The Crack-up Continues
by digby
A reader sent me this, which is evidently floating around in conservative circles:
Yes, even Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney are now liberals. But then, they can’t be conservatives, can they? They are failures, after all.
Hate to toot my own horn, but I predicted this.
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Pull The Plug
by digby
The Hotline Blogometer reports:
THOUGHT OF THE DAY: A Blog Divided Against Itself…
If you thought immigration was dividing the GOP, just look what its doing to the righty blogosphere. The group-blog site Polipundit has been ripped asunder by the issue. Lorie Byrd at Byrd Droppings explains: “I received a lengthy email from Polipundit tonight alerting us to an editorial policy change that included the following: “From now on, every blogger at PoliPundit.com will either agree with me completely on the immigration issue, or not blog at PoliPundit.com.” I would provide additional context, but Polipundit has asked that the contents of our emails not be disclosed publicly and I think that is a fair request. There has been plenty written in the posts over the past week alone to let readers figure out what happened. Polipundit ended a later email with this: “It’s over. The group-blogging experiment was nice while it lasted, but we have different priorities now. It’s time to go our own separate ways.”
Polipundit responded: “So far, I’ve allowed the guest bloggers here to write pretty much what they pleased about all issues, including illegal immigration. But on the illegal immigration issue, I now find myself having to contend with at least three out of four guest bloggers who will reflexively try to poke holes in any argument I make.”
I hate when that happens…
Update: The 101st Keyboarders think they have PTSD. I’m not kidding.
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She’s Baaaack
by digby
… and she’s right where she belongs. Judy Miller is writing op-eds for the Wall Street Journal. She’s found her tribe.
(It’s actually quite an interesting piece about Libya. Who knows if it’s true, though?)
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Da Da Vinci Hype
by tristero
There’s a a couple of interesting things in this shameless New Yorker puff piece for a Hollywood film that probably cost more to make and market than the 10 year income of all the residents of Darfur combined.* Let’s start with a strange sin of omission.
Nowhere in this article does it mention the genuinely troubling ties between Opus Dei and the Scalia family or other American rightwing theocrats who have more influence in the American government than they should.
The other is a discussion of the mortification practices enjoyed…oh, I’m sorry, I meant employed… by Opus Dei members. Many of the Opus folks wear a barbed rope called a celice around one of their thighs for two hours a day, and also regularly beat themselves with a knotted rope.
This is true, ladies and gentlemen, they whip themselves, just like in that parody of a medieval procession in a Monty Python movie, except in Opus Dei, they do it for real. Dan Brown – who, by comparison, makes John Grisham look like the American Flaubert – doesn’t have enough interest in his characters to come up with something like that.
Now if the thought that a justice of the Supreme Court in 2006 might be flagellating himself in the name of his religious belief** makes you not a little nauseous, then, well, I’ll let the article explain it:
[Opus Dei member Father William Stetson] and others frequently point out that corporal mortification, which may seem a throwback to medieval mysticism, was not uncommon even among recent exemplars of spiritual piety. Mother Teresa of Calcutta wore a cilice and used the discipline, telling her Sisters, ‘‘If I am sick, I take five strokes. I must feel its need in order to share in the Passion of Christ and the sufferings of our poor.”
Y’see? If Mother Teresa did it, then it’s perfectly ok.
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*But looked at another way, the film certainly cost less than 24 hours of shocknawe in Iraq, so we can think of Da Vinci Code as mere bargain basement entertainment by Bush’s standards.
**Surely someone in comments will describe the rationales behind the medieval practice of mortifications of the flesh, writing in a dispassionate voice that implicitly urges tolerance for religious practices that seem fucking sick to normal people living in the early 21st Century – and in the most technologically advanced society on the planet to boot. In response, I’d like to point to my dear friend, Ms. Joan of Arc, born 1412, who to the best of my knowledge never beat herself, and had a taste, if not a flair, for clothes that were both practical and very fashionable. She wouldn’t be caught dead in anything like a celice. She’d experienced enough real pain from her war wounds not to go out and seek it.
Finally, longtime readers of mine know that Joan speaks to me as directly as God speaks to the Wondrous Fisherman of Crawford. Therefore, I can personally assure you St. Joan of Arc thinks torturing yourself to get close to God is just about the stupidest thing anyone could do.
