Yesterday, the Aspen Daily News published Ken Lay’s obituary. It details out his exemplary deeds, his meager upbringing, his dedication to the Lord, and his love of family. The obit is filled with quotes from the Scriptures and a laundry list of useful charities. It includes such minutia as the claim that he once helped “a former Enron employee pay their mortgage.” The obituary contains roughly two thousand words, all of them in testimony to Lay’s superiority as seen through the eyes of those who knew him, and apparently through the eyes of God. Upon reading it, it becomes evidently clear why the man plundered the Earth’s resources for his own personal gain, and why he stole billions from others. It was because he deserved it. If there was a Scripture for it, it would probably go like this: “Take what you can, but share some of the booty with others. Be charitable, sometimes, and the Lord will have your back.”
Most of us bloggers have said this in one way or another over the past few weeks. But I think Ezra gets to the nub better than any of us have:
Because it’s not about the war. Or moderation. Or ideology at all. It’s about partisanship. The lines are brightly drawn, but in unexpected places. You can support the President’s war, but you can’t protect him from criticism. You can vote with Republicans, but you can’t undermine Democrats. You can be a hawk, but you can’t deride doves. The politics here are tribal, and Lieberman’s developed too severe a crush on the neighboring chieftain to participate. I’ve tried to explain why that may be — he gropes towards praise and recognition, and receives both more readily from the right — but pop psychology isn’t quite the point. And nor is ideology. Or the war. For all the mockery Bush received, his assertion that “you’re either with us or against us” was more widely applicable than he realized. Lieberman’s actions convinced liberals that he didn’t merely disagree with them, or fear the political ramifications of their positions, but that he was actively against them. And while they can withstand an impressive amount of disagreement, they won’t stand for dislike.
Well, yeah. Why should we? We get enough disdain from the Republicans — who last I looked controlled all three branches of government. Last night Lieberman did it again, chastizing Lamont and his supporters for ruining the Democratic party. When’s the last time you heard a Republican candidate attack his own voters?
This has been going on for decades, actually. It’s part of the old third-way, sistah-soljah, triangulatin’ that we saw coming out of the 80’s presidential wilderness. Liberal bashing was a bipartisan sport for a long time and resulted in successfully making the word into an epithet. But although some were slower on the uptake than others, most Democrats began to wise up during the 90’s when they realized that the Republican Party had morphed into a rabid band of partisan dogs who literally had no limits. The last few years have persuaded even the most conservative red state Dems that it is a mistake to trust the Republican majority and the Bush administration. As Grover famously said, they consider bipartisanship to be date rape. And it’s the Republicans who are slipping the roofies in the drinks, not us.
As proof of the fact that the rank and file aren’t ideological purists, I would offer the support for James Webb, a man easily as conservative as Lieberman, but who is as repulsed by Republican rule as the most liberal ex-Nader voter. I have been very hard on Mudcat Saunders on this blog and there is much in his book “Foxes In The Henhouse” co-written with Steve Jarding with which I disagree. But a good part of the book is a primer on how to call out Republicans and I think it’s worth paying attention to.
Here’s an example of it in action:
Republican Sen. George Allen attacked his Democratic challenger’s opposition to a flag-burning amendment, and James Webb retaliated by calling Allen a coward who sat out the Vietnam War “playing cowboy at a dude ranch in Nevada.”
The statement by a senior adviser to Webb, a decorated veteran and former secretary of the Navy, went to extraordinary lengths to question Allen’s fortitude, even repeatedly using the middle name the senator detests and never uses, Felix.
“While Jim Webb and others of George Felix Allen Jr.’s generation were fighting for our freedoms and for our symbols of freedom in Vietnam, George Felix Allen Jr. was playing cowboy at a dude ranch in Nevada,” said Webb strategist Steve Jarding in the statement Tuesday.
Haha.
I’m not sold on Saunders and Jarding’s national strategic vision, but I can’t help but think the Democrats would be well served to adopt their attitude. Democrats, moderate and liberal alike, are tired of being pushed around by these assholes. Joe Lieberman apparently didn’t get the memo. Let’s hope he gets it on August 8th.
