GOP on national security — particularly since their national security strategy is dangerous and immoral. They are as weak as they have ever been on that issue and it’s past time to make a move. Webb is one of those guys who’s willing to call them on their delusional nonsense.

I would remind you what he wrote back in 2004:

Bush arguably has committed the greatest strategic blunder in modern memory. To put it bluntly, he attacked the wrong target. While he boasts of removing Saddam Hussein from power, he did far more than that. He decapitated the government of a country that was not directly threatening the United States and, in so doing, bogged down a huge percentage of our military in a region that never has known peace. Our military is being forced to trade away its maneuverability in the wider war against terrorism while being placed on the defensive in a single country that never will fully accept its presence.

There is no historical precedent for taking such action when our country was not being directly threatened. The reckless course that Bush and his advisers have set will affect the economic and military energy of our nation for decades. It is only the tactical competence of our military that, to this point, has protected him from the harsh judgment that he deserves.

And that’s not holding up any longer.

This is big, important stuff and its worth fighting over. Rather than talk about how we need to resurrect the ghosts of George Kennan and Harry Truman and relive the glory days of 1949, maybe we could just live in the here and now and deal with what’s before us. The Republicans fucked up hugely. Somebody has to clean up the mess and it isn’t going to be them. They refuse to admit error. So let’s run on that.

I may not agree with Jim Webb’s every position on some issues I hold dear — he’s a Red State Dem, after all — and I’m sure there will be times when I will be arguing against him if he winds up in the senate. But I think he is a breath of fresh air in the Democratic party and I’m glad to have him. I know that cuts against the prefered narrative that says I’m purging all the good decent centrists in the party for my own personal gain, but it just ain’t so. I’m just looking for a few good men and women who aren’t afraid to take it to the Republicans. Jim Webb is my kind of fighting Dem.

Update: For a serious look at this concept of “judgment” vs “intelligence” see this post, and many others linked within, by Arthur Silber, particularly on the seeming inevitability of an attack on Iran. It will sober you up. This game ain’t over.

Unless there is accountability, unless there is a public assessment of the misjudgment that brought us Iraq (and potentially Iran) we will continue on this fumbling path where cheap political opportunists like Karl Rove can lead this nation around by the nose to fulfill the domestic political needs of his candidates and the coffers of his contributors. It has to stop.

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Sorry It Bothers You

by digby

… but tough shit.

From Jonathan Chait today:

But if Lieberman’s allies are irritating and often wrongheaded, alas, his enemies are worse. Lieberman recently declared, “I have loyalties that are greater than those to my party.” Markos Moulitsas, the lefty blogger from Daily Kos who has appeared in a Lamont commercial and has made Lieberman’s defeat a personal crusade, posted this quote on his website in the obvious belief that it’s self-evidently absurd. But shouldn’t we all have greater loyalties than the one to our party — say, to our country? Partisanship isn’t nothing, but must it be everything?

No, but it must be something when you are facing a Republican party that is systematically destroying everything the Democratic party believes in. I don’t know why this is so hard for DC insiders to understand. Joe Lieberman actively undermines the Democratic Party, to its detriment and for his own purposes. He could support the Iraq war, for instance, without lecturing those of us who are opposed to it from the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal for gawd’s sake! Are the optics of that not crystal clear?

It’s time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge he’ll be commander-in-chief for three more years.We undermine the President’s credibility at our nation’s peril.

Who’s being attacked, there? Are we supposed to just shut up and take that patented Rove spin sitting down? That op-ed went far beyond betraying party loyalty to the point at which I would say he is betraying loyalty to this country. Trying to quell dissent is not only undemocratic, it is unAmerican.

And Lieberman has taken that unacceptable position over and over again during the last decade or so, making a fetish out his “independence” which has manifested itself as GOP useful idiot time and again. He often “triangulates” against rank and file Democrats, making common cause with the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter. He uses liberals as his favorite foils happily helping the Republicans to demonize half of his party.

It’s not about voting records or score cards. It’s about a man who lied in the recent debate about his position on social security, of all things, and portrayed himself as having not been one of the last holdouts against the Democratic plan to preserve it as is. Here’s Josh Marshall on that subject:

Last year, when I devoted most of this blog for several months to the Social Security story, Lieberman was one of most frustrating and inexplicable hold outs. I’m much more willing than others to let Democrats in marginal states and districts take positions suited to their constituencies rather than those embraced by Democrats nationally. To me that just makes sense on every level. The premise of my thinking on Social Security, however, was that there was just no political downside to supporting Social Security no matter how red a state you were from. Abortion rights or gay rights may stand principle against expediency or even political survival. But Social Security was just a gimme, a no-brainer.