[UPDATE: Hat tip to commenter yam for the link to the celice jpg.]
Special Republican Edition iPod
by tristero
Now you can get your own Special Republican Edition iPod Video. I’m serious. It’s sort of like a U2 iPod but different. You get Bush instead of Bono and The Edge. Apparently you can’t buy it, you have to earn it but it comes with all sorts of very cool stuff including:
The full-length, deeply inspiring music video by former Attorney General John Ashcroft, When the Eagle Soars plus an EXCLUSIVE behind the scenes Making of “When The Eagle Soars” documentary!
Special firewall software that makes it impossible to download any video with St*ph*n C*lb*rt.
La Bamba – Entirely in English!
Automatically contacts the NSA to record all downloads and makes sure you’re not enjoying something you’re not supposed to.
A sneak preview of an edgy new hip hop mix, Mis-Mis-Missionary Position (“It’s Republican Tradition/It’s our Lyin’ Disposition/And It Ain’t No Imposition”) served up by The Hymen Bruthaz.
The long version of the smash hit single Wearin’ Yer Underwear To War by the 101st Fighting Keyboarders.
An enclosed coupon with a special offer to purchase a beautifully boxed set of every Lawrence Welk episode ever broadcast plus a hilarious bonus bloopers DVD – folks, it just doesn’t get better than this, trust me.
The Singing Dogs perform My Boyfriend’s Back – produced by hipper-than-you-could-ever-be blogger Jeff Goldstein.
Excerpts from President George W. Bush’s upcoming book, Mission Truly Accomplished: How I Caught A 7 1/2 Pound Bass In My Own Lake On My Summer Vacation in a special “pondcast” -get it? It’s called a “pun!”- narrated by the president Himself.
Ain’t Misbehavin’
by digby
In our regular Joe Klein is an idiot report, please find Joe decrying Karl Rove’s plan to use racism to win the election in the fall by highlighting the potential horror of negroes with subpeona power — and then decrying the horror of negroes with subpoena power.
In fairness, Klein argues that Democrats should not have have allowed these chairmen to be chairmen because they are tainted by being too hot-headed and indiscrete and well … inappropriate. They are more of those horrible 60’s liberals, who “cry” victimization and racism at the drop of a hat.
Why oh why can’t all these blacks be more like that nice Condi Rice who is so ladylike and listens to classical music and knows how to act at a funeral??? Until Democrats can find some of those, they really need to put these bad negroes on the back bench and get some good, solid white centrists to chair committees. Otherwise, we could end up with those horrible ’60s liberal African Americans like Barbara Jordan making speeches like this:
Mr. Chairman, I join my colleague Mr. Rangel in thanking you for giving the junior members of this committee the glorious opportunity of sharing the pain of this inquiry. Mr. Chairman, you are a strong man, and it has not been easy but we have tried as best we can to give you as much assistance as possible.
Earlier today, we heard the beginning of the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States: “We, the people.” It’s a very eloquent beginning. But when that document was completed on the seventeenth of September in 1787, I was not included in that “We, the people.” I felt somehow for many years that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton just left me out by mistake. But through the process of amendment, interpretation, and court decision, I have finally been included in “We, the people.”
Today I am an inquisitor. An hyperbole would not be fictional and would not overstate the solemnness that I feel right now. My faith in the Constitution is whole; it is complete; it is total. And I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction, of the Constitution.
[…]
“If the impeachment provision in the Constitution of the United States will not reach the offenses charged here, then perhaps that 18th century Constitution should be abandoned to a 20th century paper shredder.”
Whine, whine, whine. Notice that she mentions her colleague Mr Rangel, one of the uppity blacks Klein worries will become chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and hold hearings and “shoot his mouth off.” It’s been more than 30 years and Klein is worried that now powerful black politicians are going to misbehave in public. What do you call that kind of thinking?
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Final Solution
by digby
Dear God. Crooks and Liars caught the World Net Daily making explicit arguments that the US should use the example of Nazi Germany to expel illegal immigrants:
Not only will it work, but one can easily estimate how long it would take. If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of 6 million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were fully integrated into German society, it couldn’t possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom don’t speak English and are not integrated into American society.
“Rid themsleves” is an interesting way of putting it, don’t you think? I’m not surprised at this. They are working themselves into a complete frenzy on the right over immigration. (Lou Dobbs is so excited about this speech he is frothing at the mouth and almost incoherent.)