President Bush… said he was fairly confident the United States could have intercepted a North Korean rocket if it had been headed for America.
“I think we had a reasonable chance of shooting it down,” Mr. Bush said at a televised news conference in Chicago, where he was asked about North Korea’s test-firing of seven missiles, including one long-range Taepodong 2.
Total bullshit. Why? From the same article:
The United States has small batteries of missiles in Alaska and California ready to be used as interceptors, although they have not yet been tested…
[Bush] did say that he had not talked to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld about whether American interceptor missiles could have brought down the North Korean rocket.
But, hey, y’never know! Maybe if we all close our eyes and pray to baby Jesus and promise to be good little girls and boys forever, those there missiles could just work perfectly without being tested. Y’know, like when you bang on the hood of your car and the engine just all-of-sudden starts?
Uh huh. Now, here’s two questions for you:
1. What would have been the consequences if a missile interception by the US had succeeded?
2. And the consequences if it hadn’t?
My answers:
1. A totally unnecessary and very expensive war with NoKo with the upshot being a Korea and environs just about as stable and predictable as Iraq. With one difference: Next door is China who, of course, would simply sit around and do nothing.
2. Liberals would be blamed for the failure because, being Godless, we didn’t pray with enough sincerity.
The United States of Kafka strikes again. Here’s yet another story of unspeakable horrors at the hands of Americans against some Algerian nobody who was the victim of a bad translation.
After being held for a week in a prison in the mountains of Malawi, Mr. Saidi said, a group of people arrived in a sport utility vehicle: a gray-haired Caucasian woman and five men dressed in black wearing black masks revealing only their eyes.
The Malawians blindfolded him, and his clothes were cut away, he said. He heard someone taking photographs. Then, he said, the blindfold was removed and the agents covered his eyes with cotton and tape, inserted a plug in his anus and put a disposable diaper on him before dressing him. He said they covered his ears, shackled his hands and feet and drove him to an airplane where they put him on the floor.
“It was a long trip, from Saturday night to Sunday morning, ” Mr. Saidi recalled. When the plane landed, he said, he was taken to what he described as a “dark prison” filled with deafening Western music. The lights were rarely turned on.
Men in black arrived, he said, and he remembers one shouting at him through an interpreter: “You are in a place that is out of the world. No one knows where you are, no one is going to defend you.”
He was chained by one hand to the wall in a windowless cell and left with a bucket and a bottle in lieu of a latrine. He remained there for nearly a week, he said, and then was blindfolded and bound again and taken to another prison. “There, they put me in a room, suspended me by my arms and attached my feet to the floor,” he recalled. “They cut off my clothes very fast and took off my blindfold.” An older man, graying at the temples, entered the room with a young woman with shoulder-length blond hair, he said. They spoke English, which Mr. Saidi understands a little, and they interrogated him for two hours through a Moroccan translator. At last, he said, he thought he would learn why he was there, but the questioning only confounded him.
He said the interrogators focused on a telephone conversation they said he had had with his wife’s family in Kenya about airplanes. But Mr. Saidi said he told them that he could not recall talking to anyone about planes.
He said the interrogators left him chained for five days without clothes or food. “They beat me and threw cold water on me, spat at me and sometimes gave me dirty water to drink,” he said. “The American man told me I would die there.”
[…]
In prison, Mr. Saidi said, he was interrogated daily, sometimes twice a day, for weeks. Eventually, he said, his interrogators produced an audiotape of the conversation in which he had allegedly talked about planes.
But Mr. Saidi said he was talking about tires, not planes, that his brother-in-law planned to sell from Kenya to Tanzania. He said he was mixing English and Arabic and used the word “tirat,” making “tire” plural by adding an Arabic “at” sound. Whoever was monitoring the conversation apparently understood the word as “tayarat,” Arabic for planes, Mr. Saidi said.
