I’m sure most of you have heard this bizarre story about Iran forcing Jews and other religious minorities to wear badges. (In a nice touch of historical color, the Jewish badges are allegedly yellow.) Well, it turns out this was simply made up out of whole cloth and filtered into the media through an affiliate of the Benador Group which include such credible wingnuts as Laurie “Saddam is comin’ ta git yah” Mylroie and Michael “let’s invade France” Ledeen. You have to wonder what they thought they would accomplish by putting out something so falsifiable. I think Jim Henley has it right:
Why? So that months from now, someone hearing about plans to bomb Iran, or seeing footage of bombing on TV, will say to themselves, “Didn’t I read that Iran was going to round up all the Jews and make them wear yellow stars like the Nazis? Something like that. Well, good riddance.” All the story had to do was live long enough to get into circulation.
I actually have a personal anecdote that pertains to exactly that. Before the first Gulf war I was talking about whether or not we should intervene with my brother-in-law, a decent liberal who normally is not one to get onboard military adventures unless something very important is at stake. He was a big supporter of the Gulf War based on that story about killing the babies in their incubators (which had set my bullshit detectors to screaming when I heard it.) He believed it and it made him very hawkish.
It’s as Henley says, these things make their way into the consciousness and pop out down the road when people are being forced to decide if a military action is necessary. They’re planting seeds.
The press is not running with this en masse the way they did with all the earlier nonsense, but it’s all over the rightwing noise machine so there will be plenty of people who believe this crap. Still, it’s a small comfort that the mainstream media is getting a little less easily played.
Poor, poor Republicans. They are reduced to dragging out that poor old fossilized 90s retread Drudge to falsely smear Democrats again. (Geez, next they’ll be starting flame wars on usenet!) That’s a sad comment on the rightwing blogosphere if you ask me.
Old Drudge has found out today, however, that things don’t work quite the same way as they did back in the good old days of “Mad About You” and the screeching harpies of the Barbizon school of blond former prosecutors. Drudge got a letter this morning from the DNC’s lawyer for libeling Howard Dean yesterday and took down his false story.
Matt Drudge is looking for any excuse to smear Al Gore and his new movie, An Inconvenient Truth. He’s been running this story, unsourced, all day:
Burn: Gore and entourage took 5 cars to travel the 500 yards from hotel to screening of global warming pic in Cannes.
ThinkProgress contacted Gore’s representatives, who unequivocally confirmed that Al Gore and his associates walked from the Majestic Hotel to the screening at Cannes. Further, Paramount has committed to making the entire tour promoting the film carbon neutral.
UPDATE: At 3:38 PM EST, about an hour after this post, Drudge yanked the smear on Gore from his site.
This is very reminiscent of another false story about Gore that the press refused to acknowledge was a GOP plant: that stupid canoe trip which, naturally, the Daily Howler has covered in depth.
They’re running the sad old Gore playbook, and some of the media is playing along like good little robots. But it won’t work like it did before. You want to know why? Because there is a counter force to that little weasel Drudge and his fellow character assassins this time — us. Lefty bloggers will be all over the mainstream media if they do this again. We will ensure they get a snootfull of our vaunted liberal anger if they decide that “it’s just fun” to destroy Democrats on behalf of Republican thugs.
(And I’ll add that if a liberal Drudge comes along who works as a tool of the GOP sludge machine and is used to discredit the left blogosphere — wittingly or unwittingly — we will not take the bait. Chris Bowers at MYDD makes this argument explicitly, here.)
I liked the 90s as much as the next person. I tried ecstasy and bought that Alanis Morrisette album and everything. But that was a long time ago. The rightwing noise machine will not be allowed to entertain the boys and girls of the press corps with silly, trumped up bullshit like this ever again without a price being paid. The political media really need to think long and hard about who’s their daddy this time out.
One of the things I find most interesting about the global warming debate is that the libertarian view of how to run the world is completely inadequate in the face of such a thing. Not that it stops them from trying to fit the square peg into the round hole, of course.