These same people, not a year ago were obsessed with terrorism. I guess the thrill of screaming about the Islamofascists wore off. Now they want to follow lead of the Germano-fascists to “rid themselves” of the mexican vermin. It’s all part of the same great racist roar.
Glenn Greenwald notes the rising hysteria of the rightwing; some are now calling for Bush’s impeachment over this issue:
I think a lot of the Malkin types have become bored with the whole “War on Terror” business, which provided them good, strong emotional sustenance for the last four years. But September 11 is now almost five years away. There have been no good “battles” for a long time; we don’t even pretend to capture or kill any high-ranking Al Qaeda members any more; and while invocations of “war” will always be good for some blood-rushing excitement, the whole thing seems so distant and abstract at this point. It’s just not enough any more.
They’re also clearly tired of slogging through the political and ethnic complexities of Iraq. That country just doesn’t lend itself to any morally clear good/evil dichotomies. There are no good cartoon villains to hate. Calls for increased “ferocity,” less “sensitive” approaches (“bomb some more mosques!”), and less discriminate bombings can generate some temporary enthusiasm — as it did for a day or so with Shelby Steele’s column — but Iraq is so muddled and ambiguous, and not all that emotionally satisfying. It’s pretty depressing, actually, to think about how everything they said would happen there is not happening, and trying to figure out solutions, ways out, is just not very invigorating stuff for those who thrive on Hating and Warring Against Evil.
As a result, attention gets turned to immigration — Mexican immigration specifically. It entails the opportunity to rail against “appeasement” (of Vincente Fox); to create the anti-terrorist/pro-terrorist dichotomy on which they thrive; and to demonize a clear, foreign enemy as threatening not just our economic prosperity but also our national security (the “Mexican invaders”). And if the weakened, ready-to-be-tossed aside failure, George Bush, is one of the spineless appeasers this time, so be it.
Karl Rove today took a decidely different tack as he explained the administration’s position:
“I don’t care if you’re hunting deer in February or mowing the roads in the middle of the pasture in August, you’ll find somebody carrying a plastic jug and a plastic bag in the middle of the cold winter or the very hot summer, trying desperately to get north in order to earn money to put food on the table for their families. We’ve got to deal with that reality,” he said.
“And you also have to deal with the reality that we’ve got a border that is so porous and so insecure that who knows whether that is simply an illegal immigrant looking for getting a job in a landscaping company or throwing tar, or whether it’s somebody who wants to do something worse? So we need to get a better control on our borders. The only way to do this is through a comprehensive program,” he said.
As Greenwald shows, this is a huge issue for the base of the GOP. They are use it as their excuse to toss Bush overboard. Why would Karl Rove get all squishy about the mexican invaders?
Because he can count. Immigration may get his base out in the fall, and the issue may make this a closer election than we’d like. But history shows these immigration fevers come and go. Losing any hope of the hispanic vote with a bunch of Nazi talk about “ridding the country of its problems” is the end of the whole enchilada. The Republicans cannot be a majority is they lose the hispanics. Rove knows this better than anyone — and it’s got him dancing on the head of a pin unable to please anyone.
That is one atomic wedgie he’s feeling right now. But hey, when he and his pals decided to exploit racial fears way back when, they consolidated a bunch of people under their tent who have a proclivity for unpleasant behavior toward those of other cultures and races. They are demanding that their party kick some dark hued ass, preferably close enough to home where they can really enjoy it.
For those of you looking for some sane talk on immigration, check out the New Democrat Network’s Responsible Immigration Policy website. I don’t agree on every point, but overall is it a thoughtfuld, reasoned approach. These guys have turned to the hispanic leadership in the party for input and it shows — and they are engaging in massive outreach to the hispanic communities all over the country to explain the difference between the two parties on this issue. Karl Rove, representing the party of wealth, intolerance and racism, is simply not credible when he talks about having sympathy for the plight of people who just want to put food on the table. Democrats do.
Update: I’ve been meaning to blog about this for ages, and keep forgetting. Chris Hayes has written a most fascinating piece about the origins of the latest anti-immigration “movement.” There is much in it that will surprise you, particularly the fact that it was started by a liberal environmentalist who thinks that Mexican immigrants are akin to an alien species invading an eco-system. I cannot tell you how much this guy creeped me out. He and that World Nut Daily Nazi have a lot in common.