Still, when we were going after some of these folks I could see that some of the resistance out of the Fainthearted Faction was based on ingrained habits of political survival and real disinclination to defy a Republican president who still seemed very popular and politically powerful.

But what was Lieberman’s excuse?

We went back and forth with him. I’d talk to his staffers and folks around him and work and work and work to get a straight answer, but just had the hardest time. It was always this statement or that that seemed to support Social Security but really left the door open to some compromise on phase out when you looked at it closely. On and on and on.

And what was the point of that? Certainly it wasn’t political, at least not in the narrow sense. Lieberman didn’t have anything to worry about in Connecticut. If it was ideological, what’s that about? It’s a core Democratic issue. Not a shibboleth or a sacred cow. But a core reason why most Democrats are Democrats.

In the end it just seemed like a desire to be in the mix for some illusory compromise or grand bargain, an ingrained disinclination to take a stand, even in a case when it really mattered. There’s some whiff of indifference to the great challenges of the age, even amidst the atmospherics of concern.

Do you get it Chait? This isn’t an era of bipartisan consensus and when Lieberman reflexively plays this game for what are obviously self-serving reasons, he sells out the party. And I would say, he sells out America. The stakes, as Chait himself writes in this very article are that high:

Even though all but the loopiest Democrat would concede that Bin Laden is more evil than Bush, that doesn’t mean he’s a greater threat. Bin Laden is hiding somewhere in the mountains, has no weapons of mass destruction and apparently very limited numbers of followers capable of striking at the U.S.

Bush, on the other hand, has wreaked enormous damage on the political and social fabric of the country. He has massively mismanaged a major war, with catastrophic consequences; he has strained the fabric of American democracy with his claims of nearly unchecked power and morally corrupt Gilded Age policies. It’s quite reasonable to conclude that Bush will harm the nation more — if not more than Bin Laden would like to, than more than he actually can.

And so what should we do? The electoral college and the senate require that we make room in the Democratic coalition for a fair number of conservative Senators from conservative states and field Democratic presidential candidates who can appeal to at least some voters from those areas as well. We accept that. Chait, however, sees that as a negligible consideration:

Moulitsas and many of his allies insist that they just want Democrats to win. But in fact, they believe that any deviation from the party line — except for a few circumscribed instances, such as Democrats running for office in red states — is an unforgivable crime. They have consigned large chunks of the center-left to enemy status. It is an odd way to go about building a majority.

It’s the only way to go about building a majority that isn’t a carbon copy of the other party. Liberals have been turned into pariahs not just in the country, but among certain center-left (I would argue center-right) politicians who have allowed the party to be unnecessarily dragged to the right out of a failed experiment in third-way politics while the Republicans were playing brute partisan politics. The proof is in the pudding. We are in the minority and have been for quite some time now. And this polarized 50/50 nation always seems to just tilt enough to the right that we get screwed. “Centrists” like Lieberman are the dupes who make that possible.

The rank and file accept that the Democratic coalition is going to have to include conservatives from red states and nobody is arguing that they are not allowed to have latitude in their voting patterns and even in their rhetoric. They represent conservative people. That’s democracy at work. But I don’t see Mary Landrieu or Blanche Lincoln or Ben Nelson writing op-eds in the Wall Street Journal telling dissenters that we are undermining national security by criticizing the war. Even they don’t do that, and they could probably benefit sometimes from triangulating against the liberals. (And we’d grit our teeth and bear it, out of pragmatism.)

But why the fuck should we buckle under to a nationally known Blue State Democrat who votes for conservative right wing judges, supports the war, lectures about morals, compromises on basic human decency for rape victims and uses liberals as his favorite whipping boys and girls? Is it so surprising that the liberals of Connecticut have finally reached their limits?

The real joke in all this is the fact that I don’t think anybody really thought that Lamont had a chance in the beginning and were just hoping to put some pressure on Lieberman to stop kissing Bush on the lips. They were trying to shame him into distancing himself from this crap:

As some of you know, when I first ran for Vice President five years ago, my Democratic opponent was a fine U.S. senator named Joe Lieberman. We disagreed on some issues, but we stand together on this war. After visiting our troops in Iraq last month, Senator Lieberman said, quote, “almost all of the progress in Iraq and throughout the Middle East will be lost if those forces are withdrawn faster than the Iraqi military is capable of securing the country.” He is entirely correct.