Last week the “Competitive Enterprise Institute” unveiled a couple of hilarious ads about global warming in which they literally extoll the virtues of carbon monoxide as “life.” But how else can a group that sells itself like this come to grips with a global, environmental problem:
We believe that individuals are best helped not by government intervention, but by making their own choices in a free marketplace.
That sounds awfully clever until you start talking about global warming, doesn’t it? Both Paris Hilton and I are in the same boat when it comes to being able to breathe on this planet. “Choices” in a free marketplace are beside the point when the very ground we walk on, the very air we breath, the very world in which all of us, rich and poor, live is under threat. Dealing with global warming is the ultimate example of the common good and it’s the most powerful issue upon which the right’s edifice of free market individualism crumbles into irrelevance.
Global warming is a mutual, planetary challenge and the conservatives and wingnut libertarians who see money as freedom can do nothing but put their heads in the sand and pretend it isn’t happening. The only question is whether it will kill their bankrupt ideology before their bankrupt ideology kills the planet.
“An Inconvenient Truth” is coming to your town. Go see it. This is one where we are all, literally, in this thing together.
Mercenaries. I’ve been wondering when this topic would finally make its way out of the ther and be discussed openly. Atrios links to a report by Ted Koppel in which Koppel wonders why we just don’t privatize part of the army, calling it:
“the inevitable response of a market economy to a host of seemingly intractable public policy and security problems.”
The issue is raised by our “over-extended military” and inability of the United Nations to form adequate peace forces. Meanwhile, Americans business interests grow ever more active abroad in dangerous spots.
“Just as the all-volunteer military relieved the government of much of the political pressure that had accompanied the draft, so a rent-a-force, harnessing the privilege of every putative warrior to hire himself out for more than he could ever make in the direct service of Uncle Sam, might relieve us of an array of current political pressures,” Koppel explains, tongue possibly in cheek.
“So, if there are personnel shortages in the military (and with units in their second and third rotations into Iraq and Afghanistan, there are), then what’s wrong with having civilian contractors? Expense is a possible issue; but a resumption of the draft would be significantly more controversial….
“So, what about the inevitable next step — a defensive military force paid for directly by the corporations that would most benefit from its protection? If, for example, an insurrection in Nigeria threatens that nation’s ability to export oil (and it does), why not have Chevron or Exxon Mobil underwrite the dispatch of a battalion or two of mercenaries?”
Koppel notes that Cofer Black, formerly a high-ranking C.I.A. officer and now a senior executive with Blackwater USA, “has publicly said that his company would be prepared to take on the Darfur account.”
He concludes: “The United States may not be about to subcontract out the actual fighting in the war on terrorism, but the growing role of security companies on behalf of a wide range of corporate interests is a harbinger of things to come.”
I assumed this was satire when I read it. But I didn’t chuckle knowingly and move on. It doesn’t work as satire because the nation is, in fact, actually doing this.
Rather than make arcane arguments about whether its right or moral to hire a private army, which will fall on the American public’s deaf ears, perhaps we should just talk about the fact that each “soldier” makes about six figures, can quit anytime he wants and is subject to no rule of law, either local, international or military. Clearly, the administration thinks the regular military are a bunch of stupid chumps. Why don’t Republicans support the troops by spending that money on real soldiers?
The Prime Minister will appeal to his critics to look at his record in a different light after the formation of an Iraqi government. He will say the war in Iraq was in line with an interventionist or “activist approach” to foreign policy he also pursued in Kosovo and Sierra Leone, which enjoyed greater public support.
He will also say it was consistent with his policies on the Middle East, Africa and climate change.
Mr Blair will say he floated the idea of humanitarian interventionism, dubbed “liberal imperialism” by some of his advisers, in a speech in Chicago in 1999.
In the last of three speeches on foreign policy, Mr Blair will call for reform of the United Nations, saying that today’s international institutions were designed for the Cold War era.