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The Enemy Within
by digby
Following up on my post below featuring Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland, I see that Josh Marshall made a similar argument, without the historical context, today also:
I think part of the issue for many people on the administration’s various forms of surveillance is not just that some of activities seem to be illegal or unconstitutional on their face. I think many people are probably willing to be open-minded, for better or worse, on pushing the constitutional envelope. But given the people in charge of the executive branch today, you just can’t have any confidence that these tools will be restricted to targeting terrorists. Start grabbing up phone records to data-mine for terrorists and then the tools are just too tempting for your leak investigations. Once you do that, why not just keep an eye on your critics too? After all, they’re the ones most likely to get the leaks, right? So, same difference. The folks around the president don’t recognize any real distinctions among those they consider enemies. So we’d be foolish to think they wouldn’t bring these tools to bear on all of them. Once you set aside the law as your guide for action and view the president’s will as a source of legitimacy in itself, then everything becomes possible and justifiable.
The key here, I think, is to recognize that they will say that monitoring the communications of the press or political opponents is for the sake of national security. This is what comes of seeing your fellow Americans and political opponents as “enemies” to be eliminated. There is no logical or emotional leap to make between spying on terrorists in Dubai and spying on war protesters in Dubuque and spying on reporters in DC. It’s the natural result of this manichean mindset that openly touts a “with us or against us” philosophy and sees political dissent as acts of treason.
Conservatives have been selling the idea of “the enemy within” for many decades. It’s what they do. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, as amply demonstrated in the excerpt of Perlstein’s book below, rationalized their spying on the press and dissenters as necessary to plug national security leaks. Likewise, the Bush administration will have no problem doing it either.
I personally wouldn’t support giving Gandhi and Jesus Christ the unfettered power to spy on Americans. But allowing these people to do it is unfathomable.
Update: Greg Sargent from TAPPED has a new blog called The Horse’s Mouth. He takes us down another trip through time, reminding us that Republicans have been trashing the press for generations.
(All this reminiscing about my youth is making me yearn for a bottle of Boones Farm Apple wine and a fat joint with seeds popping in it.)
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Same As It Ever Was
by digby
In light of today’s predictable revelations that the administration is spying on the press, Rick Perlstein has given me permission to publish an excerpt from his forthcoming book “Nixonland”.
The trust in President Nixon might have been shaken somewhat on Day 101, when the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee repeated something he first said in October of 1966: time to declare victory and go home. “Common sense should tell us that we have now accomplished our purpose as far as South Vietnam is concerned,” Vermont’s George Aiken proclaimed. It was time for an “orderly withdrawal.” It might have been shaken more on May 9, when after six straight days with nothing on the front page of the New York Times about the fighting in Vietnam, a tiny item in the bottom right corner obscured by a feature on Governor Rockefeller’s collection of primitive art revealed that bombing was taking place in Cambodia.
In a May 14 [1969] TV speech from the White House the president announced, “The time is approaching when the South Vietnamese will be able to take over some of the fighting fronts now being manned by Americans.” Columnists vied with each other to predict the draw-down numbers: 50,000, 100,000, even 200,000. He also offered simultaneous mutual withdrawal of U.S. and North Vietnamese forces (He counted on short memories, having charged of LBJ’s non-simultaneous withdrawal proposal in 1966, “Communist victory would most certainly be the result of ‘mutual withdrawal.'”) It came the week Gallup made phone calls for its polls released June 1. That poll gave him an approval rating of 65 percent. Maybe, a nonplussed public concluded, if any had noticed the Time’s dispatch, Cambodian bombing was what it took to bring the horses into the barn.
Henry Kissinger was not nonplussed. On the morning of the 9th, a Germanic screech rang out from the porch of the Key Biscayne Hotel:
“Outrageous! Outrageous…. We must crush these people! We must destroy them!”
He referred to the Secretaries of Defense and State, whose offices he suspected had leaked the existence of Operation Menu to the New York Times. He rang up Melvin Laird, pulling him off the golf course at Burning Tree Country Club: “You son of a bitch!” (Laird hung up.) Or maybe it had come from the NSC office in the basement of the White House. “If anybody leaks anything, I will do the leaking,” he had told his people at one of their first meetings. The thought of a runaway staff was enraging — not just for diplomatic reasons but for what it suggested to the security-besotted bulldogs around Nixon about an NSC top-heavy with Harvard grads and Kennedy vets.