“When I heard it, I asked the Moroccan translator if he understood what we were saying in the recording,” Mr. Saidi said. After the Moroccan explained it to the interrogators, Mr. Saidi said, he was never asked about it again.
“Why did they bring me to Afghanistan to ask such questions?” he said in the interview. “Why didn’t they ask me in Tanzania? Why did they have to take me away from my family? Torture me?”
That’s an excellent question.
We are now a pariah nation and this is a primary reason why. I just finished the book “American Against the World” by Andrew Kohut and Bruce Stokes. More than 70% of the world now regards us dangerous. Almost as many would like to see another power emerge to check ours. We are disliked and mistrusted and becoming more disliked and mistrusted every day. It’s not getting better. It is incomprehensible that anyone can believe that this has not made our country less safe.
Kevin Drum quotes James Fallows describing a talk with Robert Dearlove today:
And — the point he stressed time and again, even in a bonus comment after the official program session had ended — the Western world, notably the United States, was doomed unless it reclaimed “the moral high ground.” By the end of the Cold War, he said, there was no dispute world wide about which side held the moral high ground. As a professional spy master, he said that reality made it so much easier for him to recruit operatives — they would volunteer to come to him, because they believed in the cause. Therefore, as a matter of pure strategic necessity, the United States needed to behave according to its best traditions, not the exigencies of an open-ended wartime emergency. (I’m paraphrasing a little, but not taking too many liberties.)
When American Democrats say things like this — as some of them occasionally screw up the courage to do — they are dismissed as pathetic one-worlders. The words are somehow more plausible coming from a man who would have been James Bond’s boss.
The words are plausible because they are plausible. It shouldn’t matter from whose mouth they emanate. Indeed, they have emanated from many, many mouths over the last few years, including mine. Aside from protesting the sheer irrationality of the invasion of Iraq and the extreme measures undertaken under the presidents wartime powers, one of the main liberal arguments has been this practical observation that crude thuggish behavior was counterproductive — that our strength lay in our technological mystique, our open society that would not succumb to threats and our ability to get allies to support us and work with us globally to shut down these terrorist operations. That argument has been given hardly a moment of consideration — helped mightily by the news media in the early days who were determined to play well-coiffed soldiers in the reality TV show called the GWOT.
The right has managed to dominate with an internally inconsistent argument that says in order to preserve our civilized values we must do unspeakable, uncivilized things, even to innocent people. (The constitution isn’t a suicide pact!) And the great thing about it is that if we were to suffer another terrorist attack, it wouldn’t disprove this thesis, it would make the case for redoubling it. (tristero takes this on, here, in case you missed it.)
The facts are that our actions have made more enemies, have made our allies mistrust us and have opened the door to the idea that because we are behaving like an unpredictable rogue superpower, the world needs other military powers to challenge us. The more this happens, the more the rightwing nuts insist that we should be tougher and stronger and meaner so that we can put these naysayers in their place. This taken to its logical ends is catastrophe for America.
Well now, this certainly does explain a few things, doesn’t it?
A decade after the Pentagon declared a zero-tolerance policy for racist hate groups, recruiting shortfalls caused by the war in Iraq have allowed “large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists” to infiltrate the military, according to a watchdog organization.
I’m not sure there’s anything more stupid than hiring a bunch of neo-nazi’s to occupy a foreign country. But it is par for the course with the Bush administration.
The thing is that it doesn’t take much to push people over the line in these stressful stituations anyway. Racism is clearly rampant among the Americans already. It’s obvious in this sophomoric Ali Baba/Hadji bullshit they talk all the time. I’m not even sure that it isn’t part of every war to a certain extent. It’s primitive stuff.
I definitely believe that racism lies at the heart of why many people supported a war against a country that had not committed any crime against ours — and why they don’t care if there were any WMD or any other justification. One dead arab’s as good as another dead arab. It didn’t matter which arab country we invaded as long as we invaded one and fucked some of “those people” up.