He believes that the UN’s failure to approve a fresh resolution authorising military action in Iraq in 2003 showed that the organisation shies away from rather than confronts problems.
That’s the kind of speech that’ll make Peter Beinert feel all funny down there. This is the vision of liberal hawks who insist that we need to keep invading countries for their own good because underneath all the death and destruction is a humanitarian mission. (Meanwhile, in Darfur, well….)
I’m not sure if Blair has deluded himself into believing this horseshit to justify his actions or whether he really is a member of the future neocons club. (I suspect that Joe Lieberman, if he remains a Democrat, is going to be the new Scoop Jackson around whom all the little liberal hawks will flock.) It doesn’t really matter: he’s throwing down the gauntlet. What is the left’s foreign policy philosophy?
A lot of people are talking about this and it’s important. Foreign policy is not going to go away just because Bush has fucked things up so badly. And we can’t just accept the Beinert wing’s romantic WWII fighter ace version of liberal hawkishness just because it’s the only idea floating around. I’m waiting for a big name Democrat to articulate a foreign policy philosophy that makes sense.
In the meantime, I think I’ll go with a couple of big name bloggers’ approach as a starting point instead. Here’s Matt Yglesias:
Dan Drezner notes that “liberal internationalism” is a term “foreign policy wonks like to throw around, but often means very different things to different people” and offers his own definition: “A marriage between the pursuit of liberal purposes (security, free trade, human rights, rule of law, democracy promotion, etc.) and the use of institutionalist means to pursue them (multilateral institutions of various stripes — not only the UN, but NATO or the G-7 as well).” I prefer an alternative formulation of my own recent devising. Liberal internationalism not as a method, but as a goal: The creation of an international order that is effectively governed by reasonably just rules.
Clearly, in the wrong hands, ideas about pursuing liberal “purposes” can be very, very dangerous if they stand without any limits by law or philosophy. Might cannot make “spreading democracy” right all by itself as we have just proved to the entire world. Perhaps it would be best to be a bit more humble in our purposes than Drezner, but a bit more explicit in our methods than Yglesias.
In any case, it is impossible to withdraw from the world even if we wanted to so liberals do have to make a decision about our relationship to it going forward. Iraq was a nonsensical, inexplicable action, but that does not mean we will be spared having to make much tougher calls in the future. It seems to me that the best hope is through cooperation with others toward the plain goal Yglesias lays out. That is not a pie in the sky, kumbaaya dreamworld goal, nor is it mired in cynical, national interest “realism.” Indeed, it is the most likely to produce the kind of necessary coordination we will need to handle the emerging challenges and threats of a global nature, like terrorism and global warming.
Tony Blair is apparently still going to insist that Iraq was a “threat” that had to be met come hell or high water, (let no facts interfere with that judgment.) He will attack international institutions for failing to intervene. In truth, the international institutions (which are hardly infallible) made the correct decision this time. The alleged “liberal internationalist” Blair made the wrong one. The lessons there are clear. When a nation decides that it is “good” enough or strong enough to up-end the rule of law and international civilized norms, that is a signal that they are neither. Liberal internationalism, if it is to be credible, has to admit this, repudiate the actions of Blair and Bush and make it explicit that its goals are reasonable and constrained by the rule of law. Otherwise, “liberal internationalism” is just another way of saying we can do as we choose. I’m not signing on to that; I don’t care whether Joe Klein says that means I hate America or not. After Vietnam and this latest debacle, I’m through with both dreamy, romantic notions of interventionist foreign policy and manipulative Great Gamesmanship. Keep it simple stupid.
“The president’s run into a perfect political storm where the confluence of natural disasters from last fall, gasoline prices, staff changes, the continuing war in Iraq, all are giving conservatives a defensive fatigue,” said Kenneth Khachigian, a California GOP strategist who served in Ronald Reagan’s White House. “And let’s put immigration in there, too. . . . There’s just wave after wave washing over them at this point.”