It would have taken very little for him to adjust his rhetoric and acknowledge that he’s been too strident in his support for Bush. The polls suggested that anyone with a brain would have done that. Instead, he has been testy and superior, behaving as if he were entitled to the seat — even saying in the debate this week that his old mentor would have counselled Lamont not to run for the good of the party. This from the man who says he doesn’t care what the party decides in the its primary.

This sense of entrenched priviledge and lack of responsiveness to the people is what’s causing problems for the political establishment. It’s not about issues, although the war, being the most important issue to the American people and unpopular by large margin, is logically of great importance. (People are dying, after all.)

Citizens have a right to be heard and if they are not heard, they have a right to try to replace their representatives with someone who hears them. It’s called democracy. The fact that it is seen as a Stalinist purge says more about those who criticize it than those who are doing it.

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“We Don’t Do Body Counts”

by digby

When I read things like this today in the Washington Post by Andrew J. Bacevich, I’m struck by the fact that people like me, and many, many others were talking about this stuff years ago and predicting the problems that would ensue. Now, the neocon experiment, full of inconsistencies and downright silly assumptions, has played out before our very eyes and its failure is there for all to see.

The article above is about one of those little discussed issues in the mainstream media, Iraqi civilian deaths, and how that has affected the ostensible mission in Iraq. Now why this subject hasn’t been an obvious topic in the press or among pundits and thinkers until now, I do not know, but it seems like a pretty obvious problem to me:

The killing at the Samarra checkpoint was not an atrocity; most likely it was an accident, a mistake. Yet plenty of evidence suggests that in Iraq such mistakes have occurred routinely, with moral and political consequences that have been too long ignored. Indeed, conscious motivation is beside the point: Any action resulting in Iraqi civilian deaths, however inadvertent, undermines the Bush administration’s narrative of liberation, and swells the ranks of those resisting the U.S. presence.

Gen. Tommy Franks, who commanded U.S. forces when they entered Iraq more than three years ago, famously declared: “We don’t do body counts.” Franks was speaking in code. What he meant was this: The U.S. military has learned the lessons of Vietnam — where body counts became a principal, and much derided, public measure of success — and it has no intention of repeating that experience. Franks was not going to be one of those generals re-fighting the last war.

Unfortunately, Franks and other senior commanders had not so much learned from Vietnam as forgotten it. This disdain for counting bodies, especially those of Iraqi civilians killed in the course of U.S. operations, is among the reasons why U.S. forces find themselves in another quagmire. It’s not that the United States has an aversion to all body counts. We tally every U.S. service member who falls in Iraq, and rightly so. But only in recent months have military leaders finally begun to count — for internal use only — some of the very large number of Iraqi noncombatants whom American bullets and bombs have killed.

Through the war’s first three years, any Iraqi venturing too close to an American convoy or checkpoint was likely to come under fire. Thousands of these “escalation of force” episodes occurred. Now, Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the commander of U.S. ground forces in Iraq, has begun to recognize the hidden cost of such an approach. “People who were on the fence or supported us” in the past “have in fact decided to strike out against us,” he recently acknowledged.

An occupying army has been shooting civilians indiscriminately (or at least it seems that way) engendering resentment among the population and they are just now recognizing that this might not have been the best idea in the world? Jesus.

This was a conscious decision on the part of military planners, by the way:

In the early days of the insurgency, some U.S. commanders appeared oblivious to the possibility that excessive force might produce a backlash. They counted on the iron fist to create an atmosphere conducive to good behavior. The idea was not to distinguish between “good” and “bad” Iraqis, but to induce compliance through intimidation.

That certainly sounds like the American mindset post 9/11, doesn’t it? (And it sounds like the Republican mindset post WWII) So there’s no big surprise.

But there was something else going on among the ivory tower think tank neocons who were strutting around the world like little Napoleons during this period. They were hyping delusionary conspiracy theories like their pal the nutball Laurie Myelroie’s fantasy BS about Saddam and the first world trade center bombing and calling all the top military brass in to watch “The Battle of Algiers” to take the wrong lessons from it. And, most importantly, they were passing out an ignorant book called “The Arab Mind” throughout the military, which was apparently taken quite seriously by a fair number of officers:

“You have to understand the Arab mind,” one company commander told the New York Times, displaying all the self-assurance of Douglas MacArthur discoursing on Orientals in 1945. “The only thing they understand is force — force, pride and saving face.” Far from representing the views of a few underlings, such notions penetrated into the upper echelons of the American command. In their book “Cobra II,” Michael R. Gordon and Gen. Bernard E. Trainor offer this ugly comment from a senior officer: “The only thing these sand ni**ers understand is force and I’m about to introduce them to it.”