But regardless of the strain of racism that already exists in that warzone, putting white supremecists in their midst and allowing them to spew their Nazi propaganda among those frustrated, frightened, bored soldiers is a recipe for disaster. Instead of the sort of common tribal hatred you might see in any dangerous warlike environment, you suddenly have someone providing a whole philosophy and intellectual structure for it. It’s the perfect recruiting ground for white supremecy and gives certain types permission to act out their violent fantasies against those they already consider racially inferior. And they are also training them to think of it in ways that are very dangerous when they come back to the US.
I don’t know if these any of these atrocities we’ve recently heard about are related, but I wouldn’t be surprised. And frankly, the way this administration has conducted their war so far, I also wouldn’t be surprised if they haven’t loosened the rules on this on purpose. I’m sure they think skinheads are tough guys. And we know how the chickenhawks love the tough guys.
Borrowing from Digby’s post yesterday where Stephen Denning says “the war on terror has been a war in error,” I’ve developed a few questions for the President … just to let him know what’s on my mind:
1. Have you done enough to fight errorism?
2. Do you really believe the War In Error is winnable?
3. Some say that global errorism has increased dramatically under your watch. Would you agree?
Joe was adamant in the debate tonight that Iraq has shown great progress over the last two years. I guess it depends on what you call progress:
The central morgue said Tuesday that it received 1,595 bodies last month, 16 percent more than in May, in a tally that showed the pace of killing here has increased since the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Al Qaeda’s leader in Iraq.
Baghdad, home to one-fourth of Iraq’s population, has slowly descended into a low-grade civil war in some neighborhoods, with Sunni and Shiite militias carrying out systematic sectarian killings that clear whole city blocks.
[…]
The American ambassador here, Zalmay M. Khalilzad, told the BBC on Tuesday that killing Mr. Zarqawi had not made Iraq safer.
“In terms of the level of violence, it has not had any impact at this point,” Mr. Khalilzad said. “As you know, the level of violence is still quite high.”
The morgue, which takes bodies from Baghdad and its outskirts, offers a rough measure of the violence. The toll for last month, provided by the morgue deputy, who insisted on anonymity because he is not authorized to talk to the news media, was roughly double the 879 bodies the morgue received in June 2005.
American officials say civilians bear the brunt of the killing, representing 70 percent of all deaths.
Except for all the dead bodies, things are going really well.
The reason Lieberman admires and supports George W. Bush so much is because they share an important, temperamental characteristic: neither of them can admit when they are wrong.
I’m listening to the Lieberman-Lamont debate and if I were just tuning in with no knowledge of the players I would just assume that Lieberman was a conservative Republican, if not an actual member of the Bush administration. He’s behaving like an arrogant, bullying thug.
No wonder the Republicans love him so much — the only time he gets nasty is when he’s debating a Democrat. When he debated Dick Cheney he practically gave him a blow job on national TV. But then, that makes sense. He and Dick Cheney both agree that Ned Lamont “and his supporters” are a threat to the nation.
Update:
On a more serious note, it is truly remarkable that Lieberman continues to voice support for Bush’s hawkish foreign policy. In fact, it’s delusional. As Kevin Drum wrote today:
…the Bush administration literally seems to have no foreign policy at all anymore. They have no serious plan for Iraq, no plan for Iran, no plan for North Korea, no plan for democracy promotion, no plan for anything. With the neocons on the outs, Condoleezza Rice at the State Department, and Dick Cheney continuing to drift into an alternate universe at the OVP, the Bush administration seems completely at sea. There’s virtually no ideological coherency to their foreign policy that I can discern, and no credible followup on what little coherency is left.
There is nothing to lose by Democrats running against this ridiculous cabal of incompetents. Yet Lieberman arrogantly criticizes those who call him on his inflexible loyalty to a failed, ill-advised strategy. What a putz.
Isn’t just wierd that whenever there’s a close election these days that the right wing always comes out on top? Now, why would that be do you suppose?