Oh please. This is not an act of God. There’s a tsunami of corruption and epic failure crashing over their heads — and it’s one of their own making. As for their “fatigue” maybe they should try being being on 24/7 defense for eight long years as Clinton was and then complain, the WATB chickenshits.
These fragile little flowers really should be frightened of the Democrats taking over the congress. If they are falling apart with “defensive fatigue” already, they obviously are not cut out for long term survival in the rough game they created. Bush was treated like a Roman god for more than four years. For a time it was patriotically incorrect to even utter criticism of him in public (just ask the Dixie Chicks.) He had a free hand and he fucked everything up royally. Now, after six months of pressure, they want to blame it all on external events and whine about how tired they are of being on the defensive. Boo fucking hoo.
The main cause of conservatives’ anger with Bush is this: He talked like a conservative to win our votes but never governed like a conservative.
This is just the latest talking point of course, but what’s interesting is what Viguerie didn’t discuss. Some are obvious and I’ll let you have the pleasure of finding them (grin). Here are a few that are a bit more subtle.
Let’s start with a small omission. Unlike others on the far right, Viguerie’s not claiming that Bush governed as a liberal. Rather, he says Bush is just a corrupt, incompetent, deceitful, Big Business pork-feeder.
If one were trusting, one could think of that as progress of a sort, meaning Viguerie’s reality-testing is improving, and that bodes well for the future of American politics. But being cynical about all things right wing, I tend to read this as – possibly – a weird feeler to the Lieberman wing of the Democratic party, to see if they might be willing to buy some of Viguerie’s mail order snake oil. He does say, after all, his new movement will be “independent of any party.”
More importantly, Viguerie doesn’t want to distract attention from the distinction he wants to draw between the evil Biz Repubs and the saintly “real” conservatives. For even if he sees Bush’s character and concerns with something resembling partial acuity,Viguerie, on all other subjects, is still out there in rightwing nutland – mewling over the morals and ethics of a science policy he doesn’t know the first thing about, gibbering on about the dangers of letting two people who love each other get married, and professing wariness of the conservative cred of two judges who make Roger Taney look like a multi-culturalist.
In short, by consigning Biz Cons and Bush to hell for betraying the “real” conservatives, Viguerie sees a political opportunity right now, a potential realignment of voters who are outraged at the sops to Big Biz and deeply concerned about other things, presumably things that directly affect them.
And then, being a Con-man from way back, Viguerie pulls a fast one. He links opposition to the evils of Big Biz to his own far-rightwing agenda. Quite a slick trick.
Now this would be a ridiculous idea, and majorly bizarre, if it weren’t for the fact that Viguerie is quite serious and rightwingers have been making these kinds of illogical links for years. Worse, many important folks strongly opposed to Viguerie and his agenda, both Democratic and Republican, still haven’t figured out a way to link opposition to Big Biz to opposition to Big Cons like Viguerie himself without sounding like Marxists. (That, too, is majorly bizarre, but that’s another post. Here, I’d just like to look a little closer at what Viguerie says. ‘Cause it’s good news, I think. )
Now, Viguerie is partly correct, if not exactly original. The Biz Republicans don’t have any kind of wide national base – the most rabid and wealthiest of these creatures total far less than 1% of the population – which is why they’ve tolerated loony nuts like Robertson, Dobson, and Viguerie himself. And which is why a spoiled rich brat like George W. Bush loves to affect the thickest down-home Texas accent he possibly can, ’cause it makes him “sound like an American,” not the filthy rich elitist he clearly is.*
But Viguerie is quite wrong in assuming that the folks united against the decadence of America’s corporate rich and the obscene tax giveaways to large corporations and their wealthiest members are all fellow loons on his moon. They’re not and 20 seconds of thought should make it clear how illogical Viguerie is being, and how desperate he is for us not to notice.