Such crass language, redolent with racist, ethnocentric connotations, speaks volumes. These characterizations, like the use of “gooks” during the Vietnam War, dehumanize the Iraqis and in doing so tacitly permit the otherwise impermissible. Thus, Abu Ghraib and Haditha — and too many regretted deaths, such as that of Nahiba Husayif Jassim.

He doesn’t mention that the word they use now instead of gook is “Hadji” or “Ali Baba.” Same shit, different war. Maybe all wars. But this one is unique in the post war world. We did this one almost alone, based on lies and some hidden agenda which nobody has yet fully explained. Indeed, the consensus seems to be that these starry eyed neocon checkenhawk warriors each had their own reasons for wanting to invade, none of which were legal, moral or politically sellable.

These bully tactics came directly from the likes of Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and other simpleminded conservatives in the leadup to the war. Here’s Sy Hersh writing about Abu Ghraib back in 2004:

The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq. One book that was frequently cited was “The Arab Mind,” a study of Arab culture and psychology, first published in 1973, by Raphael Patai, a cultural anthropologist who taught at, among other universities, Columbia and Princeton, and who died in 1996. The book includes a twenty-five-page chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression. “The segregation of the sexes, the veiling of the women . . . and all the other minute rules that govern and restrict contact between men and women, have the effect of making sex a prime mental preoccupation in the Arab world,” Patai wrote. Homosexual activity, “or any indication of homosexual leanings, as with all other expressions of sexuality, is never given any publicity. These are private affairs and remain in private.”

The Patai book, an academic told me, was “the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior.” In their discussions, he said, two themes emerged—“one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation.”

Here’s an interesting discussion of the book’s bizarre sexual fixation. The fact that so many rightwingers devoured it and believed it says everything you need to know to know about their provincialism and their personal psychological issues:

But the larger point is that no one seems to have cared much about accuracy, neither Patai nor his neocon readers. Patai says more or less what we’ve long wanted to believe, and that was enough. And the objectifying, dehumanizing and contemptuous tone of Patai’s discussion of a people he claims to like is inseparable from his arguments. It is a great tragedy if it influenced American conduct in Iraq.

Well it did. And the tragedy is there for all to see. This strain of self-serving, unsophisticated thinking permeated the ranks of the conservative intelligensia that is running this nation (making it obvious that the reason these people had been mostly denied a place in academia was not because of their politics, but because of their shallow intellects.) As it turns out, George W. Bush’s small mind was emblematic of conservatism at the turn of the century.

Bacevich in the WaPo piece continues:

Moral questions aside, the toll of Iraqi noncombatant casualties has widespread political implications. Misdirected violence alienates those we are claiming to protect. It plays into the hands of the insurgents, advancing their cause and undercutting our own. It fatally undermines the campaign to win hearts and minds, suggesting to Iraqis and Americans alike that Iraqi civilians — and perhaps Arabs and Muslims more generally — are expendable. Certainly, Nahiba Husayif Jassim’s death helped clarify her brother’s perspective on the war. “God take revenge on the Americans and those who brought them here,” he declared after the incident. “They have no regard for our lives.”

Yes, it has had widespread political implications, political implications predicted by many, many of us who could see that sending a bunch of Americans into the heart of the middle east with no knowledge of the culture, a lie for a mission, an officer corps convinced that Arabs were primitive creatures who had to be subdued by brute force and sexual humiliation and a political leadership that lived on starry-eyed dreams of American omnipotence and high-tech fairy dust — was a colossal mistake of epic proportions.

It was all there for people to see. Seymour Hersh saw it and he was called a terrorist by Richard Perle. That was par for the course.

Bacevich concludes:

For all the talk of Iraq being a sovereign nation, foreign occupiers are the ones deciding what an Iraqi life is worth. And although President Bush has remarked in a different context that “every human life is a precious gift of matchless value,” our actions in Iraq continue to convey the impression that civilian lives aren’t worth all that much.

That impression urgently needs to change. To start, the Pentagon must get over its aversion to counting all bodies. It needs to measure in painstaking detail — and publicly — the mayhem we are causing as a byproduct of what we call liberation. To do otherwise, to shrug off the death of Nahiba Husayif Jassim as just one of those things that happens in war, only reinforces the impression that Americans view Iraqis as less than fully human. Unless we demonstrate by our actions that we value their lives as much as the lives of our own troops, our failure is certain.