Kissinger’s rage had been building at leaks since an early April New York Times piece appeared anticipating troop pullouts. It flared in May, when the Times’ Pentagon correspondent reported modifications in nuclear strategy being considered by the Pentagon, then of administration deliberations over the North Korean spy plane shoot-down.
The Cambodia article wasn’t even damning. It was flattering. The point of “Raids in Cambodia by U.S. Unprotested” was how nicely the Cambodian government was cooperating with the U.S. military. It concluded that “there is no Administration interest at this time in extending the ground war into Cambodia or Laos.” It might not have even been based on leaks: a London reporter had made aerial photographs of bomb craters close enough to the border to raise suspicions, and the Times’ enterprising reporter had gone to check things out.
That wasn’t the point. The point was that they feared the White House’s secrets were being betrayed.
Kissinger called J. Edgar Hoover and told him it was time to move forward on a project they had discussed: wiretaps of the homes and offices of NSC staffers Morton Halperin, Daniel Davidson, and Helmut Sonnefeldt; of Melvin Laird; and of Secretary Laird’s senior military assistant. Thus did the FBI learn about things like Mrs. Halperin’s concern for the surgery of a relative in New York, and the three Halperin boys’ favorite playmates–and that when reporters asked Mr. Halperin to leak Kissinger statements, he steadfastly refused. The tap on Mel Laird was more productive: Kissinger drew a bead on the activities of a hated bureacratic rival. What he didn’t find was any leakers. So the program was extended, on May 20, with wiretaps on two more NSC staffers.
A reporter was next. This time, however, it wasn’t Kissinger working through the legal channel of the FBI. It was the President, tapping one of Henry Kissinger’s friends, in a way that Henry Kissinger couldn’t find out. John Ehrlichman knew just the guy: he got John Caulfield, a new addition to the White House staff, a former detective of New York’s version of the Red Squad who had known Nixon since he’d protected him on the campaign trail in 1960. Caulfield called a friend, who’d worked sweeping Nixon’s hotels for bugs during the 1968 campaign. They cased the target’s Georgetown townhouse and told Ehrlichman the job would be very, very difficult. Ehrlichman insisted they go forward, because national security was at stake. So they scrounged up some phone company credentials and shimmied up a pole to affix a bug to the writer’s phone wire.
He was Joseph Kraft, the same journalist who’d lectured his fellow media professionals to stop coddling liberals. Nixon was tapping Kissinger’s favorite journalist friend to keep tabs on the aide who was supposedly closest to him. Which was only fair. Kissinger was working towards opening an entirely separate channel to glean the secrets Nixon might keep from him.
I hesitate to even comment on this; the implications are so painfully obvious. As time goes on, it has become clear that this administration has in essence been nothing more than a GOP mulligan. Nixon: Part Deux.
The claims that these encroachments on civil liberties are benign are disproven by the actions of another Republican administration within my own lifetime. Many of the architects of today’s imperial presidency learned politics and policy in the Nixon era. It’s almost unbelievable that it could play out like this again, in virtually the same way, but it has, even the infighting. It’s a recurring Republican nightmare. They are asking us to ignore history, specifically their own history, and just “trust them.” Why would this country ever be so foolish?
And once again, the establishment press gets hoist with its own petard.
Perlstein’s “Nixonland” will be released in a few months. about a year. He’ll be taking questions at the second Firedoglake book salon meeting about his Goldwater book, “Before The Storm” next Sunday.
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Aborting The Prescription
by digby
Every time a woman comes into a gynecologist’s office, ACOG wants the doctor to offer her advance prescriptions of the morning after pill. But it is apparently not enough to simply make the offer; indeed, some women are reporting that their gynecologists are insisting that they take the prescription—even if they say repeatedly that they don’t want it. The doctors urge them, “it’s good for a year!” This kind of scenario makes a mockery out of the phrase “pro-choice.” In a situation like this, how can anyone not conclude that “pro-choice” is really “pro-abortion?”
Don’t get me started. Just go read TBOGG. He’ll tell you all about it.
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