It used to be commonplace for Mexican elections to be rigged and so I guess i’m not all that surprised that this one was. What’s odd are the striking similarities between it and the recently “disputed” elections here in the US. This is just spooky:
Ruling party officials said Mr. Lopez Obrador had the lead earlier only because more votes had been counted in areas where he was strongest. They also accused the candidate’s Democratic Revolution Party of stalling tactics in states where Mr. Calderon was strongest, saying it was deliberately trying to give the impression that Mr. Lopez Obrador was ahead as the count progressed.
On Wednesday, Mr. Lopez Obrador threatened to ignore the final tally because of “serious evidence of fraud.” Leonel Cota, president of the Democratic Revolution Party, accused election officials of deliberately mishandling the preliminary vote count Sunday to confirm a win for Mr. Calderon. He said Mr. Lopez Obrador won Sunday’s vote.
“We are not going to recognize an election that showed serious evidence of fraud, that was dirty from the start, manipulated from the start,” he said.
His party has claimed that more than 18,000 polling places had more votes cast than there were ballots and nearly 800 had more votes than there were registered voters.
When polls closed Sunday, citizens staffing the 130,488 polling places opened the ballot boxes and counted the votes, then sealed them into packages and attacked a report. The electoral institute then posted preliminary results on its website from about 41 million ballots cast.
The sealed packages were delivered to district headquarters, where election workers used the tallies Wednesday to add up the formal, legal vote totals.
Workers were not reviewing individual ballots except when the packages appeared tampered with or their tallies were missing, illegible or inconsistent.
Has anybody seen Jim Baker? How do you say “divaaaahning the will ‘o the voter” in spanish?
One of the lesser known aspects of this latest serendipitous right wing squeaker election, is the US involvement. Greg Palast uncovered some intriguing evidence that we are back in the interfering in Latin American politics business — in the name of terrorism, of course:
The target nations for “foreign counterterrorism investigation” were nowhere near the Persian Gulf. Every one was in Latin America — Argentina, Venezuela, Mexico and a handful of others.
Latin America?! Was there a terror cell about to cross into San Diego with exploding enchiladas?
All the target nations had one thing in common besides a lack of terrorists: each had a left-leaning presidential candidate or a left-leaning president in office. In Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez, bete noir of the Bush Administration, was facing a recall vote. In Mexico, the anti-Bush Mayor of Mexico City, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador was (and is) leading the race for the Presidency.
Most provocative is the contractor to whom this no-bid contract was handed: ChoicePoint Inc. of Alpharetta, Georgia. ChoicePoint is the database company that created a list for Governor Jeb Bush of Florida of voters to scrub from voter rolls before the 2000 election. ChoicePoint’s list (94,000 names in all) contained few felons. Most of those on the list were guilty of no crime except Voting While Black. The disenfranchisement of these voters cost Al Gore the presidency.
Having chosen our President for us, our President’s men chose ChoicePoint for this sweet War on Terror database gathering. The use of the Venezuela’s and Mexico’s voter registry files to fight terror is not visible — but the use of the lists to manipulate elections is as obvious as the make-up on Katherine Harris’ cheeks.
[…]
In Venezuela, leading up to the August 2004 vote on whether to re-call President Chavez, I saw his opposition pouring over the voter rolls in laptops, claiming the right to challenge voters as Jeb’s crew did to voters in Florida. It turns out this operation was partly funded by the International Republican Institute of Washington, an arm of the GOP. Where did they get the voter info from?
In that case, access to Venezuela’s voter rolls didn’t help the Republican-assisted drive against Chavez, who won by a crushing plurality.
[…]
Foreign — that is, American — interference in political campaigns is a crime. That didn’t stop Team Bush. However, when the theft of its citizen files was discovered, Argentina threatened to arrest ChoicePoint contractors until the company returned the tapes — and Mexico’s attorney general did in fact arrest the ChoicePoint data thieves to avoid his party from looking too much the stooge of its Washington patron. Whether George Bush gave back his copy, no one will say.
I don’t know if this Choicepoint thing helped the PAN steal the Mexican election but it certainly looks as if it’s another case of “you’d better win by a huge margin because if it’s close enough to steal, the right will steal it.”