Ken Lay may disgust you but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re pro-coathanger – Viguerie wants to pretend that it does. In fact, those of us who work for a living and haven’t bought the sick, rightwing framing of the issue know very well that there are times when carrying a pregnancy to term is a choice, and that choice should never be made by politicians but by ourselves.
LIkewise, contempt for Halliburton’s unspeakable behavior does not translate into strong opposition to marriage rights and benefits for all couples that want to get hitched. Again, those of us who live in the real world have far more important things to worry about – like job security, health benefits, education, and the like. (BTW, I’m avoiding the terms “populist” and “populism” here because I think they have meanings that make it easy to miscontrue a very fluid and complex reality.) But Viguerie wants us to ignore the non sequitur and think that because you don’t like Halliburton bigshots, you have to hate gay people.
And that brings us to yet another omission in Viguerie’s essay, which should make it quite clear what a fast one Viguerie is pulling here. And how much trouble he sees for the far right agenda if ever the Democrats wake up. Check it out:
Viguerie brought up the godless UN – which affects directly nearly none of the people Viguerie is claiming as a conservative base – but neglected to mention the failed assault on Social Security, which affects all of us.
Now why would Viguerie forget to rant against Social Security, that commie central-planning nonsense left over from the Nazi Roosevelt Administration? After all, it’s the fluoridated water of entitlements, corrupting Americans and sapping all our precious bodily fluids, Well for one thing, he can’t use it to pretend Bush isn’t a “real” conservative and without that, his argument falls flat on its Laffer Curves.
In fact, Bush and the other rightwing nuts tried like hell to eliminate Social Security by proposing a path to disaster a la FEMA and CIA. And Bush failed to wreck Social Security because of a simple fact Viguerie dare not mention: The base he’s talking about isn’t nearly as far-right as he’d have us believe. They aren’t all Birchers or Randall Terry lovers; in fact, my guess is that if the Vigueries of American politics were properly labeled as the extremists they really are, and not accorded WaPo op-ed privileges and the like, the apparent support for rightwing conservatism shown in the polls would be far lower.
So yes, there are a lot of folks who can no longer be counted upon to vote in goosestep for the next corporate shill the Republicans put up for national office. But this is not an opportunity for so-called “conservatives” -actually rightwing radicals -of Viguerie’s stripe. This really is a splendid opportunity for Democrats, and even liberals.
So, Democrats: Don’t blow it this time around, okay? Bush has handed you on a platter both the potential for marginalizing the very dangerous American right plus the potential for political dominance. It will never get better than 2006 and, potentially, 2008. Don’t blow it, people.
—
*Oversimplified, naturally, in order to get at an idea that doesn’t depend upon the complications. For the record, George W. Bush is, indeed, a Biz Con all the way through. He is also a cultural Con in Viguerie’s sense all the way through. To certain readers, this may seem a logically impossible assertion: How can someone be all one AND all the other? Well, it’s rather hard to explain in a brief footnote, but it’s kinda like transubstantiation or being many substances at the same time. As for being “impossible,” I refer you the living contradiction that is George W. Bush for proof of its reality.
Wow. I go off-line for a few hours and look what happened: Ned Lamont and his team, backed by the netroots activists like Hamsher and Stoller (didn’t they write “Hound Dog”?) got 30% of the vote at the Connecticut Democratic convention, which has to seem like a tidal wave to Joe Lieberman. And according to Colin McEnroe, local Connecticut journalist, there would have been plenty more where that came from if there had been a secret ballot:
The real number is lot worse for Lieberman than 33 percent. I don’t know how big the Lamont vote would get if you could tabulate the no-shows and the sleeper cells of delegates who plan to vote differently in the primary, but I do know it’s a bigger number. And the convention is full of party regulars, usually the easiest people to keep in line. Wisdom of the ages would suggest that the “amateur” voters are potentially much more rebellious.