This was a very good article until this point. Our failure is already certain no matter what we do. The fundamental flaw in this entire enterprise is not how we did it, although the massive failures outlined in this article are so obvious that it’s imperative to discuss them on their own terms. In fact, I worry that what this failure of execution reveals is a military leadership so lacking in intellectual ability and so wracked with primitive racism that this country cannot count on it to actually defend us in case of a real war. The officer corps are supposed to be smart guys, not a bunch of idiots who would read some piece of trash like “The Arab Mind” and actually believe it — much less use it as the basis for tactics on the ground. This is a dangerous situation for America.

However, the fundamental flaw remains the invasion itself, a bad decision from which everything else flows. The lesson is that an illegal, dishonest war of choice is doomed on its own terms. In the modern world outright conquest is impossible and anything else cannot be finessed with spin and wishful thinking.

That we compounded that error with a comic book understanding of the people we were “liberating” and a lack of postwar planning that was criminal in its negligence is just more evidence of the perfidy of this administration and its congressional enablers. But the central problem remains that it is not how we waged the war, it’s that we waged it at all.

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Primary Qualification

by digby

Julia defends Dr. Condoleeza Rice from the nasty rumors that are swirling around her again.

I think it’s ludicrous to suggest that she’s gotten where she is today by any means other than a rare talent for convincing men who aren’t as smart as she is that she respects them for their minds.

Which is precisely how everyone who works for this administration, up to and including Karl Rove, got their job.

I hadn’t thought about it before, but it’s true that the entire Bush administration is made up of people with the mindset of a certain class of educated women of the 1950’s. They’re all office wives to one degree or another.

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Throwing Out The Bums

by digby

Moderate Republicans say a planned summer push by the House leadership on conservative causes like gun rights and new abortion restrictions threatens the re-election prospects of embattled centrists, who are key to the party’s drive to hold Congress.

Frustrated and angry, they say the leadership’s new American Values Agenda, a list of initiatives heavy on ideological themes, seems short-sighted and ill-timed considering that few conservatives are at serious risk in November.

“It was stupid and gross,” said Representative Christopher Shays, Republican of Connecticut. “They have this obsession to satisfy conservative Republicans who will probably be re-elected no matter what happens. They get job satisfaction, but they are making it more difficult for me to win my race.”

Mr. Shays and others said the announcement of the agenda took them by surprise, particularly after House Republicans seemed to be back on track after a few strong weeks of emphasizing new fiscal controls and a push on national security issues. House moderates have also been supportive of the leadership’s hard line against the idea of potential citizenship for illegal immigrants, saying that reflects public sentiment.

I’ll be looking for the Sunday shows to feature lots of handwringing about the divided Democrats, particularly the crazed, angry purists of the left who are trying to drag the party away from the center of American politics. That is the operative narrative.

I’m sure they will not mention this from Chris Bowers:

Five weeks ago, I complained that the media and political establishment were unfairly focused upon the Connecticut Senate primary. While conservative Democrat Ed Case poses a serious threat to incumbent Senator Daniel Akaka in Hawaii, and while far-right Stephan Laffey poses a serious threat to Lincoln Chafee in Rhode Island, the media and political establishment has paid relatively little attention to those primaries. How much less? Look at these numbers from Google News:

* Lieberman Lamont: 1,590 matches in the last month
* Chafee Laffey: 97 matches in the last month
* Akaka Case: 79 hits in the last month.

Interesting, no? Chris continues with this observation:

…whenever I see the LA Times or any other rag editorialize on the Connecticut Senate primary, I just think back to these Google News numbers. If they, or any other organ of the political and media establishment think that primary challenges against incumbent Senators are wrong, then why aren’t they editorializing about Hawaii and Rhode Island? All of the complaints that have been leveled against progressives for trying to unseat Lieberman can easily be turned against the DLC for trying to unseat Akaka, or against the conservative movement for trying unseat Chafee. However, such complaints are not coming. Until they are, and until the news media starts giving those two races anywhere near the same level of attention they lavish upon Connecticut, anyone who complains about what we are doing in Connecticut is a hypocrite. As long as conservatives and the DLC are not criticized for using the primary system to enact change, progressives should not be criticized for using the primary system to enact change.

And while they’re at it, maybe they could also recognize that the national Republican party seems intent upon making it harder for moderates to win while the national Democratic party is working overtime to protect them. If “moderation” and “centrism” are what the media see as the gold standard, it certainly would seem that the Big Tent Republican establishment hasn’t gotten the memo.

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