In an interesting post over at op-ed news, Stephen Denning, an author and lecturer on the subject of narrative and leadership writes the following:
What’s the story that the new leaders will need to communicate? In broad outline, we know what it will be, both for Democrats and Republicans, since as Robert Reich has explained, there are only four stories in American politics:
· The Triumphant Individual. This is the familiar tale of the little guy who works hard, takes risks, believes in himself, and eventually gains wealth, fame, and honor. Although the Democrats, given their alliance with labor, used to own this story, the Republicans took it over by offering lower taxes. After six years of profligate spending, that won’t win this argument much longer. The winning narrative for both Republicans and Democrats must recognize that without resolving the crises in health and education, the economic future is bleak and there will be no triumphant individual.
· The Benevolent Community: “I have a dream,” said Martin Luther King Jr and JFK asked us what we could do for our country. Democrats used to own this issue until they became associated with failed poverty programs and handouts for the poor. Now Republicans are also in trouble as Katrina showed the unattractive reality of “compassionate conservatism” at home and the trashing of our allies has left America despised abroad. The winning narrative for both Democrats and Republicans here must obviously re-establish competence in coping with poverty and deprivation at home, while rekindling a spirit of internationalism abroad to solve global problems.
· The Mob at the Gates used to be the Nazis and then the Soviet evil empire. Now it’s terrorists, against whom we must maintain vigilance, lest diabolical forces overwhelm us. In recent times, Republicans have owned this story, but as disillusion with Iraq deepens and broadens, both Republicans and Democrats will have to recognize that the war on terror has been a war in error, and will need to wind down the misguided adventure in Iraq, sooner rather than later, so that energies and resources can refocused on real enemies.
· The Rot at the Top: Since the other three stories are usually so similar for both parties, the “rot at the top” story is usually the pivotal one in leading to change. With Richard Nixon, it was political malfeasance. With George H.W. Bush, it was economic incompetence. With Clinton, it was personal immorality. Now Democrats have abundant evidence that Republicans embody a culture of incompetence and corruption, while Republicans try to paint Democrats as divided, effete, liberal, pro-gay and anti-marriage and opposed to God.
I’m not persuaded by his analysis of how the parties use these narratives. But for the sake of argument, I will accept the notion that these are the four narratives of American politics. If that is so, then it’s clear to me that the modern Republicans have always used “The Mob At The Gates” very effectively — commies/negroes/liberals are the internal mob and commies/mexicans/terrorists are the external mob. But they also use “The Triumphant Individual” very well, by making the claim that it’s government that is preventing people from getting rich. Support the Republicans and you will gain “wealth, fame, and honor.”
In fact, in terms of modern politics, if you look at the “Mob At the Gates” and the “Triumphant Individual” you see that they are temperamentally conservative, and contain both a positive and negative message. “The Benevolent Community” and “Rot at the Top” are much more obviously liberal narratives and also contain both a positive and negative message. (The right does use “rot at the top” as part of their “mob at the gates” fulminating about liberals, but it’s a little bit strained.)
The problem is that I haven’t seen liberals present those narratives very effectively in years. Perhaps the problems stems from the muddling of the message during the 80’s and 90’s when the leadership decided to try third way politics. Third Way doesn’t fit into any established narrative and people didn’t know what to make of it.
I actually believe in this narrative thing to some extent. I think the human race has been shaped by stories and I think our minds are conditioned to see things in narrative terms. If it’s true that there exist only four stories in American politics, and if my surmise is correct that they naturally fall into the two warring political tribes, then that’s where the Democrats have failed and where the Republicans have succeeded.
Perhaps it’s less important to come up with that pithy little list of “what we believe” than it is to think about how we can effectively tell our story of Benevolent Community and Rot At The Top to the American people.(I’d bet we could slide in a little “Triumphant Individual” in there too.) It’s quite clear the other side is dancing and singing their hearts out while we are presenting dry power-point presentations of our latest awesome 12 point plan.
It’s not that the Dems aren’t trying. Our latest slogan is all Benevolent Community: Together, America Can Do Better. It’s just that it sucks.