I will admit that I have always believed it would be difficult for Lamont to win this race, as I’m sure everyone agrees. Incumbency is the most powerful tool in a politicians box. My main reasons for being enthusiastic is that I do not think Blue State pols like Liebermann should get a free ride when they consistently enable the opposition. (There’s a lesson here for other Blue State Dems who insist on letting their iconoclastic self-image sabotage the Party in a hyperpartisan era — Bob Casey, take note.)
After last night I think this might actually happen. Lieberman may break from the party if he fails to win the Democratic nomination and run as an independent — and he may win as an independent too, with his large Republican following. It would be tough to beat him. Bring it. It’s long past time for Democrats to draw some lines. This is going to be a brawl for the foreseeable future and we need Democratic partisans not Republican appeasers.
This is getting stupid. The NY Times is creating a false impression about the netroots support for Ned Lamont over Joe Lieberman as an expression of anti-war fervor. I think that is missing the greater point.
There are quite a few Democrats who voted for the war. They certainly have some work to do to convince many of us that they have seen the light. But the reason the netroots are taking on Joe Lieberman is because he enables Republicans on a host of issues and consistently shows disloyalty to the party in a hyper-partisan era. Alone among Democrats at the time, he went on the floor of the Senate and excoriated Bill Clinton for personal failures (that’s what the speech was about) and gave support to the hypocritical Republican witch-hunters. Then, once again, alone among Democrats, he stood up for George Bush as it became obvious that the justification for the war in Iraq was based upon lies and hype. These are just two telling examples of where Lieberman tends to come out on issues that mean something to the Democratic party in a larger sense.
He comes from Connecticut. There is no excuse that he’s in a Red State and has to pander to conservatives. He does this completely for its own sake. And inevitably, he gets the highest accolades from Republicans for doing so; he actually seems to revel in his position as George Bush’s favorite Democrat. It is understandable that a Democratic senator lauded constantly by the right wing noise machine is going to be suspect among Democratic partisans.
There was a time when a vital center coalition existed in the Senate, where there was room on both sides for trading votes across party lines. The Republicans destroyed that coalition and Liebermann, inexplicably, doesn’t seem to get that. Even worse, when the shit comes down, he inevitably sides with them. Many Democrats took a long time to learn the harsh lessons of GOP political hardball and had to lose to a bunch of thuggish right-wingers before they began to recognise what they were up against. Lieberman still refuses to accept the fact that his high minded centrism is a weapon in the hands of the radical Republicans.
The netroots are bringing some heat from the partisans and even if Lamont loses maybe this will move Lieberman’s ass a little bit back to the party that brung him. That is not illegitimate politics. It is the only way to educate him apparently. He certainly has not listened to anything else.
The DLC’s Al Frum says at the end of the article:
“A very simple thing happened that changed Democratic politics dramatically, and that was that the war turned bad,” Mr. From said, adding of the senator’s critics: “There’s a group in our party that makes a lot of noise and I don’t think they’ve ever won an election. They’re trying to take out one of the great statesmen our party has and that’s wrong.”
So he agrees with Karl Rove that the only thing that happened recently was that the war wasn’t a resounding, yellow ribbon victory. They are both wrong. The GOP has proven that it can’t govern its way out of a paper bag on any issue — and the Democratic grassroots have been fed up for some time with this play it safe losing strategy that empowered the most anti-democratic government since Nixon.
From really shouldn’t talk so much about who has won and lost elections. Since the DLC became the guiding force in the Democratic establishment the Party has lost everything. We are making a lot of noise because assholes like Al From have allowed the Republicans to turn liberalism into a bucket of warm spit — and put the government entirely in the hands of the far right. It’s not about the war. That’s just the most visible example. It’s about having no standards, no loyalty, no principles — and losing because of it!
This great statesman Joe Lieberman supported the president in his illegal, immoral war, sold out his party on numerous occasions and is being challenged for it. You’d think that a great student of the Talmud would see the good old fashioned message of divine retribution in that.